Hot cross bun season

I love making my own hot cross buns. Like most things you make yourself, they taste heaps better than the ones from the shop.  I have the dough on the first rise now and I'm going to leave it overnight and finish them in the oven tomorrow morning so they're lovely and fresh to eat for breakfast. This is the first time I've tried the leaving overnight thing. I wasn't sure if I could do that or not but several blogs said it was okay so I am giving it a go. Punching down the dough is my favourite thing to do in the whole process of making them (kneading is a close second) so that will be my first job when I get up tomorrow.

Roll on tomorrow morning.

Sorry for the silence

There's been a bit going on. That's an understatement really. I'm currently enjoying a couple of quieter weeks on the work front so that is good. I even managed to take myself off for a lovely pot of tea in a cafe this morning. All by myself. Sitting in the front window seat gazing out at the beautiful river flowing past. No one else in the cafe except the two women who run it. Bliss.

I did get a call from my Uni teaching colleague while I was there. But somehow, even talking about work seems like fun when you are in such a peaceful environment.

I should have resisted the call of the cake cabinet though. I haven't been eating much sweet stuff lately, so the coconut lemon meringue slice (I did have it without cream and ice cream) tasted a bit too sugary for my liking.  Had a tiny lunch to make up for it.

Teaching has been going okay this year. My tutorial group is much smaller and most of them seem reasonably switched on. Although teaching them from four until six p.m. can be a bit of a challenge when they've all been there since the eight a.m. lecture in the morning.

I'm thankful to God for providing me with some more work for the next couple of months. I didn't get the permanent position I applied for but there is a short term job I can do at the local hospital until the next student education contract comes up. This also solves a transport problem. We are still without a second car but for the next little while I can go to work with my husband and we actually don't need the second car as desperately as we did a few weeks ago. Of course, Murphy's law (or God's sovereign plan) says that this is probably when we will find another one. Chris is off to check one out tomorrow afternoon. I hope it's good. It's a blue one, my favourite colour, so I'd be happy to take it on that basis alone. But I suppose the mechanical condition is also important.

And somehow in the middle of all the craziness, being sick, being buried under a rather large workload and dealing with all the usual family dramas, I've managed to continue my morning walks. Not every day, but at least three times a week. I'm even doing a bit of jogging for part of the way sometimes. And I have lost five kilos in the process. And about five centimetres off my waist measurement. My original aim was to lose five kilos but I'm feeling so good, I'm going to try and lose a few more.

The C.B.R.P. went off track for a little while. Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were hard going. I just started Joshua last week. But I'm still trying to read along as much as I can before I forget what I've read before.

So that's me for the past few months. Just popping up for some air before it all starts again next week. Hopefully the blog will get a bit more attention now that I'm back into the groove of going to work.

An observation

Being the treasurer of a church sometimes seems like a thankless task.

That is all.

Never were truer words written....

From here.

I missed the Paul Kelly and Neil Finn concerts

I was feeling a bit sad when I saw people posting all over Facebook and their blogs about how amazing the show was.

So I was pleased to discover that their final concert at the Sydney Opera House next Monday night is being streamed live on YouTube. Link here.

Not quite as good as being there live, but nice to be able to watch it without leaving home.

Image from here.

I'm sitting here at my computer....

....watching a rather large cockroach crawling across the wall in front of me. He's made one trip across and back, and now he's just sitting there on the wall.

I'm trying to decide whether going upstairs to get the insect spray is worth the effort. He's not moving too quickly. Sometimes the spray can make them fly around really fast and in crazy unpredictable circles. That freaks me out a bit.

He's still not moving. We get our house sprayed for cockroaches once a year. It's been a few months since that happened. It would be nice to think that this might be his death throes that I'm watching. Although I think that the death staggers might look a bit more unco-ordinated than what I've been watching so far.

Can you all tell that I'm really scraping the bottom of the blogging barrel here? I was wondering whether I should illustrate this post with a picture, and then I just thought...umm...no, probably not required. I'm sure you can all visualise what's happening well enough.

Oops

I sent my two big guys off to school this morning with some trepidation. Neither of them had vomited yet. I was wondering if it might strike at school.

One of them was performing in a trumpet group with two other kids from his class at the local Salvation Army church morning tea today. The Salvos are conveniently located next door to their school, and the principal of the school is a member of the church so they do quite a few performances over there.

Sadly, vomiting struck at probably the most inconvenient moment it could have. Just as they were on the stage getting ready to play. I was told he had to run off stage and make for the nearest toilet. He nearly got there. But not quite. The floor around the toilet cubicle got covered. And the principal ended up having to clean it all up afterwards.

I didn't hear the full story when he was brought home by my husband at lunchtime. All I knew was that he'd had to run off stage just as they were about to start and that he'd missed the toilet. He told me he didn't know who cleaned it up. So it was slightly embarrassing when the deputy principal called me later to tell me about it. Apparently the principal thought it was just nervousness that caused him to do it. So I then had to confess that the evil gastro was making its way through our house and that I had sent my kids off to school even though I knew it could be coming. Oh dear. Caught out.

The deputy principal was amused, I think, because she usually takes the kids to most of these musical performances and thus is presumably left with any of these kinds of unpleasant cleaning jobs. She seemed to be very happy that the principal had to take one for the team this time. I'm guessing cleaning up vomit probably isn't top of the list of his regular jobs.

Sometimes you just have to laugh. It was kind of funny. Hopefully he'll be able to recover to perform again in future and the principal (also his trumpet teacher) won't hold it against him. But it's one of those moments that I'm not too sorry to have missed...

We're all sick

It is in no way pleasant to have a vomiting bug in your house. Especially when you are the first one to get it. Then you just know that everyone else is also going to be vomiting before too long. And then you are going to have to clean it all up.

Just so everyone knows, "you" in this post really means "I." And I am really not very good with vomit clean-ups. I rely on lots of assistance from my so-much-more-patient-than-I-am husband to get me through them.

Sigh. There's never a good time for this kind of sickness to strike but this week is a particularly bad week for it to descend on us. Praying for some strength and energy to deal with the onslaught. One child is already down, three more kids and a husband still to go.

More comics for your entertainment...

This time from The Great Gatsby. If you read it at school and didn't love it then, this might change your mind. I should warn you there's a little bit of coarse language in it so if that's not your thing, please feel free to skip over this one. In the end, the rest of it was just too funny not to post...

There's more of Kate Beaton's work at the website Hark!A Vagrant. Comes highly recommended from one of my favourite bloggers (and awesome cartoonist himself) Ben.