Snoskred Lives

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Spice Time

7 Comments Posted on April 29, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

Twice a week, I receive my email from Aldi that tells me what the upcoming specials will be. On the 9th of April I spied with my little eyebulbs spice sets. I used the Aldi system to send an email to The Other Half about this and I said if they were still there the next time we shopped I would like to get them.

With Aldi you are taking a huge risk if you do not go on the day something is advertised to arrive. These spice sets were due to be out Wednesday the 15th of April and we did our fortnightly shop on the 12th of April, so our next shopping trip was not due until the 26th of April.

I did not make a special trip, I just hoped they would still be there. And as it turned out, there were some left.There are 30 spices in all – 2 packs of 15 and not a single double up which makes for great variety.

Chicken Salt – Garlic Salt – Coriander – Nutmeg – Ginger – Parsley – Cinnamon – Oregano – Mixed Herbs – Basil – Paprika – Rosemary – Cumin – Turmeric – Chilli Flakes – Hot Chili – Mustard – White Pepper – Thyme – Garlic – Curry – Mixed Spice – Spiced Up Salt – Celery Salt – Chives – Garam Masala – Whole Cloves – Cinnamon Sugar – Steak Seasoning – Vanilla Sugar

Luckily, due to my recent meat buying of some very cheap but excellent chicken breasts plus Aldi have been selling larger bulk cuts of steak which we have bought, cut up, and foodsaved at half the price we normally pay for those same cuts, this week we did not have to buy any meat at all. Not even bacon. I have 2kg diced up and stored in the freezer in perfect amounts for cookery.

So there was room in the budget to buy these spices and I am deeply thrilled to have new combinations to try out with our regular meals.

I did a chicken and bacon pasta on Monday. When I put in the garlic, onions and leek, I added some garlic salt, chives, basil, parsley, white pepper and nutmeg, plus cinnamon and paprika which I always use. The results were truly epic, in particular the chives, white pepper, and the garlic salt gave it a nice kick.

I rarely add salt to our meals when cooking them as The Other Half has high blood pressure, though I do keep a Himalayan Pink Salt grinder handy for myself to use on the completed food if I feel like it. That was also purchased at Aldi. :)

The dinner I made tonight, well, there was a spice incident. I was making vegetable soup and I had in mind a soup Vilis Cafe used to cook which had a lot of awesome Hungarian pepper in it. I keep a jar of Chili in the fridge and I’d added some of that, plus some cayenne powder, and then I went to add white pepper and more flew out than I’d intended.

When the soup was done cooking, I took out a potato and ate it while I waited for The Other Half to return from the mancave. It wasn’t very spicy to be honest, and I was wondering where all my spices had gone. Well, somewhere in the whizzing the soup process, those spices came out to play, and even after adding cream and cheese, my eyes were watering with every mouthful, my lips were burning..

I went in to the other half and said I thought maybe I had gone too far with the spices, and he wholeheartedly agreed. I love it spicy but this was a bridge too far!

So if you have an Aldi, you might want to keep an eye out for the spice sets next time you visit. They are excellent value – the spices Aldi regularly have in stock sell for $1.99 per container, and here you get them for $1.33 per container. Some of these spices are rarely seen at Aldi, though sometimes they do have a few flavours as special buys.

Do you like it spicy? :)

Let me know in the comments! Also let me know if you know any special powers these spices are known to have. For example, Turmeric is said to be excellent for your eye health. I add it to things quite often now – I love the colour – and I do notice a reduction in those eye floaters.

cooking, food, recipes, shopping, Soup

My Chinese Aunt

6 Comments Posted on April 24, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

You may recall my post about My Uncle from a little while back. Now, here is the story of how I got a Chinese Aunt as a surprise to myself.

First of all, there was a relationship misfire. My uncle brought out a lady from China and moved her in with my long suffering Aunt and Uncle, with whom he had ended up living before he left for China. They stayed for 3 months and it was quite the nightmare. She clearly could not handle many of his OCD tics, nor could she tolerate the amount he was drinking which at the time was quite a lot..

The fact that he was quite determined to learn zero Chinese, the fact that he dumbed down his English to things like “I no like” or “It is the Up Money”, the fact that he had little money and he wanted to hang onto as much of it as he could, even to the point of denying this poor woman a bag of peanuts while he bought a bottle of scotch a day and as much red wine as he felt like.. plus the fact that he made this woman do everything for him including emptying his ashtrays.. I am assuming none of this was awesome in her book.

So they went back to China, where she unceremoniously dumped him, and he went looking for a new wife to be. After a while he did find a lady and they moved in together, and thus began his three years of living in a country where he did not speak the language at all, and he resented the fact that she spoke Chinese with her family, plus he was irritated that he couldn’t read any of the menus at restaurants, nor did he like any of the food.

After three years they decided to return to Australia, even though it meant she had to leave her excellent long term Chinese job, plus now she was in a country where she did not speak the language. She does get English lessons with her visa but he is the one who has to organise it and he has not managed it thus far, even though I have given him all the information to do so. She could not easily get a job doing what she used to do, so now she works too many days a week at a local Chinese massage place.

My Chinese Aunt is fantastic and we all love her, even though some of us do have a concern that she’ll be out the door once she gets her permanent residency – and I would not blame her if she was, to be honest. She has a daughter to a previous husband and there is already talk of her daughter and her daughters husband coming out here to live.

My Chinese Cousins toes in the gorgeous white sand.

So I also have a Chinese cousin. They visited here a little while back and we took them touring about a bit, they loved it. Even though I do not speak Chinese and the daughter has only a little bit of English, we communicated very well. I took them for a day at the beach and it was amazingly gorgeous there – the water was crystal clear, the sun was shining, even *I* went in for a swim.

I’ve told my Uncle to his face that I would find it difficult to tolerate him, and I’ve told him he needs to seek some help for his depression and OCD which just a few months ago had his wife in tears during a family visit and writing “depression” and “anxiety” in Chinese on her phone and translating it to English for us.

I fear if he does not deal with his issues, she’ll be gone faster than he can blink – just as the previous ladies were. We’re not talking a little OCD, we’re talking things like turning a computer on and off for an hour, or checking many times that his cigarette has been extinguished.

I do believe that the spousal visa system needs tightening up. Just my opinion. There are way too many people from other countries married to our older Australians whose marriages last *exactly* the amount of time it takes to get permanent residency here and not a day more.

I think the easiest way to fix this would be for permanent residency to take a much longer time than it presently does, which is 2 years at the moment, or a requirement that if the partner leaves before a certain amount of time – 10 years, I think would be fair – their permanent residency is revoked as well.

Aussie Culture, family

Carter The Knit Model

3 Comments Posted on April 22, 2015April 28, 2018 by Snoskred

Leah over at Just Me, Leah, posted this post – Pattern Mixing – a little while back. It inspired me somewhat, and I left a comment accordingly, because Autumn has just begun here and I’m on the lookout for that *one* great knit.

Every year in autumn, I declare Knit Hunting season open. I only want one knit for each winter, and sometimes it takes me all of Autumn to find it.

I thought perhaps Carter could model some of my past season knits and I could share the photos with you here on the blog. Carter is a little on the stick thin side whereas I most certainly am not..

I think the worst part of Carter is his bony shoulders. Sadly I do not have any 80’s shoulder pads handy in order to bulk them out a little. Also, it is super hard to put his arms into things. So we’ve gone for a cardigan draped over the shoulders look with these outfits.

This particular knit was found one Autumn in Canberra, just when I had almost given up looking for that years knit. It has a gold thread that runs through it which is difficult to see in the photos. It has been one of my favourite knits of all time, even after it lost the buttons. It drapes and sits beautifully on me – and also on Carter, as you see in the above photo.

Carter, Carter The Model, Fashion, looking back

Phone Addiction

8 Comments Posted on March 30, 2015September 28, 2015 by Snoskred

I made a comment on Ask A Manager a while back.. Part of my comment said –

My thought is – pick up the phone and call to schedule interviews….If you suffer from call reluctance or lost your tongue to a cat, at the very least, TEXT these people.

I had ticked subscribe to comments when I posted so I knew I would receive any replies.. I certainly did not expect very many.. And I went to bed because it was bedtime.

The next morning, I was somewhat shocked to receive a large number of replies and the majority of people were saying they would never text someone to schedule an interview. As the conversation went on, I became aware of a large gap between how Australia does things and how America does things which was deeply surprising to me.

I think I have managed to identify some of the reasons for this gap thanks to the discussion.

Firstly, you can easily tell in Australia if someone gives you a mobile number. The prefix will always be 04XX. In the US, they cannot tell – mobile and cell numbers look identical.

Secondly, it appears that some US plans charge people to receive SMS – I get free unlimited text with my phone plan and I have never heard of anyone being charged to *receive* an SMS here, though I know people sometimes get charged higher SMS fees for sending them to competitions.

Thirdly, it seems from the replies I received that not everyone in the US has a smart phone and many people are still using older style phones. Here in Australia out of all the people I know, maybe two of them have older non smart-phones. It is easy to update your phone here without having to pay any up front fees, you just go on a contract for 12 or 24 months.

Fourthly, some employers in Australia are using SMS to communicate with their employees. There is a system called MessageNet which allows employers to easily set up rostering, sms groups and reminders.

This concept seems complicated so I will give you an actual example – let us say the local Mcdonalds wants to let all their employees know when a shift becomes available. In the old days, a staff member would have to call every staff member and let them know, and ask them if they wanted to work the shift. They would have to leave voicemails if someone did not answer. If you have 60+ casual staff members, calling all of them can be time consuming.

With MessageNet, you can easily and quickly send one SMS to all your staff, saying “Shift available 12/4/15 from 4pm to 10pm call X number to claim this shift” – and within minutes of sending that SMS, it is likely a staff member will call in and claim it. The other possible business uses for SMS are enormous and potentially save time, money, and hassle.

And finally, SMS confirmation has become a big thing in Australia. It started out mostly with banks and online transactions sending confirmation codes to your mobile, but it has not ended there.

I now get many appointment confirmations via SMS. My hairdresser, my doctor, my psychologist, my employment agency.. all of them will send me an SMS on the day before my appointment. I have to reply with Yes to confirm my appointment. This is actually brilliant and something I encourage greatly. I am certain this has cut down hugely on missed appointments and helps businesses to reschedule when someone has to cancel.

I track my prescription medications via a phone app that my pharmacy uses. I find most pharmacies now have one of these apps. Not only does it alert me when I have 7 days left of medicine, but within the app, you can set up a daily reminder to take it.

These days, I even order our pizza via a phone app. Our local wood fired place has an app of their very own, and it is brilliant. I can even order salad at a local healthy food place via an app.

I Am Not A Slave To My Phone –

But even with all these awesome apps and sms notifications, I am *determined* not to be constantly tied to my smart phone. How does one manage this? I try to keep some degrees of separation. Here’s how I roll –

– I don’t use my phone in the car when I am driving. EVER. It only takes a few seconds and you’re dead or you’ve killed someone else. If you do use your phone in the car, please, I am begging you, STOP doing that.

– I don’t have apps like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram installed. I did have Facebook once but I uninstalled it when they updated their messenger app so it would put peoples profile photos on my phone desktop, which was downright spooky and a bridge too far for me.

– I don’t have a lot of games installed on my Samsung Galaxy. I still have my iPhone and that contains my phone games – but that phone does not have a sim card. I find it useful to have degrees of separation between games and phone – this is very awesome for me.

– My phone does not go to my bedroom. It has a home and a charging station next to my recliner. This gives me sleep time free from buzzing and phone noise. It also means when I wake up, I get me time instead of phone time.

– I have a block on my phone between 10:30pm and 8am which turns all noise on my phone to silent without vibration, so there is no way I can hear any phone noises or buzzing from the bedroom.

– I have a camera ability on my phone, but I also have a cute little Panasonic Lumix which I use for photography, so I can keep photography and my phone separated when I want to.

– I deliberately do not have every email account I use hooked up to my phone. I select which email accounts I want to be able to reach me if I am out and about and I can turn them on and off easily.

– The Other Half and I use an app called Kakao Talk to communicate with each other for free. There are other apps you can use for this, too. The major benefit for me is this – messages from him have a very specific tone alert so I know when he is messaging me.

Toxic Relationships

It does worry me that some phone-using people – in particular younger generations of people – seem to be heading down a potentially not great path into a toxic relationship with their smartphone and in some cases their tablet. I’ve been to restaurants where people are sitting there doing stuff on their phones instead of being in the moment with each other. I’ve been to movies where people cannot resist the pull of the phone.

Nev Schulman from Catfish wrote an article on this subject – The Reasons Why Your Cell Phone Is Slowly Killing You. Of most concern to me is the new generation of hunchbacks we are creating.

I also saw this article –Trying to Live in the Moment (and Not on the Phone) – after reading it, I decided to install the app Checky. It turns out that I check my phone on average 15-20 times a day. At least 2-5 of those will be replying to messages from The Other Half. One of those will be turning off my medication alarm.

Live In The Moment

I was already thinking about living in the moment for a few different reasons –

– seeing so many photos of the 747-400 coming in to land at Illawarra Airport where almost everyone there has a phone they are holding up, taking either still images or video.

– seeing people at various events using their phones to capture moments which they would never bother to get an actual camera out for.

– seeing people using phones in social situations like restaurants and cinemas.

How do you handle your smart-phone usage?

Aussie Culture, internet, life lessons, things to remember, Worried Snoskred

NSW Election Day

Leave a comment Posted on March 28, 2015June 2, 2015 by Snoskred

If you are in New South Wales, the polls have just opened. :)

I’ll be working in a polling booth again today. My apologies for not being around so much this week, I’ve been working on the training and getting organised.

It is a super long day and it’ll take me a couple of days to recover from it, so I won’t be around too much, at least not until Tuesday or so.. :) Have an awesome weekend everyone!

Aussie Culture, elections, politics

Generators

2 Comments Posted on March 27, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder since November 2014 and I finally got around to completing it. I love me an internet generator! Here are some of the more awesome ones –

Goth-O-Matic – my all time favourite generator – create your own darkly gothic poem! You get to choose from drop down options.

Meme Generator – With built in images and characters.

Internet Anagram Server – ever wonder what other words can be made out of your name? Use this generator to find out. :)

Strong Random Password Generator – if you need some new passwords this generator can help out.

Random Number Generator – need to draw a prize or choose your next lotto numbers?

Harvard Referencing Generator – This generator is super useful for those writing essays that need references.

Lorem Ipsum – generates random latin text.

List of Text Generators – want more generators? This is a good place to start. There are quite a few Haiku generators listed here. :)

This post about some of my favourite internet generators was inspired by this post from Heather Woodland – Marzipan cake fruitcake tart cheesecake sweet lollipop chocolate cake

funny, internet, Linkage, yay

Happy Birthday Sephyroth

4 Comments Posted on March 25, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

My dearest and bestest friend in the universe, Sephyroth, has a birthday which was a great day for many years, until 2001 came along. Why 2001, I hear you ask. Well, his birthday happens to be September 11th. So after 2001 the birthday became a bit of a downer day for him instead of the happy occasion it ought to be..

So much so, that at some point I assigned him a totally different birthday. I forget what it was, I think it was sometime in April. I guarantee you he will pop up in the comments and paste in the actual emails or logs of our chat on this subject, because he saves these things foreverz. :)

But this year, it SHOULD BE be a very happy birthday, because September 11th happens to be the release date for a little movie I am super excited to see. It is called Triple 9, and it contains Norman Reedus – better known as Daryl from The Walking Dead – and Aaron Paul – better known as Jesse from Breaking Bad. Plus, a few other randoms, eg Kate Winslet, Woody Harrelson, Chiwetel Ejiofor..

Yo, best you be planning a cinema trip for your next birthday, Sephyroth.

Of course release dates can and do change, I’ll keep an eye on it.

Me personally, I don’t really do birthdays myself, nor do I tend to remember other peoples birthdays. I actually seem to remember other things, eg I have a friend whose birthday is the day after International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yes, that is a thing and it gets mentioned around the web quite a bit in the lead up to the day, so it is like a little reminder for me.

Update –

Did you guys know that Sephy has a login for my blog? No? Well, now you do. And of course you can guess that Sephyroth happened to log in on Monday, for reasons but that is another post, and he saw this post scheduled and could not help but read it. He then forwarded me the email I sent him, and here tis.

Subject: Happy Non-Birthday

On Sep 11, 2011, at 5:49, Snoskred (snip) wrote:

As I cancelled your birthday and rescheduled it to Feb 18th, today is no longer your birthday, officially.

So Happy Birthday for next Feb 18th, instead. :)

Your new birthday is the anniversary of this –

1977 – The Space Shuttle Enterprise test vehicle is carried on its maiden “flight” on top of a Boeing 747.

It comes with a photo!

And this

1979 – Snow falls in the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria for the only time in recorded history.

Your new birthday is also the birthday of – 1968 – Molly Ringwald, American actress

It is also –

Christian Feast Day:
Colmán of Lindisfarne
Flavian of Constantinople
Simeon of Jerusalem (Western Christianity)
February 18 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of the Gambia from the United Kingdom in 1965.

Pls to note that on almost everyone’s birthday, something not awesome happened. EG on my birthday –

1896 – The deadliest tsunami in Japan’s history kills more than 22,000 people.

Had that happened in 1996, my birthday would be quite the bummer. :(

Anyway, happy Non-Birthday. And if you don’t like Feb 18th, pick another one, There’s 363 other days you could choose. :)

So, its night to me.. :)

Blog Friends, Sephyroth, things to remember

Some Fun Time

Leave a comment Posted on March 21, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

Recently here on the blog, we have seen a lot of very serious scam posts. However, I will like you to know that baiting the scammers can be a fun thing as well..

Today I have a blast from the past to share with you – please click through and read this blog post from October 2007 –

A Journey Along The Road To Stopping Online Scammers

I might consider doing this again – it has been a while since I’ve done much fun scambaiting stuff. ;)

funny, internet, looking back, scambaiting, Who Is Snoskred

30% Off @ Spotlight

2 Comments Posted on March 17, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

So, yesterday, I was watching Judge Judy on Channel 10 at 3pm, as I sometimes do when it seems like the wait to 6pm double episodes of Judge Judy on Arena is too long to wait..

I should point out that I had my little cordless headset on, and I was actually in the kitchen trimming up 1kg of bacon which was purchased on the weekend. I guess that is more like listening to Judge Judy. I got 5 lovely packages of bacon bits, 1 package of bacon bits for dinner that night, and 2 packages of offcuts which we like to grill up in the oven till they are super crispy.

One of the downsides of not watching a lot of free to air tv is missing out on local ads. Sometimes they are not very interesting, but today I heard that Spotlight was having a 30% off sale. My little ears connected with my shopping brain, and the message I heard was THIS SALE SEEMS NICE!

I did some maths in my head, working out that 30% off takes $9 off a 29.95 candle. I should go to Spotlight and buy some Yankee Candles, I thought, as I drove to my 4pm appointment to see my amazing psychologist.

And a couple of hours later, I did go, because Spotlight were open till 8pm. They told me that in the ad too. I got a couple of the “medium” candles in Black Cherry and Vanilla Lime and 4 wax melts, 2 Mango Peach Salsa and 2 Pineapple Cilantro.

Apparently the 30% off is for Tuesday as well, in case you did not catch an ad and you want to go get yourself some Yankee Candle, or something else.. :)

Happy Snoskred, Home, shopping, yay

Meal Planning

3 Comments Posted on March 16, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

This year, I’ve been using this great free meal planner found at #4 on this post – High Five for Getting Organized! – from kelly’s kinda crazy.

The meal planner comes with a grocery list – Above you see Carter – my trusty skeleton friend – holding it. I’m thinking from now on he will get to hold the grocery list each fortnight so if I need to add something he will remind me to add it when I walk past. :) Here is a closer view with this fortnights shopping on it.

When I write my shopping list, I mentally walk around Aldi in my mind and I write things on the list in the order they appear in the store. Thank the deities, unlike Coles and Woolworths, Aldi rarely changes their floor plan. Both Coles and Woolworths have recently re-arranged their stores and now I can’t find anything in there. :(

I also sit down with my laptop and the shopping list and go through the Coles and Woolworths brochures and write down any items which are on special that we need to stock up on. I’ve been doing this for so long now that in general we never run out of things that we regularly use.

I’m loving the cute design of the meal planner. I used to do meal planning on my whiteboard which was not so pretty, nor could I take it with me to other rooms of the house which, on occasion especially when writing the shopping list, was mildly inconvenient. It also means I can keep copies of the old meal plans on the clipboard and review them when making the next meal plan. This way, I tend to notice meals we have not had for a while and add them back in.

Just be aware the file prints out an entire year worth of meal planning – you can choose to print just one or two pages at a time but you’d have to do it manually. I printed mine out at the start of the year and I’ll have enough to last until the end of this year..

This meal planner runs fortnightly and so we have been planning our menu fortnightly and shopping fortnightly as well, with just a quick stop at the shops on the second weekend if we need to pick up something fresh. Most of the time we don’t need to, because I am getting very good at planning meals which have the fresh ingredients closest to the shopping trip – and also very good at freezing things we need for later.

This past weekend we made our regular trip to Lenards at Warrawong which is roughly an hour or so drive from here, depending which way you go. We took a little detour past Albion Park to catch a glimpse of the Grand Old Lady VH-OJA at the HARS museum. If it wasn’t too busy we would have stopped to get out and take some photos, but as expected the place was absolutely packed and we just drove past. So, my apologies, I have no pics of that for you.

I also have no pics of Chicken Young Lad who has served us on our past 3-4 trips and who is starting to remember that we are the Crazy Bulk Buying People. Even so, after each item he asks “Anything else today” and we’re all.. YEP, give us 4 of those and 8 of those.

Meat wise, we eat quite a bit of chicken in the house. When we lived in Adelaide we had a Lenards close by and we could drop in and pick up chicken on the same day we were going to cook it. We really grew to love their chicken and moving here we discovered two things –

1. It is super expensive to buy pre-prepared chicken here eg kievs & filos.

2. Even though it was super expensive to buy, none of the local options tasted anywhere near as good as the options from Lenards did.

So we make the trek to Warrawong every 8-12 weeks, and we stock up on our chicken, we bring it home, then we food-save it and freeze it. We have the Sunbeam Foodsaver. I’ve tried other methods in the past including freezer bags and ziploc bags and we find the foodsaver to be the better option.It ends up looking like this –

The red chicken breasts that you see paired in the foodsaver packets with Chicken Kievs are the pocketed breast with baby spinach, dill, fetta and ricotta. They are my favourite – so tasty! I don’t mind a chicken kiev, either, but I deeply love these little red thingies.

We took every single chicken mini roast that they had prepared and we would have taken more if they had them out the back – sorry everyone else who wanted one. I normally pre-order but this time it did not happen, for a few non-interesting reasons. I foodsaved 6 roasters but we got 7 – one went into the fridge for tonights dinner, which looked like this –

We also stopped in at Dan Murphys and bought enough cask wine for cooking to last the next 6 months or so. I use Banrock Station Cabernet Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc for cooking and they are routinely $5 or so more expensive locally so if I need them and we’re already up Shellharbour way, I like to stock up.

Last fortnight, I ran out of white cask wine and had to use red wine for our white sauce chicken, bacon and leek pasta. When you use red wine in white sauce, you end up with a delicate light purple sauce. Not that either of us minds that because it still tastes great, and I find the merlot has some interesting flavours which the sav blanc does not. I really do need to put my white sauce pasta recipe up here sometime soon. :)

If you enjoyed reading this, you might want to take a look at this post – some things I know for sure about grocery shopping.

None of the companies or products mentioned gave me anything or paid me to say this stuff, and of course if anyone did I would make that very clear right at the top of the post and it would not change my opinions on things – I call it as I see it.. :)

So, over to you..

Do you meal plan?

Carter, country life, food, get organised, Home, shopping