Holy crap.

So much has happened, and is happening..the best of which is me being able to say “I’m getting married this year!” Preparations are well under way with a meeting with our celebrant in the next week or so, invites ready to be posted out and a few details to iron out. But before all that we have to pack, and move. And I need to start my training for my new position. I’ve been doing it now for 5 or so weeks, but the official start of training is Monday  16th. Amongst all that I need to get off my ass and really focus on pushing the photography as a business! With all these things on the go, I need to find two things: More energy and more time! If you have the secret to attaining these two things, please advise immediately….

Work is good…I’m thoroughly enjoying the challenge and the massive learning curve that comes with it. I need to find my feet quickly so that the staff will take me seriously as an authority figure. We are all getting there. It’s hard for them too when they’ve had 4 assistant managers in 12 months. Each person brings their own ideas and methods to the job, and I’m still finding mine while at the same time trying to appear as though I know what I’m doing! My manager is an amazingly talented women who has the patience of a saint with my never ending questions and ideas She’s flexible and personable and we actually have a fair bit in common. She’s allowing me the freedom to do whatever I’d like to make my job easier or to run smoothly and basically has said “Kell, I don’t care how or when or in what order or on what day you do everything, as long as it’s all done by the end of your working week.  Do it how you’d like to do it. ” I’d like to stay with this store for as long as I can so I can learn from the best. The staff are great and have simply accepted this green CSR who’s only been with the company for 9 0r so months. I’m proving myself to them though and will continue to do so.

Kids are great. Still a few issues we are working on, and appointments have been had, letters been written and strategies in place for one of those issues. We’ve been extremely lucky to be accepted for the first house we applied for after the one we are renting was sold, more on that a little later.  The new place is very close to the bus run for Caitlyn to get to high school this year, the other two don’t need to change schools – which was never going to happen anyway. It just means that amongst the turbulence of a new home and weddings and new jobs and the like, they at least have some stability in that regard. We’ll be asking for a long term lease once the initial period of 6 months is up. Then we can work on sorting our crap out so we can buy in the future. At the end of the day, when renting you run the risk of being booted at any time if the owner decides to sell. We don’t want to keep living like that. If any of you have a spare 40 grand you could GIFT to us, that would help alot!

On the subject of moving, our current real estate agent totally sucks. It turns out that the way they’ve done this all has been wrong, and I’m in half a mind to bloody report them once we are out. Lying sacks of shit. Money hungry  bastards. I could go on, but you get the point. So pleased to be away from them lets put it that way! This whole looking for a new rental on a time limit totally sucks. First you have to view the place, which is at the open homes. Except they quite often hold open homes during the week. Fantastic! So basically those people that can actually afford the bloody place are WORKING. Morons. Then if you do go on the weekend ones, there are so many people that you can’t really see properly, or get a decent car park and you are just rush rush rush. Not really the best way to be choosing your next home. Ultimately I don’t care that it’s someone else’s HOUSE, while we live in it, it’s our HOME. And it would be nice to be able to take the time to see that potential home properly. As it is with the time limit imposed by the termination due to sale notice, you really can’t afford to be picky! I haven’t even seen the inside of this new house. Ant has and I trust his judgement. We basically accepted because we just want it done and dusted and get in and settled before the new school year starts. No more open homes or stressing about the right damn paperwork and catering to every bloody whim the real estate agent has. Some want to know basically how many toilet paper sheets you use when wiping your ass. Doesn’t matter now I guess. We have somewhere to move, once the wedding and everything is over we’ll start thinking a little more long term and hopefully set some goals so we don’t have deal with this shit for much longer.

Wedding prep is well underway. We’ve found ourselves a lovely celebrant who lives in the lower Blue Mountains and knows what a sand ceremony is! Hopefully we’ll meet up with her either tomorrow or the following saturday to pay a deposit and lock her in. We’ve got the food sorted, my dress is picked up with some minor alterations to be done. We’ve decided what is going where on the day. And the invites are sitting on the bench waiting for me to send them out. GO US! Once we have moved I’ll hopefully come back and share a few more details with a little more detail than this.

Best be off…need to start packing.

Oh thrill oh freakin bliss.

Wanna come help anyone?!

Today was a GOOD day. For more reasons that one. Here’s a brief summary:

No phone calls
I had a win…in fact I had several.
Someone now knows that I am smarter than the average bear
Major meltdown was averted
I was, and still am, IN CONTROL all whilst maintaining an illusion to the contrary

Today was a GOOD day, and there will be more….bring ‘em on!

Our skin is soft and smells of honey with a touch of peppermint. We are totally awesome cos we have home made body butter.

Found a recipe that I liked, slightly altered it and voila, that weird photo up there is a close up of the result. Can’t believe the difference in my skin, hair and just general well being since I started making my own stuff. I have to tell you it’s a lot cheaper too! I bought some products from a local business called Heirloom Body Care. They are local, fast and reasonably priced. Just a 10 minute drive from home so I save on postage while supporting a local business. I have some basic ingredients now that when combined with items I already have in the cupboard or can get from the supermarket and health shop will certainly make a fair amount of stuff from what I’ve tried so far. My next big thing will be to try castile soap using olive oil and lye. I need a whole day without interruptions for that one though. And  a little patience while I wait for the soap to cure!

Anyway, better share some love to the sites that have helped me while I travel down this natural skin care regime so here’s some links for you to check out.

Heirloom Body Care – supplies. So far I’ve bought some shea butter, cocoa butter, castor oil, empty bottles, rosemary extract and some stainless steel containers.

Frugal and Thriving – recipe I used then altered slightly. I think next time I’ll tweak it a little again so when I’ve perfected it I’ll post my recipe.

Soap making essentials – some recipes I want to try in the future, especially the whipped shea scrub.

Burkes Backyard – The shampoo recipe which was the first one I tried, think I’ll try this but with the castile soap instead. I used pure soap from the supermarket, which as it turns out isn’t really ‘pure’ after all!

Off now to find a way to increase the lather in body wash, as well as a recipe for face moisturiser using what I’ve got. The body butter is a little heavy for the face..I think if I didn’t use as much beeswax it may be a little better but the little container Zoe and I made last weekend is going to last for ages and I would like to have something before that!

Chow for now…

And a herb garden in the front yard.

And a pretty little garden bed in the front yard along the house with gazanias and gerberas and day lilys and succulents, all of which are flowering at the moment. One of the gazanias has three different colored flowers on it.

It’s all a bit cool. Especially when you find a hidden cucumber under the masses of prickly leaves, and some cherry tomatoes ready to pick right at the bottom.  We had no idea the cucumbers were even close!  The tomatoes are sweet and yummy and we are now anxiously waiting for the romas and normal tomatoes to ripen. The peas are ready and are beautiful straight off the plant and the lettuce has kept us going for at least a month, with no end in sight. The spinach has run it’s course and has been removed. The sweet corn is progressing well and it’s been fun watching all the different parts of the plant change at different times.

After inspecting and sampling our harvest, I  got the camera out and had a bit of fun. The flowers and fruits of our labour fascinate me and I love all the tiny parts that go into making it all so beautiful to look at and eat. Not until you get up and close personal can you truly appreciate just how amazing they really are. A flower is gorgeous and makes you smile, but when you can see the pollen on the stamen, or you take note of the sensuously curved petals – that’s when you really see mother nature at it’s best. Every single plant is unique, every single flower, every single leaf.

More photos to follow in the next few days!

Take it easy folks….

Seem to getting all natural like lately. We have a small vegie garden in the back yard now with 3 varieties of tomatos, strawberries, beans, peas, corn, lettuce spinach and a couple of cucumbers. It’s all going well and we’ve used up some of the lettuce, spinach and are having a ball watching the corn and tomatoes grow! I’ve also got herbs in the front yard which are just going ballistic and we’ve got plenty of use out of those. The amazing thing about it all is that when you tell the kids that you’ve used fresh herbs and/or spinach in their pasta then apparently it all becomes not only edible, but the BEST they’ve ever eaten! Same with the salad I made which had all sorts of things that they wouldn’t normally eat – but because it had our home grown lettuce, and the vinaigrette was made using our homegrown herbs it was apparently just awesome. It was totally awesome, and not just because it tasted sensational, but because they ate it, and came back for more.

I love watching and seeing the kids enthusiasm for something that they helped build and grow and look after. It’s brilliant watching them as they eat a pea pod straight off the plant and genuinely enjoying it, or heping me weed and taking in all the amazing aromas from the herbs. I also love getting the camera out there too!

I’ve also recently started drinking aloe vera juice to try and help with some ails I’ve had of late. One unexpected benefit of  this has been the clearing up of a skin condition that I’ve been dealing with since my days in Townsville. Whilst looking for some natural or alternative remedies to those aforementioned ales, I once again came across the idea of apple cider vinegar and it’s supposed power to heal everything from digestive problems to achieving world peace! Now i’ve not been able to drink it in the way your supposed to, hence the aloe vera juice which I find I can quite easily take twice a day so since I already had the ACV, I thought I’d go hunting for other ways to use it. And came across quite a few! One which both myself and the girls have already been using daily, is as a toner. A half and half mixture of water and ACV, moisten a cotton ball and you’ve got one foul smelling, make your eyes water toner which leaves your skin feeling clean and amazingly soft. And the smell does go away. Same solution used as a rinse for your hair after shampooing and conditioning and voila – soft shiny hair! Again, the smell gets to you as you are using it, but once your hair is dry you can’t smell a thing. I was amazed with the difference after just one time of using it. Zoe tried it and didn’t really like it, but Caitlyn loved what it did to her hair. Totally awesome, totally natural and  totally cheap!

Seeing as how the girls are getting to THAT age, I decided that I would try and keep up the whole natural theme and try and find some cleanser and moisturiser recipes that I’d feel comfortable with them using whenever they wanted without me worrying about all the chemical crap, preservatives and other nasties. So far I’ve made some rosewater and glycerin cleanser, which seems to be ok as just a refresher or toner aswell and experimented with a moisturiser that at this point would probably work better as a body wash if the consistency stays what it is at the moment! It has copha, rosewater, glycerin, honey and lavendar oil. We’ll see how it looks in the morning and how it feels once I try putting it on my skin If it’s successful, or if I manage to fine tune it till it is, I’ll post the recipe. From what I’ve researched and seen, I think I need to find some beeswax or shea butter to use as a base for the moisturiser but have no bloody idea where to find them! I have found jojoba and apricot kernal oil, both of which appear in a lot of recipes I’ve come across. I think that I’ll probably have to buy the others online. In the meantime I’m going to try and keep the all natural theme happening around here, it seems to be helping with the skin/hair and with a bit of girly bonding too. Nothing like using the same shit as mum to make you feel just a little bit grown up right?!

It’s a bit exciting isn’t it?!

I joined a site a few months back. It’s called the soup and it’s basically a site to help generate buzz and word of mouth about new products coming up. If selected for projects they send you something to check out and share with your friends, you review it and give feedback. Well I’m assuming that’s how it all works! I’ve just recently been selected for my first one and it’s berry berry exciting!

Yesterday I received in the mail 3 copies of a new book that will hit the shelves in October. One for me, and a couple extra for me to give to family or friends. Then we have a month or so to read it, then fill out a survey. In the meantime we can ask questions of the author, discuss it amongst ourselves and generally just enjoy a freebie while spreading the word! Hence this post

It’s not the only reason for this post though. I thought I might use this place as a bit of a notepad to jot down my initial thoughts as I’m reading it. It’s easy to have an overall impression of a book once you are finished it, but much harder to recall how you felt about specifics like how the characters were introduced, or storylines built up, that point in the book when you knew it had you sucked in, that kind of thing. So this will be an ongoing topic around here for awhile!

Last night I started it and to be honest the only reason I stopped reading at all was because I was so tired I couldn’t read the letters anymore! It reminds me of one of those movies you switch over to and it all seems a little slow with not much happening and you think to yourself “I’ll just watch this for a minute or two” and before you know it, it’s 1am in the morning and you can’t turn it off….you just HAVE to know what happens. Well now I just HAVE to know what the judge feels he got so wrong, and why he thinks one of his oldest friends in the world will know what to do about. So far I’m loving the way this story is being told from the perspective of someone who appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the title character on a personal basis.

For those of you who like the same kind of books, and authors that I do, I think you’ll enjoy Caroline Overington‘s style. Kind of presumptuous of me to say so after reading only 84 pages, but sometimes you just know, you know?!

Must be off, have a book to read..take it easy.

1 cup desiccated coconut

1/2 cup rolled oats

1 cup sesame seeds

2 cups mixed nuts, seeds and dried fruit of your choice. I use cashews, pine nuts, almonds, banana chips, sultanas, goji berries, dried apricot, pepitas, sunflower kernals. Any nuts or seeds that aren’t reasonably small I put in a bag and bash up smaller, or you could just buy flaked/sliced/crushed ones! The dried fruits I either lightly process or chop up a bit with a knife.

Toast the coconut, oats, sesame seeds and nuts – either on the stove over medium heat or in the oven. Some recipes say till golden, others don’t even say to toast them. I do it till you can smell the coconut! Allow to cool.

Melt 125g butter with 1/2 cup honey and 1/3 cup brown sugar.

Mix together and press into a lined tin or oven dish and refrigerate. I allow it all to cool a little and add some choc chips too. Cut into pieces when set. Keep in air tight container and enjoy!