Blink 123

How did we go from Gorgeous Baby on the left to Big Boy on the right? I think we blinked and then our eldest son James was 12 years old. Rather puts life and things into perspective, doesn't it?

James had his 12th birthday last Friday in St Croix, doing what he loves most - racing for Team BVI.

Nine sailors participated from Tortola with William and I flying from St Thomas and the kids sailing over on a 50' catamaran in very rough seas. James apparently managed to sleep through 30+ knot winds with waves crashing over the deck, which rather impressed the Captain but is pretty indicative of his sanguine approach to life.

The weekend was Boy Heaven. They all whizzed around in boats and when they weren't doing that they were playing Fuzeball or jumping on the water trampoline or eating, which meant that I was either in the galley or on the rib watching the racing. The St Croix Yacht Club bar also made the best Bloody Mary ever (apart from the Phene Arms in SW3) which helped.

James came third in Blue Fleet, which he was chuffed about and Georgie poodled around in Green Fleet. I think George may be more of a gymnastics person although he certainly enjoys messing around on boats. He doesn't really feel the urge to win anything however (unlike his older brother) but seems to have a good time anyway. William's dead keen now to get in there too - so next season it will be three of them to organize. A Fleet of Dawsons. 

Could life get any better for a 7 year old chap?

The weekend was in fact 4 days, something I can now do in my new life. It was an absolute blast - both literally (winds mainly over 20+ knots the whole time) and figuratively, as I quite enjoy playing 'Sailing Mama'. It beats Soccer Mom anyday.

Click to enlarge

I am today in fact even a SAHM (Stay at Home Mom) as my Ford is still in the hospital, and Tyler felt he could manage the day (school, piano and aikido). I wasn't going to argue. QuickBooks and housework isn't exactly the High Life but it beats driving and sweating, anyday. I'm not too sure who's more excited about our imminent homeschooling - me or the kids, though I'll still have to drop James off and the afternoon activities are island-wide.

We've thought this too many times now to get excited, but the bakery is tipped to take-off with a night shift, a bakers assistant and a shipment from New York which includes a convection oven for cakes and patisserie and a bread slicing machine.  We're designing more labels, shipping in more packaging and wondering where the hell to put it all. Although the bakery has only been open for 8 months now, it feels like a decade. We take it day by day but we are slowly beginning to breathe again as we start to get wind in our sails. It's all good.

  

How to Vapourise Time

I'm having a rare day at home on my own, whilst the truck gets serviced. The day started off without electricity, but that was OK as I had time to make a list of all the things I urgently needed to do, like finish the accounts, sort out insurance, study for my Food Handlers certificate and write my report for the RBVIYC Board meeting tomorrow. 

Have I done these things?

Hell no.

I spent over an hour looking through Savuer to find an article on rum. It was, of course, in the very last magazine I looked at. Then I spent an awful lot of time trying to get the scanner to work. So I 'rewarded' myself with a bit of Facebook. That was 30 minutes vapourised. Then I decided to catch up on my blog. After fiddling with camera's, Windows 8 and links - I'd lost another 2 hours. As a short aside, can I tell you howmuch I truly loathe Windows 8. It's for teenagers with lots of time to waste. I'm middle-aged with no time at all. Windows 8 and Me are incompatible therefore.

Anyway I'm pretty much back to my normal day now, with nothing started yet. I despair of myself somedays. But I'm not the only one. This was a brilliant article in the Financial Times a few weeks ago by Lucy Kellaway:

"One day last week I was sitting at my desk reading an academic paper on cyber loafing when I glanced at my screen and saw a colleague had tweeted: “This shouldn’t be funny but it is.” I clicked on the link and found a series of pictures of ships with silly names. There was HMS Gay Viking, HMS Spanker, SS Lesbian, USS Saucy, SS Iron Knob. At first I laughed but, as I read on to HMS Cockchafer and HMS Grappler, I thought: surely not? Thus I found myself checking on Wikipedia and discovering HMS Cockchafer was the fifth Royal Navy ship of that name, that it was built in 1915, defended the southeast coast of England during the first world war and was later part of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.

The reason I’m flaunting this disgraceful theft of time from my employer is that I was reading (before I got distracted) a shocking piece of research telling me that...the average US worker spends 60-80 per cent of their time online at work doing things unrelated to their jobs.

Until a couple of years ago I thought skiving was a non-problem. The answer, I thought, was to fire extreme slackers and give the rest of us more work to do. But I don’t think that any more. I cyber loaf even when I’m extremely busy, which means I often work at weekends to catch up. I find the temptation to waste time online is so great that it swamps everything else. It feeds almost every need I have. It’s a drug, and I can’t help myself.

Some people heroically try to pretend there is nothing to worry about. Researchers from the National University of Singapore recently concluded that surfing the internet at work is actually a good thing, as it reduces stress and leaves you feeling refreshed. I dare say this might be right for the first five minutes or so. It was soothing for my mind to alight briefly on SS Iron Knob. But what wasn’t soothing was the helter-skelter ride I took from there that left me guilty, angry with myself, stressed about undone work and about as satisfied as if I’d eaten a whole tube of sour cream and onion Pringles.

...I’ve just sent out a tweet asking if anyone has found a fail-safe way of getting off Twitter and back to work. The great Tom Peters replied at once: “Just ignore it and move on!” – the speed of his response rather undermining his advice. More honest was the man who simply tweeted “no”.

 

 

Taking stock

Chicken stock

We've started making soup in the bakery for lunch and we sell out everyday. You would think that soup is quite a strange thing to eat in a hot climate, but it's actually very popular here and in the Caribbean in general. I'm not sure why it should be so much part of Island life, possibly because of an English heritage (our most popular soup is Pea & Ham) also maybe due to the simple one-pot type of cooking that prevails. Whatever the reason, we eat a lot of soup here.

As we make everything from scratch in the bakery, we roast several chickens everyday and I always have lovely bones for stock-making. It's only now that I make stocks everyday that I've had a little stock 'breakthrough' with consistently delicious results. Seemed like a good time to start sharing some recipes again on the blog and less time spent moaning about the children.

Family Chicken Stock

 

Half fill your saucepan with cold water

Two chicken carcasses

About 10 black peppercorns

Salt to taste

Small bunch parsley & stalks

Small bunch of thyme

3 celery stalks and leaves, chopped up

1 onion, skin off and roughly chopped up (skin makes the stock dark)

3 carrots, skin off & roughly chopped

 

1. The most important thing is to not let the stock boil (this makes it cloudy). Just bring it to a gentle ripple and leave it simmering away for about 1.5 hours.
2. Let the stock cool down on the stove and then using a colander, decant the broth into a Tupperware. We use the leftover sludge in Flora's (the dog) supper, which she loves but be careful of little bones
3. Leave the Tupperware overnight in the fridge and skim the oily surface in the morning 
4. Makes about 1 litre. Can be easily frozen. We pour it into large Ziploc bags (remember to name or risk a UFO - unidentified freezer object) which takes up less space in the freezer. 
5. Good for soups. Essential for risotto's. 

We've made some really great vegan and vegetarian soups as well, with vegetable stocks. I've started keeping all the stalks of broccoli and other vegetable trimmings that I'd normally chuck away to put in the veg stocks. Just follow the same procedure as above but obviously leaving out the chicken and bumping up the herbs.

My absolutely favourite food at the moment is roasted cauliflower. We made a lovely Roasted Cauliflower and Coriander soup last week. It was heaven in a bowl.

 

 

Fiddling around with cameras

Boy Photograghy

One of the reasons why I don't blog as much as I would like to is that not only can I never find the scissors or the sellotape, I can also never find my camera which these days I share with the children as only a Martyred Mother has to.

I also don't own an iPad or iPhone (hint hint) or even have a functioning camera on my dropped-once-too-often Blackberry. I am blog creating resources starved. I just have hundreds of ideas in my head. I never seem to lose that (well not that often) thank goodness.

If I do happen to find my camera and it is by sheer miracle charged up, I then cannot find the cable to download the pictures onto my PC. Most days I just give up in a fit of pique, muttering obscenities at the world and then depress myself by looking at other people's beautiful blogs  which all have stunning photos and everyone looks like they live perfect lives where they can find everything and it all WORKS. 

The InstaGram Life. So not my life. Mine's the HoursWastedLookingforThings  Life.

The children take hilarious pictures however - mainly of each other or the dog or the ceiling. Always at an angle, too. Often featuring apps I had no clue my camera had. They also seem to take a lot of photos of the computer and TV. I thought we may be in danger of depriving them of a Great Childhood until I read that this is a good thing as apparently children who take photos of their computer games will go on to found tech start-ups and be successful. I love reading Penelope Trunk, but she is amazingly strident, albeit very funny too. She seems to understand boys, however - which some days I don't. 

 I feel a bit better for knowing that my children all have futures in Paola Alto, but my camera is still buggered.

 

 

 

The Truck

There are two photos here. One of my new car - the bakery delivery van, and a photo of our house.

The first thing you will notice is that the 'delivery van' is in fact a truck. A four wheel drive one because we live on a volcanic island township. The second thing you will notice is that our house is up a very steep road.

My life can currently be likened to driving home in the 'van'.

Firstly we have an endless 30 minute drive home from 'town'. There are only 3 types of drivers here: 10 miles an hour, 20 miles an hour and "bat outta hell'. I invariably get stuck behind the first type, although we have quite a few of the latter type living on our hill. Every day I will myself to drink less, be nicer to the kids and go to the gym more. By the time we are half way home, I'm already worrying that there's only half a bottle of wine left in the fridge, which means we always have to stop off at "Big Ben's Superette' to stock up on supplies. You will soon see why.

Once we are at the bottom of our hill, I put the truck into four wheel drive. We also cross ourselves and double check the seat belts. "We are in for an interesting ride" you tell yourself "but it will be worth it, as we'll soon be home ".

We grind up in first gear. It's a tiny little driveway of a road mostly through a banana plantation. Half way up it gets rather bumpy and the truck sways from side to side and goes sort of a "whuuur uhuuurrr uhhurr" kind of noise and one powers on through it hanging on for dear life. It's a bit 'Wages of Fear'-ish.We then fervently start praying that we are not going to meet any of our "bat outta hell" neighbours who come swooping down the hill. It's only happened once so far and it's the most  'island' I've been to date: I just ignored the other car and refused to move. They then had to reverse up the hill. "Tough" (you think to yourself) "sooorrrrry for yoooou. My trucks bigger than yours and if you think I'm reversing down this hill in a truck, THINK AGAIN buddy".

The road then gets steeper and steeper and just when you think that the truck may actually flip over backwards, you have to really gird your loins and grip onto the steering wheel and swoop it around a hairpin bend with screeching wheels and a heart full of hope. The truck is kind of going "urraaannnhhhrr,urrraaangghhhr" by now and is swaying all over the place and one just has to keep pointing it up the hill to keep it on the road.

We then drive right past our house. Zoom. So near but so far.

Our driveway is too steep to turn into, so we actually have to drive even further up the hill in order to turn it around and come back down again.

We have two turning choices: Tiny concrete platform and sheer drop or 70 degree hairpin driveway but no imminent danger of driving off a cliff. Both are terrifying. I tend to favour the latter option (see why below) which then requires one to get 'the line' absolutely right in order to reverse up the hairpin to turn the truck facing north east again. If one is about 3 inches out either way, you're screwed and then have to do about a 90 point turn burning up the clutch and brakes (not to mention your nerves). The air is blue with my view on life. The kids think it's all huge fun.

The first time I had to turn the truck I got it a bit wrong and ended up about 6 inches from the the concrete platform precipice. I thought it best not to drive the truck over the edge on our first day of ownership and had to call Tyler.  He then had to drive back 30 minutes stuck behind someone going 20 miles an hour in order to reverse the truck off the precipice. His first words after I'd explained what the problem was "oh that's easy" which you can only imagine didn't go down too well.

By the time we actually arrive home I feel like we need a thanksgiving dinner, but opt instead for a straw and the back-up supplies.  Only then can I start thinking about tackling the washing up, cooking dinner and the rest of it. There are some days I've had to do this about 3 times. You may understand why I could become a nervous wreck (not to mention the truck).

And I bet you there were those of you out there who thought we tootled around in golf carts, eh?

Sadly, no golf cart like India Hicks