It is only six days to Christmas

D1 is arriving this afternoon to stay for an indefinite time; indefinite because she has not told me how long she is staying.

This year D3 is holding Christmas lunch at Chez D3 and as it is my turn to do Boxing day I am going to have to do most of my preparations on Christmas eve which could be a bit of a problem since Multiplex/Hawaiian has seen fit to furnish me with a rather minimalistic refrigerator and it is supposed to be mid-summer here.  All of my kids and grandbabies seem to have things which they can not eat  -  gluten, dairy etc which makes then a bit hard to cater for and I have had to abandon the traditional trifle for Chocolate mousse and gluten-free sausages since they usually opt for a sausage sizzle fortunately as my fridge would never fit a turkey and a ham.  D3 is going to drop in today with gluten-free sausages which she buys at a Saturday Morning Growers' Market and they will go into my even smaller freezer.  I have to make a triple batch of chocolate mousse  -  nine raw eggs  -  yuk!

Yesterday the pony-tail palm which I ordered from the local nursery (Bunnings do not stock anything so exotic) arrived so I rode the train for one stop to Swanbourne and collected it.  It was bigger than I had envisaged and, poor thing, was totally and completely pot-bound.  I had checked that it was non-toxic to cats but Parsifal greeted it as though he had not seen any food for a month and began on it straight away.  Having re-checked its non-toxicity to cats I let him rip .  Since it is to be a permanent feature of my balcony I decided that I couldn't cage it for the rest of our natural lives.  He ate his fill and then threw up in a most spectacular fashion all over (fortunately) my horrible tiles where it was  easy to clean up.  I have planted it out in a tallish pot  where the babies can not eat out the heart but only the peripheral fronds.

My three aspidistra plants seem to be rooting so that is two out of the three non-toxic shade-loving plants now in residence and I have decided to pass on the spider plants as they really need a hanging basket and I am not sure if the Body Corporate would be happy with me putting hooks on the roof of my balcony.