Probably indefinitely.

At least we had a mini night out a little while back.

Not that I’m complaining. At the moment the chaos spoken about in an earlier blog has not subsided. Yesterday I came home either wanting to work out ’till I dropped or curl up in a foetal position and cry ’till I fell asleep. I did neither.

Well, just a little bit of crying. Tough day at work.

Don’t you just hate it when someone is so ignorant they don’t realize they’re blaming you for their stupidity? On top of that, doing it via e-mail and carbon copying your boss? Needless to say, I spent the latter part of yesterday afternoon composing a reply e-mail to enlighten the ignorant in a way that does not sound condescending, argumentative or blunt. This was not a very easy thing to do and I did think several times before hitting the “send” button. But I did and we’ll see what the ramifications are on Monday. Now is not the best time to test my patience.

I’m starting to realize that being in a position of middle management requires a whole bunch of skills not generally taught at university or by your parents (unless of course they’re evil daemons from hell – which mine most definitely aren’t!). These include having an incredibly thick skin, saying one thing but meaning another, giving vague responses and, the one I’m still struggling with:  appropriately and purposefully taking comments at face value. The latter is difficult as a woman, especially when dealing with women!

But enough about work.

I really wanted to go down to PE this weekend but plane tickets are horrifically expensive right now. Not that one could even get to the airport with all the road closures!  A quick check now on one of the local airlines doesn’t even have flights available this weekend. I wonder if my couriered package even got a place on a flight!

I guess staying at home is the order of the day. It’s certainly cold enough to crawl under a blanket, eat chocolate and watch some movies. I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Well, after washing dishes, taking out the rubbish, attending a conference call, going to the hair dresser and, probably, making dinner.

Won’t I ever learn to relax?

Chow for now.

After the other boring shopping, I decided to bake. That ended up with chocolate chips all over the kitchen floor, so those cookies are quarantined for home use only. If one doesn’t mind the odd pet fur, they’re as good as ones made with non-contaminated chocolate chips. The dogs, of course, had a ball.

Yes, yes, I know chocolate is bad for dogs. They didn’t have much, I promise.

The rest of the day was spent cooking. I had a craving for juicy T-bone steaks with a mushroom cheddar-melt sauce and garden salad with an assortment of roasted peppers and seeds. Marc was to braai the T-bones, I did the rest. For the life of me, I cannot understand how roasting peppers and seeds, preparing the salad and making the sauce took three hours!

Then again, with the TV in the kitchen, the F1 qualifying and soccer game did kinda distract me.

Now, one might think that falling asleep on the couch hugging one’s husband is romantic. At least I thought so, until Marc woke me up complaining that he was being squashed. This morning he compared the event with a car crusher: I was crushing from the side, the dogs from the top! It is probably a good thing he woke me up though, we would’ve been as stiff as anything this morning had we spent the night on the couch. This is spoken from experience.

Well, with a new day, a few tasks and an awful lot of sport this afternoon, let me get off my lazy but and help my husband remount the light that he fixed while I was typing this.

“till next time,

Chow

On the up side, my team members are working like daemons, so at least I don’t have to worry about the analytical section.

It’s three weeks before I leave for Sweden and it’s starting to dawn on me that one month away is quite a long time. It will, however, be extremely good for my carreer, as I’ll get the oportunity to learn about some of our other products we make. And, of course, I’ll be doing analytical work without much admin or other stuff, so I’ll be in my element! I’ll be fairly far up North and this time of year there is sunlight pretty much 24/7. Apparently, there are lovely forests and fields to walk through and I’ll be there in the height of berry season. Guess I’ll be picking my dinner, so no expense there!

I’ll have the house to myself for most of the time, except when Marc joins me during the week of my birthday. This, by the way, happens to be on Wednesday, August 4th, so feel free to drop a note. If I do manage to get an international roaming cell, I’ll send out the number.

On the home front, Mutty’s still around, bumps and all, the puppies are getting big (and heavy!) and the cats are, well, cats. Catherine’s nick name seems to change on an almost daily basis: usually, we call her “Tanks”, since she bowls into one and tries to knock one over. Yesterday, however, upon arriving home, Marc informed me that her name for the day was “Lassy”. Apparently, Mutty was locked into the shed by our housekeeper and Catherine alerted Marc to the fact, upon which she was released. This morning she’s back to Tanks though (being woken up by 15 kg’s of dog jumping on a full bladder is no fun at all!).

On a technical note: my latest toy is an IPod touch. I’ve had it for two weeks now and all I’ve managed to do is load music and set up a few play lists. Marc’s been sweet and connected it to our wireless Internet, so as soon as I get home, I can check my mail. Not that I’m too excited about checking mail after having responded to mail all day. The other “new” technical development is that Marc’s swapped my desk-top with his old laptop, making cooking from Internet recipes so much easier.

Speaking of which, I’ve started to bake and thus far haven’t killed anyone at home or at work. The first time I took biscuits to work, I sent a note to those people I thought are slightly suicidal and would risk my baking (i.e. close friends and enemies). They liked them, who would’ve guessed?

That’s pretty much it. Sad, isn’t it?

But it’s ok, I’m getting lavender in return!

You see, there’s a guy contracting for us at work who also grows his own food and enjoys gardening. We’re looked at quite strangely by our colleagues every time we arrive at work with seedlings! It started off quite innocently though, when I offered some calendulas for his winter garden and in return he gave me four gooseberry plants. So now it’s cucumbers, strawberries and lavender. I wonder what the autumn will bring…

Actually, he only asked if I still had some cucumber seeds but, sadly, there were only six in the packet. Strange that, a cucumber usually has more than that. Must have been a small one…

Anyway, so I didn’t have seeds but I did have two that I planted in pots, just in case the ones in the ground didn’t do too well. Well, they did, so surely I could afford to give one pot away? It’s too late in the season to start from seed anyway. And my strawberry has already migrated into two other pots, with the three now firmly connected (I will cut them apart when the new runners have “set”).

I don’t feel sad though, since it’s great to finally have someone to confirm that I’m not completely mad yet. Someone else who gets upset with the heat, rain and humidity, knowing it’ll bring on the horrible powdery mildew and other fungal diseases that can destroy a plant within a week. Speaking of  powdery mildew, the squashes are infested with it. I only saw the extent of the disease this morning and promptly got into my car, went to the nursery and bough stuff. Apparently, everyone is suffering with it.

The bottle does not have the withholding period on it, so while searching for the appropriate time between spraying and harvesting, I found out that bicarbonate of soda and a mild soap mix also works. With puppies etc, I don’t really want to spray chemicals (especially since they’re under my feet, on my lap and into my hair when I’m in the garden), so I’m trying the “organic” non-toxic spray first. I swear the plants look better already! I did, however, have to tell them repeatedly that I’m trying to help. They keep on poking me with those sharp spikes!

Let’s see how it works out, I’m not sure if I got under all the leaves though. I’m going to check…

The puppies have grown stacks – they’re all most as big as Mutty now and they have all eventually started playing together. Marc took a video of them yesterday evening and we realized today that yesterday they were all 13 (puppies at 13 weeks, Mutty at 13 years!). The cats still hate them and little kitty’s nose is still out of joint for not being the youngest animal in the house but they’ll eventually get on (or at least not try to kill each other everytime they’re in close proximity).

So, the cooking started again. I find that having prepared meals that just have to be shoved into the oven help during the week. At least then I can do something “nice” when I come home. Not that I mind cooking, I really do enjoy it, it’s just that my current style requires an hour or more to get the meal prepared, not to mention the oven time!

Okay, I’m off to skin beetroot and will post pictures soon. (The movie I mentioned is available on you-tube)

It’s not the season’s fault actually, just that it tends to come with cold weather and the cold weather leads to frost in the morning, bare trees and dead grass. Not that I care too much for the grass, it’s the ice that troubles me the most. Where the ice has stretched its cold fingers under the frost covers, the plants have burned, leaving black leaves and the odd lonely looking pepper caught mid way through maturing. I’ve picked the veggies that have no leaves left to feed them, if only to keep for the seeds in spring.

The other problem is that the ground tends to be frozen and difficult to work. The last bed that was dug (while my mother was here), took a whole morning and it is only about 6 meters long (granted, it’s also only half a meter wide). We should have waited but a trip to the nursary meant bringing home seedlings and they needed a home. The cauliflower didn’t fit in the bed, so they’re still in the wendy house in their seed trays. I would’ve planted them last weekend but sadly pressing analysis at work had to take presidence and no gardening was done at all. In fact, the actual weekend consisted of a movie on Sunday afternoon. Sad, sad, sad.

That said, we found bright-lights swiss chard seeds and they’re quietly germinating in the protective environment of the wendy house that now has a roof and windows. It still gets cold in there but at least the deadly frost is kept at bay. They’ll need planting soon, so a new bed has to be dug, like it or not. In fact, it should probably happen next weekend.

I sometimes don’t know why I’ve embarked on this mission, since I’m still buying veggies from the market and, honestly, they’re good local quality and not expensive at all. It’s a lot of work, especially if one has a full time job but, come spring, I’ll snap back and get stuck in. The cold weather just gets me down sometimes.

How rude!

The tomatoes are ours, the moldy raspberries and blueberries we threw on the back lawn this morning is theirs.

B#$^%y birds…

It’s the first weekend in a month that I’m not planting anything, not pulling anything out  nor (the firm favorite since we signed the offer to purchase on a new house) planning our vegetable garden . The kitchen counters aren’t covered with buckets of separating whey and curd, the cheese thermometer’s  quietly resting in it’s plastic holder, the food dehydrator isn’t buzzing and the vacuum sealing machine has been boxed away after the morning’s grocery shop. My hands don’t have the faint odor of sterilizer, aren’t sticky with castor sugar and the heavy-bottom pot isn’t sickly sweet with rapidly boiling jam or chutney or preserve. In fact, the house is earily peaceful.

So, with a vaguely guilty frown, I find myself lazy. Or perhaps just tired.

Having been back at work for three weeks, the year appears to be returning to normal. Deadlines loom, the to-do list at work is rapidly extending itself, the 8 hours Monday to Friday calender has filled to a third with meetings and the dreaded worry begins to set in.

I do have to remind myself that last weekend was rather busy, as was the weekend before that. Let me see, last weeked: wake up to the sound of excitedly barking dogs only to find a bag of (what appeared to be) stolen goods on top of our back wall. I phoned the police, who very co-operatively dispatched a vehicle, only to find our neighbor pearing over the back wall and very happily finding that his stolen goods were a mere 3 meters away. Of course we let them jump over (the dogs were not happy with this) and retrieve his high-fi. (We should have returned the goods on condition that they play decent music but, being fast asleep, it slipped our minds).

After that exciting start to the morning, I mowed the lawn while hubby took the maid shopping for her kids’ school stuff, made cottage cheese, washed the cars (this activity hubby instigated, I got involved in order to audit the cleaning process) and began with another gauda.

Sunday was the usual walk-in-the-park with the dogs and the rest of the day was spent on the couch.

In other words, a normal weekend.

So why am I not doing anything today? I simply don’t know. Perhaps one just gets lazy sometimes.

Ive been struggling with something for a little over 2 years now and it may seem strange to some. On the other hand, it may not to others and for those of you who have not been aware of it until now, I warn: stop reading!

The predicament is this (there’s one cliché to follow): “it is said that the eyes are the window to the soul”.

So why then do I find myself unable to talk or converse with someone comfortably while looking them in the eyes? I often don’t know where else to look. The conversation begins, I feel comfortable, but then after about 2 minutes begin to feel as though I’m boring a ten kilometer hole down the other person’s head! People begin shifting uncomfortably, find renewed interest in the paint on the walls or their cigarette. Am I alone in this?

Ingredients

5 litres full cream milk (I’ve only ever used cow’s milk since buffalo’s milk is hard to come by in Springs)

10 tablespoons lemon juice (in 1/4 cup cold water)

1 rennet capsule dissolved in a tablespoon of water (can be purchased from National Food Products in Randburg, Johannesburg [2])

Method:

Sterilize all utensils (do not ignore this step!)

Pour milk into a bucket and place into a pot of warm water over a moderate heat on the stove (I use setting 3 or 4 depending on the ambiant temperature)

Add the lemon juice and stir well with a plastic spoon

Heat to 30 degrees celsius and add the rennet and stir well again

Heat to just over 37 degrees celsius and remove from heat

Leave to seperate and when the whey is clear pour off as much whey as possible

Ladle the curds into a microwaveable dish and kneed gently

Microwave on high for 1 min and kneed again, separating more whey from the curd

Microwave twice more on high for approximately 35 seconds, kneeding between each heat treatment (the curds should be sticking together at this point)

Salt to taste with uniodized salt (NOT sea salt)

Kneed, stretch and pull until the cheese is smooth and shiny

At this point the cheese can be eaten or stored in a brine solution made of uniodised salt (again, not sea salt) in water.

Note: This recipe does not produce the same type of cheese as is commonly bought in a shop since it’s made from cow’s milk. It does, however, brown quite nicely around the edges when grilled.

[1] Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp & Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Our year of seasonal eating, 2007, HarperCollins Inc., web: http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

[2] National Food Products, P.O. Box 85103, Emmarentia, 2035, tel: +27 11 646 9022, web: http://www.thehomebrewshop.co.za/