Smokey the Magnificent

First off, in the What The I Don’t Even category… I give you this.

Anyone care to shed some light?

The snortlepig had a pleasant birthday yesterday, not withstanding a random outburst of vomiting which occurred at midday. The pig remained philosophical throughout the episode (which was orange and not at all chunky, for those of my readers who document that kind of thing), merely pointing to the puddles and saying “Cloth?”, which was both tactful and hygienic.

While not upchucking the piggie spent the day feeding duckies with her grandparents, Skyping practically her only aunt who lives in England, and eating all her favourite things for dinner.

The rest of my week promises to be on the busy side, as we are having a braai on Saturday night to celebrate Helpdesk Man’s birthday and a picnic at lunch on Sunday to do the snortlepig’s birthday with her other grandparents. Unfortunately I just discovered Smitten Kitchen, which has caused my culinary ambitions to soar and doubled the size of the grocery bill. The plan is to festivise Sunday lunch with dulce de leche cheesecake squares, make straciatella ice cream and chocolate mud cake with caramel frosting for Helpdesk Man’s birthday cake, and fill in the rest of my leisurely days constructing potato salad, fudge, flatbreads galore, hummus and marinade. Not to mention sewing a hasty winter wardrobe for the snortlepig, the weather having abruptly shifted to winter just as I was thinking about making light autumn clothes. And I have a cold. I can see how Martha Stewart ended up on the inside.

To all those who are wont to ring me up for solace and chitchat: don’t bother. The snortlepig put the phone through the dishwasher, and we suspect it don’t sing no more. Clean, though.

Two years ago today Helpdesk Man and I were staring glassily at the wall of a hospital waiting room while the doctors in their infinite wisdom decided my fulminating pre-eclampsia warranted immediate induction, but was not severe enough to warrant telling me about for eight hours, because really, since when is TOTAL ORGAN FAILURE AND MESSY DEATH worth a memo?

That wasn’t what I came here to say.

Right, yes, the snortlepig. She turns two tomorrow. With that in mind, I have decided to compile a list - non-exhaustive - of things she can do. Because frankly, her entrance into the world was a bit inauspicious. Helpdesk Man caught her head but dropped the rest of her, and when we tried to make her do the breast crawl she flailed around ineptly for twenty minutes until we gave up and latched her on. That was probably the point at which she correctly took us for suckers and decided she wanted to be held constantly for the next fourteen months.

Also not what I came here to say. Skills. Yus. At the age of two-tomorrow, the snortlepig can now:

• Knead bread very efficiently, sprinkling it with flour and squooshing it into submission. Typically she then becomes so proud of her work that she has to give the dough a little kiss. She is a sweetcheeks.
• Talk about rhinos, zebras, giraffes, monkeys, piggies, buses, flies, crocuses, trees, biscuits, chocolate mousse and a host of other notable things.
• Differentiate between motorbikes and scooters.
• Count. To eight, if you’re not too hung up on the number five.
• Lead an enjoyable and fulfilling life, despite suffering from a chronic case of helium bottom. This condition generally manifests when she is having the milks - slowly, her back legs straighten and creep until her hinder end is high up in the air, where it waves tranquilly in the breeze. Sometimes this is accompanied by an idle humming sound coming from the other end of the pig. The only temporary cure is to say sharply “Pig, helium bottom!” and squash the offending rear with an elbow.
• Wear two of the tiniest plaits you ever did see.
• Charm old ladies in the street by putting one finger in her mouth and beaming with sickening coyness. She did not get this from me. It confounds me mightily.
• Make up delightfully stream-of-consciousness songs. They usually go something like this: “An’ the treeees an’ the miiiiilks an’ the skyyyy, an’ Bobby Mouse, an’ pussies, an’ trees, an’ doggies, an’ buses, an’ the milks…”. Sometimes they last for entire car trips.
• Name her body parts, including her squish and her underchins.
• Demand “More singing onna screen, PEASE!”, which currently means YouTube clips of The Pirates of Penzance, and/or Copacabana.
• Gaze in rapt, un-Protestant adoration at a sleeping baby approximately forever, or until it wakes up.
• Play dead to avert punishment.

She can also do baby yoga, craft freeform upcycled fibre art and speak a little Swahili, but I didn’t want to make you feel bad. Happy birthday tomorrow, snortlepig!

Also, question: for how long after a snortlepig turns two is it appropriate and non-scarring to refer to her in public as Piggie or La Pigge? People are starting to give me Looks when I call her in the library.

I think I peaked early. Two lessons on I seem to choke more often than glide, growl where I should purr and freeze up with terror at intersections. Oh well. My father-in-law told me at the first lesson that new drivers usually come to a point of getting worse before they get better, so perhaps I am just precocious. At any rate I have now successfully reversed twice and executed a couple of extremely cautious three-point turns.

In happier news, my knitting is coming along. The wristlets which I demoted to dishcloths I ended up ripping out several times, and am more or less committed now to making a wee scarflet for the snortlepig - the kind that fastens with a button. I decided to do the wholething in Continental knit stitch in order to master it - it is boring, but virtuous.

Right now, though, I’ve set it aside for more pressing projects. During the last few days summer has slunk away, and it turns out the snortlepig no longer fits into any of her nice warm clothes. So I am on a long sleeved top-making mish this week, using the fabrics I bought at Spotlight recently and some vintage-ish patterns from Mother. The first one will be a tasteful grey panelled number that I’m adapting from a dress pattern - which, being vintagey, is extremely brief to begin with, so shortening it is pretty easy. It does, however, require facing my two nemeses, sleeves and buttonholes. (Zippers are my third nemesis. Taxes are my fourth. I’m also not keen on right-hand turns. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.)

80kmph, fifth gear, successfully avoided a pukeko, managed a couple of intersections and only changed into first gear in mistake for third twice. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. Driving round curves, in particular, reminded me very much of sewing - in fact, at one point I had a strong impulse to get out of the car and clip the curve of the road for a neater edge. Fortunately, I did not mention this to my father-in-law.

First driving lesson tomorrow. I got my licence in the mail, resplendent with a photo that makes me look like a cynical old-maid librarian who swigs from bottles of embalming fluid behind the stacks. My father-in-law will be instructing me. He’s quite good, calm and factual, but with a tendency to start snapping “Brake. Brake! BRAKE!” at apparently random intervals. As I recall, during our abortive lessons in the Uni car park last year, I can get up to third gear and avoid lamp posts like nobody’s business, but I cannot reverse. Also I dislike indicating and checking the rearview mirrors, mostly because it didn’t seem strictly necessary in an empty car park and I was having too much lovely fun with the steering. Not terribly promising, is it?

Also, practically my only sister Betty Scandretti has become affianced. Three cheers for Betty. Top work. We knew you could do it with a little application and persistence. Let us all learn from the example of Betty.

I made pumpkin chocolate chip pecan cashew cookies today. Who knew such a thing existed? I was mooping around the blogosphere in that contrary mood where no recipe seems to fit - it has ingredients you do not possess, or has to sit overnight before cutting, or needs those little cookie cutters the snortlepig scattered around the floor and Helpdesk Man trod on so the heart, your favourite shape, will never be the same again. And then suddenly, pow. Or zap. Bakerella, whose website is causing you to sniff snobbishly because of her lavish use of Betty Crocker boxed mixes, comes out with a for-scratch recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip pecan cookies. And your wilting spirits perk up like the ears on a cartoon rabbit, and away you scurry. The cashews weren’t canon, I just ran out of pecans. And the biscuits were nommy, and it made enough to give to my father-in-law tomorrow to say thank you for the driving lesson, assuming he exits said lesson still able to eat; and for Bible study on Thursday. So ha.

Well, anyway. It is 11:30 in the blessed PM and I must go publish an article about the best times of year to go to Disneyland; a subject on which I am troublingly knowledgeable, considering I have never been.

1. I found a pit in my allegedly pitted olive.

2. I schlped up a fly with the vacuum cleaner. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, but have been hindered by both the wiliness of flies and my tendency to not vacuum. But today I got sick of seeing bits of dry rice stuck between the floor boards, so I got out the vacuum and there it was, chillin’ on the lampshade. So I crept up behind it, and - schlp! It was this big. Do you think it died, or flew out again?

3. Speaking of flies, the snortlepig totally wigged out after seeing the corpus of a fly on the living room floor. She responds to seeing dead cockroaches on the ground in town with a gleeful “NASTY crocus!”, so I’m not sure why the tiny mortal coil of a mere blowfly filled her with such terror and sorrow. I had to give it a decent burial with the dustpan and brush before she’d calm down.

4. I made white chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate straciatella.

5. I bought two cheap bottles of wine at the supermarket, one white and one red, for experimental cooking purposes. Tonight was fish, which we had with an Italian tomatoey, white wine and olive sauce. It wasn’t the best fish I’ve ever had, but it was sophisticated as hell. Must have been a whole, what? 75 cents’ worth of wine in there? Earth has not anything to show more fair.

Actually more than five exciting things happened to me today, at least judging by the standards of the above. I cleaned the leather couch. This shouldn’t have been exciting, except that we a) eat dinner on the couch every night and b) have a one-year-old. Apparently the makers of the leather cleaner did not expect the couch to attain this level of filth. “Do not rub”, indeed. HOW ELSE ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO GET THE SWEETCORN OFF?

More excitingly yet, I discovered this blog: Sleep Talkin’ Man. It is simply a record of a man’s nightly unconscious ramblings, recorded dutifully by his ever-loving wife. Some of the things he says are not entirely decent, so I shall reproduce a few of the tamer ones here for those too moral to click:

“You’ve got to save the curtains! Save the curtains… They hold so many secrets.”

“I know it’s a shame that when I walk out of a room it gets just a little bit darker and gray. It’s a burden I carry.”

“Tea bags, see? Better be careful with the tea bags. They’re delicate creatures. Handle them with care.”

“Imagine waking up next to you every day… One chunder-bucket moment after another.”

“Legs time! Everybody get your legs!”

And my personal favourite:
“You know, it’s a human race. And you lost.”

So I suppose the seventh most exciting thing that happened to me today was discovering at least one person in this world is wittier than me in his sleep.

Today, as happens once every several years, I had an attack of domesticity. My usual prudent approach in such a situation is to lie down until it goes away, but today I did not. So far I have made a large batch of tabbouleh, from largely home-grown ingredients, no less; put a tray of cherry tomatoes in the oven to dry; and conceived the staggeringly brilliant notion of pulling out the old, tough lettuce plants to make room for some new ones.

I am now going to go organise the top shelf of the wardrobe. There are T-shirts up there in the incorrect piles. This cannot be.

Update: Helpdesk Man’s T-shirts have now been arranged by colour. By colour, maggots. Are you that good a wife? I didn’t think so.

Further update: It seems people have found my blog through Googling the phrases “do torvill and dean give each other birthday presents”, “neaps or neeps” and “security knickers”. Awesome.

I just learned that Einstein never learned to drive a car. To which I say: Is it.

1.Have you ever noticed that the face in the moon does not merely look like a generic old man with a moustache, but is exactly like Matthew Cuthbert from the Megan Follows Anne of Green Gables?
2. Me: “Do you like Parmesan cheese?”
Helpdesk Man: “It tastes like spew.”
Me: “But do you like it?”
Helpdesk Man: “Ehh, it’s alright.”
3. If you should hear the snortlepig telling you she pats winos, do not be alarmed. We took her to the zoo. And she did not pat the rhinos, merely ooed at them from over the fence, but it is sweet that she thinks she did. Maybe I can show her pictures of Europe and pretend when she grows up that we took her there.
4. I do not like audience participation. We went to a pantomime of Beauty and the Beast in the public gardens, and it was full of actresses chirpily cooing “Good morning!” Subdued mutter. “I can’t hear you!” Grudging rumble. “I said, good morning!” Pained bellow as the audience realises they are being held hostage and won’t get to the see the show unless they pony up with a yell. This always annoys me, but particularly when the initial response is more than adequate… which, however, was not the case yesterday. At any rate, I refused to be blackmailed and sat Britishly sulking until Belle abandoned her efforts to whip us into a frenzy - whether because she thought them a success or a failure, I do not care to speculate.