I will end this post now, and let you know how it goes tomorrow, once they are all dried.

For me, it  is about writing, getting it off my chest, leaving something behind for my kids.  Now that I have started my Facebook Timeline, that means there is quite a lot to leave behind for my kids.  Great !!!

This morning, after a refreshing skinny dip with my youngest in a freeezing cold pool, Kyle and I were discussing our life and this new year.  We both agreed, that although this year we had some amazing times, good times, it was definately one of the most shittiest in terms of stress.

Kyle said that he is so sick and tired of this life we are living and it is has only been one year.  I don’t think this as much, because I get to go out and experience more of this wonderful country we live in and the area, all the time.  He is generally stuck in his office.  Not a good place to be, even though it is at home. The rest of his off time is spent mowing the lawn (yawn ), building chicken coops and putting up fences.   I sometimes drag him kicking and screaming to one of our events , like the raft building on an island one the other day, and although he was the only dad, he thoroughly enjoyed himself and agreed he needs to get out more.

We both agreed, however, that we will give it one more year to make more money, and if that ain’t happening, if by the end of next year we are still leading the same old life, then we will make a huge change.  Knowing us, these are not empty words. We have never lived an ordinary life .  In our 22 years together we have lived as university students for 4 years, sailed across the indian ocean for a year, lived on a yacht for 3 years, backpacked with two toddlers for a year, lived on a wine farm for 6 months, lived on a Malaysian island for over a year, lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 4 years, and so it goes.  I think it has been only 6 years of our lives together that we have lived ordinary lives (and we still moved house more than once a year ) but we were building up a business and raising babies, so didn’t notice it fly by in all its ordinariness.

So, when do you change your life ?  What is the straw that breaks the camels back ?  I know in South Africa, the first time we left, it was when we drove past a dead body on the verge near our house (100 metres to be exact ) and decided that that was that.   The second time we left, I had been reading the book Travels on my Elephant by Mark Shand and that made us go and live in South East Asia for 18 months.  So I am wondering what it will be this time.  Will it just be “ok, it is the end of the year so now we buy that housebus we have our eye on and lets go and live an alternative lifestyle ” , or will it be something much deeper, much weirder.

I cannot wait to find out.  But what I do know, is that for this year to be less ordinary, we have to make it so, and I have to drag Kyle out kicking and screaming more and more.  Listen for it.

Perhaps if I knew I was having a party or going to a party, I would be feeling different ?  I don’t know.  Did go and get some movies, but that is not exactly a wow experience.  In fact, I find that good movies, those treasures that stick in your thoughts for years, are very hard to find nowadays.

They remind me too much of so many of those talk shows on TV, empty spaces filled by empty bubbleheads.  Of course, I have just discoved the Graham Norton show and think his is fantastic.  Perhaps because it is English ??  Wow, let the games begin.

The thing is, that I find New Years worse than birthdays (which I really do enjoy ) in terms of thinking of getting older.  For me, that big date changeover, that little number going from 1 to 2, rather quite harmless in other scenarious, is for me a huge big WAIT A MINUTE !!!!!  I HAVEN”T DONE EVERYTHING I SAID I WOULD LAST YEAR, GIVE ME JUST ONE CHANCE …. PLEASE ,…… 4 MORE MONTHS TO GET IT ALL RIGHT.

So that is where I am at the moment, as I sit here in front of a bright screen, a glass of rose next to my mouse, and my thoughts rambling on.

What have I achieved this year that I am proud of , no matter how small it is ?

• Made my first Gouda cheese
• Made my first halloumi cheese
• Made my first paneer
• Made my first farmhouse cheese
• Finally got my yoghurt down pat, so that I get 2 litres and I don’t run out
• Culled my first chickens (well, I held the legs ) and gutted, plucked and cooked it
• Started dog training lessons with my pig dog
• Stuck to my silly diet so that I am no longer in so much pain anymore
• Started playing the piano again
• Built our first gingerbread house
• Spun and wove our own wool
• Grew my own lettuces, potatoes, beans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs
• Made and perfected my pavlova, to the extent that I am known as the Pavlova queen
• Cooked mussels that Ayal had collected from the rocks whilst camping

What have I not achieved that I wanted to or done that I was dissappointed in myself

• Kept on a good exercise routine
• Gone to the beach with the kids more often
• Had more patience
• Not been so quick to shout instead of calmly dealing with a situation (I am doing a hypnotherapy course for this
• Drank far too much wine
• Played more board games with the girls
• Not completed the art course we are doing at home
• The dog training went down the drain due to whooping cough, my staf infection and rain.
• Dogs not trained and I have taken their naughtiness very personally
• Didn’t get through the girls multiplication like I wanted to and for some dumb reason this annoys me
• Gone on a hike or tramp
• Not started my ginger beer brew

As I write this I realise that most on this list is quite silly, actually.  In the greatest scheme of things, VERY SILLY.  But, I have decided to add to it when I remember.

Having purged myself, I now feel much better and am actually looking forward to the new year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!!

2 cups almond meal

1/4 cup dessicated coconut

1/2 teaspoon allspice

1/2 tsp cinnamon powder

pinch salt

1 egg, whisked

1 Tbs oil

• Mix all together and press into a buttered dish, coming up the sides if you wish, using your fingers
• Bake for 15 minutes at 180 degrees celcius.

As easy as !!!!

Sick of this all, I started roaming the internet , looking for some pizza sanity, and found it in the least expected place.  A group of body building guys who like to cut carbohydrates out of their diets but still want to eat pizza.  Yeah !!!  Thanks guys.  Due to this idea, I have taken almond meal and run with it, coming up with so many different recipes .

This is not mine, it is theirs.

2 cups almond flour (will make 2 pizzas )

2 eggs

1 cup grated cheese

dried herbs

salt

1 Tbs olive oil

• Mix all together
• Put dough onto wax paper , another piece of wax paper on top, and roll out thinly.  Don’t do a thick crust, as it tends to be dry and stick in your throat.  Death by pizza !!
• Bake for 15-20 mins at 180 degrees celcius.

2 eggs

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup olive oil

2 cups almond meal

4 tsp baking powder

2 Tbs fresh parsely, chopped fine

1 1/2 cups grated cheese (if you omit, then add some extra almond meal )

milk (Hmmm, not giving a quantity here as it all depends on the amount of almond meal you put in, and cheese )

1/2 cup cooked bacon, chopped fine (optional)

• Beat egg, salt and oil
• Mix almond meal, baking powder, cheese , bacon, and parsley
• Add egg mix to almond mix
• Add enough milk to give you a wet but still stiff texture, almost like thick porridge.
• Mix all together lightly
• Spoon into 12 muffin cases
• Bake at 190 degrees celcius for 15-20 minutes
• Turn out and cover with cloth till cool
• I keep them in the fridge in a tupperware and take it out when needed

3/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp onion powder granules (or powder )

1/2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp dried rosemary or 1 1/2 tsp fresh  rosemary chopped (feel free to use any herbs )

1 Tbs olive oil

1 Large egg, whisked

• Mix all ingredients well in a bowl
• Must not be sticky so can add some more meal when kneeding
• Take 1 Tbs pieces, flatten with hands and place on wax wrap, far apart
• Place wax paper on top, and using a rolling pin, roll thin (about 2mm)
• Remove wax paper from top
• Bake for 10-15 minutes until dark golden brown and crispy at 180 degrees celcius .

Last week before Xmas I decided that instead of making them individual, I would just roll out the whole piece, cut into squares and then put into the oven.   WRONG !!!  The side pieces were perfect, but the middle pieces were too thick as you can’t really judge them as they are in the middle.  Might try it again, will see.

Enjoy with cheese, ham, etc.

Food combining is where you never mix your carbohydrates with your proteins.  All meals are eaten 3 hours apart, to give your body time to completely process the food, before adding another one on top of it.  And, it seems to work wonders for my body.  Yeah !!!

Some people follow this diet very strictly, and there are so many different rules and charts about what to eat with what, that for me, I found it important to follow these loosely and listen to what my body was telling me.  That is  most important with any diet you follow.  Not what the expert is telling you, but what your body is telling you.

I found that my body can take pumpkin, which is meant to be a carbohydrate, and beans.  This has been a life saver for me.  Curry with pumpkin, not rice.  Stew with pumpkin, not rice.  Pumpkin chips, etc etc.  So much so, that my husband wishes that he never sees another pumpkin in his life again.   Of course, I think the real reason is because he has to chop them up as he is scared I will chop my fingers off !!!

My next frustration was crackers, bread, and pizza base.  I couldn’t eat bread or crackers with cheese or ham. And a pizza without cheese or salami ?   I mean, what is the point of living ???  So began my quest for the perfect bread and cracker using almond meal.  Because, almonds are protein.

I now use almond meal almost exclusively for all my baking, including this Xmas’s gingerbread house, my cakes, muffins, crumpets.

I will post the recipes on another post so that it is easier to find .

Cheerio

I am basically saying hello to myself, as I blog for myself and my family.  But I do love the fact that others do sneak in and read what I write, now and again.  And, if they can find anything useful, then it has been worth it.

I last posted in September 2010.  Why did I stop ?  Hell, I have no idea.  I just did.

Where am I now ?  The same place I was in September.  Well, a different house, about 10 minutes drive down the road. Or is that up ?  I never know.  We are now living in a much larger house.  This equates to larger mess, larger bills.  Don’t know if it is worth it.  Still a rental.  We live on a 29 hectare seudo eco park.  Our place is just under 1 acre though.  The reason I say Seudo, is that it started 1o years ago with the right ideas, but now it has become, as one of the people who once lived here said to me “A middle class wet mans dream “.  They don’t do organics, they spray with poisons, they don’t look after their orchards, their pastures are empty of animals except for 3 billy goats.  Not sure what they can provide, except for a nice smell.  And I have to pay $70 a month for this.  Oh, but we did get a bag of fruit in our letterbox in summer, and all 6 piece of fruit were still green.  Hmmmm, expensive fruit.  And they all zoot off to work in town.

Ok, so I am back with a vengeance.

Life has been up and down.  We are still loving it here in New Zealand, but we still do not have PR.  It has been an uphill battle with Kyle having to jump through many hoops in terms of medical tests.  And then the very last straw, the earthquake in CHCH.   Our file is buried in the Immigration building and cannot be retrieved.  URgh !!!!  Luckily we had made photocopies of every single paper, and they allowed us to send that.  But we are still waiting.

The ups have been making new friends through the homeschooling network, getting puppies and my pig dog, more chickens, and loving this area.

I will not blog everyday, as this is not a daily blog and no one is really that interested.  But I will blog.

Cheers

But the one part that sticks in my mind the most, apart from the words of the Haka which are drumming to their own beat, was when we went for a walk to the Christ Church  Cathedral.   We had our passport photos taken and had to wait half an hour for them to be processed.

We had not made a conscious or verbal decision about where we were going to go, we all just headed up the quiet street towards the cathedral.  We love cathedrals, although we are not Christians.  We also love Chinese Temples and especially Hindu Temples the most and are always drawn to them.  I think our love of Cathedrals comes from reading, 3 times already, Ken Follets novel Pillars of the Earth and now its sequal.

Christ Church cathedral is quite ugly from the outside, in my opinion.  We had been to the St. Pauls Cathedral Dunedin in April this year as it is the only cathedral in New Zealand with a stone vaulted ceiling.  It is a magnificent cathedral, both inside and out.

Girls sitting at the top of the stairs at St. Pauls Cathedral, Dunedin

Stone vaulted ceiling

Inside, the Cathedral is quite beautiful and once again, the girls were charmed with its quietness, the sun falling softly from the stained glass windows onto the wooden floors.  We were walking around, admiring all the features, the majestic arches, the organ pipes that seem to reach for the heavens, when we came to the back where there was a ring of candle holders, with one large one lit  in the middle and two lit candles in the holders.  The girls were intrigued and I told them that when a person wants to prayer for something or for someone, they light a candle , put it into one of the holders, and then say a prayer.  Ayla asked if she could please do it, so I gave her a gold coin as it is by gold coin donation, and she went to get her candle.  I asked her if she knew who she wanted to pray for and she said “Yes, Louis Armstrong.  No, actually Elvis “.  I was a bit taken aback and wanted to laugh but I managed to stifle it .  I helped her to light it and she stood there, hands in the universal prayer position and prayed silently .  Savannah then wanted to do one too, but she wanted to do a prayer to Eirikur, my grandfather in Iceland who died last week.  So both my children stood there quietly in this beautiful cathedral, heads bent , one praying to Elvis and the other to Eirikur.

I thought they were finished.  No, Savannah noticed that there is a prayer board where you can write up a note, pin it up and others can pray for you or your cause, or you can simply just write out your prayer.  Savannah wrote “Thank you Eirikur. For bringing joy to the family and for painting rocks.  I really wanted to meet you and I get the feeling that I will one day. ”  Ayla drew a picture of Elvis, saying “la la la ” and his name at the top.  Ayla loves Elvis’s singing and thinks he was a great man.

So two great men will be getting a lot of prayers sent from two little girls.

Savannah asked me when we had left St. Pauls Cathedral in Dunedin (we actually had to physically drag them out and then they still would not leave and sat on the top of the steps for at least 10 minutes.) why I did not believe in God but I always went into Churches and Cathedrals.  And I told her that these were houses built for some peoples god, that they were built beautifully and with a lot of love and that you could feel the love, and peace inside.  That I always found them very peaceful.  And Ayla chirped in “yes, that is until the preacher starts preaching ” .  I had to laugh, yes, that is right, when the preacher starts, then I walk out.

Yesterday I told them again, that by saying a prayer in the Cathedral, they could pray to their own god, whom they don’t know yet as they are too young to figure this out and it is a choice we are giving them.  To me, a church, temple, or shack is good enough to pray to your own God, and it does not have to be to that Churches God either.

Rest in Peace Elvis and Eirikur !!!