Salt and corrosion

My dog title the other day was the Australian kelpie, of which I had one called Silkie. And now, confusingly, today's title is the other dog I had as a child, an Australian silky terrier called Minnie. If only I'd had a mini dog called Kelpie to complete the circle.

Coles supermarket is doing a promotion at the moment, where you get so many points when you do your shopping, and you can use those points to "buy" a range of (actually quite good quality) cooking knives. This includes a pair of kitchen scissors, and, f-list, these scissors are good. Really good. We don't need any more knives so all our points would otherwise go to waste, so my mother used some points to get a pair of scissors. They were so good, she used some more points to get another pair to keep in the laundry. Her best friend, Colleen, lives in a town that doesn't have a Coles, so my mother used some more points to get her a pair. She liked them so much, she got my mother to use some more points to get a pair for her daughter. Then my mother used some points to get another pair for Kim Next Door. The thing is, the scissors are hard to get and are often sold out, so everyone else must think they're good too. So that's the City by the Sea: where everyone has the same pair of scissors.


January

25. How often do you stay up past 3:00 a.m.?
Rarely to never. I do have trouble going to bed. I sort of procrastinate about it. Not doing anything important, just pottering about. So when I was younger, I could easily get to two or three in the morning for a couple of hours sleep. I think I needed the time alone to recharge after being at work with people all day. These days I still need time alone but I also need a bit more sleep so I try to get to bed by 11:30, though it's often midnight by the time I turn the light off.

I've spent a lot of time this year reading mid-century (as in last century) mystery novels. This week: yet another instance of a detective describing a criminal as "groovy", as in "having a consistent MO". That's the second time I've seen that, so I gather that was a perfectly cromulent usage. Also, in a book from 1949: the idea that a young woman wearing pyjamas was, if not outrageous, slightly unusual.

Supermarket update: the toilet paper supply is fine, as it has been for months, but the tinned fruit shelves are empty, Alistair's favourite treat, Party Mix, is unavailable, and there is a four-per-shopper limit on lobsters.

This week's Friday Five is about weather (ETA: for the City by the Sea):

1. How much rain do you get as a yearly average?
According to the Bureau of Meteorology site, it's 892.7mm (about 35 inches for the imperially-minded).

2. How much snow do you get as a yearly average?
Not a single flake. Plenty of hail. And wind. So much wind. But no snow. Ask me about humidity instead, because that's on the BoM site: our average relative humidity is 73%.

3. Too much sun or not enough?
Too much at the height of summer; probably just enough the rest of the year. (Oh, the BoM site has that too: average annual daily sun hours is 2,330.)

4. When was the last time you looked for shapes in the clouds?
That's not something I do, although I do like looking at clouds.

5. What was the worst weather event to hit your area in recent years?
We had a one-in-fifty year flood in October.

A day later than planned, but here are the notes of last week:

1. My job (well, a job) is being made permanent. I mean, it's my job, in the sense that I'll be the one doing it, but it's slightly different to what I'm currently doing. I had to apply for it as an internal vacancy. Inching forward.

2. In other work news, those of us working from home had to have a home ergonomic assessment. The workplace safety man came round and inspected my home office. Did you know you're not supposed to have your keyboard raised by those little feet? It's supposed to be flat. You're also supposed to regularly change which hand uses the mouse. I scoffed at that, and he admitted that he never did it either.

3. Daylight savings started. That crept up on me. This means the clock in my car is right again, because it was daylight savings when we went into lockdown six months ago and I've barely driven since.

4. We are trying a bar of shampoo. A solid block of shampoo, like soap, but not soap. And no plastic bottle. It's... okay. It feels a bit weird putting a block to my head and rubbing, but it does lather up beautifully.

5. It feels like supermarket shopping has been back to normal for months now, but every now and then I look for something only to find an empty shelf. This week's missing items: my mother's favourite St. Dalfour jam (imported from France), Alistair's favourite Felix Party Mix (from Thailand) and my Kiri Greek Style Spreadable Cream Cheese (from Poland, unexpectedly). It's the Party Mix that's the real problem. Life would not be worth living if we run out of that. I've taken to buying a packet whenever I see it like a toilet paper hoarder, so I've now got eight packets of it, mostly Dairy Delight flavour, which he likes, and BBQ Bonanza flavour, which he doesn't.

6. News of a political corruption investigation in New South Wales today: The politician being investigated couldn't submit his phone and iPad to the investigators, he said, as they had suffered "an unfortunate tractor accident". Don't you hate when that happens?

And let's finish with a little music meme from emma2403:
Write the first song that comes to mind with that thing in the title.
A Place: Vienna - Ultravox
A Food: Peaches - The Presidents of the United States of America
A Drink: Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk - Rufus Wainwright
Animal: My Lovely Horse - Father Ted
A Number: 9 to 5 - Dolly Parton
Color: I See Red - Split Enz
Boy's Name: Daniel - Elton John
Girl's Name: Eloise - The Damned
Profession: Son of a Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
A Vehicle: Little Red Corvette - Prince

One of my colleagues at work was telling me about her young daughter, who has learnt at school to open doors with her elbows and does it at home now too. She was also worried after seeing bare supermarket shelves. "She kept asking me, 'What will we do when the food runs out?' and I kept explaining that the food won't run out, we have plenty in the pantry to last until the trucks come to fill the supermarkets again. But she kept asking, 'What if the trucks don't come? What will we eat?" and I finally said, 'Well, I suppose we'd eat Dad first.' And I thought, I shouldn't have said that, that will upset her, but she just nodded and said, 'Oh yeah, that makes sense.'" So at least one local family is prepared for the worst.

Another colleague reported that her daughter, who has just started secondary school (the school year starts in February here), came home obviously worried about something. She eventually revealed that word in the school yard was that if a child caught coronavirus but their parents didn't, the child would be taken into foster care; if the parents got sick but the child didn't, the parents were taken away and the child left home alone. I am so glad I am no longer a child who has to listen to playground nonsense.

Weekly shop today. We found everything on the list except for caster sugar. Fortunately, pasta and toilet paper were not on the list, as those shelves are still empty. I noticed the tea bag shelves were depleted for the first time too, although only the standard Lipton and Bushells ones; expensive flavoured tea bags were still plentiful.

Some local supermarkets have introduced ID checks on entry, so customers can prove they're locals and not raiders from Melbourne. So that's still happening.

My mother had to go into the chemist to get some gel for her sore foot. I waited outside with the shopping bags, opposite the exit to Aldi. Every single person coming out of Aldi had a packet of toilet paper. Every single person. Some of them, that was all they were carrying.

After that, we had to go to Bunnings (a hardware chain store). You know things are serious when Bunnings cancels its weekly charity sausage sizzle, as they have done for the next few months. Apparently they donated five hundred dollars to each charity whose event they cancelled. We were there to get some lettuce seeds, which my mother plants on a staggered schedule, a few each week, to ensure a continuous supply. However: no lettuce seeds. No spinach, mesclun or bean seeds either. Plenty of kale seeds, I noticed. Outside in the plant section: no lettuce seedlings. No vegetable seedlings at all. All sold out.

Back home, I did a bit of weeding in the garden. I found an old packet of aster seeds a couple of months ago and sprinkled them in a tray. They grew, all of them, white and pink and purple, and they had butterflies on them today. There were honeyeaters on the fluffy dwarf teddy bear sunflowers. Whenever I moved, I heard rustling the undergrowth as skinks skittered about in the sun. I didn't expect the end of days to be quite so idyllic.

(Watching Mastermind just now, a contestant answered a question with "anteater" and the host said he was "close". The actual answer was "sloth". That is not at all close to anteater, is it?)

I came into the kitchen at five to eight this morning, made breakfast, checked my emails and flipped through the paper before looking at the clock again and seeing that it was still five to eight. Only it wasn't, obviously. It was considerably later than that.

At work today there was talk of People From Melbourne making bus trips to the City by the Sea, a six hour round trip, to visit our supermarkets and buy our toilet paper. The cheek of it! We were outraged. Dangerously close to declaring it a local shop for local people. (Although it does make sense, in that there are a lot of empty shelves but no-one actually knows anyone who is stockpiling it.)

One of my colleagues said she'd heard that cat food was going to be the next thing to sell out. Heaven help us. I'd rather run out of toilet paper than food for Alistair. I'm sure I could devise alternatives to toilet paper if I had to, but Mister Cat is set in his ways. His favourite food is Fancy Feast's Chicken Feast Classic Pate, which is only available at one small independent supermarket and only in a box of twelve. I have a week's worth left, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to get another box, just in case.

It turns out my colleague was right, in that most of the dry cat food shelves were bare. However, the shelf of Chicken Feast Classic Pate boxes was full. Alistair must be the only cat in town who eats it. I bought two boxes of it and some batteries for the kitchen clock and went on my merry way.

I was thinking of doing a daily entry in November, just like I used to back in the good old days, and now here we are in the second week and I haven't even done my monthly book entry. So much for that idea.

Anyway: a general catch-up.

How long has it been since I did a proper entry? I have an outraged note that I saw Christmas decorations in the shops back in September. It seems a bit late to complain about that now.

In October, Woolworths was doing a giveaway of tat with groceries, only it wasn't tat at all: it was packets of seeds in little biodegradable pots. I ended up with little pots of chamomile, kale and tomatoes, and they are all doing very well. The tomato plants are actually doing better than the special organic tomato seeds I planted around the same time.

I have always wanted to make a gingerbread house, and yesterday I found a box of gingerbread house cutters, all you could ever need for walls and windows and a roof. And they all fit inside an A5-sized box, so it's not going to be a huge house. More of a gingerbread cottage, which is just the right size eating for a small household.

October books read

October was an odd reading month. I started and stopped several books and couldn't settle into them. The two I did finish I didn't really enjoy, and now I am marooned slowly reading something that I want to like more than I do.

* A Pocketful of Crows - Joanne M. Harris (2017) ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Blue Salt Road - Joanne M. Harris (2018) ★ ★
( Read more... )

Sunday again, which means today I did the main weekly shop and sorted out my lunches for work during the coming week. Coles, the supermarket nearest my house, has a loyalty scheme happening at the moment, where you get points for spending so much, which you can then exchange for plastic food storage containers. And they are really good containers, much better quality than (a) I was expecting and (b) the ones I currently own. So today's excitement was that I had enough points to get my second free container. Whoo!

I have vague memories of being little, very little, and going shopping with my grandmother and getting sheets of stamps in what must have been a similar sort of customer loyalty scheme. Blue stamps, which could be exchanged for crockery. Fine white china with a sort of fluted edge. She had the bread and butter plates with matching cups and saucers. They were the middle rank of her crockery: too good for every day, but not as fancy as the very fine set with a sort of Art Deco button design she received as a wedding gift. Best used for visitors, but not really special ones.

One thing I enjoy about Sundays is that the magazine supplement in The Sunday Age includes a food column by Adam Liaw. He won one of the early seasons of Masterchef Australia and he is hands down the best winner they've ever had. Most weeks there is something in his column that I want to try, and that includes this week's brown bread and apple pudding, which I will be making later this week.

There were hot cross buns in the supermarket today. Easter things! Already! While I was taking in that sight, three other people passed by and either looked horrified or actually tsked. I'm not sure Coles will be selling many use by 30 December hot cross buns, based on those reactions.

I've never been one for a big New Year's Eve. Crowds: not for me. I think the most memorable was the one I spent, alone and ill, in the middle of a heatwave. Midnight found me lying on the floor under the ceiling fan, dripping like a melting ice cube. Even then I can only remember how sick I felt, not what year it was.

Anyway, perfect health and no heatwave this year, which is good. I made a concession to New Year celebrations by going to the first of the summer night markets at the lake. That was crowded enough. Beach Road (guess what's at the end of that!) was at standstill with bumper-to-bumper traffic, so we avoided that completely and parked at Cannon Hill (guess what's on that hill!) and walked down the road instead. I looked at the market and had a vegetable calzone and mint choc chip ice cream. There, I've been publicly festive.

There was a woman surrounded by a gaggle of children at the supermarket checkout. Her groceries were loaded on the belt, her trolley had been pushed through for one of the children to start loading bags. A frisson ran through the group. The children fluttered around the woman and she looked around in confusion. Taking notice of them, I caught what she was saying.

"Oh no, oh no. All right, go and grab some, one each." The boy she was talking to looked doubtful. The woman pointed. "Look, aisle fourteen, just over there, run, quick!" The boy ran.

Once I'd started listening to the woman, I couldn't stop. Nor could she stop talking. She told the checkout girl that the boy had gone to get some of the new Twisties, they love them, the kids, it's a treat while they're staying with her for the summer holidays, they were going to the beach but it was too cold this morning so they're going to watch a DVD this afternoon and they'll eat their Twisties as a snack, it's lovely having the grandkids for the summer and their parents are coming to pick them up this weekend, not long now until school goes back, and was the checkout girl on school holidays too? And all the while she was constantly moving, rearranging the groceries on the belt, moving the fruit together and the cold goods up the front and picking up things and putting them down.

The checkout girl put all the groceries through, and the boy wasn't back yet. The woman didn't know what to do. "Oh, oh, he's taking his time, how hard can it be to find? Go and get him," she said, and the three younger children ran off to aisle fourteen. The woman sighed. "I shouldn't have done that, they won't be back, will you mind my bag, love?" This she said to me, pushing her trolley, with her handbag sitting on top, at me. She ran after them.

The checkout girl and I shrugged at each other, laughing, and she said, "They're getting Twisties, it won't take long."

The woman came back in less than a minute, surrounded by children and holding four small bags of Twisties, which she put on the belt for the checkout girl to scan. The woman said to me, "Thanks, love, have you tried these?"

I said, "Twisties? Yes."

She said, "No, no, it's a new flavour, cheesy popcorn Twisties, the kids love them, even more than Twisties, it's popcorn with cheese, not Twisties at all, popcorn—oh!" While she been talking, the checkout girl told her the total, and she scanned her card and started poking the buttons on the machine. She had been too busy telling me about the cheese popcorn Twisties to pay attention to what she was doing.

The checkout girl said, "Wrong account? That's okay we can start again."

The woman said, "I didn't mean to do the wrong button, it's moved, it isn't normally there."
The girl explained that they'd recently upgraded the software and the screens look different. The woman made a series of dithery "oh" noises, and finished her transaction. Then, because the children hadn't been putting her bags of groceries in the trolley, she had to do it, and she was still there when I paid and took my one bag of cat food tins out.

And that's the latest instalment in my ongoing series, "Meeting Old People at the Supermarket".

(Popcorn Twisties sound AWFUL.)

I meant to say yesterday that I went to the supermarket to find that a box had fallen off the wall of chocolate on display for Easter. It was box containing an egg in a Humpty Dumpty wrapper, which seemed appropriate. Poor Humpty, on the floor after his great fall, being watched by serried ranks of gold rabbits. (Honestly, those rabbits. There are more of them every year, which is also thematically appropriate for rabbits, now I think about it.) I picked Humpty up and put him back on top of the wall. So that's how the rhyme ends now.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the gold rabbits and Cadbury eggs
Did nothing because I really didn't think the end of this through.

Catchy.

I started this ten day meme back on 27 January, and here we are, ten days later:

Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

At the risk of sounding like I've seen too many episodes of The X-Files (trust no-one!)... er, no-one. I don't mean to sound like one of those horrible 'you've got to look out for number one' people. I think (most) people mean well, but they've got their own stuff to do. Basically, I think we're all just muddling along, and it's a bit easier if we can muddle along together, but I don't bank on it.