After a month of fog, Here Comes the Sun!

Loving this podcast on focus (my word for 2014) by... Jamie Ridler

Almost every Thursday I eat at a friend´s house between teaching appointments. She has 2 older daughters and now 3 young sons, the youngest just 3 months old and they are a pleasure to be around.

She is a great cook of simple, healthy food and today she cooked fennel risotto. Here´s a recipe.

Fennel Risotto

Ingredients (for about 4 servings) 
4 fennel bulbs and medium onion
1 tablespoon of butter2 cups of uncooked round corn rice7 cups vegetable broth and 1 cup of cream6 tablespoons of grated parmesanchopped parsley, salt and pepper.
Remove the core of the fennel and peel the onion, cut both into pieces.Fry in butter until lightly browned, add rice and stir, add 1 cup of broth and cook, stirring, until liquid is absorbed. Add remaining broth, 1 cup at a time until absorbed (about 20 min.) Turn off heat, stir in cream and parmesan, add parsley and salt and pepper to taste. Mahlzeit!

Have you heard about the movement "Economy for the Common Good"? It started close by here in Graz and is gathering momentum. Daily life is good here in Austria so it´s easy to believe that everything is fine but national debt is growing and there is no transparency about what happens to tax money - ECG gives me hope for the future.

One blogger/artist I have followed right from the first day that I discovered blogging is Lisa Congdon. I have 3 of her prints hanging in my entry and they are very special to me as they remind me of a time when I was quite lonely and disconnected from the outside world, living in a small village here in Austria with 3 young children and a husband who was away more than he was at home. That seems like a lifetime ago, I´m happy today and I know it.

Last year I decided not to eat meat in the month before Easter and it was much easier than I had imagined. I watched the series River Cottage Veg and it inspired me to be more adventurous with my cooking. In the back of my mind I was also thinking about a future plan of mine to live mainly from the products we can grow in our garden plus some other products that I can buy from local farmers. Growing and harvesting vegetables is such a calming, natural thing for me to do but I cannot imagine taking care of and then killing an animal and preparing it for being cooked.  In Austria it´s a tradition to take a basket full of smoked and roasted meats and sausages to church on Easter Saturday to be blessed and then eat these meats with white bread and horse radish with family and friends. We were invited to such a traditional feast last easter Saturday and when I saw the plates piled high with smoked ham I knew instantly that my meat-eating days were over and I haven´t eaten meat or fish since then.

The book A New Earth opened my eyes when I read it back in 2008 and when my Yoga teacher started reading texts from The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali I saw so many parallels between both and really started to understand and live by these philosophies. About a year later the TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor completed the picture for me.

I spent the day in Graz (the capital of Styria) where my 2 older sons live and study. It´s a lovely city with a large pedestrian zone, a river and a hill with a clock tower. Couldn´t find any cupcakes - will keep looking next time...

It´s been foggy here for about a month now and people are really starting to get down about it - I don´t mind it myself and you can always start making garden plans for Spring if the grey´s too much for you. Here´s some inspiration...
Gardening Australia, Edible City, Life in a Cottage Garden.

Love these websites where you can see inside real people´s homes (and businesses):
Apartment Therapy, Freunde von Freunden, and  The Selby.

I work as an english trainer/translator in a team formed with friends and I love my job. As well as really enjoying teaching and translating,  I have the luxury of not having to work on weekends and Wednesdays. Every Wednesday morning I go to YOGA class for 1 1/2 hours, which gives me the rest of the day to drink coffee with friends, potter around at home or spend time with my husband who is a self-employed cabinet-maker. It has taken us some time, determination, juggling acts and a few experiments to get to this point but it has been so worth it.

After reading this last August, I downloaded these free Couch to 5K podcasts and since then I´ve been running 3 times a week. Some days are better than others and it´s been really hard since Winter has set in but I´m proud to say that I can run 30 minutes without stopping which is a miracle because since my school days (a long time ago!) people have been telling me I´m built for swimming, not running, hmmm. The best time for it is early morning or late afternoon because of the sky (no photoshop used on those pics!).

This is me, thinking about taking part in this E-course,
BE YOUR OWN BELOVED

So happy to have found Flow magazine, originally Dutch and now also available in German and English. If anyone is reading this, hope you´re having a nice day!

2014: Focus on personality, authenticity, composure,
beauty - inside and out, creativity, enjoying myself and
learning to communicate more assertively.

Say "YES"to life! The sites Zenhabits and Danielle Laporte may help.
I am especially grateful for accept what is and this light meditation.

Loving...The Reconstructionists, this blog, Mr Morgan´s Last Love, owl pebbles and japanese aprons.

Enjoying homemade apple strudel, crocheting a noren, reading an old Ikea Family Live article about creating orderly surroundings that motivates me every New Year and creating a routine to help me "FOCUS".

I´m back - and my word for 2014 is...

My morning coffee

My morning coffee...hand-grind coffee beans, cook coffee in old espresso cooker, froth milk and serve!