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!