Salt and corrosion

Already I have discovered something using dog breeds as my titles: the Akita and the Akita (Japanese) (or Akita Inu) are not the same thing. Always learning.

It is zucchini time again in the garden. There were five little green fingers on the plants yesterday morning; by this afternoon they were like forearms. I picked them so they didn't get any bigger, and immediately grated two of them to make a zucchini-and-other-vegetable slice for this week's work lunches.

For my birthday last year I was given a Lego bonsai. I made it up with the green leaves and have it on my chest of drawers. While I was waiting for the zucchini slice to bake today, I finally got around to swapping them out for the pink blossoms. A bit of variety.

January

16. What's the most creative use of emojis you've ever seen?

My mother and her friends send the most bizarre emojis to each other. She'll send a text to say Happy birthday and add cake, cake, cake, balloon, champagne, chicken, chicken, chicken, duck, duck, chicken, smiley face. "What does that mean?" I'll ask, and she'll just say, "Who doesn't want a chicken?" Fair enough.

I'm doing a weekly update, not a daily one, and I still have no news. All I did this week was work - my job and filling in for one colleague still on leave - then flake out on the sofa. Towards the end of the week I forced myself to actually do something, so I made a cake.

This time last year Australia was on fire. Parts of it are again, but not here. So cold we had the heater on this week.

I bought some more dahlia corms this year, a pack of them in sunset colours. The first one has just bloomed and I can see it from the kitchen window. It pleases me so much.



Next week: I will attempt to leave the house and/or actually do something worth writing about.

This week's Friday Five: Sew what!

1. Are you crafty?
No, in the sense of scheming and plotting. I suppose yes, in the sense of making things. Knitting and cross-stitch, occasionally embroidery.

( And so on )

Non-stop action here: today I cleaned out my sock drawer. I planned to go shopping and replace what I threw out, but it turned out I had plenty of non-holey socks at the back of the drawer that I haven't worn because I keep wearing the same old holey ones. Possibility: I own too many socks.

I am a sucker for the free tat attached to craft magazines. While watching TV in the evenings I have just made a little cross-stitch coin purse, which I will clearly never need because I haven't used any coins since March. I didn't like the design so I found an old Kaffe Fassett stranded knitting pattern and adapted that to use up a whole lot of old threads. It is bright. Now I'm onto the next pattern, which is a little 2020 sampler. Nine squares depicting 2020 things, including a cocktail, a pineapple, a bee and a llama. I think the designer of this sampler is having a much more interesting year than I am.

Today's photo: a shelf of small things

I missed last week's entry and planned to write it the next day. But the next day passed and the next and now here we are next Sunday instead. So it's two weeks and very little news.

I finished knitting my cowl. I even have plans for all the leftover balls of wool, so if I get my act together there may be more photos eventually. ( The end result )

Excitingly, I even got to wear the cowl out of the house, as I had an unexpected trip to the office. They are taking advantage of no-one being there to rearrange the desks, so I had to go in at an appointed time to move my folders from my old desk to my new desk. Not that I'm ever likely to sit at the new desk. I'm filling in for a woman on maternity leave and she's coming back in July, so I imagine she'll go straight into the official desk once we're back in the office. (We have a two-month overlap.)

As mentioned a few weeks ago, there is an old house on my street that's being gutted. Last time, the builders had pulled down the top floor and left a pink toilet sitting on the edge. This week, ( it has a friend )

I assume that's the one from downstairs. What decor that place must have had.

A few weeks ago we heard that a woman from the small town I grew up in, the daughter of friends of my grandparents, had died (of cancer, not the virus). We couldn't go the funeral, obviously, but my mother and I sent a sympathy card. And this week, the family sent us a thank you note and a copy of the order of service in a specially printed envelope. So that's how they're doing that during social distancing.

My mother has been haunting the local nursery's website, waiting for sugar cane mulch to be back in stock. It appeared last Sunday, so she did her order, and a delivery truck turned up on Monday. Ten bales of dried sugar cane, all stacked in the garage. It smells like rum.

There is a fairy ring of toadstools on the back lawn.

Back in the early days of lockdown, when there was a run on flour in the supermarket, I had to buy the only plain flour left on the shelves, which was normal plain flour, but in a (more expensive but reusable) fancy blue tin, instead of a paper bag. This week, I noticed that now they had a red tin for the self-raising flour, so I bought one of them, and now I have matching fancy tins of flour.

The nights are starting to draw in. It's not dark when I finish work, but it's definitely no longer day. I've taken to going for a walk during my lunch break just to get a bit of sunlight. That's how I found out the house on the corner has guinea pigs, two hutches of them: one with four and one with two. They put them in their front garden during the day.

Across the road from the guinea pigs the other day was a woman out walking with three little girls and a dachshund pup. The pup noticed a little black and white cat sitting on a fence. The cat sat. The dachshund yipped. The cat looked away. The dachshund kept yipping. The little girls giggled. The woman eventually had to pick the pup up to keep going.

Next Doors have had a new front door installed.

Alistair's anniversary was on Friday. Five years he's been here now. I bought him some fancy kangaroo mince to mark the occasion. He didn't like it.

And that's all the excitement for this week.

( Weekly knitting photo )

In a shameless isolation stereotype, today I made bread. Focaccia. And it was good.

A game I have been playing this week: "Who's On The Phone?" From my temporary office I can hear my mother on her phone. Can I guess who it is from her side of the conversation before she finishes? Most of them are easy. Mention of quilt patterns: that's her quilting friend, Sue. Asking about the dogs: Jan. Random chatter about gardens, things she's watched on TV, and where a rather contrary mutual friend has moved to: Colleen.

But there was one tricky one. It went like this:
[Phone rings]
"Oh, hello!... Yes, good, thanks, we're fine. And you, how are you going, are you still at work?... Yes, my daughter is working from home too... Yes, it must be a bit tricky... Oh, no, I didn't know that... No, that wasn't long at all, was it?... Oh, that's no good, and in the current situation, that will be hard... Well, thanks for letting me know, all the best."

I mean... is that bad news? But she didn't sound all that sad about it. And she called me "my daughter", not by my name as I'd expect if she was talking to one of her friends. And most of her friends are either retired or nurses, so no working from home for them. I just couldn't work it out.

So when I came out to make a cup of tea, I said, "Who was that on the phone?" and my mother waved her hand airily.

"Oh," she said, "that was Harry."

"Who's Harry?"

"He's the young man from the real estate agent who was selling the house down the road last year. I had to give him my number when I went to have a look round, and he rings every now and then to let me know about other houses for sale in the area. There's one for sale around the corner, they have to sell up after less than a year."

I admitted I wouldn't have guessed that.

( Weekly knitting photo )

Thank goodness it was my mother's birthday on Friday, otherwise the big excitement from this week would have been Wednesday: the day my alarm clock needed new batteries. Not that it mattered. No need for alarms when I have a five-second commute to work.

Anyway, my mother turned seventy on Friday. I was working, and from the office I could hear her answering her phone for most of the morning. Some of her friends dropped cards in the letterbox. Her friend Barb rang the doorbell and dropped a bag of apples off. (When my mother bought this house twenty-five years ago, there was a sickly apple tree in the garden that clearly didn't like where it was, so my mother sent it to live on Barb's farm, where it thrives, and every year Barb gives her a bag of apples.) I went to my bedroom, which is at the front of the house, to get a scarf and caught another of her friends about to put a bright red potted cyclamen on the doorstep.

One of the morning's phone calls was from her best friend, Colleen, who doesn't live in the City by the Sea. Her daughter does, though, and just after seven in the evening, she knocked on the door, having just finished her shift (she's an emergency nurse), to drop off a present on Colleen's behalf. Mum sent her home with some fresh-picked tomatoes, a couple of apples and a slice of birthday cake.

(My gifts to my mother were a new iPad, which she has had for several weeks now, and a Japanese hori hori soil knife, which seemed to go down well. She also has her eye on an incredibly dangerous-looking Korean sickle, so that's Christmas sorted.)

( Weekly knitting photo )

Now I have lived with my new home office for a couple of weeks, I spent part of Sunday rearranging things to my liking. An old chocolate tin to hold my work-issue highlighters, a little pinboard for various reminders, a couple of prints so I'm not next to a plain cupboard wall. Settling in for the long term.

I have finally started knitting this year's cowl. I thought I could easily crank out ten rows a night and I would be wearing that cowl before winter. Tonight I knitted two rows. I am such a cautious person normally; I don't know what makes me so wildly optimistic when it comes to estimating my knitting speed.

I missed last week's update. Oh well. Nothing much happened. And nothing much again this week. I did my tax. I went to the theatre to see Much Ado About Nothing. I went out for lunch one day to the new café that's opened in the ground floor of Old Work's building, which I wish had been there when I was in that building as it was better than the café that was previously there. And now I'm cooking an egg and bacon pie to take for lunches this week. It's all go, obviously.

July books read

* Ransom - David Malouf (2009) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Stasi Child - David Young (2015) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez - Laura Cumming (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone - Felicity McLean (2019) ★ ★
( Read more... )

And finally, the weekly knitting update: ( 67% finished )

I've had a fretful weekend, overthinking an email I sent just before I left work on Friday. Brooding on it.

I was going to write about my week battling with our payroll software, which turned out to be part of a nationwide problem caused by the tax office changing how annual tax statements are done this year, resulting in the tax office's website going down as millions of workers logged on to get their tax refunds on the same day. But I bored myself just writing that summary, so consider yourself spared.

It's been a cold and wet weekend, so I've been cooking. Keeping the oven on to keep warm. There were eight limes left on my lime tree, so I used five of them making this pie. It's really good. And now I have only three limes left, but over seventy lemons. I won't be getting scurvy this winter.

Then, to use up the egg whites left over from the lime pie, I made some little meringues. They can be kept in a container until needed, so I don't have to eat a whole lot of meringues at once. Then, as there were no biscuits in the house, I made some, using a recipe from an old Australian Women's Weekly book. It's a recipe I really like, very forgiving of substitutes. Instead of peanuts and sultanas, I used walnuts and choc bits. Illustrating how old the book is, is that the recipe is called "party favour biscuits", as in little bites you can put in a goody bag and give to children at a party. I don't think any modern recipe book is going to put peanuts in a child's party bag.

I also bought a new charcoal face scrub. I don't know what I expected, but I was surprised by how... grey it was. But I happily scrubbed my face with it and rinsed it off. I can't really see anything in the shower, so it was only when I dried off and put my glasses on that I saw... well, the mess. I mean, I imagine it would be the same with any face scrub, but the grey really stood out. It looked like grey mascara running down the shower walls, or like I'd killed an alien.

I'm often struck, when I pick up my knitting, how I remember what I was doing last time I picked it up. Memories knitted into the fabric. What I remembered when I picked up my cowl this week was that last time I knitted it I was watching The Hot Zone, so not a particularly profound memory. Still, think of that: every time I wear my cowl, I'll remember Juliana Margulies being attacked by sick monkeys.

This is what it looks like now: ( Forty-three percent done )