Let’s be up front about this…I’m a Mighty Ape addict…each day, I scan the Mighty Ape Daily Deal email and if something looks good, I grab it.

A couple of weeks ago, the Jiffi Nurtiburst blender appeared at a 75% discount for the day, too tidy to walk away from…I already have a small ZIP personal blender but was after something a bit more meat-eater…

Anyway, it was a pretty good deal with lots of bits…and a recipe book…and loving my coffee, the Banana Coffee smoothie immediately caught my eye…healthy (well, it’s got banana’s in it!!) and coffee, how could I go wrong?

It’s been quite cold here, unseasonally so for December…this was the scene just a couple of days ago and it was as cold as it looks…

…so my first attempts at Banoffee the Drink used hot coffee (because it has been so damn cold in the mornings). While pleasant, wasn’t really doing it for me as a morning kickstarter…

The process is fairly simple so it’s difficult to get it wrong…a cup of coffee (I’ve been using Jeds #5), half a cup of milk and two bananas…

…screw the blender base on to the ‘cup’ and clip it on the blender…

…doesn’t need any more than 30 seconds to mix it all together…but, warm, it wasn’t quite punching my buttons…

The weather having turned summery yesterday (about time!!), I left a cup of coffee in the fridge to cool overnight. This morning, I tossed the coffee, some milk (and cream that was looking for a home), and a handful of ice cubes into the mix, spun it up and AWESOMENESS!!!

The cold temperature brings out the flavours a lot more…while the coffee was enough to lit my eyes up, the taste was still dominated by the banana so tomorrow’s variation will reduce the bananas by one to see if the coffee then takes the lead…

Photographers, artists, poets: show us PERMANENT.

via Daily Prompt: Tattoo….You? | The Daily Post.
Because it takes over an hour to now our lawns, I like to listen to an Audible book while mowing as a form of concurrent activity. I still have my original Creative Rio MP3 player that came with my original Audible subscription way back in 2001 – all 64MB of it! – but I had to buy a new player when Audible stopping supporting its original compact data format.
My new -since 2010 – player is a Creative Stone MuVo 4GB and while switching books while mowing the lawns on Monday, I noted that it was longing a bit worn and I wondered how long it might last…little did I suspect that question was about to be answered for me…
…as my player dangled by the headphone cable, Indiana Jones-like, near the spinning blades of death, before succumbing, unlike Indiana Jones, to their whirling dance of devastation…

The scene of the crime…

The culprit in time out…

Crime scene investigation…

The evidence…I think that it is safe to say that the damage is PERMANENT…
Replacement will have to wait until normal employment services are resumed…the jury is still out on whether a new plug can be attached to my noise-canceling headphones…fortunately there’s no more travel on the horizon before Christmas…
…and then…
…to add insult to injury, I just started on the top lawn when the mower snapped a drive belt so I couldn’t even finished the damn lawns!!!!

Reblogged from and inspired by Re-Wiring Kummerspeck | rarasaur…also driven by my resolution to aspire to a post a day…

All I know is that I was raised to solve all problems with food.

Socially awkward situation?  Put on some tea.
Did you have a long day? Have a cookie.
Did someone upset you? Go make a loaf of bread.
Are you feeling a little sick? Have some soup.

Is it too hot outside? Too cold? Is it the first day of school? The last? Did you work late? Is it your anniversary of your wedding? Is this the anniversary of your breakup? Did someone pass away? Was someone born? [read more here]

It’s probably a natural human survival impulse reaction with roots that go back to some poor old cave person have a quick and hopefully last scoff before legging it from that pesky T-Rex (so what if cave-folk and T-Rex were never co-located temporally? It’s my alternate history…!) to sustain him as the pursuee…and it would be a shame for that food to go to waste anyway…And in all honesty sometimes it’s just not convenient to go for a run when you’re stressed – unless T-Rex really is on your case, in which case, running (very fast) becomes highly recommended…

Many moons ago, when I used to work in a big concrete building with no windows – no quite true: there were two and in fours years I only managed to move from the left of the window to the right of the window although there were some that would have preferred to see me move the same difference but from the inside to the outside…

Anyway, for a time, part of the my role was to oversee the generation of any response to ‘something happening’ – due to that bugger, Murphy, normally something not good and normally around 4-30 on a Friday afternoon, or just before that grand old tradition of Wednesday afternoon sport…after the first couple of times of finding that getting excited didn’t achieve very much except getting excited, my first act after putting down the phone – hurling it across the room never really achieved much either, especially when it was on one of the twirly cords and would come right straight back at you as soon as the cord reached its full extension – was to put on the jug and “…make a nice cuppa tea…” (who used to use that line in a  radio show about the same time? What ever happens, just “…make a nice cuppa tea…”)

While the jug boiled (yes, there was a Zip but it always tasted bit funny), and then the tea steeped, I was able to get my thoughts together, piece together a rough course of action and decide whether I needed to write Friday night in town off entirely or just plan on a later start…since that time, I’ve always tried to use the tea making activity as a tool to engineer that five minutes of breathing to get my thoughts together…

When I’m busy writing, I often have a drink when I run into a bit of a block…I’m not sure if it’s the drink that does it or just passaging down the spiral stairs, into the kitchen and back up to the study, that gets the grey matter firing again. I don’t so much eat when this happens and in fact when I am on a real writing binge, I will often look out the study window and find that somehow it has gotten dark outside; or that Kirk starts to cry (a grown dog crying – who would think it?); or Lulu very pointedly dumps her head in my lap – her way of saying that it’s well past tea time for good dogs. Then, perhaps, I might feel some minor hunger pangs and realise that although breakfast might have been big, it was also twelve hours ago…

Lulu having made her point re a dog’s dinner…

Shy Kirk

…and I don’t know what Kummerspeck is either…