Smokey the Magnificent

Need four thousand words

Before accusing night falls.

Less eleven now.

1. I have discovered a new breakfast: Greek-style yoghurt mixed with a little cream and holier-than-thou Anathoth seventy-four-strawberries-to-the-inch jam. It’s verrah nice.

2. A few weeks ago I made a list of all the things we need for the new house, including bookshelves, a single bed, a desk, several chests of drawers and a hutch dresser. Panicked, Helpdesk Man went on TradeMe and bought a projector and a fedora.

3.Yesterday practically my only mother left for the other side of the world after having lunch with me and the snortlepig. It was unrelated, though. She’s probably at Singapore airport right now (and when I say “probably”, bear in mind that geography was never my strong point and she could be anywhere from Auckland to London, not discounting the bottom of the Seine).

4. Helpdesk Man and I had a lovers’ quarrel yesterday due to him being a friggin’ tard. You may help us settle it in my favour. Is a goose more similar to a duck than a fox is to a dog? Answer carefully. To foster impartiality I will not reveal on which side of the question my loyalties lie, only pointing out that good grief, foxes dig burrows and leap!

5. A wily reader will note I have not updated my Challenge progress from last week. It was… passable. “Lacked Vigour”, I would have scrawled on it in red pen if I were the teacher. But I did write several articles (no queries, though) and do a fair few houseworky things. My raised bed is now snugly full of earth - and if the weather clears up, I’ll plant spring onions and carrots in it today - and I’m slowly filling the half-wine-casks with garden mix.

6. I am making a baby quilt. It was going to be a very simple affair, 5-inch squares of pink and leftover brown from my patchwork skirt. But when I did that I wasn’t too thrilled with the colours, and my squares lacked the gridlike precision every other quilter on the Internet seems effortlessly able to accomplish |)how, people, HOW?). So I thought I’d disguise both aspects by covering the thing in appliqued leaves and Suffolk puff flowers. So far the effect is pleasing, but it has tranformed the project from  a quick whip-it-up-in-a-spare-morning affair to a fairly labour-intensive gig. And the woman in question tends to have her babies a few weeks early; so. Wish me luck and expedient blanket-stitching.

7. Two words that should be banned from the English language? Manky and sook. It is a little-known fact that Anakin Skywalker may never have turmed to the Dark Side had Obi-Wan not happened upon him after the death of his mother and sarcastically enquired “Having a bit of a sook?”

Yesterday’s Challenge tasks:

• Write one article a day.

Yup. Did. A review for Untrained Housewife of “The Gift of the Christmas Cookie”, a book that tried far too hard. I know now why reviewers are tempted to give good reviews to items they get for free; it seems very unchivalrous to look gift swag in the mouth. But there you go. The book was weedy.

• Do one thing every day to make the new house look more homelike

I got rid of a bunch of packing boxes (thank you Freecycle), and potted up a bunch of seeds. The pig emptid out the pot containing my nasturtium seeds and the packet of snow pea seeds, and tromped for some time on the resulting pile. Very homelike.

• Do one organisational thing a day

Forwarded mail for previous tenants. I’m going to spend my life doing this.

Everything else

Nuh-uh. I was going to henna my hair, but the lady came to pick up the boxes at 7 and I didn’t feel I could carry off the encounter with green eyebrows and a plastic bag on my head. I will do it tonight, or even this afternoon if the pig allows it. Too long have I hidden my roots under a hat, in direct contradiction to Scripture.

Today I took the piggie into town, always a fraught manoeuvre these days as our pram is on the fritz. She tends to conk out halfway home and have to be carried, while I clutch my purchases in my other arm and feel my arms slowly slip from their sockets. Still, we needed to return a library book. And while at the library I did something daring. I’ve been complaining lately about not knowing any good contemporary authors. Mostly being a classics girl, I haven’t read much recent literature more arcane than Harry Potter. And given that I don’t know the scene, I’m not even sure where to start - mostly I pick up books on the grounds that I saw the movie, or heard that author referenced by another author, or heard someone talk about it. But I never pick up books cold, on the grounds that the title looks interesting. Do people ever really do that? I don’t. But anyway… today I did. In fact, three of the books I chose simply because the snortlepig picked them randomly out of the bookshelf and the dust jackets looked OK.

We will see how it goes. If I were a braver man I’d just start at the As in the fiction section and read my way right through, figuring that if someone liked it enough to publish it it probably wasn’t absolute trash. I’m not currently quite that brave (or well-endowed with spare time), but this is a start. I feel v daring.

Right. By a minor miracle the pig’s asleep without me, so I’d better go slap some henna on my head and make a milktart.

Well, duh. To do a third of the things required to move house.

I’ve made a list, three pages long and counting, of tasks ranging from “scrape paint off the bathroom floor” to “check if Tia Maria has gone off and throw out bottle if so”. Actually Helpdesk Man has to do the Tia Maria thing, all alcohol tastes like the sputum of Satan to me, wouldn’t know if it was good or bad. Does Tia Maria even go bad? Anyway. I was going to give myself Points for each task, but alas - the spirit is willing, but the funds are gone. All my Suite101 money has been amassed into the common fund, like a pure riverlet being swallowed by the roaring ocean. Bear in mind that analogy says more about the size of the riverlet than the ocean. But still though. Frivolous spending is on hold for the time being. Just as well I got that fabric before we found the house, no? :p Then again, I suppose I could still amass the points and hope my Suite income will start skyrocketing enough for me to make good on the debt one day. It’d certainly make moving house seem cheerier.

I’ll probably have to spend a good chunk of tomorrow taking the snortlepig back to the doctor, too. The nail failed to make its appearance, so she’ll need another X-ray to see what it’s up to. (Probably been assimilated, which means it will take only the mildest of electric shocks to transform her into Iron Pig, snortliest superdude of them all. Good reason not to get a trampoline, at least until she’s past the terrible twos.)

Oh yeah, and… anyone want to help us move house? *beams* Not this week, obviously. When the time comes. Sure you do. You promised you would, at Lent.

Yesterday I prepared for moving house by cleaning under the spare bed and donating a bunch of old nappies to the op shop, thus clearing out half my glory box. Today I’m planning to go through clothes and toys in an effort to donate a bunch more stuff; and, following the suggestion of a woman on MDC, start packing some non-seasonal clothes. Which is tricky given the weird weather we’ve been having lately, but I’m sure there’s something I can put in a box. My Eowyn costume, for instance.

…is to do at least one thing every day that will make moving house easier when the fateful day comes. I was thinking of cleaning under the spare bed today, for example: the snortlepig hid a potato under there some weeks ago and I’m curious to see how it’s coming along.

Made multi-grain bread for Helpdesk Man’s breakfasts; started foccacia for tomorrow’s lunch; made banana muffins for Mother. Made pasta with red wine sauce for dinner, made puff pastry and from thence, palmiers with my small sister. Hung out washing. Did two loads of dishwasher. Cleaned stove. Dressed self and snortlepig. Went to Mother’s and looked at someone’s photos of her trip to Disney World. Fantasised much about visiting there myself. Posted Suite article. A moderately productive day.

The puff pastry performed admirably, rising to glorious heights and flaking into as many layers as could be wished. The custard squares as a whole weren’t quite as successful, though. They tasted good, but I was unable to replicate the rubbery solidity of bakery custard squares. Instead it made a thickish custard that promptly squoze out the sides when I tried to cut them. Any ideas? Helpdesk Man suggested using gelatine and it may come to that, but I don’t quite fancy the idea. Maybe I could try doing a baked custard - they tend to be firm and cuttable. Sort of a Spanish flan deal which I then slapped between puff pastry and iced. It seems tedious though, and none of the recipes I’ve found suggest it. Maybe Firm and Upright Custard is simply not reproducible by the home cook, being comprised of chemicals too vile to name. I suspect that is the case… but I like Firm and Upright Custard. A conundrum.

Took the pig to Lollipop’s Playland on Saturday. It’s an indoor play area thingy with a ball pit, bouncy castle, tunnels and so on. The pig had a marvellous time, although much of it was spent in examining, dropping and laboriously finding again (and again and again) a number of large sequins which had presumably fallen off some child’s clothes. In between times she amused herself immensely by bouncing on the bouncy castle, stealing her aunt’s fries and trying to climb up slides in the toddler section (a vulgar and loutish practice of which I disapprove). When we left at the end I was surprised at her biddability, vaguely expecting a tantrum… and then we discovered she still had the sequins clutched firmly in her fat wee hand.

Right, well, this week’s challenge is to be productive. Because I have things to do, including sorting out some drearily soul-sucking matter with the IRD (turns out throwing away letters from them on the grounds that one is not really into taxes and finds the whole process sordid isn’t as sound a financial plan as one might think); binding a quilt; hastily making some summer tops for the snortlepig; and plowing through a huge number of books, DVDs and CDs lent to me by various folk who want them back. And I need to write more articles, of course. I keep getting behind on my Hair Care articles - once a week comes around more often than expected.

So anyway, I am reluctantly allowing myself no internet again this week, except for email and work-related purposes. Hopefully I’ll either do useful things out of boredom or read some of my borrowed books instead.

Question: If you were going to sing an a cappella medley of TV theme songs, other than Friends and Scrubs and Charles in Charge, what would you pick? It would need to be something that matched those three fairly well in tone, so not the Enterprise theme (which is weedy and pathetic anyway) or the lyricised version of M*A*S*H* or anything.

So the gluten-free week didn’t really pan out. We tried, but other than not actually serving bread at dinner it was all a bit of a sham. Without any medically compelling reason not to put chicken stock powder in the rice, who wouldn’t? Other than vegetarians and the kinds of classy Traditional Foods individuals who get around to making real stock, of course.

The domesticity angle was less of a dead loss; I semi-kinda-sorta deep-cleaned one day, and the floor actually stayed clean for some hours together. It turns out that the snortlepig is an enthusiastic domestic servant; she vacuumed and wielded the broom with diligence and intimidation, and at one point I came across her dutifully scrubbing the toilet. (Against all known house rules, of course, but what is one to do? She had both lids up and was using the toilet brush expertly. Surely one can’t be expected to discourage that sort of thing?)

So anyway, in light of last week, this week I will continue being domestic using a handy system I devised on Friday with a piece of paper and a spark plug. To wit, I left time management and decision-making in the hands of the gods. I drew a wheel on a piece of paper with categories in various spokes, like “Eat something healthy”, “Do something organisational” and “Read to the snortlepig”. I then spun the spark plug as the whim took me and followed its dictates. Don’t obsess about the spark plug, it isn’t important - one could as easily use a ballpoint pen or a human femur or whatever, it just happened to be what the pig was eating at the time. Anyway it worked, so I’m gonna do that again this week. K?

And now for the sixty thousand dollar question: Say that as punishment for your misdeeds you were forced to consume a date scone, one of whose dates was in fact a cockroach. Would you rather eat the one scone, knowing that the cockroach was interred in its depths; or eat a scone a day for a month, never knowing which one was infested?

Oh, and another thing. If you saw a Double Irish Chain quilt made with these fabrics, would you go “Ooo” or throw up a little in your mouth, or undergo any reaction between said extremes? It seems most Irish chain quilts are quite stark, with green “chains” and a white background, and I don’t like that; but I was planning to go for a softer look, with the background colours being the pale pinks and creams and the chains being green flanked by darker pink, with some kind of interestingly feminine, non-severe border with more dark pink in it. It’s for the snortlepig’s bed. I was thinking of doing a thicker lap-quilt to go at the end of the bed with the leftover fabrics, too, possibly with a scalloped edge so as to further offset the geometry of the Irish chain on the bedspread. Any thoughts? (Other than “Dude, you have fifty-eight sewing projects on the go as it is, have you the brainworms?”, to which I would not take kindly.)

…is to atone for my housewifely and culinary deficiencies of last week, occasioned by The Quilt, as a pre-emptive strike against Helpdesk Man running off with a large Swedish masseuse. So lots of cleaning - my sewing room is a sight to behold - running a bunch of long-overdue errands, and so on. I also need to make some mooshy foods for Mother, who is now allowed to eat but not to chow down beefsteaks. And just to mix things up, Helpdesk Man and I are going gluten-free this week. Not for health reasons, particularly; mostly because I got a book on gluten-free cooking out of the library, in fact; but if it should give us an extra twinkle to our toes and shinier spleens, so much the better. (Or not, actually, because giving up bread and baked goods would be a heck of a nuisance.)

I also need to catch up on my Suite hair care articles and try to do something with sister-in-law before her infant makes its appearance. It will be a busy week, I think. Plus I need to finish the snortlepig’s winter top before the weather heats up unduly; and oddly, making The Quilt has inspired me to finish a flimsy I made for the snortlepig’s changing table before she was born. You’d think I’d be put off quilting forever, but no - the free motion quilting was fun, or would have been if I hadn’t been doing it at a frantic hundred miles an hour and snapping needles into my eye, and I even enjoyed the binding process.