Excellent maid Available for work

Priyani, has worked for 2 years with me.  She has excellent cooking skills, does everything around the home including laundry, ironing, cooking and cleaning.  She is available from 1 July for work.  Please contact her on 2952490 or 0712097001 for an interview. She has given us excellent service and we wish her luck in the future to find good employers.

Super easy Oatmeal Cookies

I've been on the lookout for sweet stuff that gluten and dairy intolerant H can eat.  Tried these today and they came out great! And super easy to make.  Daughter happily gave me a hand with these.
You can do it all in one mixing bowl, with no need for electrical mixer!  Plus since they've got oatmeal, you can feel less guilty since they're quite a healthy ingredient.

GLUTEN AND DAIRY FREE OATMEAL COOKIES


Ingredients:

1) 1 cup of vegetable oil
2) 1 cup of sugar

3) 1 cup of rice flour
4) 2 cups of quick cooking oats

5) 2 tbsp chopped nuts nut or dried fruit

6) 2 eggs
7) 2tsp vanilla essence
8) 2 tsp baking powder)


Steps:

1) Mix oil and sugar in a large mixing bowl.

2) Sift the flour and baking powder together and add it to the oil and sugar mix, then add the oats and chopped nuts.  Add in beaten egg and vanilla.

3) Stir well until it achieves a smooth texture
4) Using a teaspoon, scoop up 1 teaspoon of batter

5) Place the balls of batter on a baking tray with foil on it, leaving about 3 cm of space between each ball until the tray is full
6) Bake in oven at around 170 deg celcius (medium heat for gas oven) for around 20 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies start turning golden brown
7) Once finished baking, use a spatula to move the cookies to a plate to cool.  Serve and enjoy!!

What's wrong with Schools Nowadays

There are few things that get me passionate enough to write a blog post about.  Well this is one of those few things.  So here goes.

I wish schools these days were more like the ones we used to go to.  Background.  Daughter goes to an expensive British school here.  Following the National Curriculum of UK.   Most of the teachers "in charge" come from UK with salaries miles higher than the local people.  Everything is copied from UK in general, including the calendar matched exactly to UK schools so that the British teachers in charge can go on holiday and meet their loved ones at the right times.  There is an undercurrent of resentment because of this perceived injustice among the local teachers as they almost always work harder and better than their British counterparts, atleast in my experience. 

Anyway, as Daughter has grown older, less and less marked work comes home.  Right now, my eight year old brings zero Maths marked work home.  Maths homework is given just once a week.  "Revision" work is regularly sent home just before assessments where the work of teaching NEW concepts is then happily passed on to the parents.  There are no text books of any sort where parents can refer to for concepts that they are supposed to teach during this "Revision" work.  The same library books are allocated every year to students of new classes.  Thus students don't own anything of academic value. Spelling tests are supposedly taken every week, but parents don't know how their child is doing as we never see the results.  Project work is regularly allocated (95% of which cannot be handled by 8 year olds alone, because there is so much time consuming, messy and arduous hard work involved of cutting, pasting, stapling and what not, not to mention shopping of raw materials).  Again parents never get to see the results.  How are our children being rewarded for this type of work?  No idea.

Another irritating thing.  Endless collection of money for charity or for the library or for games equipment by the school.  This is apart from the huge sums of money we spend on the school fees each term.  Recently Book Week was held in the school.  Virtually all the activities required more money to be spent.  Book mark competition, poster competition, everything required more money to enter.  Supposedly the school needs more money to buy library books in it's already well stocked library to which students regularly also are asked to donate their own books.

Some of the parents complained after Book Week.  So now, the school has shifted their focus of collecting money to field trips!  Ofcourse the normal school field trip to nearby areas of interest for kids don't lead to too much money being collected.  So now the school has thought of intense adventure focused trips in jungles and forests far away in "eco resorts".  Obviously the school has cooked up some deal with the resort.  We scratch your back, you scratch ours.  Huge sums of money are being extracted per child (eight year old child, mind you) for spending the whole day in these resorts with breakfast and lunch to supposedly justify these expenditures.  Ofcourse the parents have signed away all legal recourse should their poor children ever be bitten by some poisonous snake, spider, insect or just fall into the swamp or gets dragged away by some rogue crocodile for its next meal. Should one poor child's parents have any misgivings about sending their child to these trips then a huge guilt trip is laid on them and the child until consent is given.  This was what was done to Daughter.  Not only where we written to twice we were orally cajoled and threatened about the consequences of not sending her (each time in front of her).  Daughter was also interrogated about justifying our reasons for not sending her asking her on which field trip had she actually got a poisonous bite which got infected leading to a surgery under GA.  Ofcourse we had never said that she had incurred the bite on a field trip, just that she had suffered such and that we were nervous about sending her to such a wild environment where there are bound to be other poisonous insects and dangerous animals.

The parents of children in higher classes all resort to tutors.   I hear about how the syllabus has not been completed.  And then there are the constant resignations by the local teachers in the middle of the school year who feel aggrieved about their pittance of a salary and far too much work.  (Not academic, most of it, but things required for show, doing notice board displays, arranging field trips, filing reports and other administrative duties). 

I understand the school has it's commercial interests. However, right now it seems that's all they have.  Academics don't seem to be a concern in the least bit.  I wonder often if we are doing the right thing sending Daughter to such schools.  After all, how much do school drama productions, field trips and charitable endeavours, coupled with near zero learning help one earn a living in the future? 

I'm Back!

This is probably my first post this year!  I know, pathetic.

So, what excuse do I have for this laziness?  Well, there has been a lot of travelling this year (right this moment there are still some unpacked suitcases in my boudoir) and I have started to exercise a lot more frequently, so I have practically no free time.  Daughter's school work has also got more demanding (for some reason schools here think at least one parent is also enrolled as a student).  There are always some time consuming pieces of work to be done, usually crafts! Hair brained management of school has made it their business to overturn almost all old school rules.  One of the results of one such stupid new rule of getting rid of staggered timings is that now it takes forever to come home.  After H's bout of dengue, he's also given up the daily drops of Daughter to school, so more has been added to my list of chores. 

Ok so the above, rather than being excuses are basically a snapshot of my life right now.  Many more chores to do!

Thanks to H having turned gluten and lactose intolerant after his bout of dengue I find that I have lost my interest in cooking as I can only cook very specific things now.

Anyway, here are  2 of the things I made recently, with a little involvement of Daughter too.

The first one is devilled eggs made interesting with a few mustard seeds and tomato pieces.  The second one is gluten free cupcakes for the hubby on the 17th anniversary of our being together.

I'm making this post short and sweet so that I actually publish it!  Cheers all!

Letting People Walk All over You or Not

I had a talk with Daughter the other day which I didn't enjoy giving but which I thought was important to give her.  She does not as yet have the self confidence I wish her to have.  She doesn't like being in the limelight and questions her talents even when everyone else acknowledges them. 

A recent play date went off brilliantly except when her friend thought that Daughter had let her have the bracelet she let her wear during dress up time.  When I found out I let her know that she needed to make amends as I'd just bought it as a gift for her less than a week ago, and it wasn't cheap.  In the end, Daughter did manage to hold on to the bracelet but by offering a choice of another bracelet which she told her friend she'd made herself for her.  However friend was a bit grumpy after that and demanded some other gifts to make her stop being a grouch. 

A week or two later I reflected back and realised that the said friend always was very assertive and demanding (for toys and trinkets) whenever she was over.  And we, both me and Daughter had never said no to her.  Even when Daughter had managed to salvage precious bracelet on last occasion, she had not done so in a forthright manner.  It was lucky for her that said Friend had fallen for the bait for the other bracelet!

I told Daughter that she needed not to be a walk over like I had been until only recently.  I admit, I have always found it hard to say no to people even when I knew that they were clearly taking advantage of me, and would never return the favour, judging from their past behaviour.  I explained to her about the "survival of the fittest rule" and how most people always followed that rule.  Soft people ended up being taken advantage of and victims and hard people went ahead.  I know that this may have been a bit too early to break such mean news to her but she needs to beware earlier than I became so.  It's hard to teach this old dog (i.e moi) new tricks.  The earlier the lesson learnt, the better.

It's only recently that I have started getting a bit tough on "friends".  There are "friends" who never ever invite us over when we are in town, and have frankly jumped to stay at our place, wherever we happen to be.  There are friends who write for information whenever they need it, but don't bother to write back when I try to get in touch.  There are "friends" who don't pick up the phone when I call, with the aid of their smart phones which send me straight to voice mail, but only when they don't need anything from me.  And for these "friends" until recently I would move heaven and earth to please them.  It's only this year I realised that I need to stop being a walk over.  I don't want Daughter to wait as long as I did.

Tiredness

So this post comes months later from the previous one and the reason has been given in the title.  Tiredness.  Yes, I am so much more tired these days than I remember being in the past.  And the days seem way shorter. 

I was trying to decide yesterday whether I have really reason enough to feel so much more tired these days, or whether it's just the dreaded getting older bit.

Well, this year has been the mother of all years for bad luck for my family.  We have had pretty much continued sicknesses to deal with since April.  My old daily maid left, and my dish washer conked out pretty soon after that.  Which means more daily washing up, a task I detest and I have not done by hand ever since I can remember.  H has been sick on and off since April, so the things he used to give me a hand with have gone down significantly. 

We had to fumigate the whole apartment recently for which we put away huge amounts of things in boxes and they had to be unpacked.  Speaking of packing/unpacking we had rather a lot of trips which we went on which increased the work load when we come back (pack/unpack)

The school run has become horrendous.  Daughter's school starts half an hour earlier and ends half hour later.  Because the commute is much worse I'm spending double the time travelling.  Before April, H used to drop her off 5 days a week and then it suddenly went down to zero.  Now, slowly he's gone back to 2 days a week. 

Daughter's homework load has quadrupled.  She often needs supervision so the rest I used to give myself in the afternoons has pretty much disappeared.

Psychologically it has been a trying year.  And when one worries or is depressed, tiredness follows. 

I had given up doing so many things I used to do before if not religiously, at least much more frequently than I do now.  Things I gave up include doing yoga, hitting the gym atleast 2 to 3 times a week.  My skin had also started reflecting all the stress I was going through and I had the worst skin and hair this year than I remember having since after having my baby. 

Anyway, recently, about a month ago I guess, I stopped waiting for things to get better.  I decided to accept as much as possible that this is the new reality.  And get back with baby steps to the way things were.  So this week I have managed to do yoga twice (perhaps for 10-15 minutes max) and hit the gym (again not more than 20 minutes each day).  Have also finally started some at home solutions in an attempt to revive my much troubled skin.  And gone back to blogging. 

So here goes.  after 4 months I have finally stopped waiting and just started accepting. 

Crowning Glory? Not so much

I've finally decided not to visit Cr*wn again.  It's a high end hair and beauty parlour here.  It is a great place looks wise.  However I've had my fair share of bad experiences there.  They include:

• Being cut while having a pedicure done (they didn't charge me for that but hell, I could have contracted a disease)
• Having my hair cut 6 inches shorter than I had asked for.
• Allowing pets inside.
• Just charging ridiculous amounts.  This has increased after they have moved to their new premises.  Recently I booked a hair ironing.  Wanting to know how much it would cost (I was going to take cash, which I often don't have enough of) they told me Rs 2000 was the starting price but it would depend on my hair length.  I described my hair : it was half way down my back.  They said it would have to wait until I came and then they would look at my hair and tell me.  I arrived at the parlour and showed the reception guy my hair.  I pointed out that it was already re-bonded and only needed straightening at the crown.  He still didn't mention an amount and told me to wait.  Finally the person who was going to do the work turned up.  I had my shampooing done by an assistant/ trainee and then the main guy (who's a hot shot in the hair cutting business here) arrives.  Note that I didn't ask for a senior person to do my simple hair straightening.  Hot shot wants to know what my husband does, does he work here.  When I confirmed that he did work here, he goes "So you're here to spend his money!"  How ridiculous and insulting, however I didn't show that I was offended.  Halfway through another customer arrives and beckons Hot Shot over.  He moves over to other customer half way, leaving trainee to finish up.  Anyway, when I go to pay the bill hot shot guy comes and whispers something to billing guy/receptionist.  Then I find out that I've been charged Rs 3500 for something that other parlours charge Rs 1800 or below and for which I've never before paid more than Rs 2000 at Cr*wn itself.  Also I know this is physical labour but the results of the hair straightening in a humid area like Colombo last couple of hours at most.  I had to re iron my hair in the evening before I went out.  That's Rs 3500 just down the drain.

What happened at the parlour is just unacceptable in my opinion.  If one is to charge such a ridiculously high amount one has to inform the client well before the services start not after as a rude shock.  Especially as I had wanted to know earlier.  One should know that a satisfied customer is the only type of customer to have and if you try to screw the customer around too much you just lose money.  Now I know this may be the Hot Shot guy's fault rather than the whole parlour's but I'm not risking such bad treatment again.  In my opinion a place that makes so much money should not be trying to play silly games like these.