roof and walls to boot!

After weeks of rain, John finally managed to get our roof on and stop the rain.  I hope we haven't triggered more drought.  It's rained every week John has been working on our house, making things very slow. Roof's up and the sky is blue.

Inside our new bedroom, lined with Charlie's signature ply, exposed recycled hardwood framing will provide shelves for our precious objects.

crimson grapes and red delicious apples

Hazy Jane made it to our shopping collective pack and pick up last week.  Here's her box of goodies.

It was so lovely to see her with baby and husband in tow.

We were short delivered on yellow zucchinis and tomatoes, but what we did get was absolutely beautiful and (red) delicious!

Bogged down and totally loving P&C admin for now...

It's only been two weeks and already the P&C seems to be taking all my time.  I think I'm just so excited to have a new avenue to use my skills in community organising. 
It wasn't until a week after I'd been elected President of our P&C that I realised what the P&C was all about - I've been in a working mum vacuum for the past three years of Gully's school life, but with River and Gully both at school, I wanted to be more engaged in the direction of the school this  year. So, here goes!
Reading the 2010 P&C Handbook and the latest P&C magazine on train on my way to uni last week, it dawned on me - we're a lobby group, campaigning for free, quality, non secular public education. It's that simple.
One week in and I've met with over 8 P&C executive members, past and present, to quizz them on their priorities and legacy; done a full day's work in the school canteen; hung outside the school in the rain on Saturday night, to personally inform parents of a cancelled fundraising event; published an information flyer for our school parents and staff about the role of the P&C and put together a survey on survey monkey for staff, parents and keen students to fill in - to inform our new P&C 'business plan'.
I so hope this process attracts an active parent community for our lovely, tiny school..
Certainly feel like I'm jumping in, but also feel really comfortable using my skills in a positive and hopefully community empowering way.


You can visit 
www.surveymonkey.com/s/LWMV9FH to view our P&C survey.

blue bower

we visited Sim and Matt in the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago.  they've just purchased a block of land and are embarking on the grand adventure of building their home.  This blue bower was nestled in their garden - see how the Bower Bird has shaped the grass - so beautiful!

market

i went to market myself for the inaugural order of the new jasmine greens shopping collective.  headed down the highway quite late and hit all the peak hour traffic.  got to the organic warehouse five minutes before closing time, thankfully they let me snoop around and spend up.  i spent way too much money, one of the drawbacks of being in a huge warehouse full of organic food.  got home with beautiful fresh produce. here it is on the palette. i don't want to make a habit of going to market. the round trip took me six hours & it's near impossible to do it under four. much prefer to pay Trevor to bring our order up from market on his semi-trailer.
next delivery is this Friday.

loripeets

Gully called them that when he was little and it's stuck.  we have five totally wild,noisy and crazy 'runners' in an avery up the back of the garden - our small way of assisting Judith with her Wildlife Ark bird rescue.  our lorikeets have psittiscine circo virus, more commonly known as beak and feather.  their flying wings have not developed, hence the name runner.  they can't fly.  we rescued our first bird, Jasper about august last year.  i was on my way to pick Gully up from school when i heard a commotion and saw a crow and a kookaburra attacking him in the mud below a mangrove tree.  Judith showed us how to care for him and lent us her spare avery.  because the virus can spread to other psittiscine species (parrots), we offer a local isolation recovery ward for lorikeets.  Jasper has long since recovered and flown off.  he was so tame when we first got him, we could hold him and could have focussed on taming him, but we decided to let him stay wild in the hope he would recover. here he is enjoying fresh flowers picked by Gully, River and Akira.  at least two more of our birds are recovering and growing their flight wings the other three don't look so promising.  we named our first two birds Jasper and Jack after Gully and River's cousins.  the new ones are baby one, baby two, baby three and baby four.

cucumbers and chillies

Charlie and the boys harvested our first hand of bananas today.  they're strung up outside Charlie's office in the back yard.  tiny little finger bananas - we'll keep them on the stalk and hope they ripen.  cucumbers, chillies and pumpkins are all thriving, rhubarb is making a comeback, lettuce doing well, eggplant and capsicums are in flower... parsley, borage and rocket are sprouting.  there are eight lemons on the maya tree, two on the fruit salad citrus and three ruby red grapefruit coming along - the few that survived the baby fruit cull. i tried to pull off the baby fruit for the first two years while the trees establish, but it felt so sad pulling off over thirty plums, and all the other baby fruits on the trees, i left a few lemons on the maya tree.  the grapefruit snuck under the radar, i'm so pleased they did.

new look house

the back room and old loo have been cut off and our new bedroom has been half built.  the deck is looking amazing - roof framing goes up this week.  our last carpenter had done such a thorough job fixing an old wall, John our builder had a nightmare pulling it down today.  the new roof will span across the bedroom and deck to the bathroom.

chocolate coated kindness

breaking my ribs had some rewards... Mum and Pete came up from Sydney with lunch and Laura dropped in these amazing chocolate brownies.. thank you xxxx

eggs

I went to wish Leah a happy birthday this morning and came home with a dozen fresh eggs from her chooks!
David and Leah have four beautiful chooks in the bottom of their garden and they're in fine laying spirits.
This photo is from the markets in Mondulkiri, Cambodia, black eggs were very popular there. In fact all sorts of eggs are very popular in Cambodia.  People would put whole eggs with shell on skewers and smoke them or steam them. They would number the eggs 1-5 - referring to days. Apparently 3 days  is very tasty, we didn't ever try - the number refers to the age of the chick in the shell.

Chinese new year

Hanoi March 2009

Pakse Feb 2009

It's the Year of the Tiger!!
This time last year we were in Pakse, Laos, eating noodles as the new year dragon entered our restaurant with drummers, dancers and a big paper mache-faced man bringing good luck to the premises.
It was a hoot as they let off fireworks & streamers in the street and celebrated in front of the Chinese businesses in this small Lao town.
The Chinese shops all had beautiful potted trees, decorated with gold & red envelopes filled with money - the dragon came and ate them - their good luck for the year was measured by how much they gave, as was the time the spent drumming up a storm in their foyer.

Organic Chocolate Easter Eggs

Easter is on its way.  You can pre-order your organic chocolate easter eggs with Jasmine Greens.


$8.80 each for 130g organic milk chocolate egg
$8.80 each for 130g organic dark chocolate egg
$13.60 each for 200g organic milk chocolate bunny


Be quick, orders have to be in by Feb 21 - they'll be delivered to you closer to Easter. 
email your order to  jasminegreens@bigpond.com

help Calga stop the sand mine

the more populated the world grows, the more impact we inevitably have on the environment.  i've spent the past couple of days learning about Calga/Peats Ridge residents' concerns about a proposed new sand mine in their neighbourhood.


the mine, located on only 134 acres of classic Sydney sandstone country is expected to extract one sixth of Sydney's annual sand supply.  it will do this by cutting 35 metres down into the sandstone and into the local aquifer that Calga and Peats Ridge residents say supplies up to 50% of the Central Coast's water supply.


it's amazing how such a small block of land wedged between Mooney Mooney and Brooklyn can potentially have such an enormous impact on the water supply for almost half a million people.  in addition, the mine process involves crushing stone to extract sand.  


the process is highly water intensive and creates invisible, but highly dangerous silica crystals, not found on beaches, where the sand's silica crystals are rounded, these silica crystals are sharp from the mechanical crushing process and can cause asthma and more significantly, silicosis, not dissimilar to asbestosis, when inhaled - there is no cure for this scarring of the lungs, that will occur from long-term exposure to the tiny silica crystals.


today i helped Scott Levi put some info on the ABC website about the mine and next week Scott will broadcast some of the interviews I've made with Calga residents and former Hawke government environment minister, Barry Cohen, who has a special connection to the area in question.


if you can make the time, simply log onto this website & ask NSW Planning Minister, Tony Kelly to stop the mine.

what a lovely bunch of bananas!

Misha and Mandy gave us three banana tree suckers november before last - this is our first hand.

back to school

back to school - to school for River for the first time - spent the day driving between swimming lessons, buying new school shoes for the boys and looking for good yellow things for Gully to use as props for his swimming carnival tomorrow.


he's in Pelis - their house colour is yellow.  thankfully his goggles are yellow.


the Peli pennant i have in mind to make for such events will have to wait for the athletics carnival later this year.


just returned from a very long and informative p&c meeting with our new (temporary) principal...  the meeting went for over 2 hours and was the most informative and interactive I've been to... have committed to putting 2 options to the next p&c for the purchase of new outdoor picnic benches for the playground.


River hates me calling it the playground... "there's no play equipment there mum!  it's not a playground, don't call it that!" he says... maybe I can bring this up at the next p&c meeting.

life's a rollercoaster!

five stitches in my leg and three broken ribs... not the best way to end a day celebrating Gully's 9th birthday, but there it is.

i had the brilliant idea to take 7 kids to Luna Park for the day to celebrate - i hadn't been to Luna Park since my best friend Martina's 12th birthday in 1984!

leaving home at 8am, we picked up kids along the way, and headed down the North Shore line to Milson's Point.  Heidi, the mother of River's new bestest friend, Felix came with us.  From the word go, the mood was hyped, kids were loud and boisterous on the train, jumping between seats and generally being excited.  

upon arrival at Luna Park (already desperate for a bex, a cuppa and a good lie down), we were very relieved to find the last day of the school holidays was not too hot, a little overcast and not at all crowded at Luna Park - already charged with lollies the kids headed straight into the rotor the kids rolled, into the dodgems, up onto the wild mouse, onto the tango train, into Coney Island, out to the Pirate's revenge, though the hall of mirrors to the spider, rock'n'tug & the carousel for a bout of quiet time before rolling back into the rotor for almost another hour, until we were virtually kicked out of the Park at closing time.

with their 'go wild' all rides and many times as you like wrist bands, the kids were hard to keep track of, queuing up for rides I had no choice, but to join them as there was no way to drag them from the barricades.

for Gully, Luna Park was not entirely his cup of tea. he spent a lot of time watching his friends, choosing no to ride. in retrospect I think he would have preferred a lego construction party at home in peace and quiet. his friends on the other hand took full advantage of parent free time to test the boundaries of their own bravery and enjoy the huge surges of adrenalin.

Gully chose to ride the dodgems and to visit Coney Island, but after that, his guests ruled the show..

Benj and Shelly met us at Luna Park with delicious birthday cake in tow - a great end to fish and chips and beautiful gift.

fantale wrapper reading was my chosen activity for the train ride home, the boys decided they preferred making caves between the train seats and shooting at each other with their imaginary guns and checking communications with their souvenir Luna Park pencils.  Generally causing as much havoc as they could.

Alex's quote of the day:

"I would read all the fantale wrappers if I could read!"  

he gave it a go, but the long names and small font proved too much of a challenge.

exhausted, Heidi and I returned the kids to their respective homes close to 9pm.  After putting my boys straight to bed and downing some delicious dumplings Charlie had waiting, I went to investigate our carpenter's progress on our new extension - only to end the day with the wildest ride yet - a 1 metre fall into the floor joists and onto the ground... the rest is a painful and slowly fading memory.

enough to say I have amazing neighbours, who came to assist in the middle of the night and wonderful friends and family helping me still x

new jasminegreens website

School starts back this week and so will our collective shopping group.


Join today & email your orders from the website.