Warning… this is going to be a long blog post, a little bit of ranting and raving and a recipe at the end…. Apologies in advance….

SOOO obviously it has been a while. I have been cooking in between ordering take out and trying to juggle the pace of living at the moment.

Life has come and kicked my in the bum, so hard that I fell head first down a very tall mountain and only now am I dusting the dirt of my knees and slowly starting to climb the mountain again.

I started a few times and got a few meters up and went back down very hard to earth.

The first started when the truck road the Telkom telephone over and Leap frog was soo eager to get their fibre installed that they practically leaped into my lap every time they saw me. I spoke to them daily for almost a month to ensure that firstly we had fibre coverage in the area and that the paper had been filled up out correctly and that the package I was taking was the correct one. Have you any idea how difficult it is to ask someone to explain in plain boring old English and not use these big internet Jargon!!!! Well a few hours after the paper work was submitted, I got a phone call from Telkom informing me that my application for fibre via frogfoot had been rejected reason given was that you can not get Telkom fibre in a business name it can only be granted to you if you apply as an individual.

Which just pissed me off, I mean an entire month of back-and-forth e-mails and constant phone calls only to be told you can’t have business fibre, don’t you think they should have told me this before I gave myself high blood pressure.

The next company I tried was Vodacom, I thought it would be easy as most of the work cellphones are on Vodacom already. Lord was I blady wrong. I was helped by a Lady who couldn’t understand that our land line was out of order and she kept phoning me on the land line, that isn’t the best part, she had no direct line so I had to keep phoning the call center and keep leaving her messages, when I got fed up with her work ethic and sent a email to her team leader she phoned me and told me that she is very busy she has over 300 clients she couldn’t not just help me alone, that was my que to have fun with her and ever email I sent after that I kept adding the line ,:”I know you are very busy with your 300 clients but I have an urgent matter.” She got tired of me and shipped me off to another sales agent who sent me an email demanding that they first have 3 months bank statements before they can assist, My mother saw this request and well she is the absolutely last person you ask for private information like that, she hit the roof and sent them a polite go f**k yourself email and well we are still without internet and still without a functional land line. To tell you the truth, it is so peaceful without a land line, no call center agents looking for people who owe them money, no wrong numbers just blissful silence.

Then the fun began, my mother’s old desktop was OLD and when the ADSL line went down, she lost the ability to go online and do her things, so seeing as I work on a server I was able to get her connected, but it would require her to get a more updated computer, seeing as I was trying to get her to move with the times, I bought her a laptop. This now required me to acquire IT skills I never owned in my life. I had to download everything and then moved it all over onto the laptop and then had to create a new user on her old computer and delete her user and user information and then after everything I took a hammer and smashed everything it was so rewarding, all that built up anger and frustration just smash smashed away.

A few weeks in and my mother left a bull dog clip on her key board and closed her lap screen, the following morning when she opened up her screen there was this huge crack. The insurance company recommended a company because they said to claim so early would be craze and the excess would be a lot, so the computer was sent off. Yes the screen could be fixed but at a price, The price to get a new screen for her laptop would cost close to R7000, the laptop itself did not even cost more than R5000, so she said no, she would work around the crack she would have to learn to be more carefully and this crack would be a constant reminder that she was negligent.

When the laptop arrived back the next day, and we switched it on, the entire screen was black, apparently the guy couldn’t get the screen open for the serial number, she he shoved a screw driver in and did more bad than good. As her punishment she had to cough up for a new laptop and before you say I am being mean. A few years ago, I went a little craze and exceeded my data usage for the month by a few grand, she made me pay it off monthly to teach me, so I am just teaching her a lesson. Thank God the laptop was still on special at Take a lot and a new one arrived a few days later.

My mum was no eager to get back to work, then she dropped a bomb shell on me, she needed the work on the old laptop, again I had to acquire IT skills I didn’t have, I had to go google and see how to do this transfer and then on Take a lot and buy VGA adaptor, take the laptop home, attach it to the TV and then transfer it onto a USB stick and then transfer everything onto the new laptop again. What a nightmare, because when I originally set my mother up, I set a password, when I tried to log in with the TV it wanted a pincode, which for the love of me, I could not remember, so it did require me to log into her Microsoft account and reset passwords. But eventually, touch wood she is up and running.

So you see, I have just been busy trying not to kill anyone and send myself to jail.

I have not been shopping in such a long time, that my fridge is icing up from just being empty.

When everything was done and dusted, my parent still had to nerve to ask when am I going to make something sweet again. The only thing in the cupboard was left over candy canes that the ants were eyeing and a lonely tub of vanilla ice cream in the freezer, which was exactly what you needed in order to make Donna Hay’s candy cane milkshake.

The recipe gave a note at the bottom, which I ignored thinking that this would never happen to me, boy was I wrong. The note said to not crush the candy cane until the milkshake was ready to be served because the humidity can cause the candy cane pieces to stick together, which I ignored and crushed in advance and when the time came to use the candy cane, the pieces were stuck together in one big clump. A word for the wise, always read the note!

Ingredients:

• 2 x candy canes, finely crushed.
  180g x white chocolate, melted and slightly cooled.
• 1 x cup cold full cream milk.
• 4 x scoops of vanilla ice cream
• ½ x cup whipping cream, whipped to stiff peaks.

Method:

• Place the crushed candy cane pieces on a plate.
• Dip the rim of your glass into the melted chocolate and then press into the candy cane pieces.
• Place the glasses upside down on a tray and pop into the fridge to chill until the chocolate has set.
• In your blender, add the milk, ice cream and any remaining melted chocolate.
• Blend until smooth.
• Divide the milkshake evenly between your glasses, top with the whipped cream and garnish with a few sprinkles of candy cane.