A Dangerous Pastime I know.

Well I have been thinking at work since I got back from Ecuador; to quote Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast it is indeed 'A dangerous pastime. I know.", and I devised a rather nifty list that I am going to share with you all today.

Things That Would Be Awesome To Do At Work:

1. Hide behind the desk and pop up when the customer rings the bell for assistance.
2. Hide under the desk when they ring the bell for assistance and rock slowly back and forth muttering about 'Nam.
3. When answering the phone use an accent, any accent, improvise with words you *think* sound foreign.
4. Hunt a coworker. Bring in a pith hat and elephant gun so everyone else can join in.
5. Find computer chairs and race through the store. Ten points for knocking over customers, Twenty if they are young and attempt to flee.
6. Lock customers in the store by playing with that giant rollerdoor.
7. Set off the alarms by going out the emergency only exit, That one out back where you need someone to deactivate the alarm so you can get to your car 30 seconds faster.
8. Superglue. On everything.
9. Practice Zumba. They did this at a Borders bookstore. I really want to work in a bookstore that does Zumba.
10. Arm small children with water pistols and nerf guns. Create a war zone the likes of which no one has ever seen before.

I enjoy work but sometimes I think when I work. Sometimes I think so hard I answer honestly when the boss asks if I was listening and I tell her "No I was off with the fairies" but it's okay, she was talking to herself.

A Better Account of Ecuador

One of the 3 school buildings. I think this is the biggest.

So the first week was mostly volunteer work which involved teaching some little kids English, learning Spanish from little kids, digging a sewerage pit thingy so the little kids can have proper toilets at school, painting a school and trying to cover said sewerage pit because it absolutely pissed down rain. So in 30-40*C heat I dug through rocks and solid clay for 3 days.

They look so innocent

I even spent an entire afternoon painting in the shade (that was pretty awesome).

You can't tell but it's 2m deep.

I also tubed down the largest river in the Amazon for 3 hours all up. (2 were travelling to a jungle lodge where we stayed 2 nights). We also went to an Animal rescue shelter (Amazoonia) and watched a witch doctor or shaman as he spit on my sisters head! (Turns out he was sucking in air but it sounded like she got spat on)

Probably the best photo I took the whole time.

We traveled everywhere by motor canoe, it's pretty fantastic, and in the back of a small truck, that was so much fun.

They didn't let us hang off the back but we tried to.

Capuchen monkeys live in the middle of the town, Mishualli. It's pronounced Misa-hua-gee because the local tribe is the Kichwa people and that's how they told us to pronounce it.

Campbell and the Capuchen

I had my face painted by a local, I was El Loco Gato (The Crazy Cat), another girl got traditional female face markings and the third had warriors I think.

Pretty photo of green stuff.

We also got to watch how traditional pottery is made. Mostly it's made using clay from the riverbed and sand also from the rivers. It's polished using a stone and coloured the same way!

Pepito the adorable/evil dog that tried to steal my sunnies.

I trekked through the amazon for 5hours in one day so I felt pretty invincible, after I slept of course, Everybody was pretty tired afterwards.

Really old tree roots full of spiders.

There were 16 people including myself. 15 Aussies and 1 Canadian. The Canadian girl is fearless she climbed the waterfall and got lost at the top.

The kids loved taking photos with cameras

The waterfall is insanely beautiful, as was the butterfly house.

The third butterfly that landed on my back.

Memorable quotes:
It's so good eh (Canadians say this a lot eh.)
How good is it? Sooooo good. (All the time)
Why do they call it a rainforest? (As we were trekking whilst it rained)
We were in the Amazon?! (After the 5 hour trek)
Ah nooooo. (We kinda over-used this)
El Blanco Diablo (Cause we were white lol)

Mmm lunch time and a Cacao fruit!

Chocolate Cuppycakes and Flooding

For the weekend I have been visiting with good friends in a tiny old town called Rochester and recently it has been experiencing moderate to severe flooding. But this was way back in January so naturally as humans we assume the worst is over. This was my first time seeing their new home!

White Wings Chocolate Cupcake Mix

The town planned a street party to celebrate the flood relief and generally get everyone back to their normal lives, schools have been closed and businesses ruined, but it was canceled due to rain and a flood warning. It's the kind of thing that happens when I visit my best friend, at least her dogs didn't eat something inedible to go to the vet again.

Quite nice for a packet mix

All in all it really could be a lot worse. The flooding in Queensland is pretty bad I hear. During the worst of it all I was actually in Ecuador doing Volunteer work for a small Kichwa community so I didn't even hear about the floods until my stop-over in Los Angeles when Americans joked about my home being underwater. I assumed that it wasn't too bad since we've recently had the bush-fires but Australia is the land of the extremes, when its hot - it's roasting, when it's raining it pours but when it's pretty it's exquisite.

Just following the instructions

Ecuador for those that don't know is located in South America and is beyond beautiful, when you're not in the mud or falling into a river. The town of Misahualli itself is also pretty unique as it's a tourist town, but once you leave the small communities and head into the jungle it's a whole other world.

We always bake something together

Where Australia is green Ecuador is GREEN.  As we trekked through a small fraction of that jungle for 5hours we saw many amazing things, butterflies were everywhere and the tiny poison dart frogs were almost impossible to find but it was definitely an experience I'd recommend to everyone else.

And they're done!

How to make a crappy packet mix cake & What is this blog meant to be about?

I started my own little bloggy because a rather impressive blog filled me with awe, as a good blog often does, but this time it was made by a real person (read "real person" as 'someone I know'). This made me think that perhaps average people can create interesting blogs about things they are interested in, which for me includes pretending to be rather epic at baking.

If I ever master this thing called Blogging I'll let you know.

Onwards to the packet mix cakes and the how to;

Step 1: Buy said packet mix cake, for this adventure I chose 2 different mixes Greens Sweet Banana Honey Muffins and White Wings Moist Chocolate Cake.
(White Wings Moist Chocolate Cake was actually pretty good and didn't last very long out of the oven so there's no proof the cake I made ever existed.)
Step 2: Set up all required utensils and ingrediants.

Not everything's there but you get the idea.
Step 3: Following instructions on the packet. Well they're there for a reason.

You may notice that isn't a wooden spoon or fancy electric mixer but I was visiting my mums house and I'm pretty sure I had killed her electric mixer last time I was there. ANYWAY....

Step 4: I'm pretty sure it said this on the box but you actually have to spoon the mixture into a tray before placing it in the oven.

And as you can see I was experiencing difficulty doing it neatly.

I blame the young people who were 'helping' they mostly just mixed it for me using a silicon spatula and licked the bowl clean.

Unfortunately this was another case of baked good not lasting long enough to be photographed so here's a picture of a cat.

His name is Boots

He gets hay-fever but isn't he funny looking haha...

What's better then a Grilled Cheese Sandwich you ask?

Why TWO grilled cheese sandwiches of course!

Some people believe in destroying the purity of the cheese in bread combination but I personally prefer it plain. Some famous people who have damaged the image of grilled cheese are in fact Oprah and Martha Stewart, Damn straight I saw that episode Oprah.... Jalapenos do not belong in food.

I recently read that Maxis would give it's workers a grilled cheese sandwich after each milestone; That made me hungry, But any fan of The Sims (2,3) will know just how highly the grilled cheese sandwich is valued and obsessed over. For those that don't know about it, (How do you not know!?) in The Sims 2: Nightlife Expansion pack you can choose The Grilled Cheese aspiration for your Sims new life obsession: thus sparking an obesity epidemic almost equal in frustration to that seen in real life! How much more Simulated real life can you get than that?

In other news my web browsing also discovered that The Sims is the highest selling PC game to date! It's pretty awesome, I particularly loved the Magic something or other expansion pack for the pet baby dragons  but unfortunately has no life obsession for grilled cheese, plus the dragon kept setting my house on fire eventually leading to the death of my favourite Sim.

Sims aside I was hoping to share a photo or two of my epic lunch of TWO grilled cheese sandwiches but alas I don't own a camera and the one I borrowed from my best buddy and boyfriend took a swim in an amazonian river :/ oops.