down to earth

I sometimes have a quiet laugh at myself for something I've said or written. Yesterday I was reading through an old list of chores I'd set down for a normal day. It was the usual kind of stuff - "clean the bathroom, wash floors, water plants, sew on buttons, post mail, bake scones", then right at the end, the last on the list, "do whatever you didn't do yesterday". It was a valuable reminder. A good friend of mine who is very well organised and lives in a neat and tidy home, would look at that last list item and shudder. It would not be good enough for her, not finishing a list would not be an option.

But I take it in my stride. I'm not in a competition, I'm not trying to outdo anyone else, I'm not trying to be perfect. I just want do my daily chores, do the best I can and go to bed happy. Putting undue pressure on yourself, setting too high a standard everyday, using lists and routines to regiment yourself is not the aim of my kind of housekeeping. Lists and routines are a good way of helping you set your own rhythm. They allow you to be flexible with your housework and will guide you through what can be done each day. A list should not pressure you or make you feel guilty for things left undone. Your lists should be a gentle reminder of what could be done but if you run out of time or decide to change the list, you can start it again the following day. Without the guilt.

What we do is hard enough without applying unnecessary pressure to ourselves. It is a really good idea to make a list to guide you through your day. Hopefully that list will become a part of your daily routine and when you go through it for a couple of weeks, it may take on its own rhythm. When that happens, things move along at their own pace and it's easier to get your work done. But if you ever have a day when you have extra chores to attend to, or people arrive, or someone is sick, you don't have to solider on doing your work according to the list. Modify your day and your mind, do what you can and let that be it. You can either start the next day with the undone work at the top of the list or just drop it altogether and do whatever it is the following week or when you can manage it.

Remember, you are in charge of the list, it's not in charge of you; it's just a guide. If it doesn't work like that on a particular day, just accept it and go to bed knowing you did your best and that any work not done can wait. Aiming for perfection and getting upset when you don't meet your expectations is a recipe for unhappiness. Be kind to yourself, set manageable goals, try your best and remember that there will be days when all the work will not be done.

You'll get pressure from all directions in the normal course of a week, no matter where you work. You could be at home with children or your elders, you could be in a shop, office, factory or outdoors working for a living. You may be retired, ill, volunteering or living the life of Riley. At some point, things won't go as expected and you'll make it worse if you pressure yourself to carry on regardless.

We're all trying to live our best lives and achieve the goals we set ourselves. But when that doesn't happen, when the normal flow of your work stops, when the unexpected happens and your daily goals just can't be achieved, it's okay to let go, step back, and start again the following day. You wouldn't insist that a friend keeps going to tick everything off their list when it's just not possible. Don't do it to yourself either. ❤️

It's a constant battle here at the moment keeping the water up to our tube stock in the front garden and the vegetables and fruit out the back. I've just come in from the garden where I watered plants for over an hour and fought off another bush turkey. I'm hot and worn out. I've parked myself at my computer with iced water and the fan going, so I thought I'd do a short extra post.

I'm happy I have this chance to thank you for the wonderful response to my post yesterday about Kerry's new shop. Last night after work he checked his Instagram and was really delighted to see all the new followers. He messaged me and asked me to send a "big thank u" to everyone who followed him and to all those who sent good wishes in the comments here.

There is this huge ever-evolving, indistinct and mostly unknown entity usually called a "readership" who visit here every minute of every day. I know what to expect from you now - and that is support, love and encouragement. Kerry however, is new to this and I think he was surprised - a very nice surprised. So thank you from both of us because you've helped Kerry build a part of his business that is notoriously difficult.

💕💕💕

Anna in Sussex asked for the recipe for the chocolate cake I made for Hanno's birthday. We have a vegan in the family so it was made with no butter, eggs, honey or milk, but it was still fabulous. If you've never make anything vegan before, this is a good starter recipe. This cake is best eaten the day of baking or the following day. I didn't ice the cake and it has a tendency to dry out without frosting or icing. Shane made a vegan cake too and he iced his. When he comes over next time I'll ask him for the icing recipe and pass that on too. All I know at the moment is that is contained coconut oil.

1 ½ cups plain /all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
⅓ cup cocoa powder - I used unsweetened Dutch cocoa
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon bicarb/baking soda
1 ¼ cups hot water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
⅓ cup vegetable oil - I used sunflower oil
1 teaspoon vinegar

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

This is one of those easy cake mixes that is divided into dry and wet ingredients. So sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa, salt and bicarb/baking soda in a large bowl. Pour the water, vanilla, oil and vinegar into a jug and mix together. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Mix together but do not over mix - as soon as the ingredients have combined, stop. Pour the batter into a greased 20 cm/8 inch round cake tin, and place in the oven for about 30 - 35 minutes. The cake will be ready when you can smell baked cake and a toothpick poked into the centre comes out clean.

I didn't take a photo of Hanno's birthday cake but I did take a photo of the blood orange cake I made this week. The recipe is the same as my whole orange cake recipe already on the blog. I added the candied orange slices and syrup I wrote about a few days ago to the top of each piece as I was serving it. Absolutely delicious and something I'll add to my seasonal recipes so we can have it every year when the blood oranges are in season. And it used up the entire orange instead of having the waste skin.

BTW, I read that there are now blood oranges you can grow in hotter areas so I'm seeing if I can sprout the seeds I took from these oranges. I'll let you know how that goes.

I hope you have a lovely day.

The past week has been lovely here. On Tuesday we celebrated Hanno's 77th birthday with the family over for dinner. Sunny and Jamie are in Korea at the moment but they facetimed us to say hello. I spent much of the day cooking and we ended up having a roast pumpkin and beetroot salad with sprouted barley, baby cos lettuce and snow peas, which was made for the vegan but we all shared it. We also shared a garden salad, spicy oven wedges, fried chicken, pork sausages and lamb chops. I made rosemary focaccia and a vegan chocolate cake and Shane brought his delicious homemade vegan cake too. As you can see, we had plenty of good food and no one went away hungry. I love spending time with my family. I'm not a social person at all now but give me the chance to spend time with my mob and I'm the first one there.

Hanno asked me to pass on his gratitude for all the birthday wishes you sent along. He reads every comment, has done for the past ten years, and he's always surprised and delighted when you send him your love. Thank you. ❤️

Hanno's hat, holes courtesy of HRH Grace.

Some of the plants I potted up as gifts.

This is our elderberry tree. You can see flower heads of berries changing from green to red. I'll be picking them when they develop their dark colour and will shared them with Sarndra. The garden is suffering with this hot weather and we have very little water in the tanks.

I spent some time a couple of weeks ago potting up herbs and chilli to give as gifts later in the year. If you have some friends who you think would like a couple of good chilli bushes, ginger, herbs or tomatoes in pots, now is the time to pot them so they'll be healthy and a good size by December. I've potted Welsh onions, cayenne chilli, mint, parsley and bay. If you're living in Australia, you can take cuttings of bay and elderberry now or pot up some raspberry or strawberry runners.

This photo was taken just before a magpie dared look into Gracie's food bowl. She chased it off with loud barking and all sorts of carry on and below you can see the magpie on the washing line with Gracie staring at it. And staring and staring. Given half a chance, she's a bit of a drama queen.

Gracie had a wash and blow dry when the groomer came during the week. She loves Julie and sits quietly while she's shampooed and dried. Her behaviour is continuing to improve and it looks like she's settling in well now. Her current mission is to keep birds out of the area near her food bowl. When we were having morning tea yesterday, a magpie dared walk on the verandah and was just about to look into her food bowl when Gracie rushed at the bird sending it flying up to the washing line. She stared at it until it flew off a few minutes later.

I picked up my new glasses on Monday and this time I had a pair of sun glasses made up as well. The optometrist told me I should protect my eyes from UV, especially now I have cataracts, so I've got good sun glasses on hand now. Thursday was my turn at the hairdressers. I don't really like having my hair cut but I went along, knowing that I'd turn into a Struwwelpeter if I don't conform to this modern ritual. I have to admit though that my hairdresser is fast and we have interesting conversations amid the clipping.

We're suffering through a particularly hot early spring. It will be over 30C all this week so we'll get back into the routine of doing our outside jobs early and stay inside most of the day. We have solar reflective paint on our roof and if we keep the doors closed, it makes quite a difference to the indoor temperature without us using fans or air conditioning. Yesterday Hanno checked the temps and it was 34 outside and 26 inside. Over the next couple of weeks we'll be decluttering again, so that will be all indoor work. Truly, the older we get the less we need. Do you find that too? We've decided to have a garage sale sometime in October and try to sell or give away a lot of what we have here.

One thing we had to buy though was another computer. I shorted Hanno's out last week by trying to insert an earplug cable into the wrong port. 😳 Oops. It fried the motherboard. And to add insult to injury, when we took it to the shop to be repaired, the assistant told us it was unlikely this "vintage" computer could be saved (it was seven years old!). So we bought another one the same as the iMac he had so he doesn't have to learn a new system. C'est la vie.

Candied blood orange in syrup for cake decorating. It will last for months in the fridge.

Using up some of the eggs. This was yesterday's lunch along with bread and butter pudding - which used six more eggs.

I bought some delicious blood oranges this week. I look forward to them every year. I've eaten a few fresh, made up a jar of candied blood orange in syrup, which I'll use to top a cake, and today I'll make a blood orange cake for our morning tea cake. I also made up a bread and butter pudding using some three day old fruit bread and a small number of the mountain of eggs we have at the moment. With Sunny away we're sinking under the weight of so many eggs from our girls. So I served up scrambled eggs with sausages for our lunch today and I'm going to freeze a couple of dozen by cracking them into a jug, mixing the yolks with the whites and pouring them into my trusty freezer pod. Each pod takes 75 mls/2.5 oz, which will be easy portions to freeze for future cakes and scrambled eggs.

So that's got you up to date with my news. This week I'll be sewing and sorting through cupboards for the garage sale. What's on your agenda this week? Whatever it is, I hope it's a good week for all of us.

I bought our first mobile phone in 1990, three years after mobile calls started in Australia. The phone was Hanno's 50th birthday present; he will turn 77 tomorrow. Our first phone, a large Nokia, was not the old brick type but it wasn't far from it. In those days you could choose your own number; we still have that number. However, the phones we have now are a far cry from that Nokia because when I slip my phone into my apron pocket every morning, it's not so I can easily answer every call, it's to take photos and listen to the radio. When we first bought iPhones, it was a non-event for me. I saw it as just another piece of technology that I wasn't particularly interested in. Now I use my phone numerous times every day but I rarely check for emails, messages or answer phone calls, my phone serves me in different ways. However, when either Hanno or I go out alone, we keep in touch using our phones and when one of us is shopping alone, we can Facetime to show something to the person at home - and that's usually me.

At the moment I'm getting ready for the annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count, which I do on my phone. It will take place on 23 - 29 October. You can download a free app on your phone which will give you all the details. You have a week in which to use the app to register the birds you see in your backyard in a 20 minute period during the week. If you don't see any birds, or only a few, that is valuable information, so they want your survey too. The app gives you several ways to identify the birds if you're not sure of what you're looking at. You can practise your bird watching skills in the lead up to the count by using the app as a field guide so it will give you a general understanding of which birds use your backyard for water, food and shelter. It's a great project for adults and older children and you can sign up as an under 18s group (schools, cubs, guides etc.). The data collected from all over Australia goes towards a greater understanding our our bird life so that strategies can be developed to help any of them that are in crisis.

Many of the photos I show you in this blog are taken on my phone camera. I use an app called Camera+ which allows me to adjust the exposure and zoom in and out, although that affects the quality slightly. After taking the photo, there are a number of advanced editing features that will produce great photos, but even the ones I take, which I don't edit, are passable. It looks like its only available for iPhone or iPad, and there is a small fee now for the download, but I think it's worth it.

Yesterday morning I downloaded the new ABC radio app, Listen. I had to. It was Sunday morning, I wanted to work in the bush house and I also wanted to listen to Australia All Over. So with earphones in and the app on my phone, I was set.

This radio program has been on the ABC on Sunday mornings for longer than I care to remember. It's sometimes inspiring, occasionally annoying and it reminds me of all of us living simple lives. People ring up and talk about what they're doing. It's usually ordinary stuff - baking for the CWA, cooking real food, riding horses, swimming, walking, fund raising, gardening, plowing crops, working at their jobs and a million other things. And yes, they are all normal people who talk about life with a passion. I love listening because there is such a diverse group of people who call themselves Australian. You hear familiar stories and surprising ones, all things you'd never know about because they're deemed to be too common and not worth air time. I think that everyone has a story to tell and it is sometimes those who look the least likely who have the most amazing tales to tell.

So there I was, cleaning up the benches in my bush house, earphones in and doing this and that to piece together my own ordinary life. After I finished in the bush house, I went inside and made lunch - nothing fancy, cold leftovers from Saturday's pork roast rack, accompanied by potato salad with poached eggs, backyard tomatoes, lettuce and sliced pickled beetroot. I doubt you'd see it on any menu but it used up the leftovers, was easy to prepare and it was delicious plain food. Outside the birds were swooping in, the sky was blue and clear and there was the smell of a few neighbourhood lunches being cooked. Honestly, you wouldn't be dead for quids.

I have no affiliation with any of these organisations. I'm just relaying my own experiences to you.