Our Travels

Routine We came back from our holiday and I went into responsible mum full throttle. As we were all jet lagged we were all in bed by 8pm which was a beautiful start. We arrived around 2pm and walked into an empty pantry, empty fridge(both) and decided to be pro-active I drove straight to the nearest grocery store and bought all the necessities from milk, bread, fruit, vegetables and the like. The following day I went off to the bigger supermarket to get the rest of the groceries. The good thing about this is then the transition home is smooth and well it felt like we never left and that my friends is how you settle back home after going away on holiday. An empty fridge always makes me want to hop back on the plane and back to where we came from with a full fridge plus the room service at the overnight hotel we stopped at! So it was a good start to the week. On top of that, on Saturday Master 5 had a playdate with his bestest friend so we went around to our friends for awhile before w...

Back in Muscat after 5 weeks in Samoa and New Zealand. Had a nice enough time catching up with family.  Yesterday ABA had a cultural food fair so made pani popo (sweet coconut buns) for the Samoa stall. We shared a stall with Australia, NZ and Fiji. There are lots of Aussies at the school so they came out full force with loads of food and Fiji and I had a little corner to sell kokoda(oka-lime cooked raw fish and kasava) and pagipopo for ours. I'm glad to say that I've aced the recipe off samoafood.com. I divide it even further to make 24 buns instead of 12 so I do 2 doughs and end up with 48 buns which is great. It's the right size for people to buy at the fair to 'try' and not be filled by one whole Samoan sized bun. So of course for us we need 3 of those little ones heh heh. Anyway my son used most of tokens to go buy it from our stall! So I guess it's nice that he likes his mum's baking! Otherwise I had spring rolls and meat dumplings in Korea. My littl...

I've had this laptop since Christmas of 2007, though it doesn't feel like it's that long ago the computer world says otherwise. I've had so many problems with this lovely HP. I've had the ram upgraded, I taken it in to have the memory cleaned to a hard drive and the latest headache is a message that keeps saying the computer memory is full when I hardly save anything on computer hardrive anymore! I've been trying to put off buying a new computer but now I can't view photos due to low memory... Very frustrating but I really didn't want to part with this machine. Oh well like all electronics these days they have a time stamp on them...our consumer society dictates that we buy buy buy. A lot of the time things aren't worth fixing as they cost about the same as buying a new one, like irons, vacuum cleaners, electric jugs.... Enough ranting this morning. Good Morning World:)

And so we're back to Square One as one brave lady in Samoa Sina Retzlaff speaks to the media with a bruised face from a recent beating by her ex husband the well known ex-Manu Samoa ex- Highlanders rugby player Brian Lima. It's disgusting that after she's divorced him he still did what he did. I saw Ms Retzlaff's picture with bruises and all on the Samoa Observer  site but what struck me is the determined smile through the pain. Domestic violence in Samoa and every where in the world is disgusting and I hope this particular abuser Brian Lima gets time in Samoa's horrid prison for what he has put his ex-wife and their children through. What bothers me more about this case and many other cases in Samoa is the fact people are quick to return the blame on the victim. Asking questions like, but what did she say or do to get a beating? The fact remains that a coward is the man or woman that beats on his/her physically weaker partner.  My journalist younger sister ha...

In celebration of our wedding anniversary hubby booked our little family into the Desert Nights Camp in the Wahiba sands in the Bidyia, Al Wasil region in Oman. It took us two hours and a half to get to the camp from Muscat. The dual carriage way after the highway was a little bit scary as dare devils overtake without considering oncoming traffic half the time. We got to the camp without incident. As we parked our car trying to sort ourselves out, a hotel porter showed up in a small cart and welcomed us to the camp. We loaded the cart with our gear and went in to the reception. We were received warmly and offered cool wet flannels to freshen up, a welcome gesture after driving through the sand. The camp was easy to find following the instructions given on their  Desert Nights Camp  website. As the golden sand dunes came into sight I felt butterflies as I was so excited to go back to the desert since 4 and a half years ago. Master Five was even more excited as he pointed to ca...

After putting baby to bed I thought I'd have a bath. I remembered a  beesline facial mask  I bought at a salon a few weeks ago and thought I'd use it. So I applied the product on my face and hopped in the bath. I felt stinging but I thought it was the product doing it's cleansing thing. After a few minutes I washed it off but my face felt hot and when I looked in the mirror a very red face was looking back at me. I tried to stay calm washed my face with more cold water to cool the burning sensation and was keeping the 'panic' at bay. I grabbed the aloe vera gel I have and applied it to a small part of my face and that helped. I held a cold wet flannel to my face to keep it cool and hoped it brought the redness down. I googled allergic reactions and low and behold yours truly was suffering from this. I'm so disappointed with myself for not testing the product first but having said that there's no warning on the packet that could have reminded me to test it b...

As I grow older I've been fascinated with retirement and 'old age'. I mean what is old age and what is expected of those who have retired. The norm seems to be people retiring and spend time visiting children and grandchildren or help raise them. However in this day and age this has really changed. For starters what is old age? We seem to think that old age is when people retire or stop working which is around 60 to 65! Retired folk that I know are fit, robust people. There's a study floating around  that found people died shortly after retiring and it is suspected that it's due to boredom and depression from change of routine and not feeling needed.  Looking around me at all the sixty plus year olds, I find highly unfair that retirement is forced upon them. It's unfair that age seems to determine people's usability(?). My mother has hit seventy and is fit, robust and a hard working woman. Somehow retiring or ceasing to work does not fit into her vocabula...