New offerings that look interesting include the next season of Dexter (which I won’t watch having not seen all of the first two), Flashpoint, Heroes (which I don’t think 7 wants anyone to watch the way they seem to not advertise it) and 24 – go Jack!

Anyone seen anything else that looks good?

Since then I’ve completed the last of my assignments to finally end this hectic year of study. Now I’m struggling to keep on at work stuff instead of getting ready for the new addition to our family, which I think is fair enough.

In the mean time we’ve adopted my youngest brother Mish who at the moment is in the baby’s room while we try to clear the granny flat out the back for him to move into. It’s been nice to have him around.

I’ve also been getting into roasting with Sam and Guthers – we’ll be selling our coffee here soon. Watching lots of cricket, shopping for baby stuff and celebrating Jesus birth with family and friends, so a fair bit to keep busy with. I have a feeling there will be plenty more to blog about in the near future. Catch you soon.

I’ve just been playing with the lighter of the 2 roasts we did last Friday. You can see our first three attempts in the pic. Guess which was our first I’m usually a fan of espresso with milk even if it’s just a macchiato – I enjoy both the flavour and the ritual of making it. So darker roasts are more my style, but this was pretty tasty. I’ve got nothing on Michelle for her tasting notes, but here goes: a bit of lemon and dark chocolate with a really full, syrupy mouth feel with a long lasting, sweet but slightly bitter (in a nice way) aftertaste. I tried the darker, but still slightly underdone, roast yesterday with similar results although less lemony – pretty good for only our third go. If you’re reading this Michelle would you like some of the lighter roast? I reckon it’d be right up your alley.

Roasting, on the whole was a blast. Good times to hang out and another skilll to learn (and hopefully master). Keeping roasting notes is kind of fun too, a bit like taking vital signs on patients which is my sort of thing, looking for patterns and differences. So far we’ve been recording: Date, Time, Outside Temp, General Conditions, Relative Humidity, Beans, Start weight, End weight, Start Temp, 1st Crack Time, Lowered Temp Time, 2nd Crack Time, Time Removed, and Notes. Any other suggestions?

The pastry is Mum’s recipe but I found a new lemon filling recipe here and it’s awesome! I added lemon rind to mine for an extra bit of zest. I blind baked the pastry cases in muffin tins then removed them to be filled and topped before baking all together. Fortunately I made some extras for the boys for the pre-roast lunch yesterday. Feedback was that the pastry to filling ratio was a bit high (thinner next time) but otherwise delicious.

I still had some lemon filling and meringue left over which I threw into a pie case made from frozen pastry – it’s tasty but no where near as good as homemade pastry.

Dear Neighbours,

This coming Friday 31st is Halloween

A few families thought rather than children knocking on every door, we could pre-arrange who was interested in participating and by simply, having something ‘Halloween’ outside, or leaving a porch light on the children would know where to knock.

We believe Halloween is a good excuse for all the children in our 2 little streets to dress up and meet the neighbours in our friendly community. We encourage all our resident families to join in.

I considered not participating at all; handing out gospel tracts instead of sugar; and hooking up the garden hose just inside the front door, choosing the ‘trick’ rather than the ‘treat’ option. Instead, I’ve decided to join in. We’ve bought some funsize bars and mini bags of Pizza Shapes (healthy option) and I found these little pumpkins at Hot Dollar which I’ve put tea lights in, for outside. I might even offer accompanying parents a coffee?

Is this the right choice?

Is God’s kingdom better served by withdrawing from or participating in community activities like this?

Please be praying for us and our neighbours.

I started a new thing with this series which I hadn’t tried or heard of being done. I thought we could use the opportunity of Bible study to read more of the Bible as this is something a few of our group struggle with. So, each week we read part of the Old Testament, a gospel and the study passage. We’ve started with Ezekiel and Mark, reading a chapter each week.

Do you do anything different or unusual in your groups?