02.55 pm
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone, and Happy Winter Day, too, because at long last, I think I’ve finally found the Theme/Template that I can live with – at least for the next week or so, anyway! 😉 It’s a “third-party” one, which of course isn’t available on the Word Press.com site, otherwise I’m sure I would have found it by now! It’s not perfect, mind you, but it does seem to tick all the right boxes. I can bypass the “show extract” format with its highly annoying (to me!) “Read More” waste-of-time – so that got a √ 🙂 I can, at a pinch, add my own graphic header (instead of the misty blossom “banner” thingy under the site title!¹) but with this particular Theme, I’m able to use of an absolutely enormous range of Google Fonts, regardless of whether they’re on my computer (or yours either, apparently!) so I was able to put quite a nice site title/Header text and tagline together in of my own choice of colour and Font – so a great big √ for that ability – I think it turned out pretty well! It also has the ability to be turned into an online store, with all the forms and everything needed for an online store – but you won’t be seeing any of that on my blog! 🙂 There were more positive notes too, but really – I’m not sure that any of you are all that interested, are you? (waits for chorus of approval…. not a sausage! Ohhhh-kay then, moving right along….)
So, as I think I might have mentioned, we had the electricians here this morning, to put in an inside power switch for the outside fountain, and to make some changes to our breaker-box, in preparation to having more solar panels installed. They were supposed to arrive at 08.00 am, but didn’t arrive until about 08.30 am… (and at about three o’clock this afternoon Julian received an SMS from the electricians, which had been sent around ten to eight this morning – telling him that they were running a bit late and didn’t expect to get here until around 08.30 am! Where had that SMS been for nearly half a day??! Thanks, Tel$tra!) When they arrived, Julian ran around the house, collecting cats so that they could be secured in the Library (Satai’s dining room and bedroom) for the duration. He gave them a bowl of pussy biscuits to appease them for the lock-up, but Sal had other ideas, and ran off into our bedroom! Not such a clever idea after all, because Julian simply locked him up in there for a few minutes, until the electricians were sorted out and organised – then he went in, scooped him up, and took him back to the Library. Well, the electricians got on with their work, and sure enough, not much later all the power went off. Julian and I went into the lounge room to read, and all was relatively quiet, except for the plaintive beeping of the UPS’s (“Uninterruptible Power Supplies” – designed to sacrifice themselves in an emergency, to give you time to shut your computers down safely) …and the yowling and hammering on the door by the two cats, who objected rather violently to being shut up in the Library again. Well, we could hear a lot of thumping and banging, and a lot of what we surmised was scratching at the door – but it wasn’t until after the electricians had finished and gone, when it was finally safe enough to let our poor little boys out, that we opened the door and saw the full extent of the damage those two little cats had done! 🙁 Maybe we should change their names to “Whelan” and “Wrecker”! We don’t know exactly who was responsible for the initial onslaught (unfortunately poor little Satai bore the brunt of the blame, mainly because he’s the naughtiest and cheekiest, whereas Sal is usually very staid and calm… :/ ) In hindsight, I think it was probably Sal² who began the destruction, for no other reason than that he feared a repeat of that terrible night when Julian was carted off to hospital, and panicked – Satai, not understanding the whys and wherefores , simply joined in with great gusto. No matter. Julian is currently on his way home from a dental x-ray, and stopping off at Bunnys for the second time today, to get “thingz” to fix what the cats destroyed. They’d completely ripped up about four inches of perfectly good carpet, all the way along under the door, and totally shredded it! It’s less-rather-than-more salvageable – but we’ll do our best. We can’t get too cross with them either, because they wouldn’t know what we were angry about – but I tell you what! Next time they have to be confined to one room, they’ll be going into the (fully tiled!) laundry, with a litter box, a damp towel to lie on (for some weird reason, cats seem to adore lying on damp towelling!) and some water! There’s plenty of sunlight and light in there – they like to get in there in the mornings, and sunbathe – and there’s not really much else they can get into in there! Anyway, what’s done is done… better that a carpet be destroyed than they get out and get lost, or hit on the road…
And now for the “good” bits! 😉
Food stuffs. Last night we had pasta for dinner, and we used a home-made “sachet”³ of our home-made – from fully organic and home-grown tomatoes – “passata” for the sauce! I’d tasted it as it was being made, and it was really delicious! For our sauce last night, Julian fried up a small to medium diced onion in a little butter and olive oil, until it was “blonded” (translucent and slightly golden) before adding it to the passata, with a few good grinds of fresh pepper. I can honestly tell you, it was the best pasta napoletana I’ve ever had – including my father’s and my grandmother’s! We had a bit of grated parmesan on it, and I hate to say it, but we both went back for the very small amount of “seconds” that was left in the pasta pot! For dessert I had a very, very nice Williams pear, and a small tub of the MOO Sticky Apple and Organic Honey yoghurt. Today for lunch we sampled the “Noir” sourdough bread from the Tree Frog, over at Doncaster Shoppingtown. Now, I have to say this – the bread was delicious, as we knew it would be, but we should have had it plain toasted, not as a sandwich. The loaf is round, and cut for toast, which makes for a slightly weird, and very thick, sandwich shape. Well, we had it as a sandwich, with sliced home-grown tomato and chopped up chunks of left-over chicken from our dinner on Wednesday night – all very, very yummy, but I felt that there were really a few too many competing flavours to taste the bread properly – I think I’ll just have plain buttered toast, next time… Tonight for dinner we’re having lamb backstrap marinated in the Feta and basil “slurry”, then pan-fried, and served on a bed of plain, steamed rice with finely sliced spring onions. For dessert I might have the last pear – before it goes “off”, and an Apple Le Rice.
Weigh-in this morning. *sigh* same old, same old… It was actually a bit of a scramble this morning to get myself weighed, and clothed, before the electricians, so we sort of raced through it a bit. The first time I hopped on the scales, it told me 74.5 kg – the same as yesterday – then I hopped on a second time, and first it shot up to 74.7 kg, before waggling around a bit and ending up on 74.5 kg again. So, phew! Same as yesterday, 74.5 kg – not too bad, considering what I’d had for lunch the day before! 🙂
And that pretty much brings me back to tomorrow! I actually have no idea what’s happening tomorrow, especially now that I think I’ve found a blog Theme that I actually really like! Maybe I’ll finally get a bit of WoW-ing in, I think I might have to practice a bit, seeing as we’ll be playing all day Sunday! Anyway do drop in again tomorrow night to find out what’s been happening up this side of the black stump – about the only thing for the blog that I have to do now is get back to taking pretty photos of the cats and Auric and Dapple, so that all of you out there in Reader Land can see how much Satai has grown! However, that’s about “it” from me for tonight, so I shall admonish you all to bee good, don’t forget that it is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool, depending on the circumstances – but most importantly, please – don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
¹ this particular Theme came with a very pretty, blurred and misty, orchid blossom “banner” thingy, which I would have left in place, except that it came with a semi-transparent plaque in the middle of it, extolling the virtues and advantages of using this particular Theme. While I agreed with them about how nice the Theme was, it wasn’t something that I wanted my readers to have to put up with, so I went looking for similar pictures in the same colours and tones. In the end I chose this one, and after about five minutes of re-sizing, blurring, colour manipulating, and various other arcane sleights of hand, I came up with a picture that was pretty close to the original, minus the blurb in the middle!
² when Julian had been taken ill at about 2.30 am and had to be rushed off to hospital in an ambulance, I’d shoved Sal, who’d been in our bedroom with us, into the Library with Satai, and locked them in, while I went off in the ambulance with Julian. I didn’t get back home again until nearly 10 o’clock the next morning. This morning I think Sal remembered this, and had visions of it happening all over again… It was very traumatic for him…
³ The tomatoes were washed, and roughly chopped into smallish (but not too small!) chunks, and chucked into the largest pot we have. I added a medium-sized “fistful” of cooking salt – as much as you can reach into the salt pig and grasp in one hand (a typical Italian cook’s way of adding salt to anything that doesn’t give precise amounts!) then we added “about a fistful” of torn basil leaves, and about a cup, to a cup and a half of water, to “get things started” (tomatoes put out a great deal of water on their own) put it all on the stove, brought it all to the boil, and cooked the tomatoes, stirring occasionally, for about forty minutes – or until reduced to a puree consistency. Once the mixture had cooled, Julian weighed the “passata” into plastic zip lock bags – 400 grams (the amount of crushed tomatoes you get in a tin) to a bag. Laying the bags flat in the fridge for a few hours to chill off, we then placed them in the freezer for later use.