workmen.

*sigh**

And that's not a sigh of the "OMG, hot, shirtless, ripped young tradies" kind, either.

It's a sigh of:

"when I call you to fix my lights, please send a sparky, not an illiterate numpty who cannot speak English".

It's a sigh of:

"when the sparky does actually arrive, can he please come equpped with electrical sparky workmen stuff, as opposed to a sparky that rings NOTHING in the way of tools"

I believe the most feared words in PNG are "I'll just have to go back to the office and pick up *insert blokey sounding tool name.. No, not Nigel**

**sigh**

Well, I got robbed.

A classic PNG "home invasion", where fingers are pointed in so many different directions that, in the end, no-one knows what really happened.

All I can say, it Thank Goodness for rape gates. It appears that they came in via the front gates (more on my now EX guard in a minute), as there's no sign of them coming over the wire. They opened that back gate.. the one I haven't had keys to since I moved in, despite several.. like fifteen... emails requesting them.

At the time of the burglary, I had 2 keys. One to the front door and one to the rape gate.

They jemmied the sliding door, and took my bilum. In which was my wallet, containing some money, not much. But the REAL piss off is that it contained all my cards.

My credit card, my EFTPOS cards (both PNG and Aussie), my licence (both PNG and Aussie), my private health insurance ID, my medicare card....  the whole lot.

They also took all my cooking knives from the knife block on the bench.

There is nothing to suggest they tried to come upstairs, but thank goodness I had the rape gates locked. FYI, if you don't already know, "rape gates" are big steel "panic room" style gates that partition off a portion of your house, usually bedrooms. From behind the rape gates, somewhere in the partitioned-off area, there is (usually) an escape hatch. In most places I've lived up here, the escape hath is usually deliberately out-of-sight of the rape gate.. for self-evident reasons.

I have an escape hatch. It's locked and I don't have a key.

So, while there is no evidence that they attempted to come up to the bedroom floor, I still get a little squiffy just thinking about it. I mean, 99% of the time, there's just little old me and a puppeh in the whole compound.

Anyway, the story goes that I heard Bubbles bark, went down to see what was going on and realised I'd been robbed. The back door was open and my bilum was missing. I didn't notice the knife block until later.

So I run out on the balcony, wrapped in nothing but a towel and call to the guard.

"Can you come around the back, I've been robbed", I yelled.

And he looked at me, with the most gormless of faces and said:

"No you haven't, I've just been around the back. You haven't been robbed"

Right then I knew a) he was in on it and b) he warn't gonna be much help.

I then realised that the guard dog, provided for me added security was locked in behind the pool gate.

Hmmmmm.

In fact, when I asked him to patrol the grounds WITH THE DOG, he refused, choosing to aimlessly pootle around the garden on his own.

I reckon his wantoks were still on the property.

Anyway, Captain Jack (of the Labu Mud Crabs fame) came around and sorted every little thing out. My phone is still being used. Some random guy answers it and has rung friends up here asking for money. The police have been, my cards have been cancelled, the process of getting them reissued begun.

Long-termers tell me it's a rite of passage up here, and I must say, I am surprisingly more relaxed about it than I thought I would be. I'm fine, my pup is fine. That's all I really care about.

It's not nearly as much fun, nor nearly as cool as a set of Hindu prayer flags, but it really is only 'stuff".

But my rape gate is my new best friend.

I've got to a point in my life, where I am currently assessing what's important. What matters and what doesn't. Sorting through what's real and what's habitual. What's worth my time and what wastes it.

And this applies as much (perhaps more so) to things as it does to people.

Last week I forgot the anniversary of my Hobbits death. 

I have a myriad of excuses, but the fact remains that for the previous 5 years, the first week of Feb has loomed large and treacherously, from Xmas onwards.

And this year it passed by in a flurry of "other things".

So, in making an active decision to spend more time on the good, and less (if not none) on the bad, and PARTICULARLY, the ugly, I've sorted my life into what's important and what isn't.

And when you are authentically.. I mean REALLY committed to this process, it's quite confronting. From the ring my first real boyfriend gave me, to the very last thing my Hobbit purchased for me, I've gone through my life and discarded what I no longer need.

And in some cases, kept what I thought I didn't.

And, because this is a food blog, and this post is in SERIOUS danger of becoming a self-indulgent, maudlin middle-aged emo sook-fest,I give you a small taste of what, after 45 years on this planet, is important to me.




A wine rack, a coffee plunger, a print of Monet's garden in Giverny, my stick blender, a mirror overlaid with KwanYin, my antique marble slab,my silicone cooking gear (but only because my non-stick ripple pan is my most prized possession!) and my cookbooks. My Aqua Sulis and a bag filled with mezzalunas and my antique butchers knives.

And my PNG panga and my hand-made bilum.

The rest was dross.

AGITK and I will be taking a wee hiatus, because this blog IS one of the things I have decided is important to me, and when we return, in about 2 week, things, my friends, will be very VERY different.

As they say in the classics, "strange things are afoot at the Circle K"

See you all on the flip side.