Tagitude

Cristina over at Little Wilds has tagged me for one of them meme thingies -- it's very sweet of you, Cristina, especially since I've essentially dropped out of sight for the past month. So without further ado, here is step one:

1. Link back to the person who tagged you (done).
2. Mention the rules on your blog (in progress).
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours (see below).
4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking to them (am going to break this one because the only people I know who haven't already been tagged will just roll their eyes and move on).
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged bloggers' blogs letting them know they've been tagged (see above).
   

The problem with completing step 3 is: Quirks? What quirks? I have no quirks. I'm just normal, me. OTHER people have quirks. But if you really insist:

1. I have a hatred bordering on the pathological for the word "utilized".
2. When embarrassed, caught out or otherwise feeling on the spot I spend the next couple of minutes humming nonchalantly to myself (I only noticed this one recently).
3. I make my tick marks backwards - it's the only sensible option for the lefthanded.
4. I genuinely like Bollywood movie tunes. When news and talk radio is seriously getting me down - which rarely takes more than five minutes in the car - Radio Lotus always cheers me up.
5. When a rat runs over my foot I scoop it up and cuddle it instead of shrieking and jumping on a chair (this will not apply in the case of rats I don't actually own).
6. My earring collection spans 20 years, during many of which my fashion sense was, shall we say, broken. But I can't bring myself to get rid of any of them; not even the dayglo wooden fish.
   

So there you go. Thanks for helping me break the drought, Cristina!

Two ways to make your dog die of embarrassment

You can visit the Yuppy Puppy pet shop and buy her a tutu:

or a little playful fetish gear:

The images are taken with my phone camera so excuse the quality, but I didn't think anybody would believe me without photographic evidence. And they they thought *I* was odd going there to buy rat food.

First you get the pets, then you bury the pets

We have just buried poor little Sniffle Rat in the back garden:


I wish I knew exactly what had happened; JJ and a friend were playing with him this morning and somehow I think his little neck got broken. JJ came running into my office mid-phonecall shouting that he'd gone all floppy. She is devastated; this was her first pet and she called him "my little baby". I will miss him too, he was a spirited young rat. We will have to get a new companion for poor Doodles who has lost his playmate. Sigh.

The timing is strange: the girls were questioning their dad carefully in the bath last night about death, what it meant and whether we were going to die. This is the first time they have really thought about this: one of their friends, our neighbour, has just lost her dad very suddenly to cancer. Sekkie's nursery school teacher has very lovingly and beautifully created a space in which the three- and four-year-olds can process this -- they are having a special goodbye Festival today -- and she has warned us to expect questions and concerns. So I guess JJ has quite a lot to think about right now. After all the morning's trauma I have parked her in front of Fantasia with the friend, because sometimes escapism is right.

And then, just because life is like that, this is how beautiful the walk to school was this morning:

A rat in my kitchen

For months before her sixth birthday, JJ was clear that she wanted two things: A party at Jimmy Jungles indoor playground, and a pet. For those of you who have no idea what Jimmy Jungles might be, count yourselves lucky. The rest will agree with me that it is one of the least adult-friendly places on the planet; but the kids love it, so Jimmy Jungles it was. I slept 12 hours that night (possibly the pizza restaurant afterwards was a mistake).

As for the pet, JJ's parents had a dilemma: neither of us like dogs (too needy, all that poo to pick up or step in) and L is allergic to cats. So, after much research, we decided on a rat. Or actually a pair of rats, because apparently it has to be a pair, which we got from a breeder in town. Their pedigree names (yes, rats have pedigrees) are Sammael and Boegiboe; JJ promptly renamed them Sniffle and Doodles. Here are the boys:


Doodles is the younger, more nervous blonde; Sniffle is the older, more adventurous brunette. After two weeks we are all more or less used to each other and the boys are happy to climb all over us in a tickly sort of way provided we don't move too suddenly. This and small children is not always possible (funny, that) and occasionally they have to be moved away when the hordes descend; but at night when the kids are asleep it's actually quite sweet to sit and play with them.

Last night was L's night out and my night in, which I planned to spend sitting with the boys, having hot drinks and knitting and maybe reading a bit and getting to bed early. Hah! (she said bitterly). Sniffle got a little too adventurous and discovered the washing machine -- or, to be more precise, the space *behind* the washing machine -- and I spent an hour sitting on the (cold) kitchen floor trying to tempt him out with chocolate-coated peanuts and bits of marshmallow. So my cuddly night in was spent remonstrating with a rat. THIS is probably why some people choose to remain childless.

On the other hand, there is this:

Sekkie with flowers for her teacher on the last day of school; and this:

Winter colour on the way to school with JJ this morning.

As of today they are both on holiday. Wish me luck.

My favourite author bio, ever

From the back flap of a picture book called Hog-Eye we got from the library today:

"Susan Meddaugh, gorgeous and younger than you are, has won the Newbery, the Caldecott, a Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize for Literature, not to mention the Miss Teen America crown. She lives in Paris when she's not in Rome, with her twenty-three children all under the age of ten. A successful lawyer, she devotes her spare time to volunteer work for world peace, the Restore Wolves to the North Woods Foundation, and Free the Pigs. When she's not writing and illustrating children's books she is writing her dissertation for her Ph.D in Primatology.

And that's the truth.

Or is it?"

PS While looking for a site about her to link to, I stumbled on one called "unjobs.org". Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the "un-" stands for "United Nations". She strikes me as just the sort of person who'd be proud to have an unjob.

More reasons to knit

My mother-in-law found an English version of Lana Grossa's latest pattern magazine and showed it to me yesterday; I don't think I've stopped drooling yet. It is astonishing what good design can do for knitting; there just is no comparison between this stuff and the ten- or twenty-year-old plain vanilla sweater patterns commonly available. Having just completed my first voluntary knitting project in 30-odd years, is it too soon to try lace, do you think?

The tooth fairy has a lot to answer for

JJ's teacher called me from school yesterday to say my child had knocked her two top front teeth out on a see-saw; I arrived to find her sobbing in the teacher's lap, an ice-cube pressed to her gums and her two little teeth in an envelope. It wrings my heart just writing about it... she calmed down once I'd got her home and cuddled up on my bed with a few stories, but didn't want anybody to see her; she was worried that she looked awful and couldn't talk properly. The dentist helped a lot by showing her the x-ray on which the new teeth were clearly visible, just waiting to come out. And by giving her a balloon, which I followed up with a visit to the toy shop. So all in all she was feeling much better by bedtime, and even more so this morning when she found the Tooth Fairy's letter and double dose of coins. She actually *asked* to go to school, which doesn't happen much at the moment.

But. My poor baby is far less winsome than she was yesterday morning. A gangly kid with a huge gap in the front of her mouth who talks funny is, let's face it, far less appealing than her cherubic peers, and she is not going to find quite such easy acceptance from the world for a while. Maybe never again. Sekkie, meanwhile, is at the height of her three-year-old charm, able to melt hearts just by putting her little chin in her hands and looking at people. She has taken to bringing me rolled-out bits of paper wrapped in sticky tape and saying "Here mama, here's a sceletope for you." I sometimes wonder whether she gets the word wrong deliberately because she knows we think it's cute.

JJ has been concentrating her gift-giving on the fairies, with gratifying results (for her). The Sleep Fairy, who's made a reappearance in our lives, has been outfitted with an entire wardrobe made of tinfoil and left on the plants outside overnight: skirts, ponchos, shoes, hats, a wand cover and several purses. This means Dad and I have to remember to go outside every night and collect them, leaving appropriate thank-you notes behind. Being a fairy is hard work.

Exorcising Miss Armstrong

Miss Armstrong is the person who taught me how to knit, when I was seven and new in town. I was delivered to her class by the principal halfway through the school year, with the words "She's skipped a year, so she might be a bit slow." Off to a flying start, then, with suspicion and resentment on both sides, and things never really got any better. I remember her as small, blond, and sharp in all dimensions; my mother, with whom I checked this memory, says "She was a pretty little thing, but she shouldn't have been teaching little ones".

When it came time for our first needlework class, I didn't have any knitting to work on; and when I confessed that actually, I didn't know how to knit, Miss Armstrong was incredulous and angry in a "what's wrong with you?!?" sort of way. So she taught me how to knit, not in a manner which suggested this might ever be a fun thing to do -- and right-handed to boot, which for a very left-handed child didn't make things any easier. My first project, a purple square, finished as a lopsided purple rhomboid of sorts with a large hole in the middle. Our term project was to knit a toy; I spent weeks poring over magazine pictures of lovely and utterly unattainable knitted toys before resorting to my mother in tears at 6pm on the night before the project was due. We made a pink square, rolled it up and stuffed it, sewed two eyes on it and called it a worm (my mother still has it somewhere).

All of which goes some way towards explaining why I've always associated knitting with failure and incompetence on my part: "Oh, I can't knit". I made one oversized and never-worn fisherman's sweater when I was 14 and everyone was knitting, a baby jersey when I was pregnant with JJ and awash in hormones... and that's about it. Until now. Thanks to a lot of crocheting, Ravelry and the world of knit blogs, it has slowly dawned on me that this knitting business is worth another try. I realised it would be fun to experiment with a different kind of fabric to the one made by crochet, and even more fun to try combining both in the same project. It would be cool to learn some new stuff: circular needles? cabling? socks? lace? Mmm.

So, here is the first thing I have knit in 30 years without thinking "thank god I never have to do that again":


It's not perfect -- my measurement skills leave something to be desired so the two front panels came out slightly different lengths and they don't match up properly-- but there are no holes in it and all the bits fit together more or less as they should. I have (re)taught myself how to cast on with one needle, knit, purl, increase (two different ways) and decrease, cast off, pick up stitches to knit an edging and make buttonholes. I consider that a very satisfying learning curve (she said, smugly). Back to crochet next because I have some yarn left over and I really want to make the Boteh scarf, but consider me a convert.

A guerrilla gardening primer

I have been sucked into the publicity machine surrounding the release of the wonderful Richard Reynolds' new book On Guerrilla Gardening, and will be doing an interview with Jenny Crwys-Williams on 702 this afternoon. For those who are finding this blog via the show, there is regrettably little about guerrilla gardening on it (so far), but here are a few other resources to get you started:

• The Guerrilla Gardening Home Page.
• A fantastic guide to how to make your own seed bombs.
  
• The site for ActionQuest Atlanta, who made seed bombing one of their quests. This entire site is well worth an extended browse, and the idea is ripe for emulation
• Guerrilla gardening on YouTube, including a video guide to seed bombing.
  

PS "Guerrilla" is an awful word to spell.

Update: Just got a call to say they're postponing the segment to next week, which may mean never, but I'll leave this up in any case. Partly because that ActionQuest site is REALLY cool and demands your attention.

Time vortex

It's been a frenetic couple of weeks since that last update, including an intense three-day course, a holiday in Sedgefield interrupted by bits of work, and several flights to and from Johannesburg including one unplanned night in a hotel because I missed my flight due to the death of a dog (not mine). Last Wednesday, which was pretty much the last time I turned my computer on before the blessed four-day weekend, included a 6am flight for a 9am meeting in Joburg, then a lunchtime flight home for a 4pm meeting in Cape Town and finally a quick stop-off at the lovely Krishna's for takeaway food so I could feed the dinner guests due at 6:30. It's bizarre that two meetings can account for an entire (long) day; the rest of the time just gets sucked into that dead zone peculiar to aeroplane journeys.

On a less whiny note, I have been knitting! For the first time in 25 years or so, not counting the teeny sweater I made for JJ in some sort of hormonal nesting pregnant-type state. Next time, I shall reveal all about the exorcised ghost of Miss Armstrong...

Silvermine

Silvermine is an incredibly accessible bit of wildness not all that far from where I live, and yet I haven't been there for years. Big mistake, which I intend to make up for in future. My brother and I took our girls there on Saturday, on a misty moisty sort of afternoon which looked not promising at all, and turned out beautiful. I was amazed by the lush growth around the dam -- it was wiped out by a huge fire in early 2000 but it's come back with a vengeance, as fynbos is supposed to. This queen protea was the size of a large dinner plate:

In the category of general coolness, we found a golden orb spider with a freshly caught dragonfly, right by the path:

And just in case we forget how vulnerable all this would be to too-frequent fires, someone has left a reminder by the trail marker:

Finished objects, thick and fast

This is me completely and utterly surrendering to my deepest, darkest domestic instincts and making something for a friend's soon-to-be baby:

In the process I have discovered that baby stuff is incredibly satisfying to make: not only did I knock this off in a week thanks to four hours on a plane to Johannesburg and back, it also just feels very good to give away. The lace bit is from a vintage pattern here, the yoke from a more mundane but useful pattern here. There's a fresh outbreak of breeding frenzy among my friends and family so I get to make a few more of these in the near future.

In the long run, Vibracrete doesn't stand a chance

I don't like garden walls. I understand the need and the desire for them, but I still don't like them; I think they're ever so slightly antisocial. I like Vibracrete walls least of all because they're also ugly as all hell. But life always finds a way:


Provided the wall owner doesn't notice, which is entirely possible given that this bit of wall is around the corner from the garage door, come spring this wall will be a riot...

Last requests

"Mom! I want to be buried with my teddy."

"Ah... okay. Sure, that's fine. But go to sleep now, angel."

"My teddy AND my sticker book!"

"Uh-huh".

I'm beginning to regret that sticker book.

At last, a finished object

Actually there have been a few which I've not got around to photographing, but here is something that has been incubating for several months, a skirt for JJ:

I haven't blocked it yet or done the drawstring, hence her dodgy choice of belt, but she discovered it finished this morning and that was that. I'm quite proud of this :-) It was inspired by this dress a friend of hers wore to school last year:

Apparently this is Benetton but I couldn't find it anywhere on the web; whatever it is, it's gorgeous. I abandoned the dress idea when it became clear that it was a) going to be very heavy and b) take forever, but I think it works as a skirt. We do even possess shirts that match, although as far as JJ is concerned "they both have stripes" is matching.

Guerilla Gardening

Our neighbour's grenadilla vine has provided lots of good eating in the past few weeks, but we haven't got to all the fallen fruit in time. During this morning's cleaning binge (amazing what impending lunch with in-laws can do) I found a very wrinkly specimen lurking in the fruit bowl; on opening it turned out to be almost completely dried out and inedible. So the girls and I, armed with miniature yoghurt tubs full of seeds and pointy sticks for hole-digging, went to the neighbourhood park this afternoon and planted hopefully all the way along the fence. The park doesn't get watered so it's a long shot, but I'm hoping that a good wet winter and the natural resilience (weediness, even) of the grenadilla will see at least one or two vines snaking along the fence come next summer. We like the idea of providing free refreshments at the bus stop. Plus, the sheer gorgeous unlikeliness of the flowers demands that they be planted frequently:

Measuring out my life in tablespoons

Why do Americans insist on using such bizarre and arcane measurements in their recipes? I mean, ounces, for heaven's sake. But most of all, how the hell do you measure out butter by the tablespoon?

Shiny happy smiley

L discovered this relic of the past during a brief spurt of tidy-up activity last night. It's now JJ's new sticker album, hugged to her chest with every appearance of delight. Isn't it gorgeous? I always loved that kind of hair; and the trousers!

Symphony of musical beds

Illness and lost teeth lead to slightly needy children, which last night led to this circus which is best expressed graphically (sorry about the crappy graphic, too late to get the sizing right now):



Iterate the last frame several times as Sekkie moved back and forth trying to convince one or other of her parents that it was time to get up and read stories. *She* was able to sleep late; the rest of us were up specially early after Jess went to say good morning to her Dad and found the tooth fairy's letter. I am going to recaffeinate myself now...

Interesting questions posed by five-year-olds

JJ has a knack for framing acute and frequently challenging questions (this ability is of course unique to her alone and possessed by no other five-year-old ever). They range from the merely sweet:

"Mom, what's the difference between 'blah, blah, blah' and 'tra-la-la-la-la'"?

To the cosmological (and borderline incomprehensible):

"Mom, if the tooth fairy uses the teeth to build her castle or her house or whatever... then the old teeth will go all brown and rotten!"
"Yeah, that's why she's always collecting new ones."
"But.... at the end of the world, I mean when the world breaks into halves... or the world and the moon break into quarters... and there are no people any more... there will still be fairies..."

To the classical:

"Dad, where did the first person come from? 'Cos they didn't have a mummy or a daddy!"

To the painful:

"Why do all the brown people live in ugly houses?"

It's not easy to explain apartheid to a five-year-old.

Annals of parental mendacity Vol 17,856

So tonight, I got Sekkie to eat green beans by secretly inserting them into her penne pasta when she wasn't looking. She didn't notice a thing.

Putting me in my place

Over dinner this evening:

"Mama, you're the best cook in the world!"

"Ah, thank you JJ. That really makes me happy."

"But not the best mother."

"Oh. Hmm."

"'Cos sometimes you shout at me and you never come out of your office."

"But... [feebly] I DO come out of my office. I'm here more than Dad is."

"Yes, but he's the best daddy in the world."

If I didn't already have more usernames than I knew what to do with...

... I'd use the one JJ came up with today. Meet Thinkerbell:

That's her big sister Appleblossom at upper right. Both new additions to the family as a result of maternal sleeplessness and a moment of weakness at the nursery this morning when I was supposed to be buying new flowerpots.

And I know it's waaaay after Easter now, but I did sort of promise egg pictures, so here is Sekkie's egg tree from the lovely nursery school, with our more prosaic home-made one in the background:

And purely for the sake of random thingyness, here is JJ's "Three Two Blind Mice House". I'm not sure what the heart-shaped aerial is for; I think it's a consequence of having pipecleaners and lolly sticks and wondering what to do with them.

We were supposed to be going on a camping trip tomorrow but Sekkie has bronchitis & is a very unhappy pup; the prospect of four hours in the car for a one-night tent experience is not very appealing. So instead, given that both girls have been looking forward to this "little holiday" for days and have indeed had their bags (very idiosyncratically) packed since Wednesday, we are going to take them for breakfast somewhere near Stellenbosch and then a picnic in Jonkershoek. Or something.

Today is also our tenth wedding anniversary and what with bronchitis and three nights of crappy sleep I have been struggling to summon much enthusiasm for the occasion; however I see there is a new box of Lindor balls by my monitor, so things are looking up :-)

Mama, you're lying in my forest

Quite often when listening to pregnant-for-the-first-time friends detailing their plans I find myself thinking "should I tell them? Or is it kinder to let them enjoy the fantasy?" This usually happens in the context of supremely in-control people explaining how the baby really isn't going to change their lives that much, the child is going to fit in with them rather than the other way around, they will not change their habits, etc. etc. I usually resolve the dilemma by reminding myself that it wouldn't make any difference if I did tell them because they wouldn't believe me anyway. From *that* side of the parent-nonparent divide (I remember, having been there once) it's only the inexplicable spinelessness of some parents that leads to them being so in thrall to their offspring.

So there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't bother to communicate across the gulf; we just have to wait with tea and sympathy ready for the day they arrive all wide-eyed and gibbering on this side.

Not all the stuff we neglect to talk about is horrible, though. For some reason I hardly ever mention in public quite how delicious it can be to have my sleep disrupted at 5:30am by a wriggly three-year-old saying "cuddle me, Mama!", throwing her little arms around my neck and breathing loudly into my face. When did she get the "d" sound right and stop saying "cuggle"? I didn't notice... and part of the reason I don't mind being woken at 5:30 is that someday I'll realise it hasn't happened for a while and then I will miss it. Even now those fiercely possessive little cuddles don't last long before she's off on a new tangent. By 6am I was being ordered out of the middle of the bed -- "you lying in my forest!" -- so she could burrow down under the duvet and have a long conversation with the elves who apparently live somewhere near my feet.

Last Thursday night her big sister lost her first tooth and started on the final stage of the journey out of infancy. She's got so tall and skinny; she's still wearing trousers that fit her three years ago, except now they're very short and tend to fall off if she jumps up and down. I keep wishing I could fix them in time, just for a few moments to get a clear bearing, but they're always way ahead of me, accelerating. Sometime next week she'll start rolling her eyes at me and being embarrassed; in the meantime, I'll take every cuddle I can get.

Shock, horror, tartrazine!

I've been sadly neglecting this blog under the twin pressures of work and a new obsession with Twitter and a whole bunch of other social-media stuff (warning: don't go there). Every morning on the walk to school I think "Damn, I forgot the camera again!" -- usually shortly after "Aagh, we're going to be late again!". I think I made a resolution about not doing any of this, but it's not been massively successful so far.

Anyway, random surprise of my day yesterday: in the supermarket, stocking up on baking supplies and Easter eggs for the long weekend. I don't normally buy yellow sugar -- apparently it's used in pickles -- but was brought up short by this large announcement on the packet: "Now Tartrazine Free!" They put tartrazine? In sugar? Dear heavens above preserve us...

Stay tuned for pictures of Sekkie's Easter egg tree...

Reasons to be cheerful, part 4*

My Barberton daisy (gerbera to most people, I guess) has bloomed again, entirely without encouragement or prompting from me. These always remind me of my ouma, who had them in her garden when I was a very little girl; I was pleased when they suddenly became fashionable and available again.


*"Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3" is a song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads that's been popping into my head at inopportune moments for, oh, the past 20 years or so. Maybe this will exorcise it.

Scary book

JJ spent most of her day at school today making a Scary Book (her idea, apparently). The question for each page is "Are you scared of a......?" This one is my favourite:

This counts as her first book, I think. I know it's icky to gush over my kids, but I'm feeling gushy about this one.

Geeky book-person's laugh-out-loud of the evening

From the New York Times:

IN a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

“‘The Metamorphosis’ — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

“The story is true. Kafka simply wrote a completely verifiable, journalistic account of a neighbor by the name of Gregor Samsa who, because of some bizarre medical condition, turned into a ‘monstrous vermin.’ Kafka assured us that he’d made the whole thing up. We now know that to be completely false. The account is 100 percent true.”

In the wake of recent revelations concerning Margaret B. Jones’s memoir “Love and Consequences” and Misha Defonseca’s “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” the disclosure that Mr. Kafka’s work was based on reality has embarrassed editors and scholars.

Words and pictures good enough to eat

Library visits often deliver serendipity, and Saturday's delivery was more than usually pleasing. Here is The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers:


The illustrations are all mashed up from obsolete encyclopedias and discarded files and old school exercise books (you can practically smell them), painted on and reassembled into an utterly gorgeous book about books. I want to own this one, and everything else he's done.

Podcasts for kids

I've somewhat belatedly discovered the wonders of audio books, thanks to the actress Natasha Gostwick and Storynory, a source of free children's literature podcasts. Right now JJ is lying quietly on her bed (it's an insanely hot day and she had too little sleep last night) listening to Natasha read The Happy Prince; recently we've listened to the whole of Alice in Wonderland (unabridged) and the fact that Alice Through the Looking Glass is currently being released only one chapter a month is causing daily queries. There are over 100 stories on the site, some written by its founders but mostly classic fairy stories (Anderson, Perrault and the brothers Grimm all represented), Greek myths, a few animal stories, some Bible stories, etc.

My original intention of using the stories as a way to help JJ get to sleep has been undermined by the fact that she finds them utterly gripping and won't close her eyes until they're done; so we have to time things carefully. She speaks of Natasha quite familiarly and just staged a mock phone conversation : "Dear Natasha, thank you for reading us these lovely stories." I think I may have to email an audio file.

Making stuff

The girls made a lot of stuff last week. First JJ was inspired to make a supper of "an egg in a nest on a tree", so I set them to work making shortcrust pastry for the nests:

The pastry cases par-baked in muffin pans turned out delicious, but far too crumbly to survive rough handling, so we went back to JJ's original idea of making nests out of spaghetti:


The tomato fruits were my idea, the chive grass and parsley leaves were hers. The carrots are our default food-sculpture tool.

Then on Thursday she finished her bag at craft class:

And Sekkie made a tortoise:

This one is cute, its head emerges and retracts on a kebab stick which doubles as the tail. Sekkie loves it and has shown it to every visitor. Her nursery school is great for this sort of thing, she is now busy with a pompom and I am getting near-daily progress updates.

The best question I've been asked all year

On Sunday night I went to Talking Heads, an event which was part of the Spier Performing Arts Festival's infection of the city. Brett Bailey and Jay Pather found 40 interesting people who were experts in various fields, put them at tables in the Centre for the Book and randomly allocated them to 100 paying participants, two at a time for 20 minutes of conversation, four or five times over. A kind of speed dating with direction -- excellently curated and put together, and most of the speakers were well prepared. I was initially disappointed to see the laptops, notepads and other evidence of preparation -- I thought it would be more fun to chat at random -- but it turned out to be far more satisfying to engage with people around their real areas of expertise; things might have turned aimless otherwise.

My random draw pulled up Anne Schlebusch from the provincial department of education, Zayd Minty talking about Goemarati!, Annelie Rabie of Business Against Crime, and Dave Duarte, whom I'd been hoping to meet anyway, with a high-speed tour of the attention economy. The best question of the evening, though, came from Peter Becker, whose table I joined, also at random, when I should have been on a break (they didn't sell all 100 tickets --how sad is that?).

Anyway, this was his question: Imagine you're the victim of a freak medical accident which means you're going to live for a thousand years. Just you. How will that change what you do?

Think about it. It's a great question. We're all used to being challenged about what we'd do if we had only ten days or whatever left to live, but this one was new to me. Working on a time horizon of 1,000 years instead of a few months can make a dramatic difference.

And now, from the department of complete inconsistency:

I have just bribed my children with Happy Meals not to whine at me for going to gym. Do you think there might be a whiff of Irony(TM) in the air today?

Some days I can just *feel* myself turning into a stereotype

On this particular day, the stereotype is "self-righteous grow-your-own-yoghurt suburban killjoy mom from hell". You know the one, admit it. I very much don't want to be the stereotype; but at the same time, it really irks me (mild formulation) that some people think they're doing my children a favour by giving them big piles of this:


This is the fallout (quite possibly radioactive) from just two birthdays, both in the past week.

For the child-free among you, those soggy paper napkins full of leftover cake we used to take home from birthday parties in our own childhoods have now morphed into Party Packs. These are obligatory gifts for every child who attends your own child's party, and I am now discovering that some people think they're obligatory gifts for every kid in class as well. There's nothing inherently wrong with party packs: I actually quite enjoy making them, when I set myself the challenge of finding desirable gifts for 20 preschoolers at no more than R10 a child (Merry Pak is my friend, and did you ever notice how cheap made-in-China hairclips are?). Just stuffing a plastic bag full of highly refined sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, approved colourants and flavourings seems like a cop-out to me, but clearly I am swimming against the tide here.

I strongly suspect some people think I am depriving my kids of a vital childhood experience by whisking this loot off into a jar which is only taken down on special occasions. I disagree; I hope I'm doing them a favour by weakening the link between "treat" and "sweet".

Would serve me right if they both turn into raving sugar addicts the moment they get access to their own money, wouldn't it?

Johann Hari nails it on climate change consumerism

Johann Hari is a columnist for The Independent and a few other places. Today's piece on his website makes it clear why he's worth reading:

"...dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily."

Read it, and then go join something :-).

I have found the perfect bran muffin recipe

I broke my kitchen scale a while back and the ensuing baking deprivation finally led me to buy a new one this week (I had not realised quite how crippled a cook can be without a scale). Anyway, I celebrated the new addition by finally making the moist bran muffins by Wendy of A Wee Bit of Cooking that's been on my to-cook list for ages:


I like making these weeny-teeny muffins because it feels like less of an indulgence eating them, they're a better size for kids and -- in this case -- because the combination of oat bran and prunes could otherwise be Too Much Of a Good Thing, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I'm happy to report that her idea of moistening the muffins with pureed prunes instead of butter works a treat. It doesn't have that "I'm being virtuous by depriving myself of yumminess" taste, in fact the prunes add a tartness that's just right. I substituted oat bran for wheat bran because that's all they had in the shop and sunflower seeds for chopped walnuts because I can never find walnuts that aren't rancid, but neither seemed to have any deleterious effect. This goes straight to the "make often" pile.

This is how families get weird names for stuff

"Mama, please I have fire apple?"

"What?"

"Mama. Please I have FIRE APPLE???"

"I'm sorry baby, I don't know what you mean. What's a fire apple?"

"Up dere:"



Fire apples it is, then.

Short and Sweet, again

I've spent two months trying to find a pattern for a crochet cardigan/thing that will: a) not make me look like my granny; and b) not take forever to produce. I started on Lily Chin's Mesh Peplum Cardi-Blouse, but got cold feet over the granny-look possibilities -- even the gorgeous model didn't look quite right in it -- and frogged it. Then I considered Josi Hannon Madera's Raspberry Fizz but didn't feel like buying yet another pattern, and Autumn Spice from Crochet Me had something wrong with the neck. The Spiderweb cardigan from Interweave Crochet had too many holes, just like Doris Chan's black Sambuca jacket which used the wrong kind of yarn besides, and everything else I looked at just wasn't... quite... right.

So finally I am back at Angela Best's Short and Sweet jacket, which I made for my sister-in-law last year and am now reprising for myself. It's only half done and in desperate need of blocking, but so far, so good:


The stitch pattern looks super-impressive but it's quite simple once you get the hang of it. Really. And it works up nice and fast. Now let's just hope my disdain for gauge swatching doesn't come back to bite me.

Small mysteries

A couple of weeks into our walk-to-school routine I started to worry that our little urban environment was quite limited and we'd already started to exhaust its possibilities for discovery. Now I'm embarrassed to report that of course it was only my observational abilities that were limited; fortunately they're starting to improve with exercise.

For example, I've idly wondered in the past why I invariably see these two things lying together under the same tree:

They look completely different, right? So today I stopped to look a little more closely and discovered some intermediate steps:

My guess is that the unfertilized flowers end up as the puny relics at bottom right, while their cousins who get lucky grow into the fine fat seedpods above. Is there anybody out there with actual botanical knowledge who can confirm it for me?

It's going to be a scorcher

This was the view from my front door when I picked up the newspaper this morning:

Every now and then it's good to be reminded that things are beautiful. It's a perfect, perfect hot day, the doves are cooing in the neighbour's tree and the pool is finally clean so there will be swimming this afternoon.

That will compensate (a bit) for today's major stupid mistake: I made an enormous pot of chicken stock on Sunday night from four carcasses that had been waiting in the freezer, and left it on the stove yesterday thinking I would get new freezer bag thingies today. Idiot. Just threw the stock -- which had been wonderful, aromatic, plan-inspiring stuff -- down the outside drain while holding my nose. Grrr.

Button loot

So here is my button haul from Amsterdam, for those who've been wanting to know. The rest of you will cause no offence by moving on right now:

Looking at them all now I really *did* go a bit crazy, but I've seen the button selection on offer locally and I knew I might not get another chance like this for a loooong time. My favourites change from day to day; currently I'm really in love with the mottled grey and white ones, but the green mother-of-pearl flowers are close. And the brown horn buttons, the ones that aren't being made any more, are just fabulous in the flesh -- there's one at about 11 o'clock of the big blue mother of pearl, and another about 1 o'clock of that.

So guess what I'm taking with me next time I go yarn shopping?

UPDATE Feb 20: Aha! For once I am at one with the zeitgeist. Yarn Harlot just posted all about her granny's button box; I wonder which of these will end up being passed on to future generations?

Hallelujah!

My connectivity is restored, and my equilibrium with it. It has been quite sobering, actually, to realise the extent to which I simply cannot function without access to email, Google, and the vast time-devouring monster that is other people's blogs. Well okay, I can function without the blog-reading but things are much less fun.

I have been trying a gentle information diet which involves not checking ANYTHING including mail until noon each day, so that I can spend my most productive hours actually working rather than chasing very interesting ephemera. It has been difficult -- once or twice I've found myself clock-watching as noon approaches -- but nowhere near as difficult as spending three days entirely disconnected. So let's hope this was an isolated incident -- although I am nervous: my line went squiffy precisely as my neighbour's was fixed, and now that mine is fixed hers is squiffy again. Neither of us is amused. The next lovely Telkom technician to visit will be forced to check *both* our lines before we let him close the ticket.

PS I have a huge backlog of posts to make including a long-delayed tutorial for Cristina, some button pics for Meir Cats, and a plea for a local stitch group so we can (ahem) "take this offline" -- now that I'm back in blogspace again maybe some of them will actually happen. Those with an interest, please feel free to nag me.

Making my day

Jesse of Jezzeblog has very sweetly given me one of these:

Now, I'm a more or less complete novice at this bloggery business despite having intended to produce one since April 2000 or so (yep, I checked), so I'm going to confess to being completely delighted. Somebody loves me! Wheee! Thanks, Jesse. And because it's my first time, I'm going to follow all some of the rules, thus:

The award rules are:
1. Write a post with links to 5 blogs that make your day.
2. Acknowledge the post of the award giver.
3. Tell the award winners that they've won by commenting on their blogs.

So I'm passing it on to the following (and here's the part where I diverge from the rules because there are only 3 of them, but whose rules are they anyway, right?):

1. Extemporanea, because if there's a new post from her I always read it first. And for Dr Who fixes.

2. Grace of Bad Mom, Good Mom because she writes with such clarity and passion about things I care about and is supremely cool on top of it.

3. Stephany Aulenback of crooked house for being consistently fascinating and providing lots of gorgeous linkery.

There is a large load of angst to go along with this but I will refrain for the moment because this post has been queued for days thanks to Telkom's sabotage of my ADSL line, and it's time to get shot of it. I'm blogging from the public machine at the gym today (insert rolling of eyes here). I would say brace yourself for a Telkom rant but I'll save the banked-up frustration for someone who actually deserves it.

Losing all inhibitions in a foreign city

Apparently some people go to Amsterdam solely for the red light district and the coffee-less coffee shops. Neither of those particularly interest me, so I chose instead to completely lose it in the button shop. It turns out I have expensive taste in buttons: Thea the very sweet owner told me several of my choices are vintage and haven't been made in decades. I now have enough buttons to last me for several years, way past the end of my current Ravelry queue.

I also lost it to varying degrees, involving actual tears in one case, in the Anne Frank Museum, the Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmuseum. On the one hand this is slightly embarrassing; on the other hand, it is pleasing confirmation that I have not grown as coarse and cynical as I had feared. But then, who could possibly be cynical in the face of this?

If you click on the link they have a fabulous little animation window where you can get a close-up view of the actual canvas and brush strokes.

I'm going to Amsterdam next week!

I've never been to Amsterdam before :-). This trip is officially for work purposes and will involve a fairly intense two-day workshop, but thanks to heavily booked flights I get an extra day or so to myself. Van Gogh, I think... oh, and pancakes... and a LOT of window shopping. My credit card lacks elasticity after the lovely long holidays without any invoices going out, so the actual shopping will be somewhat curtailed. At any rate, that is my firm intention, but if I find any good yarn shops or crafty bookshops I doubt I'll be able to resist. Any ideas?

Also, note to self: no matter how much it seems like a good idea at the time, do not schedule a wax and a dental checkup for the same day.

Small humans are very strange

Especially around bedtime, when exhaustion starts to do to them what large quantities of alcohol typically do to adults. Sekkie, for example, has recently added a new quirk to the usual sleep-avoidance rituals of one last drink of water, one more visit to the toilet and one last thing to say to Dad: now we also have "just one fall out of bed, Mama you mustn't hold". Then she lines herself up carefully on the very edge of her bed and... falls out. Thud. Then she gets back in again, and a few more tosses and turns later is fast asleep.

That's always assuming, of course, that her big sister in the top bunk doesn't suddenly burst into loud song as she did tonight: "OOOOHHHHH, the big brown bear is a bouncy, bouncy, bear!!!" With appropriate bouncing actions.

This is one of those times when parents congratulate themselves for not actually physically assaulting their children. Then, half an hour later when they go in and get all sentimental about the beauty of a sleeping child, they really, truly appreciate quite how beautiful it is.

Embarrassment

The electricity just cut out while I was in mid-sentence, which I assumed was my first daily share of the load-shedding burden. I cursed Eskom, the government and the Council's inability to stick to its own schedule and went to turn off the mains against power surges -- only to discover that I had, in fact, forgotten to check the meter and we'd simply run out of units. Oops. Thank goodness for SMS electricity purchases.

Walking to school

OK, no more angst for a bit, I promise.

I once watched a documentary about Freya Stark, a personal heroine who for some reason is pretty much ignored nowadays, in which she undertook a fairly strenuous walking tour of the Himalayas deep into her eighties. She said that landscapes unfold themselves most perfectly when seen at walking pace and you're able to take it all in*. Walking to school with the girls this week has confirmed that yet again; I hadn't realised quite how much I was going enjoy it.

Part of it is what we get to see: the mountain and its clouds, the moon, all the berries and leaves and seed pods and flowers (at the moment hibiscus, frangipani, roses, dandelions), the bugs (there was a pair of mating butterflies on the pavement on Monday), smashed birds' eggs and tiny skeletons, our neighbours, many varieties of wall and hedge and sometimes the utterly inexplicable: why do the people around the corner have seven palm-sized moulded hearts, all painted different colours, fixed to the top of their fence?

I wouldn't see a tenth of all this from a car. More importantly, I wouldn't be able to pick anything up or point to it or talk about it. I reckon my most commonly uttered words in the car have got to be "I can't turn around to look right now, I'm driving!". No such excuses when we're walking: we stop, often. We look at things carefully, we talk about them, we pick the flowers, we collect the interesting seed pods and we even, amazingly, sometimes talk to people on the street!

All this has also, incidentally, reminded me how antisocial high walls are. The people who have fences or hedges not only provide a much nicer bit of pavement to walk along, we're far more likely to know who they are.

*Except of course she actually said something far more lyrical and elegant to the same effect, which I can't remember.

Constantly confronting other people's need

I once, rather foolishly, bought a couple of home-made candles from a man called Anthony* who was hawking them around the neighbourhood. It was foolish not only because I didn't really need or want the candles (they got sent to a charity shop in the end), but also because I am now marked as a soft touch, and get asked to buy more candles every couple of months.

Normally I send him away as politely as possible, but today he turned up saying his daughters weren't attending school because they didn't have the right shoes or shirts. Now, school started last Wednesday; those kids should be there. So I offered to buy the shirts and shoes, he passed the first bullshit test by actually telling me their sizes and I duly went to buy them this afternoon. He didn't turn up on time to collect them, but perhaps he will tomorrow. I hope so.

It was a simple enough interaction, but it catapulted me straight back into the vortex of living-in-SA that I've been on holiday from, along with everything else. Anybody who's been stung by street cons will recognise the flood of conflicting thoughts and impulses: "Oh no, what does he want now... school shoes? that's a new one... wait, how can a kid be turned away from school because she doesn't have shoes? That's outrageous... is he making it up? How do I check? What's the name of the school? What are the names of his daughters?... He doesn't want money? Maybe it's for real this time... or maybe he'll just sell the shoes. Oh, I'm a horrible person for even thinking that."

Round and round, in several iterations, with everyone who comes to the door. Most of the time now I don't open it, but every now and then I'm shamed into doing so (and before anyone asks, yes I have a security barrier. I learned that the hard way).

There's a slightly different version with the men selling beautiful beadwork I also don't need at the traffic lights: "Oh, that's lovely. But I don't need one. No More Stuff, remember? But it could be his family's dinner for the day... but if I stop I'll have to fend off 20 people... whoops, no, I'm not really looking. I can't really see you, I'm paying attention to my children here. Sorry. I'm a nice person really, I promise. But I'm not rolling the window down. I'm just going to shrug apologetically and pretend this isn't happening until the lights turn..."

(I wonder what the interior monologue is on the other side of the window? I fear I look nothing but contemptible from there).

Is there any way of dealing with this that is both prudent and doesn't make me feel morally sleazy? If anybody has found one, please tell me.

I spoke to one person whose coping mechanism is to tell himself something along the lines of "The Universe has this all worked out, so if you're there it's obviously because you *chose* to be there, so it's really not my problem, have a nice day".

Unfortunately for me I think this is rubbish, so I'm left with the same old options: 1) Pretend this person who needs something from me doesn't exist. 2) Acknowledge his existence -- "yes, hi, I see you there" -- and leave it there. 3) Buy something/give him money and hope he'll go away. 4). Invite him in, offer food and drink, hear his life story, adopt his family, transform their lives.

1 is mean and cold and life-denying. I try very hard to avoid 1. Mostly I vacillate between 2 and 3, both of them half-assed ambivalent fence-setting cowardly sorts of responses. 4 of course is the ideal-world option, the noble course of action approved by all fairytales and religious texts, but in *this* world I just can't go there. And not just because of perfectly legitimate safety concerns, either -- the thing is, why *this* person? Why not that one too, and the next one, and what about the hundred after that? I think of how much need there is, not in the world but just in my little inward-looking corner of it, and I feel all small and helpless and go to make tea.

And of course every single one of these interactions, several times a day, comes overburdened with a terrible weight of History, so that nothing is simple or transparent or quite what it appears to be. Some days I feel we're all just ciphers, really; or we behave as if we are. We assume a single glance tells us everything there is to know about each other and play out our roles accordingly, but it's not very satisfying.

I'm going on too long. I shall go and re-read Shikasta, or something.


*His real name isn't Anthony, of course, but he obviously pegged me as "white lady who won't bother trying to pronounce my real name", so I get the English version.

I have been lucky so far to escape the current round of power outages, but they've certainly resharpened my focus on how to reduce my consumption of just about everything as much as possible. I've ticked all the easy boxes so far: I recycle everything I can, the kitchen scraps get fed to the lovely worms, most of our fruit and veg comes delivered every Thursday by the nice organic people from Robertson and I'm growing my own tomatoes in my teeny garden this year. We're also fortunate to live in a climate that requires neither heating nor air conditioning (although we'd probably be more comfortable with better insulation).

Now, though, I'm down to the more intractable stuff:

1. The swimming pool uses lots of both water and power -- it's a very small one, more a splash pond than anything, but still. It consumes. Can't see us giving it up, though, especially having seen how many happy hours the kids can spend in it while I get on with stuff. So, rainwater collection tanks are on the shopping list. Apparently there is now a rectangular variety available which we'll actually be able to fit neatly into our available space.
   
2. A grey water system for the garden is the next logical step. I'm afraid of how much it will cost but I haven't actually done the research yet, so a call to Water Rhapsody goes next on my list.
3. Then we should get a solar water heater -- but again, they cost a lot of money. With any luck Eskom will do another round of subsidies this year, and we'll get in before they all run out this time.
4. But I really can't see us doing without two cars, and there is my major source of late-night guilt. The kids are now both at schools within walking distance so that helps, but for everything else I can't see an alternative to the Toyota. I work from home so there's no daily commute, but the errands! If I was very brave and very fit I'd do a lot of them by bicycle, but Cape Town traffic is NOT sympathetic to cyclists. As in, people die. Which I'd obviously rather not. However, there is at least one proper cycle path under construction, so here is a promise myself to at least try that.
   
5. I hardly ever buy red meat, but we still eat a fair amount of (free range) chicken and ostrich. And eggs. I need more practice in cooking without animal proteins.
   

All of this is kinda sorta leading up to a good set of Groundhog Day resolutions -- I like the idea of skipping New Year and spending the first post-holiday time just thinking carefully about stuff. Things are starting to crystallise.

Random acts of feminism

I love this article in the Guardian suggesting random acts of feminism as a counter to the relentless persistence of misogyny in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I particularly like the idea of delivering subversive reading material to the doctor's waiting room. Now I have a new excuse to go trawling through second-hand bookshops!

One more thing I never thought I'd do

Sometimes I think my life is just one long lesson in never saying "never". I never, for example, ever ever imagined I would crochet a dishcloth. Not so long ago I would have sniggered at the very thought. And yet here I am, having an indecent amount of yarny fun producing stuff like this:

I think this is now my eighth dishcloth (or is ninth? I made some as gifts and didn't get them finished in time to photograph). Mostly it's been just me and a little stitch dictionary and bits of leftover yarn and Doctor Who or something similarly entertaining. I love doing these. They're fast and they give me just enough practice to perfect a new stitch but not enough to get boring. There are only so many dishcloths a family can use, however, and I'm running out of people to give them to, so if anybody wants a long-lasting, environment friendly, handmade thingy to scrub their pots with, let me know.

The joys of springcleaning

Once upon a time, long, long ago in the days when the world was innocent enough to allow hitch-hiking and Zimbabwe exported things other than large-scale human misery, my friend Caroline and I spent a few happy weeks there doing... well, nothing in particular. The photographs were lost years ago, but one of the many joys of springcleaning is discovering forgotten treasures hidden away in cupboards I've been too scared to look in the eye for months. Years, even. So I was pleased to rediscover this beauty, which I dimly recall buying in Bulawayo:

I actually *wore* this one:

Which may go some way towards explaining these:

Yep, I actually wore those. In public. Many times even, if the fading is any guide (can you imagine what they looked like *before* the fading?). I always disclaimed being a hippy but my goodness, the evidence is not in my favour. Take this psychedelic number I bought a few years later in Tanzania in a fit of slightly misguided enthusiasm and have never actually used:

My brother says the central bit looks a bit too fangy for comfort. I never saw it before, but he's right.

Abject maternal surrender

I have spent the whole of this week being maternal and house-keepery, in a frenzy of New Year springcleaning which has so far dealt with about half the accumulated clutter of the past year or so. At this point only my desk remains a sea of unfiled papers, unsorted bills, lost stationery, must-remember-this-person business cards and orphan post-it notes. I had a precious two hours this morning to get some actual paying work done and I spent ten minutes of it searching for my notebook, which turned up next to my bed under two half-read novels and an unstarted climate change horrorfest. So what I *should* be doing right now is piling into said desk with a black bin bag and a ruthless mind, while the children drool absently in front of Jay Jay the Jet Plane, which I agreed to rent in a moment of weakness (it's too hot even to swim and tempers are fraying). What I *will* be doing, however, is sitting next to the children with a cup of tea and my attempt at Lily Chin's mesh peplum cardi-blouse in a lovely mossy grey-green bamboo yarn. I am afraid this may turn out horribly grannyish, but it is worth a try. I will also daydream about how absolutely wonderful it is going to be when my nanny gets back on Monday...

Happy 2008

I am a dedicated New Year Scrooge and had committed myself to being well asleep by midnight tonight, after a lovely leisurely afternoon and supper with similarly minded friends (or if not similarly minded, at least sufficiently exhausted by pregnancy and newborn respectively to appreciate an early night). My neighbours, however, are equally dedicated party animals -- and I'm not quite Scroogey enough to resent a New Year's Eve party, so here I am awake, and making blogging my first act of the year.

My long absence since that last jammy post on December 11 can be put down to a combination of children's entertainment, holiday brain and frenzied last minute gift-making, including more additional pots of jam than I can count at this point. Suffice it to say I got through seven kilograms of sugar, gave two varieties of jam to everyone and still have seven jars left in the cupboard to gloat over. I also did a lot of crochet-y and sewing-y things all of which I neglected to photograph in the rush, so they're rather blurry in my memory at this point. The holiday brain doesn't help. In South Africa, for those not in the know, we have four public holidays between December 16 and January 1, with the Western Cape throwing in January 2 for good measure. All this at the height of summer, so more or less everyone shuts up shop and heads for the hills. Or beaches, mostly. It's silly season with an extra twist of lemon and a party hat on top (American readers are encouraged to imagine Christmas and Thanksgiving falling within ten days of each other in July).

So anyway, that's where I've been: out, or in the pool. Insert spacey relaxed sort of smile here. More to come when we head to the beach ourselves for the rest of the week, and then I suppose sometime after that I will have to tidy my desk, pay the bills which I know are lurking in there under piles of discarded wrapping paper and children's drawings, and get some sort of work going. In the meantime, Happy 2008!