Yesterday.

How lovely to wake up to the sound of rain. It's pouring down now, though I can barely hear it over the slurping sound of my parched front garden gulping it down. If I was living in an animation, my garden would turn itself into one big straw or cup, just to make sure it gets every drop it can. I heard on the news a couple of days ago that this is the eleventh straight year of less than average rain fall. Isn't that incredible? And here was silly me, thinking that it was only seven.



Yesterday was a postless day here, which is unlike me, but I was so busy. Not with anything major, but it was my last day before work, and I was uncluttered by all of those oafish kids with their big feet and irrational demands for food at regular intervals. It's annoying. Anyone would think they were growing or something.


So on my own for the last day in a fortnight, I went out and watered the veggie garden, and picked my first zucchini for the year. Still no pumpkin flowers. (Apparently I've got to help the pumpkins have sex by fooling around with their flowers. It's a little intimidating. It's been so long since anyone in this house (namely me) did that activity that I'm worried I'll muck it up for the pumpkins. It'll be their first time. I want to make it special. Maybe I could download Rod Stewart's 'Tonight's the Night' and play it to them. Then at least they'll know my intentions were good.) Then I tied up the tomato plants (sounds a little kinky after all of that pumpkin flower talk, doesn't it?), and picked about 15 leeks to make room for some new tomato plants. It's going to be frozen bolognaise sauce city here in a few months when the tomatoes get into gear! It's the only way to survive a full time job. I need lots of precooked meals in the freezer. After yesterday there's now 3 more leek and potato soups in there. I also pulled out two silver beet plants, and made an impossible pie full of silverbeet for my lunches this week. The dog food also has heaps of it this time.



The rest of the day was filled with pottering. I did heaps of little jobs. I went to Spotlight to get some rudimentary sewing things. I have an old lady's sewing basket that came with the house, so I delved into the depths and came up with some wins. Cabling knitting needles for one. I was going to Spotlight to buy some, so that saved me some money. A stitch ripper. Heaps of old buttons... the list goes on. I went to Spotlight, and I was wandering around with my list of things to buy. That place is so big, and I didn't know where to go. I had a few things, but others were hiding. I paused by the counter, gazing aimlessly about.


"That's a big sigh," said a lady behind the counter. "Is anything wrong?"


How embarrassing. "I'm a bit out of my depth," I said.
I explained why and what I was there for, and she took me under her wing and showed me where everything was. She laughed when I said just how ignorant I was, and how I'll be turning up to the quilting class on Thursday (all different levels of experience) with my bits of material (oops. fabric) held out to them with no real idea of what to do next. I'm worried about cutting into my nice new fabrics. What if I get it wrong?

"They'll be lovely to you," she said. "Those sort of people are so into their quilting that they'll do anything to get you into it too."

It sounds like a cult. A quilting cult. I bought a couple of nice bits of fabric for my 'stash'. I assume I'll be expected to have one of those. All of the crafty bloggers rave on about their stash and what they've added to it. To curb any more cultishness I also bought a pair of rosewood knitting needles for my jumpers I 'll be knitting. The afghan is going to be put away till next year, and I'll make a start of something smaller.

Brennan starts his braces odyssey today. He gets the separaters in today. and after Year 7 Orientation Day tomorrow he'll go back and get the whole kit and caboodle in his face. Poor kid. Both glasses and braces. Hardly seems fair. I haven't heard anything from the orthodontist's office about any lack of payment, so I'm assuming Tony has finally come to the party and paid up. Otherwise I'll have to, so that dream of installing a roller skating rink in the back yard will have to go.....

Gifts for the street.

Here are the books I've ordered from the UK. I took them along to the Simple Savings meet up in Melbourne today, as a bit of a show and tell. It was nice to catch up with people from the Simple Savings forum, and put faces to names. Seeing as I log on every day to see what the discussions are covering, these women were like old friends. Actually... four of them are. We've met at previous get-togethers.

These books are great. I ordered 'The Gentle Art of Domesticity' after I discovered yarnstorm soon after I started blogging. (Look! I think I've learned how to link!!!! If it works... thanks lightening!)

I got hooked on the colours that she captures in her photography. Vivid, in your face colours. The book is lovely, the kind of book you should really dip in and out of. (Unlike me, who has to read a book cover to cover immediately.) It's fascinating to see the effect that the photos have on different people. Connor adores them, and he's been inspired to take the camera and experiment with all sorts of shots. Jordan, on the other hand, flipped through a few pages, then closed the book and said, "It's too bright. It's doing my head in. I think I prefer pastels..."

I've been inspired to take up quilting by seeing the things she's made, which leads me onto the other books. I've already whipped through the encyclopedia one, which has colour photos. 'Quilting for Dummies', on the other hand, is more my speed. It talks about needles, and thread, and how to thread a needle, etc. God help me when I finally get started. I doubt I'm going to set the quilting world on fire. Judith and Sylvia at the Simple Savings meet up were saying that I should start by quilting a knitting bag. I've had the same bag that Sally Went, the bully who made my life a misery in primary school for years, gave me when I was seven. She came to my party, proceeded to ignore me and made horrible comments to the other kids there. Mum told me years later that she wanted to throttle her. Still, at least I've made good use of the knitting bag. It looks a bit moth eaten and battered now. It has holes and bits are hanging off it, but my frugality kick is just about satisfied. Time for a new bag. But is a quilted knitting bag a bit weird?? (I don't want any other knitters to point their fingers and snicker at me. I don't know if my self-esteem is strong enough to take it....)

Look at this. Lovely, isn't it? It's sticking through my front fence. Last year I renovated the outside of the house by ripping off the hideous fake brick cladding, painting the weatherboards underneath and pulling down the brown brick front fence and putting up a tall picket fence. (Shutting out the world and making a haven for the boys and I after too many disappointing dates. I think by that stage I was up to about 80 or so.) There's 3 rose bushes on the fence line that were part of the original garden. Today I saw the flowers when I was waiting to pull into the driveway when I was coming home from the city. I should cut them and bring them inside, but I won't. They're my present of beauty to the street. They're close to the fence, so they're not likely to take the eyes from some unfortunate pedestrian who happens to walk past the house. They're just a simple thing of beauty.

A peaceful Sunday.

Look at what I made yesterday!! Along with everything else, I thought I'd try my hand at playing with food colourings. I made aqua icing. (4 drops blue, 2 drops red.) It sounds like a better idea than it turned out. It's not terrible, and it looks effective, but it reminds me of the aqua colour in toothpaste/gel combinations. (It could be a subtle reminder of what you should do after eating these. There's so much icing sugar in the icing that it turned my teeth on edge. But the kids are excited.) I had some white chocolate buds so I whacked one in the middle of each cake. They needed an extra something for pizzazz. So instead of biscuits, the kids get these for lunches and after school tomorrow. They're happy. Everyone loves a cupcake.

Then I went and picked the last cauliflower for dinner. Not a moment too soon. It had tall stalky lumpy bits growing out of the top of it. If it was in a shop you wouldn't go anywhere near the obviously mutant love-child of a caulie and a snail. But unfortunately this vegetable wasn't from a shop. I've nurtured that cauliflower. I've fertilised, watered and gotten (is that a word? getten? gooten?) up early to water it for too many times to let a few hideous growths stop me from eating it now. I remember the time Brennan and I realised that it was actually sprouting something we could eat. We jumped up and down. We squealed with joy. (Well... I did. He's nearly 13. He's too gruff and manly.) I've invested a lot in that bloody caulie. Hopes, dreams.... dare I say.... love.....

Plus the fact that it's sometimes a big pain in the proverbial to have a veggie garden. How many times have I dragged myself out of bed at 6am to water the damned thing? I wouldn't do it for flowers, that's for sure. Do you know how uncomfortable it is to have the water-logged hem of your bathrobe flapping around your ankles at that hour of the morning? Ankles aren't the most insulated part of the anatomy, and it's bloody nippy at that hour of the day. And sunburn. You go out to throw a spare cup of water on the leeks and you see weeds. An hour later you realise that yes it is a bit sunny and you're getting a beautiful cancerous glow. Nothing like a melanoma on the face to set off that gorgeous smile.

So that cauliflower was going to be ingested no matter what it looked like. Actually, here is what it looked like..

Yum Yum! The stalky things swivelled around to watch me as I walked up to it, but I didn't let that bother me. It's organic, so that means that everything about it is good. I yanked it up out of the ground and ignored the shriek as it twisted and writhed in my hands. I sprinkled salt on it and laughed as bubbles came out of it. The stalks waved frantically... I knew I couldn't let the torment continue. I am a pacifist, after all. So I banged its head against the ground until the tortured movements subsided. Oh the mighty hunter!

(Ok.... I'm going a bit mental here. I walked over, pulled it out of the ground and brought it inside. But imagine if all that stuff DID happen??? It'd be freaky as!)

I made the thickest cheese sauce you've ever seen, to disguise its lack of comeliness from the kids.

It went down a treat.

One really nice thing happened to end the weekend. Normally my boys travel round as a pack. They're here with me all together, they go to their Dad's all together, so they rarely have time apart. The Virgos were at Tony's this weekend, (that's boy 2 and boy 4 for the Astrologically uninitiated), while the Capricorns were with me. (I have 4 boys. You work out who the Cappies are.) When the boys came home after 'boys' weekend', it was lovely to see how pleased they were to see each other. Jack and Connor went out to play a game of cricket in the backyard, while the other two sat in the lounge room and chatted about stuff. I wonder sometimes how often the boys will choose to see each other once they've grown up and moved out (OH happy day!!!!) When little things like this happen it makes me optimistic. They like each other, and that's a good start.

Growing dinner.

Here's my answer to 'Yarnstorm". I may not have vivid colours on my walls and cupcakes, but by gum! the chard is doing well.

I don't know why I had children. This is the second day of no work on the novel. Jack decided that he needed the computer to write a song. He had his guitar and he'd noodle around on it, and then he'd whack it on a program he uploaded (that'll make the computer go even slower) and then tinker with it some more. After FOUR HOURS he was satisfied. I could've written 'War and Peace' by then. Still, I got more knitting done on the afghan (3 balls finished... 5 more to go. ) This rug is already covering my lap and is half-way down my shins. I'm not a particularly tall person. I'm thinking that this thing will be able to shelter a family of refugees and a ute when I'm done.

Before we went to Phuket I planted out 2 beds of potatoes that were sprouting. There were a fair few of them, so I went mental. I was jamming them in 1cm apart, saying "They'll be right." There are 2 beds of them, a small one (pictured) and one double the size. Yesterday I went to the grain store and bought 10 bags of mushroom compost to cover both sets of plants, so they'd grow lots and lots of lovely spuds. $45 worth of soil didn't even half cover the small bed. Here they are after the 'burying' has been done. Now I don't know about you, but I think that $45 can buy a fair few potatoes.... What's the point of spending buckets of money on compost when spuds aren't that expensive? So I've decided to ignore the huge bed of spuds, and go with what the little bed produces. What I really want to do is grow them in a container. No mess, no waste and easy peasy. I just have to find the right container. I want something that I can reuse every year. I hate having to redo a job.

Jordan's now hassling me about using the computer for his Science homework. I'm over having kids. Anyway, I have to go out to the garden and select a victim for the cauliflower cheese we're having. There's something deeply satisfying about growing your own food. It's a shame that it took me till I was now to discover it.

Productivity.

After I uploaded this I realised that I should've made this a LAAAAARRGE photo. The afghan (look, the afghan!) would look far more impressive. I've been knitting feverishly, and according to the pattern I'm a quarter of the way there. Yes, gentle readers, I've done four rows of squares. With very few mistakes, considering I've been knitting in front of the tv and blogs on the computer screen. But here's the thing.... how come in all of the knitting blogs I've wandered through, the people start a major project and then five minutes later post a picture saying "oh look. I've finished. And by the way, here's some shots of the forty-seven hats and scarves I completed while I was doing this major project. Just so I didn't get bored." How do they do it??? Do they have an extra pair of arms, so they can casually keep knitting while they're cooking dinner or driving to music lessons or working in the garden? Are they insomniacs, knitting quietly away in the dead of night by the dim glow of a night light? I wish I knew their secret. They're making me feel very inadequate.

Speaking of works in progress, look at this life sized portrait of a cauliflower I grew. I'm so excited. I bought a punnet each of cauliflower and brussels sprouts plants, and bunged them in at the end of winter. It was supposed to be too late to get anything from them, but I thought I'd do an experiment and just see. I was planning to pull them up this weekend, but when I was watering on Wednesday I saw two golf-ball sized caulies. I squealed and jumped for joy. Brennan came out (he's the other cauliflower and brussels sprouts lover in the family), and he said that he found them a couple of days ago, but decided not to tell me because he didn't want to spoil the surprise. What a sweetie. So we squealed and jumped up and down together. Nothing's happening with the brussels sprouts as far as I can tell, so they're living on borrowed time.


After lunch I'm popping on a sunhat and planting the seedlings I bought last weekend. They've been sitting in the laundry trough all week. Heaps of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis and lettuce. Mum noticed two of the tomato plants were optimistically putting out flowers, blissfully unaware of the bee-less state of the great indoors, so before school yesterday I raced out and put them next to the pigface so they could live it up. Yummy little yellow cherry tomatoes.

I take my history in novel form.

I wonder who was the twit who saw this pretty plant and said, "Let's call it Pigface." I've planted some along the side of the main veggie patch with the thought of pollination in mind, and I was appalled when Mum said that's what it was called. I suppose if you squint, stand on your head and look sideways at it then the flowers might appear to be pigs' snouts, but honestly I think there'd also have to be a major amount of chemicals running through your system at the same time. I really likes this plant, but now I've gone off it a bit. Maybe this proves that a rose by any other name DOESN"T smell as sweet.

I'll be writing more about books, after a fabulous comment I received on the last post. She reminded me about Jean Plaidy. Every Saturday morning I used to walk up to Highett library with one of those old lady wheely shopping carts filled with books and spend a halcyon hour or so browsing the shelves for my fix for the next week. Jean Plaidy was one of my favourite authors. Prolific! My God the woman could churn them out. She also wrote gothic romantic fiction under the name Victoria Holt and I sampled a few of them, but my true love was for her historical 'faction'. I learned so much history from reading her work, and I'm sure that she's coloured how I regard historical figures even today. Catherine de Medici, for example. The woman was a queen of France and poisoned people left right and centre. Towards the end of her life people got nervous if she looked at them for too long. Yet I regard her with a tinge of fondness. She had it tough when she was a girl....

Am I the only one who learned history through reading fiction? At school the only interesting year of history we did was in Year 7. Egypt, Rome, etc. Then for the next 5 years it was set down that we had to do Australian history. For the first couple of years it wasn't so bad. There's Ned Kelly, the Eureka stockade, explorers trudging off into the deserts and carking it, the gold rushes....
But we've only got about 200 years of history. There's only so much sensational things you can learn about before the mundane and dreary take over. (And yes I know the Aborigines have about 40,000 more, but they didn't write any of it down, and so we poor school kids were forced to learn about squatters and Federation year after year.) In my last year of high school I rebelled and ended up learning European history by correspondence. Yes, that was probably the extent of my teenage rebellion that year. I lived life on the edge, baby...

European history, even by correspondence was more interesting than sheep farmers and explorers dying in the desert (again). It was this subject that introduced me to Renaissance art. I still remember being blown away by the sculpture, the paintings and the absolute attention to detail. But the lesson content was still a bit dry, full of legislation for this and negotiations for that. I wanted Henry the eighth striding down a hallway in Hampton Court with his retinue around him. I wanted colour, movement and passion. In short... I wanted my historical novels.

I'm still a sucker for them.

The environment and Aldi

Apparently it's Blog Action Day today. I just found out five minutes ago. I feel compelled to take part, in case people who know about B.A.D read what I was going to write about and think I'm an ignorant pig for not writing about the planet and putting it first.

Growing a veggie garden in the middle of a drought is a pain. I wish I'd started years ago, when you could water every day if you wanted... hell, you could switch a sprinkler on, get into your bathers and run giggling through the water.... how easy would that have been? (By the way, the picture is not an exotic vegetable I'm growing. It's just a random one from the holiday.)

Water restrictions where I live (Melbourne, Australia) are the biggest pain. I live in an odd numbered house, so I can only water my garden on two days a week, those being Wednesday and Sunday. The evens have a different two days. You can only water in the morning up until 10am (I think), and the hose has to be one of those trigger nozzle ones, so not a drop is wasted. Our dams are only about 30% full (give or take a couple of percentage points), and this is in the middle of Spring, when usually we get LOTS of rain. So the situation looks pretty dire. In the country they're even worse off.... in some places they can't water outside AT ALL, so the choice is either shower with buckets, trudge out and hand water, or let the garden die.

We've been doing the bucketing off and on, but do you know how heavy a bucket of water is? And I don't have time in the mornings when we have our showers to get everyone organised AND trundle in and out to the garden with ten buckets of water. But if the drought gets worse I'm going to have to. My front garden has been left to the elements.... whatever survives survives. It's looking surprisingly good. By good luck, most of the plants I put in seem to be drought tolerant. They weren't selected for that seven or eight years ago... but it's worked out pretty well so far. It's the veggies in the back I worry about.

At the moment I'm growing potatoes, pumpkin, leeks, onions, lettuce, silver beet, spinach, rainbow chard, and a few brussels sprouts and cauliflowers that were put in too late and are probably going to go straight to seed. This is the second year I've tackled growing our own food. It's fantastic... the taste! the crunchiness! the unchemicalliness! There's nothing like seeing your son devour a home grown cucumber in one sitting that is as big as your arm. But the drought is a big fat pain.

Global warming? I don't know. What I do know is I want some rain water tanks and some bloody big storms to fill them....

Now that my bloggish civic duty is done.... (hopefully a few photos of Thai plants and a whinge about water counts),

we finally did the big Aldi shop yesterday. Whoopee! I'm stating here for the record that I adore Aldi. I like to take the whole family, because if the boys help we get in and out of there in a little over an hour. If I'm by myself it takes forever. We went in yesterday, and got two trolleys. Brennan drove one, and Jordan had the other. We filled those suckers to the brim. I bought 18 packets of bacon/ham bits, 20 tubs of margarine, a case of spaghetti (Only 49c a tin, so I don't mind if the boys use this sometimes as an after school snack), 20 packs of pasta, enough mince to make 16 meals @ 500g a meal, 8 kgs of rice, 8 tubes of toothpaste, 3 packets of dishwasher tablets, 10 packets of skim milk powder.... etc etc. You get the picture. When I go to Aldi I buy BULK!

I save a lot of money on my food bills by doing this. Two massive trolley loads, with things piled under the trolley as well as in it so high that Brennan could barely see over the top cost me $618.

The first time I shopped like this it took 8 weeks before I had to go back to Aldi again. In the meantime I had to pop into my local supermarket a few times to top up on fresh items and things Aldi don't sell, but my visits there dramatically decreased and so did my spending. The next time was twelve weeks between shops, and for interest's sake I kept a record of everything I spent on food. My weekly food bill (including wine, pet food, toiletries.... everything) averaged out to $118/week. Before I did this my food bills were anywhere from $160 - $240, depending on whether I bought meat. I was flabbergasted. (Never has my flabber been more gasted!!)

This time around, what with the holiday and all, I've pushed it back to 15 weeks. I haven't done the figures yet, but in any case I know that I'm saving heaps. I love having my pantry, fridge and freezer full. I feel like Ma Ingalls with all my preparations done for winter. (Actually, she would've had to bucket to water her veggie garden, so I should stop complaining....)

The kids are pleased. Now that there's 10 kilos of self raising flour in the house, they'll get cakes to eat after school again. Just got to make them first....

Sanitised potatoes.

Don't you love that overseas travel opens you up to new experiences??? This was in Bali, when all of us except Jack cuddled the snake at Tanah Lot. Hilarious video, especially Connor's face as the snake writhed around.

My Bali video has worked its magic again...

A couple of months ago, my friend Sandy came over on a Friday night after I'd dropped the boys off at their Dad's place. Well into the second bottle of champagne, after viewing the video, we hatched a plan to go to Bali in 2008...two families NOT joined at the hip, but meeting up for dinner, doing Waterbom Park together, etc. And now my sister and her girls are desperate to go to Bali next year after seeing the video. We all watched it again yesterday, and now the boys and I are all fired up for the next trip. (Finally! I was starting to think I'd never get excited about Phuket!)

It was funny, talking to my sister and showing her the vegie garden... SO not her bag! When she got here I was washing out some ziplock bags that the kids use for their lunches. They bring them home, I wash them, hang them on the line till they dry and then re-use, re-use, re-use. Good for the planet, and (over time) far cheaper to do this than continue to use Gladwrap.

Anyway, she came out with me when I was hanging them up, and said, "You know Frogdancer, this isn't normal."

I debated- what to say? Who wants to look cheap? So I simply said, "Yeah, but it's good for the planet." Which is true.

She said, "Yes, I know, but it still isn't normal."

Which is interesting, because her tone of voice would've made me stop doing it if I was at all worried about what other people think, but instead I started talking about the vegie garden.

I was showing her the little potato sprouts and she told me about when she was pulling up weeds in her new garden, and up came some little potatoes!

I said, "Did you cook them?"

She laughed and said, "NO! I threw them out."

I gasped, and she said, "I know! But you don't think that food comes out of the ground...."

I looked at her, and knew exactly what she was talking about. Food comes from the supermarket in shrink wrap. She threw out the potatoes because they were in the dirt, but would have no qualms buying brushed potatoes in a plastic bag. We laughed about it, because it's so true. We've been sanitised, homogenised and pasteurised... not just with milk but with everything.

But Guess What?? We were talking today and she said that I've rubbed off on her. She's bought a tomato plant!! This stuff is contagious.

Tony rang while I was writing this. He wants to take the kids out for lunch tomorrow, because he misses out on half his 'boys weekend' because of Phuket. He passed the phone to Vivienne, and we nattered away for nearly twenty minutes. It's so nice that he's chosen to marry someone who is down to earth and fun. The kids love her, and it's all good. Plus the boys look so good in the wedding photos (last year... they were the groomsmen), that I've got the photos up in my office. Bizarre, I know, especially to those who are still married, but it's far better than warfare.

Busy day today. I finished knitting a scarf, went to the bank and cleaned them out of Thai money... before you start thinking I'm a millionaire-they only had $200... and then I mowed the lawns and did the edges, unearthed the passports (the kids look so young!) and filled out various bits of paperwork. Booked the car into long-term parking, tried to have a nanna nap but was interrupted by some water guys wanting access to a watery-pipe thingy on the property, did three loads of washing and was filled with guilt because we should be packing, but we'll do that tomorrow..... the usual stuff when holidays are coming.

The good news is that I texted Pitsa in Phuket. She answered, and it's raining there, but the shopping is fine.