Chicken Soup

This delicious soup was the result of a simmered frozen chicken carcass (I never waste them), removed and chicken pulled off a set aside in fridge.  Add to pot bay leaf, then any vegetables you have left over in the fridge, mine has onion, corn, zucchini, tomato, carrot, (all chopped in the Kitchen Wizz), then add a hand full of lentils to thicken, salt and pepper and simmer for about thirty minutes (or hours on the stove set on very low or in a crock pot, to give that lovely winters day swell to the house) and add half a cup of broken rice noodles, vermicelli noodles or risoni and a handful of chopped parsley, and your set aside chicken 10 minutes before you want to eat).  Serve with crusty bread. Yum.

Mistle-Toes - Cute and Cheap

Cute and Cheap

I got this great little gift idea from Pinterest.  10 bottles of $2 red nail polish, tied with a red bow and Mistle-Toes tag will make a cute Christmas gift for my Connect Group girls. I was going to attach a file, but couldn't wait while I ordered them on line, so decided just to stick with the nail polish.

How to Make it Rain - Wash Your Car

Me, Muggins AKA Rain Maker, took the car through the car wash Friday before last, then headed off to Hillaries in the Northern Suburbs on Saturday, just in time for a big storm. Ten cent piece sized hailstones pelted the car, covering the ground like snow, and leaving my car, thank goodness without any dents but adorned with nuts and branches from the tree it was parked under.  Most of them were washed off on the way home, but I've decided not to wash the car anymore, I'll just keep an eye on the weather report and as soon as it looks like rain, I'll squirt some detergent on it , and park it out on the lawn.

What do THEY know?

Good question.  People are always trying to pigeon hole us where they think we belong.  Why should who you were or are now define where you end up.  God has a plan for everyone of us.  If the teenager David had paid attention to his brothers when he turned up at the battle with Goliath and the Philistines, he would have gone back to minding his sheep where they said he belonged.  See they didn't know that inside their little shepherd boy brother beat the heart of a mighty King, who would be remembered and loved through centuries.  We all know Moses stuttered, Samson had a bad temper, Noah was a drunk, Mother Teresa was from a well to do family.  We all have potential locked up inside of us still waiting to get out.  Don't let what THEY say define who you are.

THROUGH THE RAIN TO THE RAINBOW

Sitting having coffee in a Christian Café one afternoon, I was taken by a childs picture stuck to the counter.  There were flowers and grass and a rainbow, and the caption said.  You cant get to the rainbow but through the rain.  It is so true of life, often when things are going wrong one thing after another, we can slump into the pits, wondering where  God is and if he really has our best interest at heart.  But, for anything to grow it needs balance, water, sun, fertilizer.  However, it is the fertilizer part that most of us don’t like, when really if our life was all sunshine and lollipops, we would become a bit soft like Marie Antoinette.  When the Queen was told that the people had no bread, she responded with the famous line ‘Let them eat cake’.  When things are easy all the time, we lose touch with the real world, we would have no empathy for people that are going through difficulties.  Jesus himself went through everything himself, so that we couldn’t say, ‘well He has no idea what it is like to be going through what I am going through’.  Jesus knew what it was like to have what we call good days.  People shouting Hosanna! And throwing palms in His path as He rode through the street, Hailing Him as a King.  Then bad days, when he was abused, beaten, rejected, gossiped about, wrongly accused and denied by friends he had cooked breakfast for on the beach.  2 Corinthians 2:14 says that God always leads us in triumph, that what we go through will, if we don’t turn bitter but draw closer to God, cause us to give off more of the fragrance of Christ.  Like pressing a rose the more we press in to Christ the more of His fragrance we will carry with us into our work place, our Church, our family, our World.

Spencer Strikes Again

Spencer's mum had just purchased a beautiul new iPhone and was thinking she would sell her Nokia that is still in perfect condition.  She hadn't allowed for the Spencer factor.  Spencer is always opening the door of their freezer which is at the bottom of their fridge and sorting through the contents, obviously another Jamie Oliver in the making.  Apparently Spencer thought that phones like vegetables need to be frozen while at peak condition and popped the Nokia into the freezer, which was found by his Dad while fetching the ice-cream.

Needless to say, phones unlike vegetables do not appreciate being frozen they prefer Australian sunshine.  His parents debated on whether to dock his pocket money but he is only 18 months so it might take some time to recoup their loses.  Toddlers, you have to love them!!

command presence

I really need to get that whole command presence thing going, you know the way people in authority are taught to walk, as if they have a stick stuck up their bottom, while at the same time scanning the rest of us as if we were just scrapped off the sole of their shoe.  I just cant seem act sensibly if I am packed to go anywhere at all.  Airports in particular bring out the Billy Connolly in me, as I get far too excited for my own good, and all of a sudden the Village Comedian in me takes over. Am I the only one that always beeps when I go through the scanner.  Oops! I forgot to take my mobile phone out of my pocket, beep beep!, oops! my shoes have metal in the arches, beep, beep!  Presumably, they interpret my giggling and loud friendly banter as a person who is definitely on something dodgy, or they need to frisk their quota for the day, and I look like a good sport.  Either way I always get a quick up and down with their little machine and get my bag checked for explosives or drugs.

Why are us noisy ones always picked on, I thought it was the quiet ones we were meant to watch!