Salt and corrosion

Winter has properly started and it looks it. Winter here isn't like Christmas card winter, all white and glittering. It's green and brown and smudgy grey.

There was a story on the news tonight about the winter solstice swim in Hobart, much, much further south than here. Two thousand people swimming nude to celebrate the winter, including one lady who is 92. I hope I'm that spry at her age, even if I give the nude swimming a miss.

I started knitting my cowl this afternoon. When I was little, watching my grandmother knit, I would dig in her knitting bag — turquoise with a jacquard print and white trim — and find some spare needles and a little ball of wall and knit along. I could do a loop to get started, but then it was more like tossing noodles with chopsticks, with me waving the needles and wrapping wool around them and being baffled that I didn't have anything that looked like her knitting.

That's what I felt like again today, following the provisional cast-on, new to me, specified by the pattern. I had my ball of wool. I had my waste ball of wool. I had one needle. I twiddled that needle under the wool and over the waste and under the wool. I had... nothing like a stitch that could be knitted. It took ages and several YouTube videos to get it done. All that effort for only fifty-four stitches.

I have now knitted two rows.

I knitted a jumper last year. Finished on the very last day of December. Sort of. I knitted it the correct length as per the pattern, but on me it's too short and I don't care for it. Fortunately, it was knitted top-down and I have enough wool left to pull the band out and knit another repeat of the cable pattern. Unfortunately, that requires me working up the nerve to pull the band out. The nerve and the energy, both, neither of which I have just now, even though I would really like the jumper to wear over winter.

So obviously, I've just bought the wool to knit myself a new winter cowl (the short version, in blue) instead.

This is a parrot autumn. This is the first year the young flowing eucalypts at the end of my street have flowered, and with the nuts have come the parrots. Red ones, green ones. They stop in my garden for water. So that's nice. A change from sparrows.

in other wildlife news, I have a tiny money spider living in my car's wing mirror. I see it running across the mirror when I'm driving. My well-travelled little friend.

My quiz team tied (with a team called Quislamic State) for first place this week, but were beaten in the tie break. But they'd already announced second place, so we were... first-and-a-halfth?

I have been slowly plugging away at my knitting. ( Update )

I meant to take a photo of my raspberry pavlova wreath, but didn't get time on Friday. This is all that was left on Saturday:



It was good. And it made quite an impression, especially considering it's a regular pavlova with spoonfuls blobbed on the tray in a ring shape.

I was supposed to crush some freeze-dried raspberries so as to dust it with hot pink powder, but Pronto Fine Food Merchants (the City by the Sea's number one delicatessen) didn't have freeze-dried raspberries. They had freeze-dried everything else, though, even bananas. I ask you, f-list. Who wants freeze-dried bananas rather than raspberries? No-one at all, that's who. Anyway, after some deliberation, I bought freeze-dried peaches and made a pale pink powder, and you know what? Whole or crushed, they are delicious. I am going to buy some more and break them into my next batch of trail mix.

I also made some spiced walnuts, which required coconut oil, and now I've got most of a jar of the stuff left. What to do with it? I found a coconut oil cookbook in the library when I was returning my mother's books yesterday. It says you can substitute coconut oil anywhere you would normally use oil or butter, then proceeds to give recipes for coffee (one espresso shot, coconut oil and butter) and porridge (oats and coconut oil), two things that no-one adds oil or butter to. Or maybe everyone does and I've been making them wrong all these years.

Weekly knitting update: ( A bit )

I started the next part of my knitting last night. Knit, purl, purl, knit, and so on, only to realise that I'd made a mistake somewhere in the increasing. Fortunately I only started with four stitches and had gradually increased up to sixteen, so it wasn't too much of a burden to pull it out and start again. Part of the problem, I think, was that the knitting is on circular needles, as it will eventually have hundreds of stitches, but with just the four stitches the cord was getting tangled. Easily fixed, that: I dug out a pair of straight needles and knitted on them.



My grandmother taught me to knit on these straight needles. She called them her Shellonite needles. I've just googled that, and it was an Australian brand between the 1910s and 1940s. The needles are tortoise shell. (False, I hope. Actually: false, I expect, as the -ite ending makes me think it's something like Bakelite.) They are pretty and slippery and they knit beautifully. There used to be lots of them, a pair in every size, many bowed with age, and as they broke, she would snap them to size to use as cable needles.

My grandmother told me not to lick them as she knew a little girl who licked knitting needles and she DIED OF POISON. She and my mother both knew little girls who used someone else's pierced earrings who DIED OF HEPATITIS. My grandmother also knew a little girl who stuck her hand in a log where a snake was sleeping, and you'll never guess what happened to her. She DIED OF SNAKE BITE. Truly, my grandmother had a story for every occasion about a little girl who died tragically. Possibly, like Kenny from South Park, it was the same little girl every time. Perhaps, in a metaphorical sense, it was me. A harsh fate for someone who just wanted to lick a pretty, shiny knitting needle.

This morning my mother and I went for our usual weekend walk along the beach path. We do a circuit from the surf club car park along the beach front to the breakwater, then back along the road to the car park. This morning we returned to the car park to find the monthly farmers' market had set up while we were gone. So we wandered through that to the artisanal baker, and headed home with a sourdough cob for lunch and some almond croissants for breakfast. A good morning's work there.

Weekly knitting update: ( First part finished )

This week, I bought a new doormat. My thrilling life. I went to Clark Rubber ("Everything pools, foam and rubber!"). It's an odd sort of shop, that. It's a big, concrete-floored space, with metal shelves full of practical things like caravan mattresses and pool hoses. Utilitarian rather than decorative. But they also sell pool toys, so the first thing you see when you go in is a giant inflatable peacock. As in, already inflated, to greet you at the door. So that's a bit of fun. (The giant gold swan on that same page was also lurking about at the end of an aisle, although not the giant rainbow unicorn, sadly.)

This is back to keep me honest: ( Weekly knitting update )

Weekly update

1. An actual paragraph I had to read this week

The circumstances in which most businesses today find themselves are complex, dynamic and uncertain. These circumstances can be usefully conceptualised using an integrated systemic complexity perspective where macro-scale bundles of contextual influences can be successively unpacked into micro-scale dense networks of complexly interacting, mutually influencing and multiple causally-ambiguous considerations.

Okay then.

2. Bathroom renovations

The solicitors have been faffing about with John's will, but my mother has now received her share of his estate. She and one of his sons were the executors, not that they had to do much. The solicitors did everything, very slowly. John's other two children, who live interstate and rarely visited or called him, have been champing at the bit to get their share. They've been calling their brother, the other executor, weekly to find out where it is, because one of them needs it to pay for a second house he's already started building and the other wants to buy a new caravan. I'd be more sympathetic if they needed it to get by, but they're just coming off as greedy and selfish. But I won't have to have anything to do with them once all this is finalised, so... I guess they can go on being greedy and selfish. I won't see it.

Anyway, the money has been released, so my mother's plans for renovating the bathroom are finally afoot. After playing with the manufacturer's website visualiser, her current favourite is a 1200mm Eden vanity in a Chalky Teak or Charred Oak finish, but not with black handles or taps. Black fittings are right out. For now. She has a week or so before she orders things, so it may change.

Weekly Masterchef update
- Your pannacotta was too grainy and you've... taken your parsnip too far.
- Your presentation was a fail and your parsnip... was too chewy. [NB: This wasn't the same dish as the above.]
- Your duck was inconsistently cooked and that skin... wasn't crisp.
- Your marron was cooked beautifully... but your couscous wasn't, and where was the ras el hanout?

Weekly knitting update
This week I bought some buttons.

I am so close to finishing this cardigan, I spent a happy evening not sewing on buttons and looking at patterns on Ravelry, thinking about what to knit next, when Old Ma Killjoy on the sofa said, "Did you ever finish those mittens?" Oh. No, I didn't. I put that knitting project away to teach it a lesson. It knows what it did. I suppose I should finish it. I think there was about a mitten and a quarter to go, unless I have to rip it out and start again. Time will tell.

This week:
1. Spongebob Quizpants came second. We are creeping up slowly.

2. Someone on Masterchef served up coriander ice-cream. That's a big bowl of nope.

3. I went to Melbourne for the National Gallery's annual winter blockbuster, which this year is Van Gogh and the Seasons. The paintings were superb, of course, but they really needed to rethink the layout. To enter you had to go through a narrow, zigzagging walkway. I think it was supposed to be like walking down an alley, which would have been fine, except they don't stagger the number of people who can go in at once anymore, so the alley was packed. And it was even worse in the little room they had for each season: still a lot of people, and they don't prohibit photography now, so people were taking photos of the works from oblique angles. So I was hot and crushed and grumpy and not inclined to linger.

On the other hand, when I was a teen, I had a print of Wheat Field with Cypresses on my wall, and it was lovely to meet it in person. I treated myself to a reusable grocery bag printed with it in the gift shop later. No glasses cleaning cloths like they had for Degas last year. I wonder if Van Gogh would be pleased about that or not.

Next week: Monday will my last day at work. Again. I feel oddly flat about it this time round.

Weekly knitting update: ( First band in progress )

Two headlines I read on the cover of That's Life magazine while in the supermarket queue this morning:
1. Help! I'm afraid of CRUMPETS
2. Mum's shock: Doing the laundry PUT ME IN A COMA

One question from a meme I saw on my f-list (the rest were too boring to bother with):
1. When was the last time you saw a duck in person?
Yesterday. I saw two ducks on the grassy area in front of Simon's on the Waterfront. Also: Three pelicans sitting on one of the boats at Lake Pertobe Boat Rentals.

Weekly knitting update: ( So close! )