Last September we went in halves with Sue and J in the purchase of half a Prime Angus Steer. (Which we are still enjoying.) Since then, ordering another half has proven difficult, as has locating equally well raised pork and lamb of any quantity.

Enter Feather and Bone. All of their meat is organic and/or free-range and of very good quality. They send a newsletter on the Monday. You order by the Wednesday evening. And it’s delivered to your door on Friday or Saturday. They also supply a number of the nicer restaurants in Sydney, including Red Lantern, where we just went for my birthday dinner.

With our first order from Feather and Bone, we have had the salami both as is and on pizza; used half the lamb shoulder in a Guiness stew; and more recently the pork mince in cabbage rolls. And as a bit of a bonus, we got this cute little guy. He won’t be featuring in any dinner any time soon.

Do you know what this is a photo of? No? Not even a guess? It’s bird poop. Bird poop in our house, on our hardwood floor. Now this is not just inside our patio door. The bird had to come through the door, through the family room, skirt the kitchen, through the dining room and halfway into our living room. Without startling the dog. Or us seeing it.

That is one balls-y bird.

I used to use a Facebook application called “My Aquarium”. Essentially you selected fish and other marine animals to gift to your Facebook friends. The other day I received an email from them that showed an … interesting and rather mystifying … about-face in business direction…

We have decided to focus on something more exciting. My Aquarium’s name and functionality will be changed next week to SpeedDate, a fun way to meet new people. Data entered into the original app won’t be used anymore. Feel free to check it out.

Thanks,
My Aquarium

WTF?

In our marriage, Duncan is the one who maintains the garden. He allows me to have my patch in the front yard - but the only edibles in it are the hard-to-kill rosemary tree and grows-like-a-weed mint. In all else, Duncan reigns supreme.

We have a square foot garden at the front (which is probably more accurately a 3-metre square garden), planters down the side of the house, and a garden at the back. We have (sorry, Duncan has) planted everything from tomatoes to beet root to radishes. We have been very lucky with the only thing the possums have gone after being the cabbage.

The stars of the culinary garden have always been tomatoes and basil (too bad we couldn’t also grow bocconcini - we’d have ready-made caprese!), and of course Duncan-being-Duncan, chilies. As evidenced by this harvest one weekend. And what do you do when you have too many chilies? Dry them slowly in a low oven, and when all moisture has been removed, grind them in an old coffee grinder. Homemade chili powder!

Can one ever have too much basil? Trust me. One can. We have two types of basil at the moment - your regular garden variety + Greek basil (more “bite”y and potent). The Greek basil started as a little cutting from our friends Patto and Jess. It has grown into a veritable tree. The garden variety Duncan planted as a companion to our tomato plants. And each is doing really - really - well. So what to do with all this basil when you have enough pesto and Thai green curry to feed an army? Freeze it into cubes for use in stirfries during the winter months when presumably our basil should die off. (Let’s hope it does otherwise we may be trying to pawn off basil cubes to our friends…)

Duncan recently added to his plethora of citizenships by becoming Australian last week. OK. Plethora is maybe a tad of an exaggeration. But at three he still has one more than me! That’s a situation that cannot be tolerated for long. We must move somewhere in the EU and stay there for 2 years so that I too can have 3 passports to choose from.

Speaking of passports and choosing - apparently you cannot leave one country on one passport and enter a second country on another. That is frowned upon. Who knew? I was just trying to avoid the queues…

We left work early today because the power went out. We have laptops and with a deadline tomorrow, I thought that by the time I got home, everything would be back on and I could continue to work. But no. The blackout remains, our servers are still down, and we may be in for a zombie invasion.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Today I finally had a chance to go through all of the pictures I took during the time Duncan’s sister and family were visiting us over Christmas. We miss you guys!

George

Angus

Duncs - one hopes this isn’t an indication of things to come! (It was in fact my drink and the bottle was empty by the time Duncs got a-hold of it.

Simon - nice…

Susan - you can see the boys get their looks from their mother…

Is that he did in fact hit the ball!