Haircut, pancetta, shimmies and lamb chops

Saturday

6.45am: woken by the goats who think that exactly sunrise is breakfast time. Argue with Stu about which one of us is getting out of our warm bed to feed them. Decide we both need to get up anyway. 

7am: Stu is out feeding animals and waking up the mini farm. I'm inside starting kitchen chores and looking for my hairdressing scissors. 

7.30am: my hair now about half the length it was (selfie hair cut - big success) I'm feeling better and we're all munching on muesli or fruit muffins for breaky. 

9am:  off to a friends house for a 'Pig Day Out'. Arrive to find the pig (one that us and our goats had been acquainted with earlier in the year) already dead, bled and ready for the next stage. Kids ran off the play and Stu and I mucked in assisting with some 'dead pig beauty therapy' - a hot bath, a removal of body hair and a quick detox (aka a removal of organs). This pig, like the ones our friends have done in previous years, had been raised very well on scraps, rolled around in the mud of a large paddock and been treated very kindly for 11months and was now destined to become all sorts of cured porky goodness - salami, pancetta, sausages and much more. 

2pm: a delicious lunch, which Kylie had been working on all morning - fresh sourdough, garden salad, sausage rolls and pies and the freshest pork spare ribs ever - yum!  Then the men headed back to work - fat preparation time and listening to the footy on the radio. Kylie and I went to visit their chooks, grabbed a  barrel for my seaweed fertiliser to be made in and talked gardening. 

4.45pm:  left them to it with the pig, they'll have many more hours of pig things to do over the weekend. We had to get home, take the goats for a walk in the beautiful evening sunshine, make a big bowl of pasta for tea and then it was time for me to metamorphose into a belly dancer. 

8pm:  show time. Another one of our regular Greek night performances at a local restaurant. My troupe of 3 dancers performed for half an hour to a great audience. So much fun!

9pm:  a quick post-gig chat and giggle with my dance sisters before I headed home. 

10.30pm: full of warmth from a day of friendship, laughter, sunshine, work and lots of good, real living, Stu and I headed to bed. 

Sunday

6.30am: up to make some bread for the day. I've been too busy to organise sourdough (which is what we've been eating recently), but a quick batch of rolls, a white loaf and a batch of muffins will do. 

7am: feed goats (yep, sun came up!)

8am: breaky with the family and time to do a few quick jobs around the house before it is time to head out for the day. 

9am: Stu is off to be a soccer dad with one of the boys and I'm off to another friends house to help her out butchering a couple of sheep that she'd had hanging over night. 

11.30am: sheep cut up into lots of chops, roasts, ribs etc. we bagged them all up, filled their freezer and our esky full of enough meat to last our family a really long time. 

12pm:  Stu (who was done with soccer), Jacki and I headed off with our combined herd of kids over their private path to the beach. Paddling, a little winter dip for a few kids, rock pooling, sand boarding and seaweed gathering kept us all entertained for an hour or so before our tummies suggested we should head back over the dunes and taste some of our hard work. 

2pm: a freshly picked garden salad, my fresh bread and some barbecued lamb chops filled happy bellies - yum. 

3.30pm:  on the way home, called back into the 'pig friends'' house to check on progress (nearly done, cool room full of salamis, pancetta and rolled cured meats that look amazing!), drop of some of our wool for them to try felting and to pick up a microscope that we're going to use to look at some organs we retrieved for dissecting and other cool biology lessons. 

5pm: home again. Time to load the freezer up and pop my seaweed into my new barrel. A spot of work in the garden and time to admire the last of a beautiful final day of winter. 

6pm: basic dinner - French toast and some preserved fruit. Four exhausted people ready to chill for the rest of the evening. 

That's what I call a crazy, busy, slow living weekend! ;)

Sunshine through the leaves

Baking delicious sourdough creations and converting recipes for thermomixing. 

Digging, carrying, sifting and creating wicking beds ready for a summer full of veg that have not suffered dehydration before they had a chance to grow. 

Building a new herb garden from recycled tyres and filling them with lots of lovely herbs, but also a grapevine to give our kitchen window summer shade and winter sun, a kiwiberry and a gooseberry - just for fun and maybe some yummy food. 

Creating costumes and sets for a fabulous play that the kids wrote last week and then watching proudly as they rehearsed and then performed it fabulously. 

Waiting hand and hoof on my demanding little goat who is hopefully delivering us a new kid or two or three in early November. 

Enjoying spinning on our spinning wheel (a fabulous garage sale find), in front of warm fires on chilly evenings. 

Celebrating academic achievement with my kids and stretching our brains over challenging  maths and science problems one day, and then spending the next digging in the garden with them and doing no book work at all. That's what we love about homeschool. 

Working up a sweat at a new dance class - not belly dance and not me as the teacher. A challenge that I'm loving. 

Feeling proud of my achievements at a recent weekend of dance appraisal. Sometimes it really does seem that I've managed to fall into the perfect life for me. 

Odd social dilemmas - help one family friend butcher a pig or help another to butcher a sheep.... Decisions!

Contemplating Christmas (its only 4 months away!) and writing lists of gifts that I need to make for giving. 

Considering returning to writing my blog and trying to work out a way to do it that makes me happy and doesn't make me feel like I'm wasting time. 

Enjoying lovely late winter days where the sun shines through the leaves, our bees buzz busily around blossoming fruit trees and our chooks scratch and peck and lay lots of eggs. 

That's what I've been up to lately.