We love tak­ing walks in the neigh­bour­hood. Sometimes we go for quick lunch at a favorite café, oth­ers we enjoy a drink of some kind and then there are the more prac­ti­cal walks that take us to the library or the local shops.

If we decide to go grab a drink, we would pick some cat tails on the way from our spe­cial area and swing them around until they brake. The Dod gets his own handed to him, rid­ing on my back, and then he is expected to try to tickle the bounc­ing girls around me.

I love this wall.
The color, the tex­ture, all of it.

Little B skips ahead often, as she is my non-stop child; my per­petuo mobile; the child that climbs just about any ver­ti­cal object she faces; and yet, all this activ­ity and train­ing has not made her less likely to be a party of injury events around here. Quite the oppo­site, she can get a scrape just by breath­ing, I am sure of it. But, as I have always said, you are not a child unless you have bruised legs and a band-aid some­where on your body. She is def­i­nitely a child.

She skips, and skips, and skips until the street, which we cross together and then she is off again, unless she finds some­thing inter­est­ing and then she is behind call­ing for us to wait.

Miss Fab, my dogol­o­gist child (I dont think I have made you privy to her new obses­sion with dogs), is usu­ally closer, explor­ing and chat­ting and melt­ing with love for her brother. We usu­ally have to guess how many dogs we will see on our out­ing and we know we will see at least two; for we have the chao-chao we love to stop by and say hi to.

He is quiet and we could have missed him, had he not stuck his black nose under the fence that one time, back when, before he was our dog. It even took our res­i­dent pro­fes­sional dogol­o­gist a bit of time to fig­ure out the breed, there is so lit­tle of him showing.

Last time he made these sad noises, behind the beau­ti­ful white fence, and we decided that he is lonely all day, while the own­ers work. We bought his story until a noisy lit­tle fella jumped about around him, as though to prove his exis­tence or worth as a friend, for they are two, behind the fence. Nosy and Noisy. Our dogs.

Spring does make our walks more col­or­ful and there is so much to see and touch and pick.

Flowers are dis­sected and exam­ined, and paper bark trees are relieved of a bit of their coats in the name of explo­ration too. We love seed pods, cause there seem to be an unlim­ited vari­ety of ways plants have fig­ured out to spread their genes into the world — seeds with wings, spiky seeds, mil­lions tiny ones, pods, singing choir look­ing pods et cetera, et cetera.

No mat­ter how many times we do our walk, it never gets bor­ing and we always find some­thing new and interesting.

Still, its nice when we arrive at our cur­rent favorite water­ing place. Its even bet­ter if our pre­ferred inside sit­ting spot is free — it has enough chairs, the chairs are puffy and com­fort­able and there is enough table in front to cause trou­ble and spill stuff.

And as much as I want to tell you we leisurely enjoy our warm drinks, barely upright in the big puffy chairs and feet sprawled on the table in front, I cant. Because this one may look mel­low and all classy, well-mannered young gen­tle­man in his cardi­gan, but its all a lie.

At first the apple juice may sit there, amongst the pen­cils, undisturbed.

Miss Fab may be able to play some word games, while let­ting her yo-yo rest and wait­ing for the cinos.

Which come won­der­fully frothy with sprin­kling of brown choco­late goodness.

My drink of choice is a long black.

No sugar, no milk.

For those of you that won­der what in the world that is, its like a long espresso; watery strong espresso.

I love to drink it while catch­ing up on the newspapers.

But this one unleashes, shakes off the drowsy feel­ing he may have devel­oped rid­ing on my back and sets off.

He wants every­thing; to try it all, him­self. So armed with my unused tea­spoon he walks around and dips it in every­thing, drips stuff all over that big olé table, mixes things that should not be mixed.

Miss Fab attempts to restrain him, gen­tly, by offer­ing her baby­cino as a sac­ri­fice to the com­mon good. And this works for about half a sec­ond, and then he is off again.

This day was a bit extra crazy, as he was sleepy too, so life just had to bend over for him or else he was going to make it. We, our­selves armed with nap­kins, kept wip­ing behind him, but the end of the road for him was when he started pour­ing to and fro var­i­ous cups and spilled a lake on that table, which didnt look as nice any­more. That marked the end of his free­dom and he was swiftly strapped to my back, tightly, where he spent the rest of the time — blink­ing and rest­ing his tired head on my shoulders.

We did man­age to catch up on the news and elec­tion devel­op­ments and that cof­fee made its way to the depths of my being.

On the way back we take a dif­fer­ent route, just to be wild, or at least not to repeat our­selves. And here I will present to you our jump­ing game. Yours truly came up with it one day, when we were Dod-free, and you may be tempted to just call it long jump­ing, its not, so dont utter it.

Its our extra-special-fun-bike-lane-wild-game.

See — wild!

Its risky too, cause you never know when the extreme bik­ers may wizz by and put your life in danger.

Starting posi­tion:

Trembling knees, men­tal prepa­ra­tion, deep breathing…

Whooosh!

Every jumper is marked and we try to beat each other. I am way out of the kid­dies league. I fly, baby! Fly like the wind; jump straight back home. Not sur­pris­ingly, Little B man­ages to out­jump Miss Fab from time to time. And Mr.Blab? Last time he joined us on a walk, he used the excuse that he is sick and never embar­rassed him­self with an actual result. But I am pretty sure we all know where he will fit, I just won­der if he will make it past the white line…

Then the girls decided to be archeologists.

And dug the sides of the path.

So we can come back home with a pile of rocks.

A pile of rocks that is still in front of the back door and we trip on them to this day.

With titles like that its no won­der I am not get­ting any traf­fic thanks to SEO (search engine optimization).

Its the truth though, I will attempt just about any­thing. You wont find me hid­ing in a cor­ner, bit­ing my fin­gers about how I will be ter­ri­ble at some­thing. I may very well be ter­ri­ble at it, but I will at least give it a go and find out for myself. Call me a skep­tic, thats me.

So awhile ago when Mr.Blab jok­ingly asked me to cut his hair, cause he was too lazy to go to the hair­dresser, I said „Sure, dude, have a seat and hand me those meat scis­sors over there”.  I said it jok­ingly too, but he turned out to be even cra­zier than me, because he handed his mane to my com­pletely lost for words hands and the rest is history.

I have had my hair cut, I have watched other peo­ple do it, many times; I knew the proper tech­nique to hold the hair, and who doesnt know how to use scis­sors?! It cant be that hard. And the truth is that even after I was done with him, he was safe for pub­lic view­ing and didnt miss a day off work, to both of our surprise.

I still have no clear idea what I am doing when I grab the scis­sors, which now are proper hair-cutting ones and I even have thin­ning blades to com­plete my pro­fes­sional tool set.

Yours truly is now the offi­cial fam­ily hair­dresser, which not only makes  my man unap­peal­ing to other females, but also saves us not a neg­li­gi­ble amount of money. (The kids get good doos, because of the blood connection)

My prob­lem is that after every time I cut Mr.Blab’s hair, I for­get how hard it is and next time he asks me, which is usu­ally right before he looks like Big Foot, I agree to do it. And as soon as I stand there with my comb and scis­sors and try to moisten that moun­tain of hair, I feel half of my life run past me. The dread over­comes me, because ladies and gen­tle­men, he has way too much hair; I am cer­tain, in fact, that he is the rea­son so many other men are bаld around the world.

I snap with the scis­sors and noth­ing seems to change. I have no idea what I am doing is what comes out of my mouth every once in a while with a ner­vous laugh. Its ok, as long as I have some hair — calmly responds my client and we usu­ally laugh a lot. He pre­tends to be scared some­times and is not appre­cia­tive of my assistant/s, which might be spray­ing him with a bot­tle or pil­ing his cut hair on his pants, for exam­ple — what is this place?!

Oh, no worry, mis­tur, its all in bill…oups, that your ear?

By the end of it, my hands are falling off, and I am sure I patch up the last bits barely, barely. But he is always happy, bless his lazy heart.

Dodman, approved my work too.

And that is all that mat­ters sometimes.

And then he is put to work.

I won­der who can make a blan­ket from all of that cut hair.

Or two.

Miss Fab has been learn­ing how to write lim­er­icks poems in writ­ing class. I had no idea what those are, but after a quick exam­ple and rhythm tuto­r­ial, I got the jist of it.

The form of a lim­er­icks goes like that accord­ing to Wikipedia:

The stan­dard form of a lim­er­ick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, sec­ond and fifth usu­ally rhyming with one another and hav­ing three feet of three syl­la­bles each; and the shorter third and fourth lines also rhyming with each other, but hav­ing only two feet of three syllables.

The lim­er­icks were pop­u­larised by Edward Lear and his won­der­fully named book:

I love the char­ac­ter armed with non­sense; it lov­ingly reminds me of myself sometimes.

Today on the way to writ­ing class we had some fun and made a bunch of poems, poems in motion, lit­er­ally. And here for your hope­ful  enjoy­ment are a few of them.

1
I love my lit­tle old bed
its soft, cosy and red
its small and dash­ing
almost too flash­ing
I cant believe they cov­ered it in lead!

2
I have a very old cat
It needs a much big­ger mat
For she is so lazy
my cat called Maisey
and so extra­or­di­nar­ily fat.

3
I wanted to make a cake
but I didnt know how to bake
Out fell the flour
I made it a tower
and the milk made a per­fect lake.

4
Once I went to the mall
and I saw this one guy fall.
A man called Ted
came up and said:
„Why do they make malls so tall?”

5
Oups! I was eaten by a bear
Why me? This is not fair!
Its warm and cozy
But not so rosy
I am never doing  another dare!

6
Once I tried to climb the  wall
but instead I took a big, big fall.
My knee is bruised,
my jaw is fused,
please, give emer­gency a call.

We have our favorites, but I will be curi­ous if you have one too?

Comments in lim­er­icks get extra points. The points you can spend at that thingy over there, behind the blue stuff…a bit further…there, somewhere…oh, for­get it!

Weeds.

What are weeds? And are they mis­un­der­stood? I am guess­ing that those out there that spend numer­ous hours and money fight­ing with unwanted pesky gar­den guests will be reach­ing with their shak­ing, blood­ied fin­gers through the mon­i­tor for my throat, but calm down, breathe, give this blog­ger a chance.  I will get to my point even­tu­ally, as labo­ri­ously as it may end up being.

We skip the vio­lence and move on the pleas­ant things.Flowers. Imagine a front yard beau­ti­fully scat­tered with emerg­ing flow­ers. Some more fra­grant than oth­ers. The new breed of white, small and gen­tle ones are fill­ing the air with the most mind-swaying aroma. Every time you walk there, it feels like nature’s scent mar­ket. That is what our yard feels like at the moment.

The other day the Dod walks up to me with a flower in his hand and hands it up to me. The smile on my face must have had an impact on him too, because he ran back out with Mr.Blab say­ing more…more…

Next, he comes back and greets me with a small, but wide-toothed smile and hands bulging with freshly-scented, white blos­soms. My heart can only take so much, but this I soaked up to its fullest. I took one of the best bou­quets I have got­ten from the clutch of the two of my favorite hands and buried my nose in the moment.

My new gift now has a prized posi­tion on my desk and its per­fume lingers all around the place.

Freesias.

Some of the most won­der­ful flow­ers I have had the plea­sure of see­ing and smelling. I was not sure what they were, but one of you (thanks, Mina) men­tioned the name and now I am well informed of our gra­cious lit­tle visitors.

Get this though. They are weeds here. Lets just say that when I read that, Mr.Blab and I basi­cally laughed. In our world, a flower that plants itself, grows and exists with­out an ounce of our effort, and to top it all off smells divine and looks more than pleas­ing is noth­ing short of the per­fect plant. THE per­fect plant.

That was part of how my visual and smelling senses were tick­led that day.

Later on I took care of the taste buds.

I am new to bak­ing, but its grow­ing on me. This could be good or bad, or maybe good and bad, but I guess only time will tell. For now I am giv­ing in every once in a while. Remember my burned up first attempt at choco­late tarts? I just had to go back and improve.

So for movie night, again, I made a sec­ond batch. I made more dough than I needed so I quickly made up a savory fill­ing for the extras. I had some old cream cheese and spinach leaves that were call­ing, no, beg­ging to be freed of their fridge mis­ery. The fill­ing ended up like that: a layer of gar­l­icy cream cheese with spinach and that was topped with caramelized onions and cap­sicums. I am not com­pletely sold on the com­bi­na­tion, but they were very pleas­ant and quickly disappeared.

The pièce de résis­tance were the choco­late tarts, though.

The idea for these had stuck in my head from the Master Chef series. Last time I used some recipe I had found on the net, but this time I went and got the infor­ma­tion from the source and the result was a success.

For the dough:

2 cups  of plain flour
2/3 cup of  but­ter
Pinch of salt

Whiz in the food proces­sor until its crumbly. Then add ice water, bit by bit, until it starts to come together. Dont overdo it, it needs to just start to come together.

Flip it on the counter and make it into a disk. Cover in plas­tic wrap and it goes in the fridge for awhile. 30min or so.

Then roll it out thinly and cut out the cir­cles you need to put in your shapes.

Poke the bot­toms with a fork and then put bak­ing paper and weights on top (rice, beans or proper ones) to fill them up. Chill.

Bake in medium hot oven for 8-10min. That is called blind bak­ing and the weights keep the dough from puff­ing up and mak­ing it impos­si­ble to fill up.

Remove the weights and bake for fur­ther 10min. Watch it and dont burn them up as I did at first.

Then they are ready to fill up.

For the filling:

I microwave a few pieces of dark choco­late until melted. Then I add in cream until it looks like a runny choco­late sauce.

Thats it. I pour this into the ready and wait­ing tarts.

To serve we have been using straw­ber­ries and whipped cream, but the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. I am think­ing it wont be half bad with some crushed nuts on top either.

The result left every­body happy.

The girls were inspired as well and decided to sur­prise us with their own ren­di­tion of a desert for movie night. Sweets buzz up any child and ours are no excep­tion, but their minds were not only fired up by the poten­tial sugar intake. Their cre­ativ­ity was impressed by the ideas of Heston Blumenthal, whos show we adore — Heston’s Feasts. We watched him put chicken in an orange jelly, instead of orange flavour into a chicken, amongst other things.

We got choco­late stuffed straw­ber­ries from our bud­ding chefs. Thanks, Heston!

And our move watch­ing plates were now complete.

With choco­late melt­ing in my mouth and belly, and the fine sum­mer scent of the best darn weeds melt­ing in my senses, I can safely say that this day is wel­comed to visit me again any time.

This, pies and flow­ers kind of day.

One of my favorite things to do, amongst many oth­ers, is to grab a loaf of bread, break it apart and dunk the freshly torn pieces in a gooey mass of hum­mus driz­zled with extra vir­gin olive oil. The best place to do it is while leisurely lean­ing on the kitchen plot, as though it hap­pened by sur­prise, I was walk­ing by and saw the invit­ing food there and stopped by to dip in its yum­mi­ness. Its not a word, I know it, but it should be. Cause it exists.

I have worked on my recipe for awhile now. Even though its quite sim­ple and straight for­ward, this is the one I have set­tled on and do every time. Yes, you can go with the much eas­ier and quicker option of using a food proces­sor, but even though I thought those chefs on TV are just snobs when they sang praises for the mor­tar and pes­tle, I am afraid, I have proven myself wrong along the way. Or maybe I have just became one of the snobs myself. Either way, I much pre­fer the result that emerges after ener­get­i­cally bash­ing and grind­ing the ingre­di­ents with my own hands. Same goes for pesto.

You will need - chick­peas, lemon, gar­lic, tahini. extra vir­gin olive oil, salt and pep­per — optional: cumin or cumin seeds.

If you are using the food proces­sor, you skip the whole rest of the post, put every­thing in the bowl, whiz it and you are done.

Otherwise:

I start with the gar­lic and salt.
If I feel like it, I may toast some cumin seeds and add those in as well.

After they are well mushed, I add the tahini paste.
I use unhulled paste and that is why its so brown.

Then its time to start to add some of the chickpeas.

You can use canned ones, but I soak the grains for 24 hours and then sim­mer them for about 30min or until they soften.

I add some chick­peas, bash and add some more.

As I go I smooth it up with adding the oil, lemon juice and water. Yes, water.

At first I used to do the hum­mus only with oil, but it took a lot, as I like the mix­ture to be soft, not hard and gluggy. Then I tried adding some water instead of the oil and worked well. Now I would guess that half of the liq­uid is water and it has not been at the expense of flavour.

It helps to have will­ing volunteers.

The process takes awhile and a lot of woman power.

As I am bash­ing and feel­ing the mus­cles in my arms start to give in, I dream of eat­ing the result and hav­ing no guilt. I have worked up for it, after all

My vol­un­teer has a dif­fer­ent out­fit now — I told you it takes awhile.

I cant really tell you the exact pro­por­tions and quan­ti­ties, as I never mea­sure. The lemon juice, salt and pep­per go in as the fre­quent tast­ings indi­cate for their need. The tast­ings are half the fun, dont skimp on them. Same goes for salt, make sure you put enough or else the result can be quite uninspiring.

I wanted to take a few fancy, yummy shots of the result, but Miss Fab exclaimed close to the end of the process some­thing along the lines of  „When will you stop tak­ing pic­tures, so I can shove some in my mouth?!”. And that is all I needed to just open the doors to all the hun­gry, heav­ily sali­vat­ing peo­ple in the room and declare a free for all hum­mus mor­tar on offer.

And that is pretty much the end of the story.

Cause not long after, the care­fully crafted dip was gone.

And only the fond mem­ory of it lived in our minds,

and full bellies.

Til next time, our dear friend.

I love vot­ing. I always have.

In  fact, I dont think I have missed any elec­tion from the time I could vote.

Its not that I think my vote is extra spe­cial for the elec­tions, its that it is impor­tant to me. Even though my voice may be a tiny squeak in the sym­phony of pol­i­tics (if that even), I pre­fer to make it instead of being silent. I will vote even if none of the par­ties are wor­thy of my vote — I will cast a protest vote, but I will cast one.

And today was time to cast. Since I am a very respon­si­ble blog­ger and fol­low all the rules of good blog­ging, all of them, I will of course not engage in any polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions or dis­close my own polit­i­cal stance. I will be a lovely fresh green Switzerland. Of course.

The excite­ment is full and in our fam­ily we dont walk with bore­dom on our faces to the polling booths, we run to them.

We wanted to walk the way there, in honor of our stance, but it was rain­ing and Little B has a bit of a sore throat, so we set­tled for the car.

And then we were there, our oasis of elec­toral power.

For those that are not decided by this point or have trou­ble remem­ber­ing names and such, there are help­ful ‘infor­ma­tional’ materials.

I dont know who this guy was, but we loved his slogan.

Oh, Joe…

Welcoming com­mit­tee of vol­un­teers for the var­i­ous par­ties, who give out How-To-Vote cards.

Voting in Australia can be a bit funny, so those cards are sup­posed to help vot­ers in the process. You pick the one of the party you want to vote for and they let you know how to do it. So you dont mess it up

Then we waited our turn in the school hall..

I got my wal­let in a ready posi­tion to whip out my dri­vers license and prove vote worthiness.

Miss Fab was my stand-in voter and marked the papers for me. While Little B, did it for Mr.Blab, who were using the booth next to us. I love the car­ton polling booths. I won­der what they do with them afterwords.

The lit­tle one waited patiently.

Then its time for the all impor­tant casting.

And more casting.

And that is it.

That is all it takes.

Then it was time for celebrations

and exu­ber­ant behaviour

suit­able for any proud voter.

People have fought for this right and women like me and the girls have not enjoyed it that long. Give or take 50–60 years. Scary when you think of it.

We cer­tainly dont take it for granted.

We are pas­sion­ate and hope­ful these elec­tions, despite the worst and most unin­spir­ing cam­paign­ing ever.

Except one part of it. Funnily enough it was made for the Gruen Nation show (our favorite) and it was not an offi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the party.

Not say­ing any­thing though.

We are Switzerland. Remember?

Signed,
Respectable blog­ger who never engages in polit­i­cal discussions.