Food glorious food

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It’s the end of #blogjune… Will I miss it? Yes and no – my daily brain strain will enjoy having a little holiday, but the commitment to write something every day has been a very useful exercise. Thank you to all the June-bloggers who posted and who read my posts. It’s been fun 🙂

Actual June also comes to an end today – and with it the third of the food-drives hosted by Menagerie10 (our place). Last December some friends and I decided to collect food to help out those less fortunate than us. Sharing some Christmas cheer by giving, rather than receiving, sounded like a good idea. So we agreed to each set aside one durable food item every day up until 19 December. Then DaughterDearest and I went out to delivered the boxes of food to the Foodbank and were given a little tour of the facility.

We were very impressed with the set up – and with the great work that Foodbank does right around Australia. So much so, that I decided to host four Foodbank food drives this year. I started a Facebook group and invited a few people to join in and commit to fighting hunger in Australia by donating a tin/container of food each week. The result was that I delivered 55kg of assorted comestibles to Foodbank at the end of March.

Foodbank delivery1_2016Today, Cassie-puppy accompanied me back out to Foodbank to deliver the group’s second care package of the year: this time 25kg of food, all most gratefully received and put into stock for distribution. Watching the forklift drive away with the boxes felt good. Good to know that my friends and family are prepared to to care about the homeless and needy – and to do something concrete and practical to help out. So, thanks everyone – I hope you all felt a little warm glow too 🙂

Foodbank deliiver_20160630

We have two more collections this year, one for delivery to Foodbank at the end of September and one just before Christmas. So if there’s anyone out there (in the Perth region) who’d care to donate to the next appeal, please let me know. This poster outlines the sorts of things that are most appropriate – please note: no glass or bottles.

foodbank poster

Amuragami experiment

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A friend’s baby turns one this weekend, so I thought I’d make a gift for him rather than buying one. I then spent many (!) minutes scrounging around on craft sites, knitting sites and pinterest, hunting for a simple project. As always, I found the sheer volume of ideas for make-and-do overwhelming and stalled out more several times. But in the end I came across some adorable little crocheted animals. It turns out that they’re called amuragmi – and they’re really cute.

This is about when I reminded myself that the last time I made soft toys I vowed to never do so again… but 2012 is a whilxmasknits_dec2012e ago now… and amuragami are quite small… and there are heaps of free patterns available on the internet…. and I managed to talk myself into giving it a go.

The only tricky part, really, is that I’m not really much of a crocheter. I have crochet hooks, but only because I inherited them. To date I’ve made a few granny squares (in the dim and distant past) and a pair of glovens (last week), so making a crocheted toy was an interesting decision. Nevertheless, I boldly chose a simple pattern for a roly poly cat, then set about a YouTube video to teach me how to make a magic loop – which is the first stage of the process.

A few binned attempts later I now have all the elements crocheted and final assembly has commenced. So far the critter doesn’t look a whole lot like a the pattern, but it is kinda cute and I think 1-year-olds tend not to be too judgey, so I’m hopeful it’ll do the trick. Next time a smaller hook size, perhaps, and finer yarn.

Roly Poly Cat - construction phase

Be your own first audience

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My parents read to me when I was little – which is probably where I learned to love stories. More than that, I learned to love the spoken word. I find a beautifully narrated story the most fabulous entertainment imaginable. The combination of a well modulated voice and a rousing tale is right there at the top of my ‘best things ever’ list 🙂

Fast forward to when I was at uni. There I noticed that academic prose tends to be littered with the sort of language that professors and tutors require – but which doesn’t make for easy narration. I chose to avoid that as far as possible, reading my essays and assignments out loud after writing them so that I could get a sense of how they sounded.  My goal? To achieve words that scan well and can be read out loud without awkward pauses. This often required cutting out unnecessary words and/or complex language in order to express my thoughts more efficiently.

I’d type and scribble – then read it all out loud – then tweak what I’d written until it sounds right. Then I’d do it all again. It made me think about what I’d written differently. Hearing the words gave them different meaning, helped me to understand my research differently and make linkages I might otherwise have missed.

My postgrad supervisors enjoyed this aspect of my monthly reporting. We’d all sit down and get the social niceties out of the way, then I’d ask them ‘Are you sitting comfortably…? Then let’s begin’.  Flipping open my journal, I’d read my report to them as a story – a compilation of my research activities, thoughts and analysis over the past month. And they’d sit back and enjoy it. Afterwards we’d have a discussion about the research, but no session was complete without story time. It was enormous fun and we all remembered a great deal more about the project from month to month than we might otherwise have done.

This way of being flowed through into how I structured my thesis and, later, my memoir. It’s how I choose to write (for fun and profit).  The dogs have never been much of an audience, really, but they’re very patient with my ramblings… Perhaps they know that as my own first audience I will also always be my harshest critic?OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Creative mundanity

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I’ve been thinking about creativity, about the creative activities I’m currently engaged in (writing, knitting, mosaic, rug making, cooking) and how much I enjoy them. The one thing they all have in common is that they each offer me the opportunity to do things differently. In every instance I can choose whether to follow a script / pattern, to use one as a guideline, or to create something from the ground up. Whichever option I choose, everything I make is new and different and hasn’t been made before – at least not by me.

On the other end of that scale is what I consider the least creative pastime imaginable: household 450px-Wooden_clothes_pinchores. Somehow floors always need vacuuming, beds making, laundry washing, loos cleaning (etc) – and it’s a little tricky to come up with new and exciting ways to get these done. Emptying the washing machine today, I remembered my mother-in-law once telling me how she used to look back at her washing line with pride. She said it pleased her to see how sparkly clean the washing was and how nice it all looked in colour-coordinated sections…

I was young and the best response I could muster at the time was a smile. Perhaps it was the only response possible in that situation. It probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to tell her that her comment made me feel sad for what I perceived as the narrowness of her life – or to tell her that my feeling on looking over my shoulder at a line of washing is generally just one of relief that it was done and hung out. Again.

But was Ma-in-law actually trying to teach me something? Could she have noticed something of my newly-stay-at-home-mum frustrations and been trying to help? Perhaps she was using the laundry as an example to show that one can take pride in doing the simplest and most mundane of tasks well – and that no task need be inherently objectionable, particularly if viewed pragmatically.

With hindsight – and the knowledge that she was an kind, intelligent and creative woman – I feel it likely that the laundry comment did indeed have some deeper meaning along those lines. It’s also probable that this and other subtly delivered messages from her over the years are an example of what is now referred to as intergenerational learning. I was very fortunate to have her in my life and feel quite sure that she helped me to understand that aspiring to do something well, no matter how insignificant or repetitive that thing may be, is worthwhile in its own right – and can even be fun 🙂

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Wooden_clothes_pin.JPG

 

The last of the winter harvest

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Yesterday I roasted the last of our sweet potato harvest to enjoy with our mid-winter feast. When we all sat down to consume vast quantities of vegetable soup, Moroccan lamb tagine, chicken in white wine sauce – and sweet potato, I was intrigued to discover that whilst most people there enjoy eating sweet potato, not many knew just how easy it is to grow.

To be honest, I didn’t either until relatively recently – but since then we’ve grown and harvested two very successful crops and haven’t looked back. As simple gardening goes, this is a real winner.

In short, sweet potato is easy to grow, provides an attractive ground cover relatively quickly, and makes a great substitute for potato and/or pumpkin for household consumption. The runners produce edible leaves, very tasty roots and, as a member of the morning glory family, also graces your garden with lovely blossoms.

450px-Ipomoea_batatas_002The plants grow best in a sunny position, but I’ve had reasonable success in semi-shade as well – so don’t let that put you off. There’s plenty of detailed information available on how and where to grow sweet potato, but it’s not even slightly tricky: cut the end off a sweet potato – plant it – water it – watch to see the shoots come up and spread – it’s like magic. Once you have established plants, you can take cuttings from those and plant them directly into the ground and watch them grow – more magic  🙂

We have a whole new crop planted in our verge garden and are looking forward to future garden bounty.

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Ipomoea batatas 002.JPG