F-F-F-Friday - still not quite home

I'm away again. We are setting up our place in the wine country and have been up here all week.

My apologies for the missing Wednesday post. I don't have Internet up here and I'm relying on my iPad for connectivity. It's super slow and inconsistent as all heck. There is one particular spot in our living room where it's a dead zone. Move the iPad two feet to the right and it works. Funny thing is, it's right in the middle of a three seated sofa we used to have, so The Boy would sit on one side and I would sit on the other and in between, our iPads connect to commune with the Internet. Bah! I need to get an Internet connection set up here. Then we'd have wifi.

This post is really about our life as it is right now. It's a bit hectic. Our trip the the US to visit family was wonderful, but being away for a month has left a lot to catch up on. This week we are in wine country but mostly we're stuck in the house sorting and organizing.

When we bought the house it came with some furniture but it was all rather crappy furniture. Serviceable but when you parked your butt on the sofa and you were too enthusiastic about it, you very well could find yourself traveling across the living kroon floor 'cos the sofa was so light, it would move the instant you put any weight on it, plus is was not very comfortable. That said, it was furniture and we lived with it for a good 5 or 6 years until now.

We've taken our good furniture out of storage and decided to set up the house more permanently. The old furniture has been donated to a charity, who were delighted to receive it, since they were just setting up and furniture store to sell furniture, the proceeds of which would go to fund a shelter for battered women - a very worthy cause.

Being away from home, and more importantly away from my computer means that I don't have access to my photos and all my other blog posts which are cooking and recipe related. This means you are going to have to put up with a post that has nothing to do with cooking at all.

So far, we have been here since Tuesday and we've had one day of the charity coming over to collect furniture, which led to us going to bed at 6:30pm after dinner because we had given away all the furniture, except for the beds. We lay in bed and read, played on Facebook and read some more until we got tired and went to sleep. I think The Boy also played like a gazillion games of Sudoku.

We've had one day of our furniture being delivered, which was totally insane since there was a lot of furniture and about 90 boxes of books that came out of the library. I think we will have a problem there because we have more books than shelves because quite a few of the shelves have been commandeered for other non-book related purposes.

On a very important note, the mirror to my dressing table did not get found and hence was not delivered. This does not make me a happy girl. In fact, I went on record with The Boy to say that I was not happy and rather frustrated. I'm slowly getting over it.

After the delivery of furniture came the unpacking. O-M-G!!! Is there a lot of unpacking to do. There are like a gazillion boxes ... oh wait, I've already mentioned that! It's now Saturday night (I know, I know, I'm doing a F-F-F-Friday post! I'm going on the assumption that it is still Friday somewhere in the world!)and thankfully, after an entire day of plugging away, all the kitchen related boxes have been put away and all the boxes from what used to be my office have been opened and emptied out onto the dining room table. That's it though, I'm calling it a day. The stuff on the dining room table will have to wait.

Right now, I feel rather out of sorts, so I apologize for what is already turning into a rather long and rambling post. I am tired, but not really tired. I am bored, but not really bored. I do not know what to do with myself. The Boy suggested I blog, so here I am. One can only lie in bed reading for so long!

I have not done much cooking since we've been back from the US. I've made breakfast a few times, but let's face it, that cannot be considered cooking. (I am going to attempt a copy and paste of a previously written post tomorrow - wish me luck - to post, for more regularly scheduled programming and less rambling. The good news is now I have a kitchen set up in the house in the wine country, from now on to be referred to as The House, as opposed to The Apartment which is in the city (where my beloved PC resides and the good kitchen stuff also lives).

Now, the kitchen ... little "k" as opposed to The Kitchen, which is in The Apartment. The kitchen (little "k") is rather spartan. We've brought up a good set of dishes, quite a few, actually, so on that end we're set, though if we were to entertain more than 10, the plates will start being rather mismatched. The knives in this kitchen suck! They suck BIG TIME!!! They are some rather pathetic Wiltshire knives that you can buy from the grocery store for about $6 a piece (a real bargain) but as knives, they suck! They don't stay sharp, nor do they cut well. The steel is too thick, they don't sharpen well and there is no balance in the knife at all, unlike my Global knives, which are just perfection, or my Wushtoff panini knife which is just sexy as all get out or my black mirror finish Ceramic knives which are like super cool, murdering ninjas. In short, the knives up here, in the kitchen, reek. I will need to do something about it pretty soon, which is either bring up some extra knives that I have in The Kitchen which I'm not currently using or ask The Boy real nicely for a set of Global knives for this kitchen.

All that said, I have pots, I have pans, I have sucky knives, I have some spatulas and even sprung for a lemon squeezer yesterday, so I think I have enough to turn our a meal here. I'm planning on doing a few dinner parties up here, inviting some of our local friends over to eat. I will cook and of course, they will bring the wine, and since they all work at wineries and have damn fine cellars themselves, I'm expecting some good shit to be brought for drinking with the meal! Win!

Anyhoooo ... we are here till Monday and then we head back to the city and The Apartment.

*sigh* ... I miss my PC ...