Smokey the Magnificent

Today the pigs and I were chillin’, and Tiny Miles let out a belch to wake the dead. The pig had been jumping about, not paying attention, but stopped and said “What was that, a growl?”

“It was a huge boip,” I said.

The pig started jumping again and said with satisfaction, “It was MIRACULOUS huge!”

So anyhoo, yup, that was awesome. Also, it is now 2012, an uncannily futuristic date. And this year I shall be 26. Soon I shall be dead, And Tiny Miles will be one, which is just absurd.

I celebrated New Year’s Eve with a shindig, at which I served ice cream sandwiches and won a game of poker. My method for success is to sit out most of the hands in order to milks Miles to sleep, thus preventing myself from frittering away chips; and then to come back and go all in on a straight. I recommend it. Sadly, everybody left the party at 11:30, and the pig woke up at midnight having flashbacks to ‘Nam from the fireworks, so it wasn’t a terribly auspicious beginning to January.

Nevertheless, I am full of new-yearly vim and resolution. I started piecing an Irish chain quilt of the pig’s, the fabric for which I bought two years ago. I made resolutions in a nifty list. I bought a diary (after the New Year, for the discount, though it pained my soul to wait) and filled it with reminders about church lunch, birthdays and the need to pull weeds out of the garden. I joined a challenge online to complete 52 crafting projects. I bought a new dress, in order to swish through 2012 chicly instead of slobbing around in an ex-maternity tunic that doesn’t allow me to breastfeed in public. (On second thoughts, I should probably have bought two dresses. I am extremely short on clothes.) I chose a colour scheme for our new interior walls in two seconds flat with Helpdesk Man, although I am now having second thoughts. Colour is not my strong point.

Also: we watched Green Lantern. My word. It was awful. Usually halfway through a terrible movie I can relax into a resigned torpor and just go with it, but not this time. Even five minutes from the end, I was casting longing glances at my sewing machine. It was almost as boring as this one time Helpdesk Man bought cable ties.

Also, I have discovered a new principle of life: there is no foodstuff which cannot be used as a term of endearment for one’s baby. Helpdesk Man and I have been testing it out, and it’s utterly true. Miles is my wee pumpkin muffin, my tikka masala, my little pierogi, my wee scrap of biltong, my fat wee haggis, my little can of beetroop, my schmear of cream cheese upon a bagel, my little stack of hotcakes, my fat moussaka, my wee chipolata sausage, my tiny crock of kraut, my suet duff, my little dob of wasabi, my boysenberry, my snickerdoodle, my little TV dinner, my hybrid tomato, my little garlic naan… I could go on. I defy any of you to come up with a foodstuff that doesn’t work. Venison pasties? Pan-fried dumplings? Carpaccio? Sashimi? See? It just cannot be done. Gape with awe.

This is Miles.

.

You will notice Miles is a catfish.

Miles mocks you with his eyes.

No, I jest. He likes you.

Miles don’t take no guff, though.

Miles fears no Commies.

Miles fears nothing.

Yet this tough exterior cradles the soul of a poet. Sometimes, for instance, Miles feels a pang of melancholy in the produce section, because he gave up brassicas. For Lent.

Miles is a delicate soul. Sometimes things that amuse coarser mortals shock him to the core.

Then he silently judges.

Take, for example, his large, tiny sister.

His sister has body art and drives a motorbike.

She is pretty hardcore.

Miles recoils from some of her lifestyle choices.

But he still likes her.

My life at the moment is dominated by gardening. A motley collection of seventy-odd pots is lining my deck, and I have developed a routine of taking them to the new house once the seedlings have sprouted, planting said seedlings, tipping out the dirt into the new flowerbed, and returning the pots home to start the cycle again.

It’s fun. Sweet peas and sunflowers, which germinate quickly, are particularly gratifying. Nigella takes longer, but looks pleasingly feathery; gypsophila and dianthus have uninspiring seedlings, but will presumably pretty up later on. I’m not entirely sure my Californian Thai Silk poppies are planning to make an appearance at all.

Planting the garden is also fun, at least when I can do it in the cool of the day and Helpdesk Man is around to hold the baby. I am trying to follow the advice of the gardening books from the library and plant in drifts, but the assembly-line process of seed-raising has made things a little patchier than intended.

In fact, the more I read about garden design, the more I realise I am an utter gardening yokel. The writers of garden design books are a scathing bunch, and do not suffer folk like me. To start with, I should have aimed for three structural plants for every interest plant, and relied much more heavily on perennials. Good advice, if a bit late for this year, but I trotted off to the Warehouse and got six white geraniums, and took a few cuttings from some pink ones a friend had as well. Then in the next book I read, the author described geraniums as a “shapeless heap of leaves” - apparently they are the stretch pants and ill-fitting hoodies of the perennial world. So that was depressing.

Then in the next book, I learned that persons of true taste and refinement select only wild, heirloom-type plants, in which the flowers are in naturally-occurring proportion to the foliage, rather than modern bloom-smothered hybrids with doubled flowers. I like doubles, but apparently they are garish and bland, suitable only for redneck philistines who like “a lot of colour” in their gardens. Colour, it turns out, is the first pleasure of the vicious. True devotees of nature revel in textures, a combination of Spires and Umbels, and especially grasses. One whole book, the author just kept on bringing up grasses. Apparently wild grasses are “indispensable” to any garden – she waxed particularly lyrical about the kinds which all bend in the same direction in the wind, which gives Movement to the planting, because heaven forbid one’s planting just sits there. (I suppose that’s how triffids were originally marketed, though, and they did well.)

There’s more. One should not plant too many species - “rip out half your plants and double the rest”, is the advice, which I can see now is good, but I’m not about to follow it after all the time and money involved. One should not combine hues, tones and shades (which are all different things – who knew!), lest the planting be unbalanced. One should use native plants wherever possible. One should plant for year-round interest, so something is always in bloom or providing structural beauty due to seedheads or interesting branches. One should plant veily tall plants in front of others, so the viewer cannot see the entire garden at a glance. One should echo the architecture of the house in the design and materials of the garden bed edging. One should blend the garden in with the surrounding environment. One should use a colour wheel. One should choose one’s colour scheme based on the time of the day at which the garden will most often be seen (reds are bad in the evening, apparently). One should not over-use hot colours, especially in a small garden. One should divide one’s garden into “rooms”. One should always – or never, according to another author – have a large, plain section of lawn.

It’s fascinating, but somewhat intimidating. With this year’s selection of (horror) annuals only half planted, I’ve already started planning next year’s garden, which will be Better and Classier and More Mature. Lemon-yellow “Moonwalker” sunflowers, large drifts of English lavender (perennial, ha!), and something shortish and dusky pink at the front, interpersed with occasional ornamental alliums. Do you think?

In the mean time, I planted three rows of broccoli seedlings out. And the snortlepig, who was helping me, asked if she could “smulch” them. There are whole piles of smulch just lying around, presumably made from the corpses of apple trees. And today after we finished planting the piggie and I picked some forget-me-nots, little purple flowers and pretty feathery grasses to take home. There will be benefits to living in the country.

1. Last night Tiny Miles emitted a poop of such force and vehemence that the snortlepig sat up in bed and said “Mummy, are there fireworks?”

2. National Novel Writing Month. I am doing it. Usually I plan ahead and end up paralysing myself with the crippling horror that what I produce might not end up being the next Harry Potter. This year, fortunately, I forgot; until the first of November, when Helpdesk Man casually said (I was in the bath, just to set the scene) “It’s NaNoWriMo, are you doing it?” And I was all, “Why not”. So I am. 3361 words so far. Most of them rubbish. Will keep you apprised.

3. We’re moving to the country. A friend’s mother has an orchard with a cottage on it, and she offered it to us - cottage, not orchard - to rent for a very reasonable sum. Moving will not be an unalloyed joy - the house isn’t as pretty as our current place, and it’s less convenient, being out of town. Plus, of course, we will have to move house, and you know what that means? Cleaning the oven. But still, though; we’ll get to keep chickens, and I can have a veggie garden practically as big as I wish, or even two - one in the backyard for the frillier sorts of lettuces, and a big old rototilled patch out in the orchard for the less presentable veggies like pumpkins.

And in the front yard, I plan to plant flowers. I have never grown flowers before, but I’m suddenly very excited about the prospect. In the last week I’ve read about eight books on garden design, and it’s fascinating. The authors make all these oddly specific pronouncements, and you think “Come now, don’t be narrow-minded, I’m sure that would look nice in certain circumstances” - but then you ponder a bit, and realise their way is Right and True. For instance, one chap was scathing of garden beds in which the plants were neatly arranged from shortest at the front to tallest at the back. Apparently you have to have some skinny, longer plants at the front (like poppies or tulips, that kind of shape), dotted about to add texture and prevent the bed from looking unnaturally tiered. This was news to me. Similarly, another chap went on a rampage about home gardeners who only buy six tulip bulbs in different colours to save money. What you have to do is save up your pennies and buy a whole bunch in the same colour, planted in a drift, and interplanted with some low-lying species to set off the colour and cover the area near the ground, which will otherwise look bare and leggy. He showed pictures. He had a good point.

4. Being off sugar is boring. I do not like it at all. It’s not exactly fierce, intense suffering; it’s just dull. I see a picture of a fancy three-layer cake and think “Ooh, I should make that”, and then realise I can’t eat it. Or I think “I should make mousse tonight, it would bring joy to Helpdesk Man’s rheumy eyes”, and then I remember, and think “Oh”. And am I bursting with new life and energy? No, I am not. I complained about this to my sister-in-law, who has been nagging me to do it for months, and she said “You’re probably still eating too many grains”. I think she’s trying to drive me to suicide so she can have my cast iron pots.

5. This is the pig in a dress I made her.

6. What is the definition of a millionaire? This has been nagging at me. If you have $750,000 in the bank and a $250,000 house, are you a millionaire? What if you have a million-dollar home, but no money in the bank at all and you can’t buy cheem? Can it be shares in a business, or can you have invested it all in a posh necklace? And it gets even more confusing when people say “He made his first million by the time he was 30″. Everyone who works a $50,000-a-year job for twenty years makes a million dollars; but that’s not generally seen as worth mentioning, and it certainly doesn’t make them rich. Does the “first million” have to be a spare million, as in, he’d already made enough for the house and groceries and then made a million on top of that? That seems wrong, but then so does not accounting for expenses. I don’t get it.

7. The other day - I was in the shower. I feel a need to point that out. A lot of interesting stuff happens while I ablute. Sometimes when I wash my hair, I finish it off with a blast of cold water to lock the cuticle, and the cold water tends to trigger a panic attack because I have a phobia of whales and they live in cold water, so I have to brace myself for it and keep my eyes wide open and see how cold I can let the water get before I panic and turn it off. It’s sort of life-affirming: lends spice to the experience. Anyhoo. I was in the shower, talking to Helpdesk Man, and I said “I just read a book called 50 Buildings That Changed the World. It was interesting. But most of the buildings didn’t actually change the world, they were just kind of nifty. They should have called it 50 Nifty Buildings. That rhymes.” And Helpdesk Man said, in a supportive, vaguely patronising manner, as one would congratulate a child on its crooked W, “It does! Not, you know, well…”

My self-confidence is at a pretty low ebb these days, so I said “mm” and washed for a bit before my mind went “‘Ang on”, and I said “Fifty. Nifty. How does that not rhyme?” And Helpdesk Man said “Oh. I was thinking of “nifty” and “buildings”.”

Christmas is approaching (fools), and I have begun angsting about gifts. A while back I discovered a rather lovely rhyme - purportedly from the Victorian era, although I doubt it - designed to make the process easier. It goes thusly:

Something they want

Something they need

Something to wear

And something to read.

Gosh, I thought. That’s nifty. And I vowed to do it. But it turns out, it’s not as easy as it looks. For instance, do craft supplies for the snortlepig come under Want or Need? She doesn’t, as far as I know, actively want anything for Christmas; I don’t think she’s figured out the concept of a wish list yet. So does it count if it’s something I know she would want? Does it break the whole principle to divide, say, Something They Need into four separate gifts - say, crayons, chalk, stickers and glue? Does the poem include Christmas stocking presents, or exclude them? What if Something She Needs is also Something To Wear, and possibly Something She Wants as well?

Pottering around the internet, I discovered that mothers more cunning than I have wrestled with this selfsame problem, and overcome it. Basically, they cheat by changing the poem. So a mother who has already planned to give her child, for instance, a handmade tote bag, a toy that goes ping, a zoo membership and a bag of cocaine will simply justify the purchases by altering the poem to read:

Something handmade

Something bought

Something to do

And something to snort.

Or, if I were to retroactively justify various presents bought for Helpdesk Man over the years - a whiskey glass with a moustache etched on it, a hip flask, a wallet and some hand-embroidered manly hankies  - I’d make it something like this:

Something unintentionally hipster

Something from which to swig

Something made outta the dried skin of a dead lamb

And something not very big.

No Shakespeare, but it gets the job done. And y’know, the existence of this literary form this really sheds some light on the origins of the poem “Three Rings for the Elven-Kings under the sky”; don’t you think?

I just discovered an awesome webpage. It is, somewhat inexplicably, hosted by ecclesia.org; it is titled simply “Handy Hints”; and it is mostly gems of wisdom along the lines of “Prevents brooms from slipping when you prop them against a wall. Cut off the finger of an old rubber glove and slide over the handle”; sooth stuff, mostly. But then suddenly, in the “Insects and Animals” section, underneath “Prevent flying insects. Hang fresh bunch of stinging nettles to front of door”… there is this.

“Outrun Crocodile/Alligator. Run in a zig-zag pattern, and not just in one straight direction. When making left or right turns, the crocodile/alligator has to come to a crawl to move in that direction because of its short legs.”

This isn’t an isolated tip, mind you. The same section includes advice on Elephant Attack (”If one runs after you, and tries to stomp you, get out of their line of site. For example, if you are around some trees, hide behind a tree. If it comes after you, zig zag to another tree.”), Bee Attack (”If you are being stung by a swarm of bees, don’t breathe. Bees are attracted to carbon dioxide.” But repelled by the STENCH OF DEATH, presumably?) and, most handily of all, Shark Attack:

“Do not swim away, because sharks are attracted to erratic movements. When a man swims away from a shark, it looks to the shark like he is struggling, squirming, and panicking, and the shark will attack! Also, do not play dead. A shark has all the senses we have, plus more, and a shark will know that you are not dead, but will be confused why you are not acting like you should be. So, it will get curious and may start to knaw at you.”

That’s knaw with a K, folks. If I ever become a fascist dictator, I’m going to make that the official spelling. Dissidents will be forced to breathe at bees.

Okay, I have a question.

If you are dining in a restaurant and notice a severed human finger in your dish, is it illegal to eat it?

See, I don’t know whether cannibalism per se is actually against the law. Kill-your-own, yes (well, presumably); desecration of the dead, ehh, probably. But if it’s already pre-desecrated, and you’ve paid for it…?

I asked Helpdesk Man, and he did not know. He thought maybe you could be charged with obstruction of justice, because the finger could be evidence in a crime. But I think that a normal, un-cynical restaurant-goer would be justified in assuming that it was severed accidentally; I’m sure the number of criminal amputations or corpse-dismemberments is fairly low compared to your run-of-the-mill ham-slicing accident. I mean, if you come across toenails on your carpet and sweep them up, and it turns out later that a burglar broke into your house and clipped his toenails, you wouldn’t get clapped in the clink for destroying evidence; surely?

After some consideration, I can only think of two potentially litigating issues.

1. If the finger were obviously recently severed - like, it was still spurting blood - and it was nestled in a salad or better yet, a sorbet, so that its chances of reattachment were fairly good (as opposed to, say, being slow-braised alongside a lamb shank), consuming or even withholding it could be considered tantamount to kidnap. To analogise: if you came across a car accident in which someone’s foot was severed, and you grabbed it and waved it around and said “Ha ha” and ran off, I’m fairly sure you’d be arrested. But then. perhaps this is more like finding the foot in a ditch by the road, in which case actually returning it could be perceived as supererogatory… legally speaking, I mean. So perhaps if the maitre’d clapped his hands and shouted “Anyone got a finger in his moussaka?”, you’d be arrested for cramming it hastily in your mouth and saying “Nope”; but you would not be punished for failing to venture off your own bat back with it to the kitchens, where I hear there can be strong language.

2. In all seriousness, I think it’s possible the Treaty of Waitangi applies here.

Thoughts? And be honest: if you found the finger in a $200 entree at a five-star restaurant, how many of you would put on your sophisticated faces and just go with it?

Shall I compare thee to the snortlepig?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
See’ng my clean dress (when she was small, not big)
With a thin coat of puke she would distemper it.

My first pig’s face was yellow like a fright
But no such jaundice see I in your cheeks
And, being changed, you kick with great delight
Cheerful and sweet, despite your poop, which reeks.

She screamed; you sleep. She wailed; you gurgle. She
-Though arguably cuter in the face-
Pooped only once a month (from neck to knee)
Your active bowels denote the Master Race.

But if you turn out bad (and I suspect it)
My abdomen shall sue you. ‘Cause you wrecked it.

Helpdesk Man and I have been experiencing a bout of penury. Ever the helpful spouse, I got out Living Off the Smell of an Oily Rag in New Zealand from the library and read a bunch of thrift blogs. The results have been largely unhelpful.

I don’t know what I expected, really. There are only so many variations on the save-more spend-less theme, and I’ve been baking my own bread and using cloth nappies (not personally, you understand; for the pigs) since the dawn of time anyway. I think I was secretly hoping to find a website that suggested “Look in the linen cupboard; I popped a tenner in it last time I was around”; but nope.

Tips, I have found, can be categorised thusly:

The Privileged: “Go out for lunch instead of dinner. Share an entree. If you’re really worried about paying your beach house decorator, order water”. Any helpful suggestions to sell one’s boat or to eliminate 200 or so television channels also come under this category.

The Naive: “Maybe your mother could watch the children while you take on a part-time job”. “Try asking your landlord for a reduction in the rent”. (I’ve considered ringing mine and saying “Will you charge us half-rent if we actually keep the place clean?”; the pig sometimes bargains this way and, while it shouldn’t work, sometimes it does.) “Knit potholders to sell at craft fairs”. “Perhaps a friend will let you house-sit for a few months”. “Why not dust off that novel you’ve been working on?” “Start a blog. You can make a lot of money, like Pioneer Woman!” Etc.

The Bleedin’ Obvious: “Buy cheaper cuts of meat”. Well, by gum. You mean to say they cost less than the expensive cuts?

The Frankly Sad: “To save on water, stand in the shower and turn it on for 10 seconds to wet yourself; better yet, dampen up by using the dregs of water from glasses people have left lying around the lounge. Turn shower off. Tip a packet of Borax over your head and rub in vigorously; this way if you lie around the kitchen at night you can also deter roaches. Borax doesn’t clean body odour very effectively, so you’ll need to use a little elbow grease, but that’s okay; it will save that costly gym membership! Turn the shower on again for 20 seconds to wash off the blood and Borax. If you keep a bucket over the plughole, you can use the runoff as a nutritious soup. Turn the shower off again. Using this method, my husband was able to save 60 gallons of water a day, before he shot himself.”

I also found a tip by a woman who swore you could make stew by putting boiling water, chopped veggies and bits of meat into a thermos. I doubt it.

The Vaguely Illegal: These tips involve saving pennies at the expense of by-laws or one’s fellow-man: in other words, cheating. One should, apparently, check the stamps on all one’s mail, so that if the cancellation stamp missed its mark, one can cackle with glee and go write a letter to one’s aunt, on The Man. Similar tips include dumpster diving (which I would totally do, incidentally); selling home-baked goods in defiance of food health and safety laws; pretending to one’s electricity provider that a rival electricity provider offered one a better deal, and if the first electricity provider does not top that deal one will pack one’s toaster and be gone; and contesting perfectly valid speeding tickets.

The Stanky: I probably shouldn’t get too precious about these ones, because let’s face it, I do use homemade deodorant and haven’t looked shampoo in the face in years. But I did come across one tip in which a lady told us how she collects roadkill, places it on a rack in her yard with a tray underneath, and as the maggots drop off, feeds them to her chickens. And well, for the record, I don’t do that.

The Brag: These are not in fact tips. These are unreproducible, jealousy-inducing anecdotes about someone’s sweet haul from the thrift store/dump/wealthy neighbor. “I enter competitions, and the other day I won $500 worth of free skincare products just by writing a sonnet to the T-zone”. “I found a $50 bill in the carpark”. “Today in the Salvation Army I found a set of limited-edition Disneyland teaspoons, a Moby wrap that was only slightly puked on, and a ten-dollar bill in the pocket of an old fur coat”. “I attended a taxidermy closing-down auction and got all my Christmas presents for a steal”.

The Ideological: Sometimes the tips themselves aren’t bad, but one is left with the distinct impression that the tipster isn’t so much wanting to save you money as make you a better person. “I became a vegetarian for financial reasons and my colon has never been lither. Best of all, I’m not participating in the brutal slaughter of our cloven-footed friends; their blood does not spurt in my dreams. You too can be murder-free for the price of a cube of tofurkey”. “Cloth diapering isn’t just better for my wallet; every child in disposables creates a pile of dirty nappies as tall as the Empire State Building, which will stand tall long after his meagre achievements have been forgotten and his phthlate-ridden corpse has festered under a parking lot”. “I started eating only rice on Mondays to empathise with the plight of the Haitians. Not only do I save a ton, but it gives me a spiritual connection to these people who I bet you don’t care about, because you don’t eat rice on Mondays. Do you? Do you care about the Haitians? Say it with RICE!”

There are doubtless other categories. After perusing these for a few days, we were still not rich. I decided to write my own list of frugality tips. Of course, just like building your own home (which the Oily Rag book blithely suggests you do if you are, and I quote, “handy with a hammer”), it turns out it’s not as easy as it looks. After much thought, I have come up with only one tip, and I give it to you now.

CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT: Arson.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Donations gratefully accepted.

First off, this brought a brief and transient glimmer of joy to my brain, which, let’s face it, usually just sits there, and I thought you might like it: An Illustrated Guide to Bees.

Second off, I am looking forward with fondness to watching the films of my youth with the snortlepig. We watched Mary Poppins the other night while Helpdesk Man was off carousing, and it was nice. For one thing, we ate carrot sticks and cubes of cheese out of an ice cream sundae cup, which for me is pretty darned Martha Stewart. And also, this afternoon I sang “Feed the birds” as I mended a pair of trou (also pretty d. M. S.), and the snortlepig said “Is that Mary Poppums?”, and it had been, like, a week ago, and she is a Clever Pig. And as the years roll on, if I am not taken by Teh Lupus, we can watch The Sound of Music (which Helpdesk Man has never seen and refuses to, kind of like me and Titanic, only now I secretly want to, because I became briefly obsessed with the wreck after reading the autobiography of Violet Jessop, and I even googled pictures, which as someone with a phobia of all undersea life over about a foot long - seriously, we had enormous hoki fillets for breakfast this morning and they gave me the heeby-jeebies - is No Small Thing, and I hear they did a good job on the architectural details of the ship, and plus, Theoden’s in it).

And Anne of Green Gables. You know, people say that watching movies is anti-social and does not promote togetherness; but it’s bunk. Never mind that entire vibrant communities and indeed practically my own marriage are built on a mutual appreciation of River Tam; some of my fondest memories of my smeggier sisters involve sneaking to the living room at ten past four to watch M*A*S*H* of a weekday.

Third off, tomorrow I am going to the Auckland Food Show. I am taking the auxiliary pig, but not the snortle one, and I plan to eat many little things on sticks and chew judiciously at the purveyors of infused olive oil in a manner calculated to imply I shall be back for a bottle on my Next Go Round, which I probably won’t, because really, you can infuse it yourself, or could if you had a rosemary bush, which we don’t, but still, sixteen dollars. (Probably.) And it will be awesome. I will come back laden with cheem.