Sunny Autumn Days

Autumn has been kicking up some pearlers of days! Its been great doing a little scruffing about in the garden (mind you a concentrated effort is needed)

The salvia has exploded. Its hard to believe I cut this back to the nub every season. I think it comes back a little bigger and better each year. Its alive with bee’s and butterflies.

I was pleased to sell all my cucumber at the markets on the weekend but several more are nearly ready for picking again!

Chickens are enjoying their scraps and outings into the main yard – still laying well!

Pip totally thinks he is going to go prancing about on top of the chook coop. (I took him down much to his disgust – I didn’t really have time to go mucking about with ladders to do a Siamese Rescue.)

Its not all work – yesterday evening us girls went down to Fossil Bluff to watch the sun go down, paddle and generally enjoy ourselves

Today was another super beautiful day, so we took the kayaks down to the river for a paddle

It was Mana’s first time trying this. She did really well. (Happily she didn’t fall in, even though it was sunny, the water was a tad on the fresh side!)

I got to trot along the path that goes by the river to keep an eye on them and take some photos

Then it was back to the kitchen to make up a promised batch of raspberry ice-cream!

Emma cooked and sieved the raspberries while Mana and I made up the base vanilla recipe. Once cooled, we mixed them together and chucked it all in the ice cream maker

The taste tests were extremely positive – but it still needs to freeze properly overnight.

Apparently we are having ice-cream for breakfast. 😀

The last plan of the day was somewhat thwarted. As a treat, we were making home made chicken pizza’s plus we were going to introduce Mana to “The Princess Bride”

Imagine how happy I was to finally get the first two pizzas into the oven and exactly 5 minutes later – total power failure!!!

At 6.30pm weekday evening… you could hear the mothers in the district crying I am sure!! Half way through everyone’s dinner time!! It didn’t come back on for two hours!

We decided to try to cook one in the BBQ.

Oh. My. Sainted. Aunt.

Walking back into the shed, seeing smoke pour out of the doors – it looked like we had set the whole place on fire!!!

I went from “Not Happy” to “Less Than Happy”

I made an emergency run into Wynyard to get hot chips and bread – reeking of smoke – and put the other two pizza’s on the fire top – they crisped up, but at least they stopped short of cremation.

Dinner by candlelight & torchlight, entertainment by Emma’s string of really bad jokes! Mana thinks we are all mad.  🙂

Cheers everyone