Pursuing Apple Crumble - Winter Foods

I can remember distinctively the start of obsessing about apple crumble. I was teaching pole that Saturday and I must have had a function or something. I went home and Mick had cooked a really nice apple crumble made. He winged it and did not follow a recipe. Every apple crumble after that was just not as good as that one. And we never knew why. He tried adding oats, almond meal and everything.
The funny thing is, I have never made one as I do not like rubbing the butter into the flour - don't ask. I think it's a throwback of fearing pastry. So I stumbled on this recipe from Exclusively Food. I used 4 small Granny Smiths, I might use 5 small ones next time. And I used a food processor to get the butter into the flour. It worked a treat - so easy. The hardest part really is getting the apples peeled and chopped into pieces.
My first series in Winter Foods, this is the time of the year where I get cooking. Hope to blog more soon :)

Kylie Minogue in Melbourne

Was anyone there on the first night - 14th of June? I was there in my $150 seat. I think this was cheaper than Britney. But my goodness this girl can put on a show.
I was in my usual mood of "I do not want to go out, I want to hibernate at home". So I felt like this the entire day -> :|

I tweeted my mehness and someone assured me that Kylie will rock it. And she did! She was amazing! Wet and slippery dancers in aerial shows accompanied her. Kylie has her own slaves! She has SLAVES pulling her in a gold chariot. It was amazing. She did a fantastic version of "Slow" which was in a big band style and had her dances holding fans as the stage she was standing on liftd up and rotated. Even the dancers were belted down with sequined belts. Everything glittered and everything was gold.

The next day I channeled Kylie. I wore a dark navy dress with a gold glomesh belt and silver Giuseppe Zanotti shoes. <3 that look and I don't care if I was mismatched. I just realised that I have gold shoes, will wear them together next time.

The lovely @theaussieword was also there on the 14th and cheered me on during the day about my mehness before the concert. Check out his awesome picture on his blog and a video and picture gallery soon.

VOIP

So I must have embarrassed myself by asking on Twitter what VOIP software there is out there. Skype - the responses came in. Duh, I have only been using Skype for 3 years!

I have purchased Skype credits so that I can make calls on my computer without having to plug in the landline. I am on my way to divorcing with Telstra. Contacted TPG today and they said the transfer will take 10 - 20 days. OMG 10 to possibly 20 days with no interwebz!

How did you guys go with transferring to Naked ADSL2? Please let me know if I should do it. I'm scared of breaking the cycle on something that is currently working well. Also what is this VOIP thing with TPG? Ploise explainnnn.. I am starting to feel like a ditz. I think that I will stick to Skype until I get Lync.

Comments on Naked ADSL2 transfer please!

You cannot control the events ...

But you can control the reaction ... This was my takeaway from International Womens' Day 2011. I remember running in with excitement. Ok there was free food but I always LOVE IWD because it was a chance where we get together as women and we do a camaraderie pow-wow thing. I am also biased in this year's IWD as it was lead by one of my favourite SEs. As usual she looked amazing and she has the best shoes!

So I am sitting there while this guy who is powered by a carton of V PLUS caffeine went on his rally speech. It was about events and how we cannot control the events but we can control our reaction.

That is something that I believe we all should remember and try to put into practice. Instead of being angry what what we cannot control, perhaps we should try to look at it at a different angle. Well that's my daily (trying to) post for Project Positivity. What have you done to control your reaction to negative events? Would love to hear from my readers.

Movies!

Do you remember when you used to watch every headlining movie when it was released? I miss those days. I am finding the same stuff all the time. Sequels, remakes and cartoons .. I am guessing movies do not make money these days with piracy, file sharing etc. But honestly I think I have gone off movies. I have a Quickflix account - no fines, no late charges etc. They deliver to your door how good is that! I am browsing the site and trying to find something decent to add to my queue and there is nothing.

What's everyone watching these days? Reality TV? Tell me some good movie titles?

And yes I have watched Inception.

End of a chapter.. or a short closing of the book rather

So I did my short transition and wrote my email out to say see yas I'm off to another place to all my Senior Execs and Managers. I got emo when I was writing it. The responses included I will miss you, to WHAT! You don't like us anymore! :( to NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! Bummer for us...

Went downstairs to have drinks - I didn't know that they were doing this for me. Anyway positive spin on an emo day. Got free red rock deli chips and sparkling. :) Guess what else! I only had to wait 5minutes for my train. WOOHOO.

Cat People

It appears that like does attract like. I seem to have a lot of friends who are cat people. This is my cat Mao Mao .. or was my cat. He disappeared on the 8th of November 2008 and I never saw him again. We had posters everywhere and nobody ever saw him.

Positive note - he would have eaten one of my boys by now.

Project Positivity

There is a recurring sentence I hear a lot in the social media outlets that I have been nestled in. It is "I am so sick of the negativity in my timeline/facebook updates". Surrounded by negativity myself and doubting my own capabilities with all this negativity, I decided that I needed to get this sorted in the new year. I embarked on what I called Project Positivity. I spoke about Project Positivity to everyone that would listen. I wanted it to spread..I wanted people around me to be positive reinforcements.

I started this because I read something on a forum. I cannot remember the term now as it was a few months ago and my brain is a sieve on non-work things. It was a tad like "The Secret" and no I am not an Oprah fan! The thread had heaps of posts on this exercise working for them. You had to visualise what you wanted and lots of these women (I hang out at female dominated forums) had received what they had visualised and believed that they would get it.

It got me thinking that I have always been self sabotaging. So I changed my attitude (a little) and stopped telling myself that I couldn't do this or that. I started to push myself forward and tried to change my attitude and demanded more from myself and stopped (tried) talking myself down. So it has worked for me so far and I want to spread it further. My aim is to turn this into a daily (mmmmmm more frequent perhaps) snippets on turning things around to the positive. Look let's face it there are days where nothing goes right for you. But let's all look at kitteh pics and icanhascheezburger and it gets better.