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Friday 28 October 2011

Aaaaaarrrrrggggh! What a big week!

This week has been hectic. Lots of events, changed plans, sleepless nights and deadlines happening all week long... with a bit of hair pulling and a few tears along the way too. I must admit some of the dramas were actually self inflicted this week.

This weekend our city is hosting CHOGM* so we have a public holiday today. The holiday is usually held at the beginning of October to celebrate the Queens birthday (I know it isn't on her actual birthday but October is the time when we recognise it). Anyway the holiday was held over to today because the Queen is actually here in Perth to open the CHOGM meeting and having a public holiday now limits the traffic within the city area which will help all the delegates get around much easier.

My DH has been on night shift this week which means I've been sleeping very lightly. On the first night I finally exhausted myself by 3:30am, and each successive night I managed to get off to sleep an hour earlier the previous night.

In addition to my usual crazy schedule this week, on Monday I decided I really needed to have raspberry jam on toast, but we had run out of jam several weeks ago so (as I was looking for pointless projects due to my procrastination over other deadlines) I spent several hours cooking and bottling jam. That night I planned pasta for dinner but we had run out of home made pasta sauce, store bought sauce always tastes very acidic to me so I try to avoid using it, so we had sausages and vegetables instead.

On Tuesday I made and bottled 9 litres of tomato and eggplant sauce. It takes about 4 hours to cook and as it simmered on the stove I tinkered with a few other projects. Then my husband's best mate dropped in for a coffee (DH was home from work). This meant I forgot to stir the sauce near the end and one corner of the sauce cooked onto the base of the pot. Thankfully it didn't transfer any burnt flavour into the sauce but it took me about 45 minutes to scrub the pot clean.

On Wednesday I made some fresh pasta to go with the sauce. I took some fresh pasta, sauce and a small jar of jam to my Aunty. She is recovering from a full knee replacement and recently lost her last sibling. I intended to cheer her up with my visit but we did share some tears too while I was with her.

I also finished taking photos of my S10 flower sampler temari sampler and did the grocery shopping. We were supposed to a have dinner guest but his plans got mixed up so it got rescheduled to Thursday. Instead we decided to all go up to Mum's for a visit after school. We came back via Miho and Seth's house to collect a red lamp and we played with the kids, stayed for Curry Rice for dinner then came home late.

On Thursday I started getting everything organised for the workshop this weekend. I ran out of ink as I began printing the patterns and had to dash down to Officeworks for more. I changed the ink cartridge only to discover that the new cartridge had broken the print head. After a few minutes of wringing my hands and feeling tears well up in my eyes I called EPSON to ask for help. This has happened before when I was working toward a tight deadline and they kindly couriered me out a replacement printer. To my horror I discovered that they had closed their Perth Office at 2:30 (probably something to do with the Public Holiday today). So I called Officeworks and they very kindly agreed to help save me. Not only did they refund the $80 I'd spent on ink even though one of the cartridges were jammed in my printer but they also professionally colour printed all my workshop notes for free while I waited.  Hallelujah for good old fashioned service!

Also on Thursday our guest came for a quick dinner. I was a quick dinner because DH was rostered on a night shift and Mr W had a school dance. I am surprised but I managed to get the dinner organised by 6pm. We had spaghetti cabonara made with our own eggs and home made pasta noodles and fresh crunchy salad and a tasty apple shortcake slice for dessert.

Today I have been packing up ready for the weekend temai workshop beginning tomorrow. I hope I don't forget anything... I really should make myself a checklist.


*CHOGM:  Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting

1 comment:

  1. Wow, you have had some week.

    I have burnt more pot bottoms than I care to tell anyone since I have no short term memory a good deal of the time. I finally fixed the pasta sauce problem by using a crock pot. Gives a nice slow cook tat sauce needs and I've never burnt any since then.

    now if I could figure our how not to burn the chicken soup!

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