Monday

Eaten today:
Porridge made with local, unpasteurised milk as always with a teaspoon of sugar
1 small apple
1 square dark chocolate
Four slices bread with about 50g cheese and a couple of spoons of chutney (a pumpkin based one this time - the pumpkin ones really seem to improve with age, they never taste as nice at the beginning)
Yoghurt with some dried berries
1 medium apple
Forgot to bring a bottle of water to work and only drank about a litre of water - such a pain to have to keep getting up and going to fill a glass and I can't always get away from my desk. Filling eight or ten glasses in one go isn't the most practical solution either. Have filled a bottle for tomorrow already.
1 square of chocolate brownie/cake. This one:

It's a recipe from my Fabulous Cookies book although I didn't have any self-raising flour or baking powder. Still turned out all right I think and was satisfyingly choclately.

Had a martini when I got home as an aperitif while I was preparing dinner. Then I remembered I had opened a bottle of sparkling wine as a treat for myself yesterday. Finished the rest of that (about half of it I think) with dinner as well and have to admit I am feeling just a bit tipsy now. Apologies here and now for any and all typos and any more nonsensical writing than usual. It's quite fun this feeling, haven't been tipsy for a while now. :-)
Had a small salad for a starter and then a portion of the bean casserole for a main course. I took a break between courses by chopping up the last three boskoop apples I had bought at the weekend for the dehydrator.
One square or orangey dark chocolate and two Kinder Schoko Bons for dessert.

The bread I made yesterday ended up looking like this:

I'm loving the bread slicer although it took me a few minutes of left-handed awkwardness to get it working this morning. The bread on the other hand, although it's okay, is extremely yeasty tasting. I haven't made bread for a long time and it's even longer since I made a yeast bread and the very simple recipe I have used in the past from this book calls for fast acting dried yeast. But the yeast I had bought here a while ago just had instructions on the back for activating the yeast with water and sugar before using it so I decided to wing it a bit and activated the yeast first using part of the water needed for the recipe anyway. It definitely activated:

And the bread did rise well and is a good consistency (although it did take longer to bake than expected - I really do need to get a proper cooker soon). It's just this very yeasty, almost beer-like taste which bothers me. It's still very edible, especially smothered with cheese and chutney but just not as tasty as it normally is.

All the washing up is done this evening as well. It does feel good to be entering a third week of keeping on top of things. I did the all the ironing last night (I knew a couple of glasses of sparkling wine would keep me motivated while doing it :-) ) except for one duvet cover, which I will do tomorrow. Haven't made much progress on the filing but got a little bit sorted. Have put away all the washed and ironed stuff as well. Didn't have a very productive day in work today - did good work while I was concentrating but found myself easily distracted. Did spend some time re-reading through the flylady basics. I remember finally getting around to reading through some of the flylady website a few months before leaving Ireland, took some of the stuff on board but never did anything much with it except for now and again. I don't agree with absolutely everything she says but there is a lot of good stuff in it. A lot of what I've been doing for the last two weeks is kind of what she aims towards too.

So just for the hell of it, here are a couple of things gleaned from various places such as flylady, tescopoly, Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts and various other blogs and bits and pieces on t'interweb and all filtered through my brain to become:

- The time you spend doing housework is time you are spending loving yourself and your family (unless you live alone, then it's ALL just loving yourself)

- Broken window syndrome - if something is out of place, you're more likely to leave something else cluttering up beside it. If a place is well looked after, you'll look after it better.

- Keep the sink tidy - not going to use windex or any other chemicals to shine it but keeping it wiped down and making sure I wash the dishes at least once every day does keep things under control. Important: if I put away the dishes when they are dry, the next lot of washing up doesn't seem half as onerous.

- Making the bed every morning. Actually, I did start doing this a few years ago and then I saw a piece on some documentary about dust allergies and so on where they showed some microscopic stuff of what probably lives in your bed along with details on the temperatures and humidity needed for them to proliferate. So now I fold back the duvet in the morning to air the bed properly. When I get home from work, I fold it up to the top of the bed to air out the bottom part. But I have been trying the last couple of weeks to at least to that - leaving the duvet scrunched up in the middle of the bed or whatever way it landed when I got up serves much the same purpose but does lead to a broken window syndrome type effect as well.

And finally, here's an amusing (well, I thought it was funny) little youtube link:
Dan and Dan - the Daily Mail Song - what can I say. I'm a pushover for rhyming songs!