Suprise!

I'm back.

Firstly I should explain my absence of late. Whilst I haven't always had a reason to blog, I've been cooking, I've been seeing friends and family, I've even worked another emergency at work. I've also been a little stressed and have had headaches.

I made a very significant life choice before starting this blog. Without revealing it, it is the biggest decision I've made in my life. I've wrestled with it in my head and used a close friend as a councilor and am comfortable that it is the right decision for this time. Today that chapter was closed (or at least the bit I have control over). I feel like I have given someone else a chance I will never have and whilst it could become complicated, the more I think about it, the more it feels right.

I am hoping that I can now sleep a little better at night and get back to working on my diet, and am also very thankful that I have good friends who are not judgmental and there in my time of need.

Friday Night Cards

I haven't played poker in about 3 weeks. Work has been busy, the weather hasn't been great and I have been a little lazy. Today I was quite determined to play.

One particular friend often plays with me. She was unavailable today, so I played on my own. I have to say that I was in Auto pilot today and despite finishing the tournament only a few hours age, remember very few specific hands. I fumbled raises and played several weak hands.

Out of a field of close to 40, I still finished a respectable 9th. This was better than I deserved but still outside of the money. I enjoyed myself, but was pretty far outside of my zone and am quite rusty. At least I made it out.

Time to retire?

Today is my bosses birthday. Technically, he is not really my boss, but plays a team leader type of role in my team and shields us from a lot of heat. He turns 55 today, which is also legal retirement age.

He seems to think he is dispensable but he has a great deal of historical knowledge. He is also a great trainer and backed me moving into this role so I am eternally grateful. He is getting increasingly frustrated with the politics in the company and is planning an exit strategy.

Realistically, he wants to be made redundant and probably won't retire. Redundancy would probably be difficult as there are others who have a lot of respect for him also. He seems to undervalue his worth and whilst he deserves a payout, it probably wouldn't be in the company's best interests. ONly time will tell the future.

Government addicted to Spending

One of Tony Abbot's rhetoric's is that we have a government addicted to spending. He is always quick to compare spending today to 2007 - the last year of coalition government. In recent days, Labor's budget has blown out to $12B in the red, having the government scratching its head on where the money is to come from.

I think both sides of politics are to blame on this one. There was a perception that we would ride the mining boom for years, as such, revenues were high and we were afforded tax cuts, superannuation incentives, baby bonuses and a raft of other handouts. Now all of a sudden we have woken up with our major assets sold and trying to find ways to rake in extra revenue in an election year.

Politicians are well paid. Why can we never draw in quality. It feels that there is a great degree of self interest and representatives rarely do what is right for the country. When you look to Italy, Monte tried that and took massive swings against him. What is wrong with voters these days/

Stitched Up

My walking coworker has just come back from minor day surgery. He had a benign lump on his face that was growing to a point that it was rather large and consuming a fair piece of real estate on his upper jaw.

Since coming back, he has a vigour about him. He has started walking to and from work, has a spring in his step during his lunchtie walk and is very diet conscious.

I admire his will and drive. My pants right now is really tight and i'd love to lose a couple of kilos. Lets see if I can get anywhere this time.

Jungle Gold

I have been watching quite a fair bit of this of late after it was recommended by a coworker. it is a relatively short series on a couple of Americans trying to solve their financial woes by mining for gold in Ghana.

I don not know how much is real and how much is doctored for TV, but it is amazing how so much can go so wrong. It feels that the operation is always hanging on by a shoestring and noone is brave enough to call it off. It is interesting that we find the misfortunes of others entertaining in a show like this.

I'm probably watching too much crap on TV at the moment and not doing enough walking and interesting things. I really need to pull my finger out and correct this.

Sfogliatelle

My father has a particular Italian dessert he is fond of - sfogliatelle. It is a lemony custardy ricotta filling convered in very thin strips of puff pastry. My mother was watching a cooking show and they happened to show how to make this treat - there are very few shops that sell this locally. My youngest sister was visiting today so we went out and bought the ingredients and gave this a try.

The instructions said this should take approximately 2 1/2 hours. It took far longer than that. We had seen various youtube videos on how to make this but were not prepared on how fiddly these are to make, particularly to amateurs like ourselves.

The trickiest bit is to create layers pf puff pastry and involves rolling many many thin layers of dough into a croissant like shape.out effort seemed ratehr long for some reason and did not have the desired thickness around the trunk.

We pushed along and made lots of stuffing. When it came time to fill them, our mistake became apparent and our sfogliatelle were very small and we had lots of stuffing left over. We were all starting to get frustrated and decided to cut our losses and make puff pastry cannoli with the remainder.

I think we are all a little disappointed with our effort, but at least we gave it a try. The end result did not taste too bad, but is not the best I've had either. At least we were able to do something as a family.