We lost a special lady last week, my 84 year old Aunty Marj. I say 'my' but we're not related. She's my mate Kelsey's childhood neighbour, whom I adopted in my late teens. Aunty Marj had a kind word for everyone she met, and some sage advice for a young woman named Amanda, who thought too much about what other people thought. Aunty Marj had experienced great sadness in her life. She'd lost a ...
Gardening
11 fun ideas for Christmas cooking with kids
The kids have been on Christmas holidays for fifteen days now. 21,600 minutes to be exact. I estimate that they've been arguing for 19,600 of those minutes, accounting for the brief respite of sleep and yesterday morning when they were a bit cute for five minutes while the Big Sister read the Little Sister a story. They move from room to room, leaving decimation in their paths. It's all I ...
Italian lollipops | prosciutto, basil, grissini sticks
Do you have created words that are exclusively your family vernacular? Misnomers that the kids started and you've adopted? The (then little) Big Sister once called our Guinea Fowl "Guinea Flowers" and I still call them that to this day. Our rain gauge is near the farm gate and our letter box so when the Little Sister started calling checking the rain gauge checking our "rain mail" it caught ...
an open letter to my new lesion
Dear new lesion, We spotted you on the MRI yesterday. You seem to have moved in without completing a tenancy agreement. This is problematic in two forms: 1) we cannot be sure when you took up residence. Without being able to determine when you took up residence in my peritrigonal white matter, we cannot be sure if you're a pre- or post-treatment arrival. For the purposes of this letter, ...
stained glass window biscuits
Growing up, we had a red tinsel Christmas tree. It didn't matter what decorations you put on it’s sparse branches, you could not make it look any good. As the saying goes, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and this tree was more pig’s arse than sow’s ear. The first Christmas Bearhands and I shared at the farm, I bought a department store-worthy tree on Grays Online. When it ...
12 days of Christmas cookbook
I have loads of crazy ideas. To be honest due to time constraints (and/or returning lucidity) most of them never see the light of a blog post. But today's crazy idea is the exception to the rule. One of my favourite things about blogging is the fantabulous, clever, generous people I've met. So when I woke up one morning with the idea to put together a 12 days of Christmas cookbook, I knew finding ...