No sun.

No rain.

No wind.

There hasn’t been any actual weather here for days. It’s like the doldrums. All across the state the DSE (Department for Sustainability and the Environment) has been doing fuel reduction burnoffs. There’s a solid smokehaze across the state and you can smell it, day and night. I guess it okay, knowing that it’s controlled burns and not bushfires. The plants will grow better and there will be less in the way of weeds. Hopefully it will also mean that we won’t have a bushfire problem next summer. But it’s awful. And I can’t help wondering if our street wallaby is okay. Not that I see him that much, but it’s just nice knowing he’s there. I hope our burnoff missed him, and that he’ll be eating all the nice young grass soon. The really good thing about all that smoke is that when the rain washes through it there will be better germination of native plants. They like smokewater.

But waiting for rain. Even the frogs are quiet now. All I can hear is my chooks murmuring to each other and traffic on the other side of the valley and the sound of water running.

Oh yeah. I should show you this:

Yeah. Beloved got to work on the pond yesterday and installed the fountain so now we have running water and I can here it from my desk. It looks pretty. I have installed some more rocks so that the water flowing down looks as if it’s seeping out of the rocks and I’ve made a video of it, too. It looks like the water is flowing out of an underground stream.

It’s all full of mozzie wrigglers though, so my aim for this week is to find out what sort of fish are good for ponds. I want small ones that will eat mozzie wrigglers but leave the tadpoles and frogspawn alone. Also they need to be little so that they can hide under the plants from hungry kookaburras.

I am feeling as if I’m making some real changes to the way I’m living my life. Funny thing, a lot of the time I go off crook at Beloved because he bites his nails (drives me crazy) and he tells me that it’s just a habit. Poss is the same with her finger biting. As if that means it’s set in stone. I tell them that it’s just as easy (or hard) to create good habits as it is to create bad ones. Weight Watchers did this article about habits, and I thought it was an interesting and helpful one. It reminds me very much of the principles Jon uses in his book. It’s all about the good things in this world, and that’s why I like his book so much.

Yesterday I made a custard tart. It was FABULOUS. And I made it using xylitol instead of sugar. It tasted just as good as any shop custard tart. Oh, I tell a lie. It tasted way better than shop custard tarts. Xylitol is a natural sugar which is sweeter than cane sugar (so you only use half as much) and it has a GI of 7. I was a bit worried that it might not work so well in baking, but it was perfecto. This week I’ve got my writing group and love to bring something nice along to share for lunch. It’s always a bit of a challenge as most of the group are on some sort of “diet” and then there’s the problem of one group member who is a vegetarian, one who loathes veggies with a vengance, one who doesn’t like spicy food etc etc etc. I saw this recipe on Weight Watchers today and thought it looked pretty good, so I’m going to give it a shot. I think everyone likes olives (don’t they?) and if they don’t well, there’ll be plenty of other goodies to choose from, and it’ll be a nice change that I’m not bringing along something identical to what everyone else has.

Something I meant to mention last week was my handy-dandy seed grinder. Jon recommends eating flax seeds every day. They are loaded with Omegs 3 and also very good as a bulking agent. Now you have to grind them because if you don’t, well, they just, uh, go right through and you have flax seeds coming out the other end (sorry, there is no nice way to put that.) I was putting flax seed oil on my food, but you have to be really careful with it because it goes rancid easily and you cannot cook with it. You never put that stuff into anything that’s going to be heated up because you’ll be left with a rancid mess.
You can buy them already ground, but they go rancid really quickly, so it’s better to grind your own. I tried a few different methods of grinding the seeds, but nothing worked, and I didn’t particularly want to pay a fortune for some special flax seed grinder. Beloved paid $40! for a lovely little mill that works really well but takes forever to grind a few seeds. Then I saw a coffee and herb grinder at the supermarket, only $17 and electric. It works like a dream and now I have my ground flax seeds on my porridge, in my yoghourt, and I put them in muffins and other cooking, too. It’s great.

I have learned my lesson about getting on the scales before I should, but I have to share with you one bit of good news, which is that I can do my bra up on the middle set of hooks now. I have chucked one disgusting old bra out and I’m telling myself that the next bra I buy will be a size smaller.

Well, I’m off to research pond fish now.