Finding your own path

Pebbledash picked it up, I am turning 61, not 62! Thanks Diana. Meryl, one of the volunteers I work with picked it up too. When I mentioned at lunch yesterday that my birthday was coming up, she said it didn't seem so long ago we celebrated my last birthday. Then it hit me, they gave me a morning tea for my 60th, I'm still a mere slip of a girl - I'm going to be 61. :- )I removed the email

Radio, books and newspapers

Some of you might remember that I did an interview with Radio National recently. That program will be broadcast tomorrow, Thursday, at 8.30 am Australian eastern time. The program is call Future Tense, here is their website, a description of the program is here.And here is part of the Radio National email sent earlier this week:"You can let your international readers know that they can either

Organising the kitchen

We had a major problem in our kitchen in 2007. Our dishwasher hose started leaking water and before we knew what was happening, the floating timber floor had a cushion of water under it. We claimed on our insurance and to make a long story short, had to have everything in the kitchen removed to dry out the flooring, then, when they realised that wasn't going to happen, the flooring was

The best cake

I spent a lovely weekend here with Hanno. Not much happened, there were a few phone calls and little else. Hanno worked on the garden, cleaned out the chook house, Lucy-proofed the garden fence and mowed. I spent most of my time either writing or cooking and a couple of times we sat together on the front porch with our tea, talked and just enjoyed the weather and the scenery. It's been

'Publish' - celebrating one million visits

When I turned off my computer yesterday, the counter was on 999,934. This morning it had clicked over to 1,001,100. I can't quite believe it! When I first started my blog, in those early days when I wondered about a name, what to write about and if anyone would read, I never for one second, imagined that less than two years later (started May 2007) over a million visits would be registered.I

Still in the garden and wondering about the downs

We had a feeling there would not be many potatoes in that last lot we planted. Hanno dug them up yesterday and we only had about two kilos (4½ lb) from the entire bed. One end of the potato patch never flowered, the other end had a few flowers and was the area that gave us what we harvested, most of them are small potatoes. It's really disappointing when we prepare a bed, plant seeds and tend

Small steps towards a simpler life

After receiving a dozen emails in the past day or two about starting a simple life, and having many new readers join us over the month, I thought it was a good time to write about that subject again. So how do you start living simply? The complex answer is to develop a set of simple values you want to live by and fashion your life around those values. The simple answer is that you've probably