It was a long hard hot day yesterday for many.

For us it started off by a phone call near midnight of some good news from our daughter.

Then around 5 am another call [I am always jumpy when the phone rings at that time of day].

Low and behold it was for Fran, another suicide in the early morn.

I am getting worried about Fran with all the volunteer work she does with the Crises Response Team.

We had a little chat later down by the waters edge; Fran tends to keep her own council when it comes to emotions and feelings. I asked if she receives any ‘de briefs’ like the paid staff of NG have.

Fran’s answer was ‘no’ but she talks a lot with one of the staff members of NG health who is also a member of the CRT here and said that helps her quite a lot.

I tend to steer away from funerals but yesterday decided to attend the funeral of the two young children and their Grandfather.

The church was packed when we entered, we were directed upstairs to the choir area, it ended up packed too.

If there ever was such a thing as a good funeral then I guess yesterday’s service was close to it. Simple service and though I am not a religious man hymns sung in Inuktitut always get to me.

Sad times or not one has to eat. A simple but delicious Vegemite, cheese and lettuce on multi grain for lunch, been awhile since I had one of those.

Then after a feed of fried cod I had some home made apple strudel with raspberry ripple ice cream.

Earlier in the day I decided to use some of the overabundance of apples in the fridge but had trouble concentrating about what to do with them.

So I threw caution to the wind and just started doing it. made up the pastry and refrigerated it.

Then a made up some apple sauce for the pork roast later today today.

I rolled out half the pastry and covered it with about a cup and half of the apple sauce. Then I mixed some brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves with about half a cup of raisins and quarter cup crushed almonds. I spread this over the apple sauce before covering that with a thinly sliced peeled apple.

I then rolled it all up and baked for about half an hour, it turned out not bad all things considered; actually it was darn right tasty.