Five Question Friday! 9/21/12

Posted on 25 September 2012 by SJPONeill

I was a bit slow off the mark with this edition of Five Question Friday over the weekend…too busy baking for Carmen’s birthday dinner on Saturday and then we had the twins on Sunday, and Monday?…Well, I was just knackered and still had the annual accounts to do – yes! I do know that the financial year ended in March!!

1. What is one grammar issue you cannot let go without correction?

Absolutely and positively, apostrophe abuse…for example, the difference between it’s and its – why don’t people just get it!

2. What’s your favourite thing about fall?

Here, in civilisation we call it autumn (if it ain’t broke…)…best thing about it for me is looking forward to that first snow of winter…assuming of course, that winter actually arrives…it took its own sweet time this year and while this looks pretty chilly:

…this was as we had the next morning:

Pretty pathetic really and now that the days are getting longer and flowers are starting to pop out, it’s unlikely that we’ll get any more this year – unless of course, I shift all the delicate plants out from their winter shelters…

3. What’s your favourite dish to take to a potluck?

For Carmen, it would have to be one of her uber-pavlovas, either au naturel or deconstructed…for me, on the those occasions when I might be allowed to take my cooking out of the house, probably my South African curry (options of vegetarian or not).

4. When do you start Christmas (Holiday) shopping?

Despite great aspirations every year, normally the fortnight before, although the greater panic is not so much the shopping as getting everything all wrapped up and in the mail for those family not in the immediate geography…

5. Did you move homes a lot growing up?

Nope…not once…my parents are still in the same house that I grew up in and left home from…

…to Invercargill in 1983, then Burnham, Singapore and Linton up to the mid-90s, then Trentham and Khandallah, finally in 2004 to where we are now in Raurimu…

Of course, it has changed just a little since we arrived….

Five Question Friday!! 8/17/12

Posted on 18 August 2012 by SJPONeill

It’s that time of week again – another five from Mama M

What’s the one thing you buy every time you walk into the store?

Three things:

Milk…hard to cook or bake without it and tea and coffee sans milk ain’t worth getting out of bed for – if we end up with a surplus, it can always go in the freezer for revitalising later for baking.

Dog roll…the walking carpets get fed Purina but get bored with the constant dry food and like to have something juicy/tasty to go with; whatever dog roll is on special is what gets grabbed but often they luxuriate in left-overs instead… breakfasts this morning was two cups of Purina each with a couple of big globs of mixed apple crumble, last night’s curry and rice, and porridge and yoghurt from our breakfast this morning…

Butter and marg…as for milk, butter is a bit of a must for a lot of baking plus toast/bread without some sort of spread is dry and yukky…

If you had a day all to yourself how would you spend it?

I would really like to have a decent crack at the challenge of a Blitzbau …I have been following most of them this time around and it looks like a lot of fun…just need to have a day to dedicate to one during the blitz season…

theconfidencestoat’s Matchbox 1/72 Hawker Hunter T7 56 Sqn RAF Coltishall 1964

Are you a speed limit driver? If not, over or under?

We have a 10kmh ‘tolerance’ here but I rarely go over that unless it’s a brief spurt when passing…far easier and cheaper these days to just add in some extra time if I really need to be somewhere on time…the twins on the other hand, are speed maniacs – can’t think where they get this from…?

What’s your favorite dessert to make, homemade or from a mix??

That’s an easy one…our self-saucing butterscotch pudding…it’s yummmmeeeee!! Oh, did you think I was going to share the special recipe…? Nope not even a pic less lest some culinary schemer deduce the secret ingredients…

Would you rather have a spider or a mouse scurry across your face (no copping out and saying “neither!!”)?

Probably a mouse as they tend to be in transit and are less likely to take up residence or want to contest ownership…not actually that fussed as spiders here (apart from whitetails) are not really much to worry about and, now that we slashed back all the scrub from around the house and installed the ring of death of bait stations, we don’t have much of a rodent problem…when we first moved here, the rats used to queue up on the deck by the front door to hoover down any leftovers the dogs might have left…

Five Question Friday! 7/6/12

Posted on 8 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Is love at 1st sight possible?

Hmmm…attraction, yes, lust, most definitely…but love? Nope, I think that has to develop over time once two people get better acquainted and get to know each other before making any big commitments like ‘luff”…

How did you choose your pet’s name?

First time around, Mum told us kids we had a new pet coming and we should pick a name for it – it was all a big mystery and previous pets had been four-legged and woolly so us kids didn’t really put too much effort into it and selected the most foolish name we could think of (in the early 80s) which is our our spaniel got the grand monicker of Claudia.

Some two decades later, I made a casual comment that the new spaniel pup were selected looked a lot like the cartoon character Pepe LePew. Kirk, our current big dog, got his name because Carmen’s brother had a big Rottweiler named Khan and I passed the comment once that Kirk kicks Khan’s butt any day (Trekkies will get it). Lulu our rescue dog was Lulu when we got her, and Deeta the Rottweiler pup that we are fostering at the moment is Deeta although I see that someone is getting all googoo eyes over her so I suspect that she might be adopted by the time I gte home next week and be up for a name change…she’s less common Rottweiler with a tail which is good because we’ve never been fans of tail docking for it’s one sake but even as a puppy, that tail is already a lethal weapon that can clear a coffee table of everything in second when she gets excited…

Deeta who’s still just little…

What are you considering giving up (cable, home phone)?

Nothing at the moment…we cut back on a lot of things when I left the Army went for more of a freelance employment path and a lot of that was really just stuff that we didn’t use that much or really miss now…things like SkyTV and keeping the spa on year-round (we hardly use it any way once the novelty of having one wore off unless the twins are here or we have guests). I don’t have a personal mobile phone any more because I hardly used it when I had one and we’ve trimmed back on magazine subscriptions too mainly because it was getting to a read once then file away forever scenario…Google is your friend for most things…

I gave up drinking for a long time, initially because I was riding big fast bikes and didn’t need the distraction – I found that once I broke the habit of drinking, it was easy peasy to not drink at all…of course, Pepsi profits took a big dive when I gave up giving up about a decade ago…When I was posted to Wellington in the mid-90s, coming from an environment that ran on hot black coffee, I cold-turkeyed off coffee for a good three years…the imediate effects I noticed were sleeping better and thinking clearer and I became a real tea connoisseur but over time it crept back into my diet, partly driven by increasing difficulty finding good tea blends….

How much do you pay your babysitter?

We’re on the flip side of this now and starting to wonder if we should be charging for our baby-sitting services!! No, not really…it’s always a joy to look after them and they are better entertainment than anything on TV. On this one, I don’t think that the minimum wage is a bad start point for determining babysitter pay; then again, you might opt for the good old babysitting pool where a bunch of people share mutual babysitting services…

How “young” is old enough to babysit?

Or maybe…when is too old…? Young enough here is governed by the law which prevents any children under 14 being left home alone so obviously a babysitter would need to be older than this… personally, I’d be looking at at least 16-17 so that you can be fairly confident that they could cope with likely emergencies…

Five Question Friday!! 6/29/12

Posted on 30 June 2012 by SJPONeill

What’s your favorite childhood snack that you still eat as an adult?

Probably pikelets loaded with strawberry jam and fresh whipped cream…I will post some pictures next time we make some with the girls…and then, while looking up the URL for HFG, I saw it had a recipe for cinnamon and banana pikelets so for you foreigners and colonials and rebels who aren’t quite sure what a pikelet actually is, have a look, have a go and enjoy…it is a summery one too for those sweltering in the Northern hemisphere heat…

What food will you not eat the low fat version of?

Can’t think of any really…we normally opt for the healthier version where there is a choice…SWMBO won’t touch the ‘diet’ versions of Sodastream syrup whereas I don’t really care…I guess milk maybe where we tend to avoid the full cream dark blue top stuff but won’t go as far as the green top trim milk because it tastes like white water.

What’s your favorite way to cool off during the summer?

Sitting in the pool with a cool drink and a good book, possibly an Audible version as the hard copy ones get a bit grumpy around the water.

What’s your favorite summer read?

Don’t really have seasonal reads…sometimes we don’t even have clearly discernible seasons! I’m more likely to experiment with food in summer so possibly my summer reads are more culinary in nature, Healthy Food Guides etc…

What are you doing to stay cool in this awful heat?

Hmmm…not really a problem here at the moment…just pulled up the blinds in the study and can see that we have had a bit of a frost but no as extreme as I expected last night…clear blue skies as the sun come up over Mt Ruapehu so it will be sunny today, warm INSIDE, and a few degrees above zero outside

Five Question Friday! 6/1/12

Posted on 2 June 2012 by SJPONeill

1. What were you scared of as a kid?

The even stevens top three are…

…classic Doctor Who monsters, of course the Daleks but they’ve been rather overhyped since the Doctor Who renaissance since 2004 – worse than cockroaches, they just won’t die – but equally as scary were the original Cybermen…

Regardless of incarnation, the Doctors always had such crappy situational awareness….

….and the Abominable Snowmen – although now they kinda just look like decapitated Big Birds (in good old-fashioned black and white, of course)…

But being strictly honest, it was a Dalek that almost got me in the end…Dad used to right into squash and while he played, us kids would roam the depths of the squash court complex (which also supported a decent size badminton club). Can you imagine my sheer gibbering terror when I rounded a shadowy corner – right into an eye-level real live Dalek!!! Looking back from now, there is a slight possibility that it was just a super-size display shuttlecock….

Stingray hit the screens back home around 1967-8 – I used to watch it with Mum but mainly through my fingers and/or behind the couch as Troy Tempest, like most heroes seemed to have this innate ability to get himself right into the middle of a bad situation EVERY episode – why did WASP keep such a klutz on the staff? OK, so fair enough, he managed to recover things in thirty minutes…but even so….

And finally, there is the ID monster from Forbidden Planet – after almost sixty years it remains a classic that is totally not in need of a glitzy CGI-heavy remake…the whole idea of a an invisible monster that could crfeep in anywhere and get you took a long time to get over….

2. Do you sleep well in a hotel?

I hope so as I get enough practice at it!!! I think I spent two months overseas last year in one form of hotel accommodation or another – this year is a bit milder but still looking at four or five week in hotels – and that’s not counting other ‘alien’ beds as I travel around New Zealand for work…or my days on-base when I am not working from home. Actually, I have to admit that I don’t mind it too much as if there’s one thing you pick up from an infantry career is how to sleep just about any place and feel good about it…

Can’t really complain if this is the worst view I have this trip..!

Looking back, I think that the only time I have had trouble sleeping in a hotel room was one night I spent in the Crowne Plaza at Changi Airport where I checked in late in the evening and found that the first flight went out at 0534 in the morning as my room (directly overlooking the runway) rattled and shook…nothing like an early start to the day!

3. If you could meet any celebrity, dead or alive, who and why?

[Edit: Holy heck!! I skipped a whole question!!!]

I see that Mama M struggled with this one too…I’m not really too much into the whole celebrity thing nor whatever it is that might define ‘celebrity’…so often the public persona of an individual is so different from who they really are…the mighty(yeah, right) knowledge base, Wikipedia describes celebrity as:

A celebrity, also referred to as a celeb in popular culture, is a person who has a prominent profile and commands a great degree of public fascination and influence in day-to-day media. The term is synonymous with wealth (commonly denoted as a person with fame and fortune), implied with great popular appeal, prominence in a particular field, and is easily recognized by the general public.

And that doesn’t help at all…if anything that definition is of someone to be feeling sorry for that particularly wanted to meet for any reason – think I’ll pass on this one…

4. It’s a hot summer day. Do you prefer to be pool side or at the beach?

“It’s a hot summer day.” Ok, it probably is somewhere but it hasn’t quite made it here yet – although it is not unpleasant outside….if ‘at the beach’ could be stretched to include ‘lakeside’ then I think that’d be the preferred option with a pool the slow second option – there’s nothing quite like naturally moving water over the canned variety…

5. What is your favorite summer dish?

Hmmmm….this is a real toughie…after much very careful consideration, I have to opt for a cold chicken salad with lots of crisp salad, tomatoes, croutons, peppers, et cetera… accompanied by a tall chilled glass of genuine root beer…

Five Question Friday!! 5/25/12

Posted on 26 May 2012 by SJPONeill

1. Are you a napper?
Nope…not really…if I let myself nod off, then I will probably be out for hours and wake up at o-dark-30 all refreshed and energised which just perpetuates the problem. If possible, I prefer to push through to a normal(ish) bed time for a rest…of course it doesn’t always pan out according to plan…

2. What was your favorite subject in school? Most hated?
I liked English, reading and writing from the very start – had my first story published in the Sunday Times when I was seven and found this year that I still have the first exercise book in which I wrote stories…it’s all in pencil so I need to scan it soon before it all fades away…hated maths from Day 1…

3. Did you have the something old new borrowed and blue at your wedding? What were they?
Old was probably me, new would have been the wedding cake (rings and wedding dress we have bought a few years before), borrowed would be the two witnesses that we met at the hotel, and blue would be the lagoon behind the beach where we had the service…I’m travelling at the moment so don’t have access to any of the pictures so will update this is a couple of weeks…

4. What one thing are you determined to do this summer
Noting that we are the bottom of the planet, summer is a few months away..reroofing the house was the main objective for the ‘summer’ just gone and we got it done in the only four day break of decent weather all ‘summer’ – finished at 8-30PM on the Thursday night and it was bucketing down by midnight! This coming summer might be focussing on levelling out the lawn and pushing civilisation all the way to the fence around the house…

5. Ice cream or Popsicles?

Is that even a question? Ice cream -hands down!!!! And none of those dodgy marketing flavours…good old-fashioned vanilla or hokey-pokey will do nicely with fresh fruit in summer and melting over a hot butterscotch pudding in winter…

Cutting and running today as I still have to finish packing etc…

Five Question Friday!! 4/27/12

Posted on 28 April 2012 by SJPONeill

Do you make your kids finish all the food on their plates?

As a general rule, yes…but sometimes a battle is simply not worth it…equally generally, they are pretty good about hoovering up whatever is put in front of them…(talking grand-kids here so the rules might be a little different…)

Do you give an allowance?

Nope…they have both left home and are on their own, despite occasional hints … but we still feed them when they come round home though…

Do you actually park your car in the garage?

That’s the general idea and , yes, there is a car in there…with winter coming down here, we will probably have to get our act together so we can get the truck in there as well – had a couple of windfalls with ‘in-theme’ windows for the cottage/sleep-out and the big box things are displays cases from the Te Rapa Payless Plastics that Carmen scored from their closing down sale last weekend…both items need a temporary home til we get round to shifting them to either the storage garage (no, that’s not it in the picture; that IS the car garage!) or installing them…

What is one food you will NEVER cook?

Kina aka sea urchin…looks like snot and not interested in investigating further before the zombie apocalypse strikes…

I rest my case…

Do you have anything exciting planned for the summer?

Not really…just being able to bask in the sun and enjoy the great weather we never got this summer…first summer trip will probably be Brussels but it’ll be coming on to winter there so not sure if that will count? Hoping for an Aussie trip before Christmas though…

Five Question Friday: 13 April 2012

Posted on 21 April 2012 by SJPONeill

On a break this morning, I was doing some housekeeping in my WordPress library and came across a draft post titled “Five Question Friday: September 9, 2011“…I was about to delete it as part of the housekeeping as my assumption was that, from the date, it was associated with the 911 Anniversary. Fortunately, the little voice stopped me and on further investigation, I found that I was so wrong (it happens once, maybe twice a year)…

All I had in the draft was a link to Cecilia Futch‘s post of the same name and from there, I followed her further link back to My Little Life ( I hate the way that Blogspot regionalises its URLs – at first glance all its good blogs i.e. the ones I go to, are from New Zealand) and the latest iteration of Five Question Friday (of course, it’s already Saturday here but just go with the flow for now…) which I thought that I would give a go and maybe even do as a regular feature…

Rules for 5QF: Copy and paste the following questions to your blog post, answer them, then watch for the linky post to appear Friday morning and LINK UP! (Feel free to play along on Twitter, also!)

Oh, and remember (pay close attention…this is the important one)…HAVE FUN!

Can’t guarantee how much I will remember to do the linky back thingie but let’s see how it goes…

The envelope please….

1. Groceries are high right now what is easiest way you have found to cut back?

Growing our own greens and herbs – currently we’re on about iteration #54 for a sustained garden but getting there slowly – it’s all a big learning experience and we’re slowly getting our heads into growing things up here…the other big cost saver is shop around and have a good idea of what things are worth today – if we don’t need need need something then give it a miss til it comes down e.g. pumpkins are currently going for per kilo what the whole pumpkin went for last year…

2. What are the top 3 things on your “bucket list”?

I don’t really have one – I’ve been quite lucky that through work and pure circumstance I have done a lot of things already and there is nothing that I really have a great hankering to do…

3. Would you rather give up AC or heat?

Aircon, without a doubt, hands down, no question…it’s doesn’t get that hot here, certainly not intolerably so but it does get cold (in all fairness though, nothing like a good Northern Hemisphere winter)…opening doors and windows and making best use of shade is enough here to mitigate any likely natural heat – and if the volcabo cooks off again, the best apporach to cooling will be to place it squarely in the rear view mirror…

4. What’s your favorite cocktail??

Carmen’s Smoothie…looks and tastes like a fruit milkshake but removes coherent speech and the use of the your legs for a number of hours…

5. What was your first job & how old were you?

First job was probably helping with setting the table and doing the dishes as oon as I was tall enough to see what I was doing…at school, I used to earn pocket money mowing lawns, stacking hay, etc…most of that used to go on books and models. My first full time job was at Industrial Fibreglass in Oamaru…

As you may draw from the picture it was an interetsing organisation…my first real real job then was probably working as a lineman with Telecom in Invercargill from 1983…