Snoskred – Life in the Country

No, I’m not brave enough to try it – but Freya Hoffmeister is currently kayaking around Australia. I have been following her blog – you should too! You can find it here – Freya’s Blog. Right now, she has not seen land in almost a week – she is crossing the Gulf of Carpenteria. She will hopefully see land again this Friday.

Only one other person has successfully kayaked around Australia. It will take approximately a year. I have to say I admire Freya greatly – I cannot imagine the courage and strength it takes to do something like this.. I find it hard to get organised for one four hour trip out on the local creek, I cannot imagine planning ahead for spending over a week on the water – sleeping on it too!

I think our kayak might be ready to take the winter rest, sadly. It has been so cold here the last few days – it is snowing in the Australian alps again.. at night time it is getting down to less than 5 degrees! If the sun comes out again, we will go out for a final trip.

Today we did not plan to go shopping, but with KRudd’s $900 bonus burning a hole in everyones pocket, who could resist?

We bought us a great spicerack spinner thingy, a new oil burner for the other half, some excellent value scented tealight candles from my favourite candle shop which work out to 50 cents a candle, a jewellery rack for my earring collection, a new knife set as our old one was ageing ungracefully, and a knife sharpener to keep the knives sharp.

Some of my earrings checking out the new home. The pink ones in the middle were sent to me by Charcoal Sniper P, one of the mods on The Mudflats, they are sooo pretty and they also arrived with some maple candy which I had always wanted to try. Char gets married in like a week and a half, too! Congratulations on the impending nuptials Char – and a welcome end to the stress of wedding planning.

Of course, it is a pity that we only spent a tiny amount of the billions monies KRudd is throwing around, the rest will go to pay off debts which probably won’t do the economy any good..

1. Toast Bread.
1a. You can butter your bread, or use cream cheese. I do not like to do either, myself. Any of these options will work.
2. Place enough bacon to cover your bread under your grill – however you do it. Or, you can cook it in a frypan but that will take longer I suspect. I have an LG Solardom so I put it on the top shelf of the microwave for 5 minutes, turn it over, and do the other side for 4 mins. When you have done that, it will look like this.

3. While the bacon grills, once you have toasted the bread, cover it in avocado. I like to slice mine and arrange it creatively on the bread. Some like to mush theirs up. Either way is fine. Mine look like this.

4. When the bacon is grilled, arrange it prettily on top of your avocado covered toast. Like this.

5. Cover the bacon with a slice of cheese. I like the Aldi vintage sliced cheese for me, but for you feel free to use any cheese you like.

6. Place grills back in the oven until the cheese is melted how you like it.

7. Eat!

No, nobody is paying me – I paid them! But, I do have to tell you about this because if you are in Australia and you like your aromatherapy, this website will literally save you shedloads of money. How would you like 100mls of essential oils for less than you usually pay for 12-18mls of essential oils? I like it plenty, I can tell you.

100ml May Chang (sort of like lemongrass) $9.00
100ml Peppermint $10
100ml Sweet Orange $5.50
100ml Mandarin $ 8.00
100ml Pink Grapefruit $9.00

100ml Cedarwood $7.00
100ml Lemon $9.00
100ml Lime $9.50
100ml Spearmint $9.00
100ml Tangerine $7.00

Many of the above flavors I bought because I still had small amounts left of the old oils I bought in those flavors – I wanted to be able to compare them with the “more expensive” oils. I honestly cannot smell any difference at all. Maybe my sinus is faulty and maybe you would smell a difference, I don’t know – all I can say is give it a try, at these prices who can complain!

I also bought 7x15ml “fragrant” oils – these all turned out to be 18mls instead. These cost me a mere $2 each. And this is the first time I have ever found some of these flavors.. chocolate! watermelon!

So if you are wanting to buy oils online, you might want to give this place Escentials Of Australia a try and see what you think. I will be ordering more – and next time some of the more expensive oils which I took out of this order – originally I had over $230 worth of oils in my basket, but I was soon told off by the other half..

In the end I spent $97, and shipping was about $14 – I opted for registered Australia Post, otherwise my postie tends to dump it on the doorstep and vanish. That is so reasonable. I ordered it on Thursday and it arrived today with Easter in between.
I also did some book ordering, but that is another story for another day.