Bedtime, over-excited.

I’ve just been on a crazy book buying frenzy. I LOVE eBay. I’ve had my fair share of near misses, and crooked sellers, but holy horses, when I can buy a used book from the UK for far, far less than it would cost here what’s a girl to do? I bought: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Thomas Lux New and Selected Poems, House of the Scorpian by Nancy Farmer and Emergence by David Palmer. The latter two are for my thirteen year old who is a voracious reader, and whose pitiful cries of “I don’t have anything to read!” moved me to act, in sympathy. I know all too well the pain of nothing to read (which is why there’s books for me, too). I bought two Shakespeare movies too: Baz thingo’s Romeo + Juliet, and the Hamlet with Ethan Hawke.

Like a Wide Anvil From the Moon the Light
By Thomas Lux
Like a wide anvil from the moon the light
on the cold radiator and all the windows in a row
along the spine close–zeroes winding tight.
And to make the rattlesnakes feel at home?
A private cactus farm. There’s not an eek’s chance
of getting out of here. Some apples, bruised,
mute, are nailed back to their branches,
and the south wind–low, hot ash–cruises
through a crook in the apple tree’s trunk.
The dirt, not known for its tenderness, on its knees
somewhat, and one munificent ant carries a crumb
to the crumbless. Every pond on earth agrees:
they are tired of being dragged–all those hooks–
for drowned children. All this beneath
the ceaseless lineage of comets! Books
help a little: groan-soaked, one broken etc. thief,
tree surgeons lost above tree lines,
chasmed sidewalks, a hatful of blanks,
sore-got ore….Yes!–it does feel exactly fine
crawling ashore, emptying the boots of water, and frankly
here’s to clouds the color of bone,
here’s to the indecipherable path home,
here’s to the worm’s sweat in the loam….

 

More imaginary flowers.

Every five or ten years or so, I look back (five or ten years) and shudder at how stupid I was five or ten years ago. Do you do that? It’s nice to think that I/we get smarter and more authentic with passing time, but also horrifying to think that my/your past is 98% embarrassing, and 2% grudging acceptance. Diary writing and blogging are like that too. Does your voice always sound weird to you, too? The blogs I most enjoy reading always sound immediate, authentic, fresh. It’s something to aspire to.

I had a baby! Ages ago. She’s just about eight months old. This is what she looks like.

Zoe

We called her Zoe. She’s very full on, and very wonderful.

Yoghurt!

Thankyou Jalna. She likes Jalna just like her big brother did, THIRTEEN years ago. But where is swiss custard flavour gone? For shame.

So that’s the big exciting news. The rest is pretty dull. I’m still making soap – a lot of soap – and lip balms and stuff; and of course it’s bulb buying time, and I’m thrilled to say I have fritillaries and galanthuseseses this year. I’m also secretly putting in some trillium for a Springtime surprise for the Canadian. We’re cooking a lot. He thinks he might have some kind of blood sugar/diabetes thing so we’re doing a lot more low GI stuff, which suits me because now we’re eating a lot more vegies and whole grains, thank dog. Other kids are good. I spend almost every waking moment knitting or playing with the baby.

What are you up to?

 

Where is the camera cable, Universe?

Oh god, I’m so tired.

And I cannot find the camera cable. I have a slew of excellent pictures to show you, punctuating my (probably kind of vague and wandery) post – except the phone just rang, and taking the opportunity to drift around while talking, I found the cable, right where I thought it would be, on B’s desk.

It's not the heat, it's the insectivity.

The morning after the first hot day we had this week, I came downstairs and after freaking out at the vast numbers of small, scratchy, Christmas beetle like, yet not Christmas beetles beetles on every surface downstairs, including caught in my dishbrush and scratchy thing, and skittering around in the bottom of every single cup or dish, this monster staring at me from the shelves was just too much, and I scooped it into a bucket, and put it outside. I never saw it again, thank goodness. Do you know what it is? It’s like a grasshopper, but not a grasshopper, a strangely repulsive, gelid brownish green, with really enormously long antennae.

This is really just so you can see how pretty he’s looking. And you can see the scars left on his nose by Rosey’s little terror. Poor old Sim, he wants to be friends with everyone.

Three in a row.

Constructed by Gus, styled by his mother. Good, aren’t they?

Do you know what this is?

I have a lot, I mean a LOT of roses in my garden, let me see if I can give you a quick rough count…seventeen types that I can think of off the top of my head, and this one is by far the most wonderfully rosey and seductively fragrant. Is it the apothecaries rose?

Making a Quick Escape

One grey and drizzly afternoon, while waiting for Tanya to visit, I was staring out the window at my roses, when I noticed a spiny little chappy snuffling about under the something tree, amongst the withered bluebells. I grabbed my camera, and took a series of badly framed and unfocused pictures of this wonderful Australian, who I fervently hoped would set up house in my front garden. This would have been even better than the tortoise I so desperately covet but won’t ever have. And of course, neither do I have a resident echidna, as you see it’s eventual departure across the road.

It's a cold, cruel, hard old life.

Looks peaceful, doesn’t he?

It’s getting hotter, and I want a drink, and the kids are squawking, so I’m off. Keep cool!

 

Palm Oil.

“It has the scent of violets, the taste of olive oil and a colour which tinges food like saffron but is more attractive”
– Ca’da Mosto, a 15th century explorer on discovering palm oil.

Sounds pretty seductive, eh? I ripped that from a pro palm oil website.

Today’s soap:

360g olive oil
240g coconut oil
180g palm oil
30g cocoa butter
243g water
115g lye

It’s been sitting in a lunchbox mold for a while now and looks stunning: creamy, dense, smells very nice indeed, which is rather a shame, because I now feel like I’m probably not going to use palm oil again. I was a bit conflicted about using this oil at all (what if I love it? then I’ll want to keep buying it, rainforests be damned!) but it is, you know, here already, might as well give it a whirl, it doesn’t mean I have a problem, I can stop anytime. Anytime!

I read a lot – a LOT – of recipes for soap that include palm oil for its sudsy, but not drying, and bar hardening qualities, but also increasing amounts of anti palm oil sentiments, which I guess is due to the environmental concerns surrounding the production of palm oil, where it has often been the case that vast tracts of rainforest are torched so as to make room for palm plantations for oil production for use in fuels, soap and food. Some of the oil suppliers I looked at offer “sustainable” palm oil, and if it is indeed produced in a sustainable way, that must be a good alternative if you feel you simply can’t go on without it.

Lush has decided to go palm oil free, releasing this neat little press release which contains this odd line:

“Lush has teamed up with a small soap specialist in the UK to develop what is claimed to be the world’s first palm oil-free soap base.”

Hopefully that’s bad writing, not delusion, because you know, there’s a lot of soap out there without palm oil in it (so maybe they mean commercially available, in the vast quantities that Lush requires).

Lush is a funny thing though, isn’t it? I like Lush, let it be said, in fact I just bought a shampoo bar and some shower gel from them this week (the shampoo is for my poor scalp, and gel is for the husband for Xmas)(snow fairy! it’s the bright pink plus sparkles one that I bought for myself years ago but he is crazy for it, claiming it smells like hockey card bubblegum)(don’t tell anyone though, alright?), and of course their bath bombs are quite magnificent, but I’ve been slobbering all over their catalogue and two things caught my eye. First, they use a lot of seriously premium oils for perfuming: rose and jasmine at least, in a quite a few products and that stuff is expensive. Far too expensive for the home soaper to use, and frankly the thought of using rose oil (rose oil!) in my soap makes me feel a little bit like throwing up, because I make cold process soap and the saponification process would eat up that attar and spit it out, and I’d have spent hundreds! of dollars for nothing…but you know what…*lightbulb!*I reckon Lush mills or rebatches soap to get those awesome fragrances. I think that’s how you’d get the scent, without it being cooked off. Milling is when you take a soap, and grate it or grind it, heat it up a bit, adding scent and other goodies, and remolding it. It’s a way of making soap if you’re not into the bubbling cauldrons and lye hazards of cold and hot process soap (and isn’t actually soap making in my opinion)(maybe soap crafting) but you’d like to make something a bit nicer than shop soap. Now, where was I? Oh yes….the super expensive oils. I was going to say something about all their products being overpriced to cover the cost of these very expensive ingredients, so you might as well buy the ones with rose in them.

The other thing is that Lush makes a lot of noise in their advertising about their ingredients list. Compare it to other soaps, they invite, you’ll be amazed, etc:

Snowcake

Ingredients:
Water (Aqua), Propylene Glycol, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Perfume, Sodium Stearate, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Titanium Dioxide, Benzoin Resinoid (Styrax Benzoin), Rose Absolute (Rosa centifolia), Cassie Absolute (Acacia farnesiana), Glycerine, Sodium Chloride, EDTA, Tetrasodium Editronate, Benzyl Benzoate.

Holy sodium lauryl sulfate, batman! That’s quite a list, isn’t it? Looks like there’s some palm oil deriviatives in there, as well as our old friend sodium lauryl sulfate, which hippies don’t like. So while I acknowledge that Lush do say “…see the difference between Lush soap and your average bar..” and I know they mean your average supermarket bar, it still makes me chortle. You can do way better at home, yourself, although you’ll have to live without the rose and jasmine absolutes.

While searching for marzipan scent (which I found! hurrah!), I saw someone looking for chardonnay flavour oil on a forum. Ew! What on earth could it be for? Lip balm? For that it’s-nine-o’clock-and-I’ve-already-had-a-drink scent and flavour?

Palm Oil Action

 

I’m getting up pretty early these days.

Which is good and bad: good because wow, look at how many more hours a day has when you wake up at five o’clock, and bad because wow, look at how many more hours a day has when you wake up at five o’clock.

I’m enjoying the early hours. I take the dog for a lurch around town, leaving an aural trail of wildly barking dogs behind us, make better breakfasts (today: banana smoothy, toasted tomato and cheese sandwiches), get in some hardcore internet trawling, do a little more housework. By afternoon, however, I’m falling asleep in front of the computer, but delighted to find myself tired at bedtime, instead of hitting some kind of nocturnal energy zone, able to power on, until I try to wake up the next day, exhausted and wan.

I have been making soap. I’m very boring about it. B will ask me what I’m thinking about, as I slump, expressionless, eyes unfocused, and what I’m thinking about is endless streams of “…so, infuse the sunflower oil with carrots, that should work, and I wonder if I should get some of that pumpkin seed butter, zomg, so awesome, and what else is orange?, maybe that’s enough orange, must get Beth’s juicer off her, and get my oils from the post office, is B going to the shops tonight? must have lanolin, vegetable oils are so mid ’90s, unless I can work out how to get that great marzipan fragrance….” and so on.

While searching for marzipan scents, I found this in a description of a perfume: an imaginary flower in the heart notes. The perfume in question is Kenzo Power, so I’ll be trying to nab a sample of that somewhere, but doesn’t it make you wonder? What would the imaginary flower in your heart note look like? Smell like?

 

Omnivore’s 100.

How the Omnivore’s 100 works:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.

2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.

3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

4) Optional: Post a comment at Very Good Taste, linking to your results.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes Rice is a fruit, right?
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries Even in the Sydney suburbs, you can find and eat wild blackberries.
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (But dang, that sounds tasty.)
31. Wasabi peas Never again.
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (Why don’t rose and mango flavour count?)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat Mongolian style!
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (Why would I? What an odd one.)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian Ok, it was durian icecream. Scary stuff. Delicious custard eaten on a hot day in a garbage dump.
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill On the other hand, maybe I would, if it was super fresh and I knew what it was. Maybe.
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (I would totally eat horse!)
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

 

Been a while, eh?

You know I have a list of blog quirks I hate, and posting either a) filler posts when you can’t be bothered to write anything, but feel you must, somehow, appease Your Public (usually pics of your kid doing something that you think is cute, or posting something apologetic) – to which I say, for dog’s sake, get a grip upon thyself, no-one cares that much, or b) breathy “I’m back!” posts, after your period of not caring to write anything because you can’t be bothered, or, worse, because you have an Exciting Project that you can’t write about (then why are you here? why bring it up?), when really? you were gone?

Both very annoying. I stopped myself – just barely – from a), but as you see, could not stop myself from b). Perhaps my terribly amusing little rant has distracted you, and you didn’t even notice, in which case, carry on, dear friend.

1) I’m back knitting my poor mother-out-law’s mittens, She’s going to Spain next month, so I feel I must finish them before then, because she’s walking a lot, I imagine there will be chilly mornings, and I do worry about her poor cold hands, all alone and misunderstood in rural Spain. They’re coming along. The problem is that I must actually concentrate while I knit, and I usually knit with one eye on a movie or something, and it isn’t helping. My oldest son is home sick-ish from school, so I think we will fire up the popcorn, and watch MirrorMask. I’ll try to knit. I have, on the other hand, completed a pair of mittens each for the small boys, and begun a half dozen silly projects for myself.

2) We’ve all had a nasty head, migrating to chest cold. The little boys brought it with them and we’re just finishing it up. It is the cold that wrote off the holidays, we were all too sick to go for walks or come up with thrilling holiday activities. Luckily, we all enjoy lounging around playing computer games.

3) Honey vs sugar. Which do you like? I used to be all honey, all the time, but I often find that buttery sort of honey flavour a bit too much in herbal tea, mostly because I tend to drink super delicious herbal tea (let me now urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to try Celestial Seasonings Black Cherry Berry. If you like cherry flavour, you will LOVE it). But honey of course is very nice on its own. In an attempt to not find myself after lunch, jangling and headachy from eleventy cups of tea, I’ve been drinking hot water, with a spoon of honey and a slice of lemon in it. Very pleasant. No jangling.

4) Lemons are good, aren’t they? I can’t grow them outside here, so I have a small one in a pot (which reminds me, I need to pot it up before spring – add to list of million pre-spring things I should do; I haven’t even done the pre-winter things I meant to). I used some in a marinade last night that was too lemony and not enough mustardy or soy saucy or something, in any case, not what I hoped for; and others in this lovely yoghurty cake which I’ve made with berries, but mostly I’m not so hot for cooked berries, altho it is very good with them, it is also quite wonderful without, especially warmly fragrant from the oven. Ingrid, that blog’s owner is in Switzerland, so I wonder if she used beet sugar in hers, and maybe that recipe would be a nice one for you, too?

5) I’ve been re-reading (and did you know, some people don’t re-read books? isn’t that odd?) Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire, and it’s an interesting read. I always do enjoy Brooks’ writing.

6) Not pregnant. Am constantly angry.

 

The Problem With Mohair.

I really love mohair, especially kid mohair, and especially when it is spun very fine and is like a whisper soft cobweb of warmth and softness. Often, mohair is spun with acrylic, which gives it a great deal of strength, but always seems to make the resulting yarn rather scratchy once knitted. On the skein, it’s very nice, like the skein of Sirdar Blur I bought last week which was like a lovely blue kitten until I swatched it, when suddenly it turned nasty, and just like the mohair blend yarn I bought last year, unwearable. The solution is to buy better quality yarns, ones that are spun with merino, or silk for strength. I have a skein of something mohairy by Anny Blatt floating around, which breaks every twenty centimetres or so: the only mohair yarn I have been completely happy with is Jo Sharp’s, and until now I’ve been hesitant to fork out the cash.

Craft was nice this week, if quiet: only two of us in attendance, I don’t know what happened to everyone else. Some crossed wireage, for the most part. Still, we had a nice time: lunch was very good, and the company delightful. I mean my friend, not that she found my company delightful. Although I really am rather delightful, when I make the effort.

I’m carefully not mentioning my bad news. I alluded faintly to my pregnancy in previous entries, but I have to now say that that pregnancy ended this week. We’re very sad, and rather battered, but we’ll be alright. I don’t think either of us are actually mourning a lost child, and really, I wasn’t very far along, certainly not time to attach our vague baby plans (some names, some knitting, ideas about a crib) to this actual pregnancy as an actual individual, but we did dream, gently, cautiously, about what this child might be like, when it would be born. Life goes on though.

 

Holy cow, Led Zeppelin rocks!

I came to this realisation later in life than most, and I blame the meatheaded boys I went to highschool with for poisoning the water, but now I have Led Zeppelin fever. I’m listening to Kashmir right now!

To answer your question, Ingrid, we do whatever we’re doing. We’ve done some talking about doing a bit of charity crafting, but for the most part, everyone brings whatever they’re working on, and we craft in close proximity, eat lunch, and natter. It’s very nice.

What I do is knit, of course, endless new projects that I flit to and from each week (last week: baby clothes; week before: mitten for Anne), except when I embroider, but I don’t have any embroidery on the go, because I am knititng for the baby! and no other project seems as appealing as nice little woolly things. Speaking of which, while I was buying yarn yesterday (which was way more fun than usual, because I have been on a poverty induced yarn diet) there was a chick in the store who was buying stuff to make cloths to wipe up baby vomit. Yes. No mother would spend hard won crafting time on such a thing, would she? Would she? I certainly didn’t. I bought new washers for this purpose, or cloth nappies if there was a lot to wipe, can you image edging something with ribbon, to wipe up the spew? And then she had the temerity to make snide comments about the yarn I was buying!

Craft last week was a bit on the dull side, to be frank, because we seem to be shedding members. Just three of us, and one of us is my friend I see a lot of already, the other is a noisy woman who is nice, but goodness, loud all the time and it’s wearing after a bit, and the other was me. And I have my moments, but really I’m looking to spend time with people I like and don’t always see. I sent off an email this morning to someone to find out if there’s a reason she hasn’t been coming: I suspect the noisy woman is part of the reason, which will suck, because once you start hinting to people they aren’t welcome, you might as well stop altogether. Lunch was dire, utterly flavourless pumpkin soup. Effie was on her way to a girls weekend showing dogs and eating too much, so we didn’t see too much of her, except to discover that she has nine basenjis and a pair of idiot foxhounds, And breeds pigs. Aren’t people endlessly interesting?

 

Happy Tuesday

This is going to be a bumper multi-media entry. You’d better go and make a cup of tea.

First up, this is what late Autumn misty mornings look like here (if you are at dog level in our back 1/3, looking east)(and are the husband, he who took this picture):
and this is the mitten I am currently knitting for one of my lovely mother-in-laws (the charmingly named Bird in Hand mitten)(very definitely worth two in the bush):

* Went to craft group on Friday at our new venue, the Other Pub (there are two, as well as a sports club, all serving alcohol and doing very nicely too, in this town with a population of 400. Do Australians have a problem with drinking? No mate, no trouble at all) where we had shepherds pie (delicious) and apple crumble (also delicious!) for dessert. Effie used the last of her own apples for the crumble and says that if we teach her to knit, she’ll teach us to shoot.

* Sometimes being pregnant is boring. I am about 9 weeks pregnant, and it is dull dull dull. Unlike thrillers and clever little entrees, pregnancy is better a bit boring, so I shouldn’t complain, but I wish I had something to talk about. The husband doesn’t wish to know the sex of the child, while I do, very much, as it will influence what I knit. This can’t end well.

*There is a mouse in the house. We’ve seen it a few times, and I can hear it now behind me, scruffling around. I am even more determined to cut holes in the floor so that the cats can access the upstairs (I miss kitties sleeping on the bed!) and avoid the dog, who cannot help but chase after them every single time he sees them. I’m not certain if he wants to eat them, or play, but they are having none of it, and hate him with a white hot passion.

* I made peanut butter cookies yesterday. They were delicious.

And I’m just uploading a funny little video, also taken by the husband, of a small and interesting frog. I’m uploading it to youtube, which is taking about ten zillion years, so while we’re waiting, maybe you can send me helpful thoughts to help me think of something to make for dinner to go beside little meatballs. Chips? Potato pancakes? We need easy, not drippy food that we can eat while slumped on the couch watching Lord of the Rings, on our inaugural Tuesday night movie night (because WoW goes down, and this is a nice chance for us to catch up on movies, which we all love, but mostly take too long for us country mice who must wake up at either 5, 6 or 6:30 am depending on day and person). Don’t movies sneak up on you? I have Beowulf and I Am Legend waiting downstairs for me, but I have Marie Antoinette on my mind, and will probably knit for the baby (I’m knitting this nice little kimono type thing, and can I add, if you are new to babies, that this shape is the easiest and quickest to get onto a baby, and very warm. Look for the ties relatively high on the chest like this one, not low, closer to the hem, for better staying on babyness. I had some French baby clothes for one of mine, and the underwear was all shaped like this, and so easy and wonderful I’m pining for it now. English and French babywear is the nicest, in my opinion)(Oh yes! I’m using some wool/silk stuff from NZ that is amazingly soft and smooth and squooshy) while I watch it and make notes for a review that I want to write.

~time passes~

Ugh. I’m going to publish this post and edit to add the video later, when it’s done uploading.