It's easy being green

If you were to ask me where my favourite place is to eat, I would have to say the lunch table in our staff room. I love my job. I love my co-workers and I love the kids I work with. The best thing I love about my job is lunch time. In fact, I the only reason I go to work is to have lunch with my friends, which says a lot because I'm only a part-timer and get paid until lunch time. After that, it's my own time so I guess when I stay for lunch (every day!) it's overtime. So evidently I'm a dedicated worker and therefore extremely valuable to the team as a whole.

Lunch at work can be a little weird sometimes, which is probably why it suits me so well. We've got one character who steals lunches and constantly snatches cups of tea right from out of the rightful owners' hands, a couple of us are a bit OCD, we have another one who guzzles all the milk before showing his appreciation with a loud burp (he also claims to have seen one of my nipples as I was searching for something in my Double A filing system once - something which I categorically deny) and everyone (except the lunch stealer) brings in goodies such as chocolate and cake. Another thing I really enjoy about lunch is the random conversation.

Halloween has just been and gone, not that it's a festival I celebrate. Most years I get involved in our church's Halloween alternative, known as the "Light Party". This year I got throw on a clown costume and make balloon animals - after just 1 1/2 hours of training. It's all in how you hold your tongue.

Just some of the cool stuff we made

Meanwhile, Smiley lives in the coolest area on Southside. It's so cool that the people in her street have decided to call themselves a gang. They don't need much of an excuse to throw a party and even have their own exclusive Facebook page. Smiley is a gang member. She'll be wearing a patch soon. So the...er...(trying to think of an anonymous equivalent to their name here)...the "Strange Gang" (tee hee!!) had a Halloween party and Smiley was telling us all about it at the lunch table.  Now that she has lived in New Zealand for four years, the pavlova has become Smiley's kitchen specialty. If you're not familiar with the pavlova, google the recipe. It's fabulous and it's ours (and don't let the Australians try telling you that they invented it!)

So for the Strange Gang Halloween party Smiley added her own special twist to the recipe. She made the pav green, with black cream. Normally a pav is white, fluffy and pretty but this one had to be spooky. Apparantly it took a lot of food colouring to make it look this gruesome:

Scary, isn't it!

And that's how the conversation at our lunch table turned to green. At that point Smiley wasn't talking about the pav. She was referring to the effects of the pav...if you catch my drift. Thankfully, she only took a photo of the pav before it...er...exited the systems of those that consumed it. Apparantly it stuck around for quite a while. I'm not so sure if it was the green food colouring; I think it was the black cream.

Naturally I had to put my two cents worth and raise the topic of chooky poo. My kids and I had been watching the baby chicks when one of them screamed out that there was green poop in the coop. We spent quite a bit of time trying to work it out. I was about to turn to Mr Google when my six year old daughter suggested that the red cabbage her daddy had thrown in there might be responsible. OMG! This child is SIX! By golly I think she had something because she was remembering the time I showed her how red cabbage leaves can be used as a pH indicator.

My braniac 6 y/o in her Light Party costume. FIrst prize went to a pink star fish, but there were no "sour grapes"

Speaking of chicken poo...one of my chickens came up the steps and took a dump on the back deck (that's kiwi for "patio"). Does this mean that it's now a "Poop Deck"? :o)