Its a big, wide back yard out there and I want to see it all! Joining in with Wordless Wednesday at Project Alicia again! Pop on over to see many other wonderful images! - K xx

My Mom can bake - she baked all sorts of yummies when I was a kid. My oldest friend can bake - including her daughters wedding cake (you know, that sort of bake, really good stuff) My Aunty is amazing in the kitchen and even my husband can bake. Ok, I'm stretching it a bit here as his whole cooking repertoire is spag bog, fried egg sandwiches and, believe it or not, a fruit cake. I have never been a big baker. Cook? Yes!I LOVE making all sorts of savory things for breakfast, lunch and dinner but have never been too crash hot on the sweet side of things... Unless its a sauce ( I am the sauce Queen in our house!) I'm getting there! Chocolate chip cookies baked with my very own hands! Anyway, last year while doing the Slow Living Essentials monthly round up, that includes cooking from scratch, I started having a go at baking again. Its a bit hit and miss and I'm not the best at following recipes (which may have something to do with...

Its been raining so much that my chickens will soon think they are really ducks... Joining in again with Wordless Wednesday over at Project Alicia - Pop over to see some other wonderful images! - K xx

I have been experimenting with no 'poo for a while. That's not a complaint of the lower alimentary tract as much as it may sound like it, but short hand for not shampooing my hair. Yes, I do wash it of course, but not with commercial shampoo. And I do condition it - with fairly long hair I have to otherwise, pretty soon, my hair would get stiff and sticky outy and I'd have a scarecrow head! I came across the concept on a blog called " Uniquely Normal Mom " about a year ago and apart from a few trips away, when I didn't take my concoctions with me, I haven't shampooed my hair since! I found with such long hair that methods of dry shampooing with bi-carb didn't work for me and although my home made soap did a good job, it did too good of a job, really, and stripped my hair of any grease or dirt entirely and left it frizzy and very dry.  Christine's rosemary rinse helped a lot but I really needed something slightly gentler than my...

I have been following Christine at Slow Living Essentials for over a year now! And in 2012 she started a monthly round up to record on our blog, how we have "slowed down" under nine categories - I have been doing this since she started it and really get a lot out of it. This is my February reflection on Slowing Down - the Slow Living Essentials way!  NOURISH: Make and bake as much as possible from scratch. Ditch over packaged, over processed convenience foods and opt for 'real' food instead.  I have been back at the baking again. Getting better at the ANZAC biscuits and able to produce a savoury muffin or two when the mood strikes me. Which is become more often - success breeds success it would seem! PREPARE: Stockpile and preserve.  With all the rain we have been having here the only thing we need to preserve is our sanity... REDUCE: Cut down on household waste by re-using, re-purposing and repairing.  Attempted (not very successfull...

Aren't they beautiful? My oldest niece and her two girls at the wedding of my second oldest niece! We had lots of fun didn't we girls? Joining in with Project Alicia for Wordless Wednesday once again. Lots of beautiful images over there if you are in the mood to browse!.

If you have chickens, sooner or later they are likely to get scaly mites on their legs. I didn't pay much attention when my chickens first got it and by the time it had registered that there was something wrong, its quite painful for the chookies and quite hard for the owners to get rid of them. I know that one of the main causes of the mite for me is sugar cane mulch. Either the mites are on the cane when it arrives (which I suspect) or there is something in the sugar cane that brings the mites out from their hiding places. Once I switched from sugar cane as litter on the ground for them to scratch in and also in the coop and bedding boxes, I got rid of my mite problems almost over night. Two of my chookies have got a slight case and I thought I should get onto it before it gets to the stage where its got to be very painful, like in the picture below. Picture from Backyard chickens.com This is a reasonably advanced case and as you can see the scales have lifted from ...

I have a lovely little side table that was made by my Father-in-law a few years ago that sits beside the couch. It's great for snuggling up with a book on a rainy day (plenty of them at the moment) and being able to reach the cup of tea no matter which end of the couch you want to settle in on. The students also find it great to balance their laptops (or are they i-somethings these days?) while they share their Australian adventures with their friends and families back home. Basically its a great little table. It turns out that its was also the perfect size, two Christmas's ago, to land a remote controlled helicopter on. So good, in fact, that it got a brown box tape "H" stuck to it. After Christmas was gone and the helicopter has fallen from favor, I bought my wee table back to the couch and took the "H" off, denoting its use as a coffee table instead of a helipad for the time being and lived with the "H" in sticky stuff for the next 18 month...

A hot chocolate made at home is some how messier than one you get from the shops... Linking up with Wordless Wednesday at Project Alicia - come and have a look at other wonderful images!

Under the funny shaped cabinet in the bathroom we have a wicker basket with a cloth lining to collect all the dirty clothes before they get washed. It took me a while to find one that was the right height and width to fit under there and so when it started falling apart, I didn't want to have to go through the performance of visiting every place in Queensland again, in order to get a new one. One morning while I was getting the washing out of the machine, I spotted a bunch of wire that the husband had bought home from some job and was sitting in the laundry (I don't know why he thought that was a good place for it to be...) and it triggered a though - what if I were to wire the basket back together? And thus the bionic basket was born! Here's what I did... Basically, I used the thickest wires to rebuild the basket where the wicker was missing from the handles which is where most of the damage was from pulling out the heavy basket was. I then used the smaller ones to tie...