Home Alone

Earlier in the week Tereasa made a rather on the spot decision to take the kids to go and visit my parents in Toowoomba (over 600kms from Rockhampton). So on with the arrangements. Did you know that it could be possible to take 2 hours and thirty minutes to order a couple of plane tickets over the web? I surely did not. It started with a couple of drop down menus not working on the site, so I checked all of the usual suspects such as the sites listed browser compatibility and the java settings on my Mozilla browser but no luck. So this lead to a few fruitless phone calls first to the airline and then to the credit company and finally after much confusion there was a realisation that what had appeared to be a + symbol on my credit card was really a worn number 4. Then as if lady luck had changed her mode the drop down menus started to function again and I was home free. With printed tickets in hand the frayed tempers subsided to harmonious smiles once again and the smiles returned to faces.

Wednesday morning when Sheryl woke up the first thing that she said before she was even fully out of bed was daddy how many hours is it till we get on the big plane. Then before I even had time to tell her that I was taking off at 10:00 am the phone rang and grandma was asking about how long to go. I could see that both parties were keen to catch up.

It has been eerily quite at home since and I must admit to missing the girls though it has been nice to have some vacant possession of the television viewing time. I think I managed quite well at my first food shop in at least 12 months. I decided to get those things that get put off because kids just won’t eat it and I discovered that you can actually buy a pre-marinated kangaroo mini-roast. I cooked this I the oven at 200 degrees for about 45 minutes with my chunky cut veggies along side for the entire time and a good sprinkle of Italian herbs over the lot and it was to die for. My favorite little trick is to take a couple of whole cloves of garlic roughly pealed ad toss them into the spray oiled tray with everything else after cooking any excess peal will just fall off the garlic and you eat the entire clove. There is only a lovely hint of the strong garlic flavour left in the clove and even those who object to spicy foods would have to agree on this one mmmm.