Life is back to a pace that allows for blogging and the occasional bit of pottering. The last few months left very little time for either and in fact very little time for anything it seemed.
Our new kitchen got finished and so did the office and classroom and for a while we just enjoyed it all. Our little family has now found a new rhythm in our bigger space and the little school for two is doing well too.
This past month was time for the big Winter holiday in South Africa and our house had been bustling with people throughout. My sister and her kids came from Canada for a month and we had the best time. The little ones spent countless hours exploring the garden, collecting rocks and climbing trees. They must have circled the property a million times on their bikes and worked up a huge appetite looking for the kittens and building sand castles. We took turns cooking for all the hungry little tummies (and some days we had many, as more friends came to play) and both shared the kitchen. We toasted marshmallows on the fire and went foraging for Pecan nuts or peas in the garden. They ate oranges and dried mangoes and drank liters of my Mum's home-made lemonade. My heart aches now, just thinking about the happy times.
Our friends from Cape-Town and Namibia also visited, which called for more cake and big camp fires and potjies full of deliciousness. And more tears when it was time to say goodbye.
The holiday was simpy magical, but more so because the days had been beautiful and warm. Almost impossibly so. The sky seemed an iridescent blue with none of the fires, wind and horrible, bone chilling cold.
All this beautiful weather had us all gardening up a storm over the last few weeks. We have expanded beds and created paths, moved mountains of compost and huge logs and ever so slowly got rid of the last of the cement.
Unfortunately my telephone cable were the target of a copper cable thief in July, which meant a whole month without any internet here on the farm. Our telephone company then installed a thief-proof cable, but alas, the new technology and the old farm lines did not want to communicate so well, which meant more interruptions in service and alas, many blog ideas left unpublished. It had been a year of excuses for my lack of posts - no internet, no camera, no computer, no time. But here is to a more creative, crime-free future.
The lack of internet meant we did have a lot of warm evenings in front of the fire-place, reading books or watching sports. And the fire-wood came from a friend who traded me a load for some of these cookies.
And the cake was an impromptu cake for a birthday party dinner that we were invited to. I had all the ingredients and then experimented with the combinations. There are very few rules when making an ice-cream cake. It is sort of a marvelous concoction really. Try it, you won't regret it.
