Getting Ready For Christmas

School is back and we are going full throttle into the fourth and final term of the year. The silly season is upon us and the Christmas decorations have been out for a while now, I think Christmas would be a very nice time but for the commercialism and expectation of lots of money spent.

We only buy gifts for the very young on each side of the family, and even then I personally don’t do the buying giving the job over to the grandparents. The reason for this we live interstate and it would cost a small fortune to send through the post, so we hand over some money with vague instructions for gifts. If I had to do it personally, I am really not sure it would get done as I hate Christmas shopping, especially when everyone has everything and nothing is left over for special occasions.

I have started on some handmade gifts for friends, and these are the gifts I enjoy the most as I enjoy making them. This year I am crocheting some dishcloths and sewing a shopping bag, I think, I always make chocolate balls for my Tai Chi classes and I am thinking of some other stuff too, though I may run out of steam.

The Dam is getting quite low, this area has a lot of water in it during the wet season.

We still haven’t had any rain and our water saving skills are really coming in handy, at least we know how to get by and still be clean (always a bonus, to be clean and not smell). We are putting the hose through the window and filling the washing machine with bore water, filling buckets with bore water or saved rinse water from the machine to use to flush the toilet and having navy showers (you know, turn on the water and get wet, turn off the water and soap up, turn on the water and rinse off, done). We are really looking forward to the wet season.


The gardens are going along OK and are growing, though the watering I do is never as good as a good shower of rain. I really want to expand some of the gardens, widen them actually, and build my banana circle near the gully, however I will wait till it starts to rain, not much point in doing it now.

I have some good looking loofahs growing, I have left these ones to grow large to save the seeds and use for cleaning. The small ones, when I get more, will be used in cooking in things like curries, they aren’t very nice steamed.

Our chicks are growing fast and running and jumping and doing the things that chicks do. The big chicks hang out by themselves as they are at the bottom of the ladder and get picked on a bit by the others (life is hard in the flock) and the golf ball chicks are now bigger than a golf ball but the term has stuck.

Best get back to the full time job of running after the chooks, growing food and saving water while trying to stay cool and not get sunburnt, in our, currently, dry heat.

ON OTHER MATTERS

I am going to make these biscuits today, how can I not. The title of the post over at The Glass Half Empty caught my eye straight up “The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie” and how could I not look. So of course, now I have seen the post, how can I not make them? I will sacrifice myself and be a guinea pig to see if they are good, however, I am pretty sure they are, how could they not be, they have chocolate chips in them.

I haven’t been over to “The Greening of Gavin” for a while, not because I don’t want to it is just life is busy and I have a lot of blogs and sites in my favourites it is hard to keep up with them all. However it is time to catch up with what Gavin has been doing, check out his blog, it is always interesting.