Clearly food is  lot cheaper in the US. Since i had most of the stuff in stock, I popped into town to get the balance (10 items from a 24 item shopping list for the week/month. $50.00!! And that did not include the chicken legs, maple syrup or other expensive items - quelle horreur. What is it we are paying for? Or more to the point, how do they keep prices so low in the US when most veges are grown in California and shipped to all other parts of the States?

Anyway, I will still stick with this for a bit to see how it goes. Baked corn bread today and have beans in the slow cooker. This morning's pre-soaked porridge was delicious as well. Despite Americans having a reputation for supersizing everything, the porridge will only do me three meals, which I guess is why I am carrying a bit more weight than I should, lol.

Tonight's dinner is the least appetising of the week, being collard greens (whatever they are - I am using cabbage), beans (pinto beans cooked in the slowcooker with bacon) and corn bread. I made the cornbread in muffins which means I also ate two of them for lunch (and very tasty they are when hot and dripping with butter).

It will be another three hours before the beans are cooked as I did not check the recipe early enough in the day and they only went on at noon, so I will probably eat the cabbage and cornbread first and have the beans later.

Bit chilly here today with temps hovering around 6 degrees, but nice sunshine for all that.

One of the less desirable aspects of living alone is working out what to cook for dinner. This becomes that much more irritating when you have been doing it for 50 years and just run out of inspiration. If you have a decent income, when all else fails you can pop into town for a take away or some other treat, but that is not an option at present.

So I was thrilled, today, to have a website drift across my Facebook page that provided monthly meal plans for a family of four, three meals a day, seven days a week for $80.00. Normally these contain all manner of bland and unimaginative recipes, but this one was great. So I have spent much of the afternoon downloading and printing to PDF the meal plans and accompanying recipes and shopping lists (which unfortunately do not include quantities so that it can be flexible enough for a smaller or larger family unit.

Most of the recipes are freezable as well, so I can make up the whole meal, then freeze it in portions as is my wont. And they include vegetables which are a bit of a failing on my part, despite the fact I grow them, simply because I forget to cook them in time for whatever casserole or soup I am making. No curries so far (she has only published January to March - northern Hemisphere timetable), but the rest of the recipes sound fabulous and would be cheaper still here as I either grow or have in stock most of the ingredients. I plan to start cooking June recipes tomorrow (once I rediscover the kitchen benches). Unfortunately tonight's dinner is more likely to be toasted cheese sandwiches due to lack of forethought and a raging hunger, lol.

This morning I popped into Oatlands to get some money out to pay the man who delivered the wood for me, and ran into another down-the-road neighbour who keeps pigs. So I took him to the School Garden and together we pulled up all the overgrown, past-use-by kale, cabbages and such like left over from a gardener who no longer lives in town. His pigs will be very happy tonight I imagine.

Due to lack of activity at the cottages, it was another quiet day at home today, interspersed with washing, walking the dogs (which got a bit exciting when I once again accidentally leashed Shadow instead of Seb) and generally sitting around. Given we have minus degrees forecast for tonight I also brought in some more wood. Sunrise this morning was a little more clear than yesterday, though not wildly pretty. It was good to be able to see though!

Struggling to remember what we used to eat in the 1960's? I know for me it was overcooked veges, meat and bread with every salad. But apparently it was not like that in the country...... I was at the Mill Cafe yesterday trying to cheer myself up with a slice of apple and walnut bread when I spotted a copy of the Weekly Times on the reading material shelves. An old copy. 1960 to be precise. Imagine my surprise when I found a bunch of garlic recipes there, and what is more, a recipe for Aeoli. And we all thought it was some super trendy food for bright young things!

I was particularly impressed with the tractor prices - a really big one with a cultivator bar for under two thousand pounds!! Wish they were that cheap these days.

 This was filling in time waiting for the sheets to arrive so I could finish off the cottages. In the end I gave up and went home, returning to town after lunch to finish off the rooms.

This morning the fog was so thick I lost sight of Seb while he was still attached to the lead (as was I).

I took this photo after our walk when it was starting to clear a bit (I could actually - just - see the edges of the oval from the middle by that stage).  The drive in to clean the bank was rather fraught (there have been large deer on the road of late), but made it intact and by the time i got out it was clearing to a nice day.

Dropped off some receipts to the Council chambers to get refunded for the catering for our workshop, and so home. Did a load of washing but as I was pegging it out it started spotting with rain and getting overcast once more, so it is now drying indoors a la the old fashioned way.

I am thinking of running for Council - what do you think? A fairly thankless task, but at least we might stop losing money to appeals we have no chance of winning. Council's latest decision (refusing a low-intensity organic poultry farm) was indefensible and will result in referral to the Tribunal for sure. It really only needed a few conditions to deal with the objections and would have been a great addition to our local economy. That and our mayor, when approached about setting up a Bendigo-bank in our soon-to-be-vacated ANZ bank building, couldn't see the point. Um. Keeping viable banking in our town is not something Council might be interested in????

So I am meeting a Hobart City Councillor when I next go to town to see what I might be letting myself in for.

Soggy foggy drizzle all day - blargh ....

Lack of sleep is becoming a habit. Woke at four this morning due to being overheated (I know, ironic after the other morning). Will be happier when these weather swings stabilise and leave us to it. It's too cool not to have a fire, but having lit one it rapidly becomes too warm. Sigh.

So I had breakfast and walked the dogs and then walked them again in the (very thick) fog before heading in to clean the bank. Whereupon I discovered I was also required to clean all three cottages (sudden rush to the head on the part of visitors apparently). Got there and started stripping beds only to discover Brad had not ordered the sheets I messaged him about last time i was in there. Since this left me with one sheet to do four beds, I gave up. But I managed to eke out the situation with some generously sized double sheets for one bed, and stripped another un-used bed so that there was one cottage available should he get a last minute booking. Agreed to go back tomorrow (when the sheets are delivered) to finish off the other two cottages

By that stage I was feeling peckish so went to the Pancake Parlour for toasted sammies and a large hot chocolate, then on to the Garden where all the mess from the Workshop was still to be cleaned up (Eleanor had been in there earlier but had apparently not been moved to do anything toward this end. So I packed up the chairs, folded up the table and popped it away, found homes for the tea,coffee and sugar and decided the two bananas must be mine. My intention in going there today (since the workskills lads were not going to be there) was to whipper snip the garden beds that we have made so far which have been sprouting nettles and other succulent weeds for some time. For reasons best known to itself the whippersnipper decided to clag out and the motor to start smoking. So I took it to Andrew and they only thing he could suggest was new string. So it now has new string and is sitting in the back of the ute awaiting my trip to town tomorrow.

Needless to say I was quite weary by the time i got home, but the dogs were relentless so we have now had four more walks and they, at least, are asleep. I may not be much behind them, but will have to be awake at 9pm so the can have their last pitstop which should allow me to get some sleep tonight (temperatures, external factors, whatever, permitting).

Steak and kidney on mash again tonight.

Not much sleep was  had last night. Apparently Cracker Night comes late to the country, starting at midnight last night and continuing until at least one am. Since I was already awake, it having been somewhat warmer last night it did not wake me up. But it did keep me awake and the dogs were not too impressed either. I got up after half and hour and read for a while in the hope the would see the lights and take the hint, then returned to bed in the dark, only realising when the snoring started, that Seb had joined me there. Rather than cause further ructions I left him to it, which may yet prove to be a mistake - I will find out tonight I guess.

So you can imagine how happy I was when, having checked my emails at seven this morning, I discovered I was left to set up the workshop by myself as well as having a list of digging and such like to do to ensure there were rhubarb crowns and seedlings available for the market stall (the reason I was left to myself - we had agreed to cancel it if we could not get someone to run it for us but this was apparently lost in translation).

Then i got to the Garden to set up and discovered that one of the three hay bales we had stacked to provide wind protection for the new lemon tree was missing. Since we had a lot of people coming to the workshop, we needed those hay bales to provide emergency seating. I finally found it in the polytunnel where someone had broken it open to mulch their bed (ignoring the pile of broken pea straw bales in the chicken shed which would have done the job rather better).

Nevertheless, despite my foul mood, the workshop went well and was well attended. I was just recovering my equilibrium when four people arrived just as we were resuming after lunch, announcing themselves loudly, trying to make jokes about having not realised it started so early and generally being disruptive. I had been seated near the door to allow me to come and go discreetly, but this lot stationed themselves there, shoving my chair around behind the screen on which the power points were being presented, then when I finally gave up peering round the edge and took one of the toddler chairs that were emergency seating, the bloke in question calmly took my chair and sat himself down in a more appropriate location (and the wonder why we point out too many men feel 'entitled' grrrrr.

Then at the end of the presentation when I was looking forward to taking half a rhubarb cheesecakehome to console myself, Eleanor insisted everyone take a slice before they left. So I only have three tiny slices to keep me going - very annoyed at that!

Grumble mumble. There were some good gadgets presented at the workshop, and I plan to save up and buy some to help me lengthen my growing season a bit more cheaply than by building a full scale polytunnel.