After a tumultuous month, I made an incident-free return to work yesterday. By some small miracle, I managed a whole 8-hour shift without getting sick, injuring myself or pissing anyone off. Praise be! I now have 2 days off in which to bake and grocery shop. I'm playing with a few new recipes so I fully expect as many failures as successes. Mum has challenged me to create a cupcake with a couple of challenging ingredients (not telling just yet!) but I'm going to wait til I've got a few more recipes perfected before trying that one for her.

So much time off work let me concentrate on sorting out a few long-avoided chores. The one I procrastinated over most was the sewing on of buttons on B's work shirts. His company were recently outfitted with new shirts. Unfortunately, just about every original button snapped off every shirt. Not due to poor stitching or low quality thread - nope, the centres of the buttons just popped right out. Thank God they're all done now. Well, they were. He managed to pop another one off this morning, getting dressed for work. My sleepy response from bed was, "You've got to be #&*king kidding!".

I also got to sort out the pantry. This was a mammoth task, especially since I started baking frequently.

B put up plenty of handy racks for herbs, spices, flavourings, essences, seasonings and stocks:

See the lovely tidy baking stash? The green lunch bag contains my cutters, piping bags and tips and flower-making tools. I can highly recommend Decor brand storage boxes, especially their spice storer (bottom right of pic) - 10 teeny boxes with a 1/4 teaspoon measure, just perfect for cachous/dragees/sprinkles/hundreds & thousands/coloured sugars. If you're curious about the brown stuff in the clear plastic box on the bottom left, it's 2 different brands of brown sugar. I didn't realise til I got the 2nd bag home that they were so very different!

Here are the new Ikea cupboards B installed while I was in hospital:

And just for giggles, this photo was taken at the Logan Hyperdome. The sign reads, "Non-Potable Water. Do Not Drink." Yes, that is a toilet flush.