Smokey the Magnificent

Nearly every famous speech from history and the arts can be given new meaning by adding “like, so“. Like so:

“I came, I saw, I, like, so conquered”. -Julius Caesar

“Frankly my dear, I, like, so don’t give a damn.” - Rhett Butler

“A woman without a man is, like, so like a fish without a bicycle.” - Gloria Steinem (attrib.)

“E, like, so equals M C squared”. - Einstein

“Make it, like, so so!” - Jean-Luc Picard

“Unfortunately, no-one can be told what the Matrix is. You, like, so have to see it for yourself.” - Morpheus.

“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak’d meats/Did, like, so coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” - Hamlet

“It’s, like, so a trap!” - Admiral Ackbar

“We are, like, so not amused.” - Queen Victoria

Amirite? It’s nice to know that my $12,000-plus-extras-for-Cookie-Times-from-the-library-vending-machine degree in English didn’t go to waste.

You, like, so shall not pass...

Last night my computer died. We were innocently watching an episode of QI when it let out a long-drawn-out scream, went “kbbbpt” and perished. According to Flatmate Man, who knows these things, it’s either the power pack or the motherboard; either way, it don’t sing no more, and I am reduced to typing this on Helpdesk Man’s laptop, which I despise.

On the bright side, the loss of easy entertainment did mean I accomplished things last night. I sewed a good portion of a baby shirt, and then spent an amusing half-hour trawling through my past, in the form of a bag full of childhood memorabilia foisted upon me by my mother, who is moderately sentimental about such things but has, after all, six mostly-grown-up children, and who has the time?

The contents were as you might expect: immunisation records, a second prize for needlework, recommendations as to my character wheedled out of parishioners. There were a large sheaf of school reports, all of which stated that I was bright - which was probably true - and a pleasure to have in the class - which was at worst and likeliest a bare-faced lie, and at best teacher-parlance for “has not yet actively committed arson”. There was also a fulsomely enthusiastic assessment of my brainials by a child psychologist, which might have been more flattering if I hadn’t been sent to see him on account of my temper tantrums; but still. Apparently most of my problems were due to the ineptitude of my peers. Yes, you. I hope you’re sorry.

Lest all this praise go to my head, I also discovered two sobering truths about myself.

1. A while back I started toying with the idea that I had had, as a teenager, a mild form of body dysmorphic disorder; a psychological condition in which one views oneself as far more hideous than objectively warranted. Aside from the natural pleasure of diagnosing oneself with a condition of any kind - this year I found out I have megalophobia, and the pleasure this gave me almost outweighed the crippling paranoia I get upon seeing the Free Willy DVD case at the shop - it explained, I thought, why I spent my adolescent yeas hiding behind my hair, unable to respond to personal compliments from Helpdesk Man for the first two years of our relationship with anything other than a muttered denial and ungracious scowl.

Unfortunately, last night I happened upon some photos of my teenage self, and let it be sadly stated for the record:

I did not have body dysmorphic disorder. Just a hella unfortunate face.

2. From somewhat earlier in my lifetime, but perhaps foreshadowing Point Number 1, I came across my birth notes. I have a bit of a thing for birth notes; I find them fascinating; so naturally I perused mine with great interest. The snortlepig’s moment of birth, for the record, was heralded by my lovely midwife with the words “Baby girl born at 6:33; well done Mum! Beautiful girl; welcome [name of snortlepig]“. Not strictly scientific, perhaps, but charming. What did my OB-GYN have to say, in the section marked “notes on newborn”?

“Vernixy”.

That was it. A single, dismissive word, dripping with disgust. One could imagine him dangling my infant self distastefully by one arm, remarking to the nurses that he would skip lunch after all; perhaps then striding down the hallway with a pained expression on his face, heading for the dispensary for the first time since he promised the wife. Maybe he jumped off the carpark. I don’t know; but it seems he could have reflected a little on the ignominity of being thusly summed up in one’s earliest moments of life. “Vernixy”. I should put it on my tombstone.

So there that is. In other news, I am now officially 39 weeks and 1 day pregnant; and if I make it four more days without giving birth, I shall be the most pregnant I’ve ever been. Oddly enough I’m not, as pregnant women are expected to be, impatient to meet the baby. I have a lot of sewing to do; all my Hypnobabies practice has yet to convince me that childbirth will be a fun and Christmassy event; and when it comes down to it, in the words of the immortal Jean Kerr, whoever she was - “Now the thing about having a baby - and I can’t be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter, you have it”.

Well said, lady. Anyway, Super 8 comes out on my due date, and I want to see it. And I stood on a small sharp shard of something the other day and cut my foot, and I object to going into labour with a cut foot; it might throw off my whole vibe. (I felt similarly about last week’s flu, but that seems to have mostly disappeared, save for a hacking cough; thank you for asking.) Worse things do happen; I know a lady online who broke her leg a few weeks before going into labour, and can you imagine? Horrid. Even a bad sunburn, really, would put a damper on things. Or ebola.

This is why I love Peter, Paul and Mary:

But that is by the by. Did you know David Tennant once played Hamlet? Onstage, but they made a film version as well. Get a load of this:

On the bleak marshes there lived a virtuous maiden with her father and his second wife. The farmer was fortunate, and the maiden drank plenty of good goats’ milk and ate her fill of good barley bread. But the girl’s stepmother had bitterness in her veins, and so she devoted her days to tormenting her daughter-in-law.

One cold day the stepmother had awoken in a foul mood, and she scolded and beat the maiden all the long day, and at nightfall finally drove her from the house. Weeping, the maiden stumbled through the marsh, pursued by the stones and taunts of her mother-in-law. The tears so blinded her that the maiden was forced to tear the kerchief from her head to dry her tears. But a wind sprang up and caught the kerchief from her, and the girl ran after it.

Now the marsh was flat and desolate, but here and there a stunted tree grew. And the maiden’s kerchief tumbled towards one such tree, and as quick as sight disappeared into a crack in the tree’s grey trunk. The girl reached in after it - and to her astonishment the crack was deeper than her arm was long, though the tree looked small, and she could not reach the kerchief. And as she groped the crack widened, and with a cry the maiden tumbled inside.

When she came to, the girl gasped to find herself dazzled by sunlight. The grey bleakness of the marshes had disappeared, and she was sitting in a field of wildflowers and singing birds. Astonished, the maiden arose and began to explore. To one side of the field she heard laughing voices, and rubbing her aching limbs she stumbled towards them.

At the end of the field was a clearing, filled with shining folk. Women in dresses of the palest hues swung and danced and combed their hair; tall men with beardless faces drank from crystal goblets and swam in a pool filled with shining fishes. The maiden gasped at such a sight and backed away, ashamed of her own dirty clothes; but the most beautiful lady of them all, with a dress of cobwebs and kind, ancient eyes, ran forward and clasped her hands.

“Greetings, O favoured one!” she said, and her voice was like light. “Your sorrows have not been unseen by the land of Faerie. Here there is peace, and bliss, and you shall live without fear.”

Then maidens came and took her, and they washed the battered maiden and dressed her wounds with salve. And once she was arrayed in a dress of palest green, they pressed her with grapes and sweetmeats that sent strength coursing through her veins. And the Queen of the Fairies came again to the maiden and said “See, I have chosen a husband for you among our people”. And she presented to the maiden a golden-haired man with sparkling eyes; and as the maiden looked into his eyes she felt all the songs of the songbirds welling up in her heart, and she loved him well. And so they were married by the field of ever-living flowers, and the fairies paid them homage.

It seemed like only a few hours later - though in the real world a year and a day had passed - before the sun slipped away and twilight stole over the clearing. And the Queen of the Fairies called the maiden, and spoke to her kindly.

“Forever shall you dwell among us, and your children will be blessed and have great gifts”, she said. “But beware the wrath of Faerie! If ever you squeeze the pimples on the back of your fairy lover, you will at once be cast back onto the marsh - and though we do not wish it, I foresee that your death would soon follow such an event. So beware!”

The maiden promised faithfully; and the Queen led her to a marble couch in the middle of the clearing, where her husband lay. The maiden lay down and tried to sleep, but the silken covers slipped away, and by the light of the moon she saw that her husband’s back was covered in juicy pimples. Alas! the maiden was a picker, and she did not last ten minutes. She felt a rumbling cry of rage from the trees and grass around her, and the next minute she found herself once more swooning by the tree in the bleak, cold marsh. Then the marsh weasels came.

Today I was seized with a wild, creative urge occasioned by being behind on the laundry. I made the snortlepig some trousies.

They have side seam pockets, the insertion of which taxed my tiny brain to the uttermost.

Also big knee-pockets, into which I am thinking of putting small pillows to cushion the knees of the snortlepig when she falls on them during walks. I’m not sure, though. It seems anti- the survival of the fittest. One would not wish to do the species a disservice by artificially advantaging a snortlepig who cannot retain control of her own two feet.

Just for larks, I also topstitched some pretend pockets on her rump. It’s doing little things like this that keep me topside of the Seine.

And because I am Thrifty and Virtuous, I made the legs very long and fully lined so they can be turned up and the pig can wear them till she’s, like, thirty. And don’t think she won’t.

The pig was also struck with the creative yen today. Know what gets ballpoint pen off an LCD monitor? Handsoap, hairspray and/or rubbing alcohol. Thank you, Google.

Note to the world: never trust a snortlepig. Today I was doing some long-overdue gardening, and in the course of pulling out three gone-to-seed parsley plants the size of trees I accidentally terminated a tiny spring onion. As I’d just put on some chicken soup - incidentally, you might like to pause at this point and contemplate the picture of virtuous and wifely industry I paint here - I handed the spring onion to the snortlepig and said “Go tell Daddy to put this in the soup. Can you give it to him and say “Daddy, soup”?” “Daddy, soup, okay!” said the pig, and disappeared with charming alacrity. By the time she returned, I had accidentally pulled up a baby carrot as well. “Can you give this to Daddy for the soup as well?” I said, and she disappeared indoors once more - but feeling a slight premonition, I followed her inside, just in time to see her up on a chair by the stove, attempting to stuff the entire carrot - dirt, greens and all - into the bubbling pot.

It turned out she had, indeed, shown the spring onion to Helpdesk Man - who, with typical male cluelessness, responded to her enthusiastic “Soup!” by informing her condescendingly that while spring onions can, indeed, be used for soup, they can also be used to cook many other things. At which point the snortlepig must have realised one of life’s great truths, and decided to do the deed herself.

Snortlepig: 1

Helpdesk Man: 0

Smokey: 0

Soup: …still edible, I think. The spring onion wasn’t that dirty.

As some of you may know, I’m a vague, lazy adherent to Traditional Foodism, aka the Weston A Price Foundation system of nutrition. Of late I have decided to step it up a notch, and thus rashly made a pledge in the presence of my online peers to:

• eat fish twice a week
• eat organ meats once a week (and a tablespoon of liver hidden in a largeish lasagna counts - what am I, Wonder Woman?)
• eat yoghurt five times a week
• and consume chicken broth in some form three times a week.

Fish twice a week is a tad pesky, as I don’t drive and only go to the supermarket once a week. I might have to buy frozen, which is problematic because Helpdesk Man once violently hurled after eating some frozen fish - and even though I’m pretty sure it was coincidental, it causes him to view all iced seafood with a rheumy and skittish eye. I cannot blame him, really. I ate a kebab once with little bits of carrot in, and - well, we shall not speak of it. Anyway, apparently fish roe is the most nutrient-dense form of seafood, followed by shellfish, but I simply cannot bring myself to look a mussel in the eye, and the snortlepig made friends with some at the supermarket the other day (”Bath! A having a bath!”), so fish it is. Fissssssh.

So, yup. Tomorrow the lawn-mowing man will be upon us with his claw outstretched for the taking of lucre, so I have to get up early in the morning and walk the piggie to the butcher’s (not as terrible as it sounds). Helpdesk Man is away on Monday nights, so… let’s see here…

Monday: Pasta for dinner, go to butcher’s in morning, get cash out for lawn-mowing man, make hot cross buns for in-laws. Yoghurt for breakfast. Get Helpdesk Man to charm the chappie at work into putting free bus credits on my bus card, which is running out (he thinks the snortlepig is cute in the face - v handy, thrift-wise). Chicken soup for lunch. Try to finish knitting the snortlepig’s other wristlet.

Tuesday:  Yoghurt for breakfast. Go into town and buy wool to knit this top for the snortlepig. Get library books. Stop in at supermarket on the way home and buy fissssh. Fissssh for dinner. Wait, smeg. Mum’s homeschool choir is having its first performance at a rest home, and I am expected to attend for reasons of dubious usefulness. Do the shopping in the afternoon, then. Or whenever the performance isn’t. When is it? Then my choir practice at night. Gotta make something. Something bananoid, gotta use them up. Yus. Defrost gravy beef and liver.

Wednesday: Yoghurt again. Make something crockpoid with the gravy beef, incorporating a minute, token amount of liver. Soak rice. Chicken soup for lunch.

Thursday: Shopping with sister-in-law. Buy fish! Eat fish. Red fish. Blue fish. Have rice with the fish, cooked in chicken stock.

Friday: Date night with Helpdesk Man, a concept that has become laughably meaningless of late, but which will probably involve eating steak on the couch and watching the A-Team while the snortlepig kicks us in the face. Must ask Helpdesk Man what he wishes to eat sometime before Thursday, so as to buy it from the supermarket again. Yoghurt again - by this time, gut is teeming with iridescent life to the point where we will probably cancel Saturday altogether in order to sprint a half-marathon.

Wait. On Friday my practically-nearly-only-brother-in-law will be staying the night in honour of Easter. I shall have to ask my sister what he eats. It better not be fisssh.

At some point during this whole protein-laden debacle, I should also finish sewing the snortlepig’s spotty winter top, query a couple of print articles and write a few more for the web. And clean the light shades, on which flies have rudely throomed. Also experiment with a sugar-salt-water syrup, which tonight I used on my hair admixed with henna as a moisturising agent, but which needs to be more scientifically tested next time I wash it.

K.

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.

Of the three candied bacon ice cream eaters, one was enthusiastic, one mildly so and one not. So there you have it. I’m not sure I’ll make it again, partly because it was rather labour-intensive; but I might make candied bacon next time I go on a hike, ie. in about ten years.

My article about FAM is done and handed in. Woot.

Today I just fulfilled a long-put-off vague desire and made panna cotta. White chocolate panna cotta. I’m not sure about it. I like custard and milky things and white chocolate, but on the other hand the simplicity of the recipe makes ot starkly apparent that it is basically solidified milk. We will see.

More excitingly, I am trying my hand as a conductress this afternoon. Well, a semi-conductress. Like silicon. Or silicone, I suppose, being the feminine variant. Never mind. Anyway. My mother has started up a homeschool choir, and I will be doing vocal exercises at its inaugural meeting today at church. The choice of location was fraught with politics, as Mother did not wish the choir to be exclusively for Christians; but there are too many kidlings to have it at someone’s home and our church has a very decent piano. The decor isn’t that oppressive - no gold eagles or stained glass or anything - but we will see.

What’s more of an issue is the songs. In case you have never interacted with homeschooling parents en masse, they tend to be - how shall I put this? - intense. “Live and let live” isn’t necessarily their motto. “This isn’t a hill I want to die on” is not something they say a lot. “Meh” is not in their vocabulary. Confronted with an innocent peanut butter sandwich, the average homeschooling parent will immediately wrestle five moral/ethical/ecological issues out of it, ranging from disadvantaging peanut-allergic children to objecting to the non-organic nature of the bread*, and will probably call for its immediate ritual incineration. On a good week, letters to the local paper will accompany the process.

The upshot of all this is that finding neutral and inoffensive songs for the 5-16 age range is a very, very difficult task. Mother has stated at the outset that Christmas carols will be part of the programme, but otherwise she wishes to avoid religious songs (otherwise what will happen? The Catholic mothers will want their little angels to sing Ave Maria, that’s what’ll happen. In the chapel of a Reformed Baptist Church. And we don’t even want to think about that.) Which leaves… what?

Do Re Mi, pretty much. Double Trouble from the Harry Potter films? Vetoed due to witchcraft. Blackbird by the Beatles? Vetoed due to drugs and immoral living. Anything from the Disney canon? Vetoed because, well, it’s the Disney canon. Puff, the Magic Dragon? Vetoed because, obviously, it’s a metaphor for getting high. Somewhere Over the Rainbow? Mother, nervously: “I’m not sure… it does have witches in it…”

To put this in perspective, Mother knows a homeschooling lady who pulled her children out of a children’s choir because one of the songs was entitled “We Love Chocolate”. Can you spot the issue? Here it is: We do not love chocolate. We love Jesus.

This promises to be an interesting afternoon.

*Plus, the owner of the store at which the bread was purchased has dubious political views. And we shouldn’t be eating non-Essene bread anyway; or, perhaps, we shouldn’t be eating grains at all, because humans were designed to forage for raw fruits and nuts only, but not in an evolutionary way.

Remember the snortlepig’s security knickers? Well, she seems to have made a new friend. It is a small bottle of peppermint essence. She fell in love with it at the supermarket when I gave it to her to hold in place of the cream, having spotted at the last second that she had taken the lid off and was about to upend it onto the supermarket floor. That same day I made mint chocolate chip ice cream (not my most successful flavour - that was three weeks ago and we still have some lurking in the freezer), and had to wrest the essence away from a squealing pig with entreaties and promises to give it back. When it was returned to her, sans half a teaspoon, she carried it away in sobbing triumph and promptly hid it under the sofa where my clawing fingers and dodgy housekeeping would never find it.

Then a few days ago, the snortlepig’s tiny aunt discovered it under said sofa while searching for the snortlepig’s small wooden animals. I put it back on the shelf and thought nothing of it until today, when the snortlepig started dancing and pointing and saying “DA!” at the pantry. I picked her up, wondering if she’d developed a sudden taste for dried chickpeas… but nope. She’s been carrying the peppermint essence around again for two solid hours. Freak.

Interestingly, although the peppermint smell cannot be detected outside the bottle and although she almost certainly does not associate the two, the mint chocolate chip ice cream was her favourite flavour. She also eats olives. She’s classier than me.

Incidentally, shikakai? Good stuff. Exceptionally. If this keeps up I might be able to wear my hair down occasionally, although of course I would then have to navigate the perils of giving the snortlepig the milks without sitting on it myself or having said pig twine it round her feet and pull. Madonna never had this problem (the Blessed Virgin I mean, not the singer, although I doubt she did either).

I’m drafting a dress! It is harder than it looks. And invisible zips are evil. I will update you when there is good news: until then, don’t ask.

In other news… hoom. Helpdesk Man ate the first ripe tomato of the summer yesterday and his eyes watered a little. I am babysitting my small sisters on Friday, and we will watch the last 29 minutes of Toy Story 2 and the entirety of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I have an article due in six days that isn’t even remotely written. We watched Season 5 of The Office and are on to Season 6. I’ve been listening, goodness knows why, to wizard rock and have so far sifted only two decent songs from the dross - I Believe in Nargles and Accio Love. Both of which are, quite honestly, rubbish: but I have a small life. Also, the pig’s wet nappy reeks strangely of tuna, which we have not eaten for months. I’d better go change it before worse things happen.