Smokey the Magnificent

1. Tiny Miles has acquired a tooth. So begins Phase Two: Weaponisation.

2. We are Moved In. More or less. Blimey. Words cannot describe. Moving house seems to be more of a major production every time we do it. Helpdesk Man and I have solemnly agreed not to move again until we wax rich and we can build our dream homestead/castle/commune out in the country.

As it now stands, the kitchen, living room and pig’s bedroom, are all nearly painted, and the hallway is partly painted. Nothing is entirely painted, a state of affairs we must remedy soon, before we get used to it and leave it masking-taped and blotchy for the next ten years. Still, the house looks vastly better. One small section of skirting board in the living room is still its original green, and it catches the eye something fierce as soon as you walk in the door. A whole room of it would probably have made Helpdesk Man run amok in a matter of days.

Speaking of running amok, this is the ideal place for it. We went on a recon mish the other day and snooped round the orchard. Not only is it far bigger than I had imagined… it is awesome. We kept coming across odder and odder things - a decomposing shed with a decomposing dinghy and kayak inside, a stagnant lake with a hide, a delightfully eerie sawmill, steampunky rusted contraptions of unknown purpose, with valves and dials and levers, skulking under apple trees; a small flock of rosellas; a creek with waterfalls; an abandoned van that looks like it belonged to the Lone Gunmen; and a bright red telephone box, falling apart in the middle of a field. The whole place is just begging to be used as the location for a gritty Kiwi film about hillbillies, zombies, raptors or (ideally) all three. And there’s convolvulus.

3. The wildlife here is equally fascinating. In addition to the rosellas and the resident sheep, we have discovered a kingfisher, a bird of unusual design dubbed Dennis the Quail-Bird, a hedgehog called Hapless, a rat named Howard Harley (the pig named him - I dunno), a creature called Mighty Mandible Moth, which bit Helpdesk Man when he tried to evict it, and a large spider which builds beautiful orb webs on the porch every night. At least, she used to; her latest few efforts have been a bit patchy. I think she lost the will to create after we accidentally destroyed her web for the fourth time, walking through it.

There have also been two slugs, but we shall not speak of those - they give Helpdesk Man the heeby-jeebies. And looking out the window, I see there is a cockroach on the porch. One moment while I bellow for the man of the house.

4. You should see the pig’s room. It is pretty neat. The pink and cream stripy wall pleases me more every time I look at it. I found an old round mirror I bought ages ago off TradeMe (only to have Helpdesk Man take one look at it and say “Ew… you bought that?”, whereupon I shoved it in the shed for two years) and covered the frame with cream ruffles. Then I covered a Styrofoam ball with folded circles of pink satiny fabric, to make a ruffly ball thing, and hung it above the pig’s bed on a ribbon. Sophisticated as hell. I’m going to do more of them, in cream satin and lace net, but the first one took a lot out of me - I had to cut out 116 pink circles, traced around a mug. The whole thing took two days. Still, it pleases me. And when I’ve covered the pig’s corkboard in green floral fabric, and made cream curtains with four layers of ruffles at the bottom, the second-bottom-most being pink, and found some vintage knobs to use as curtain tiebacks, and bought and distressed a desk and bookshelves, and made a teepee with thick dowelling, and finished the pig’s summer quilt, and put a cream ruffle around her mini-trampoline, and replaced the light shade, and made a nightlight… well, it will be the cutest wee room you ever did see. And then I shall take photos.

5. The garden is growing apace. We’ve been eating zucchini ever since we got here; we missed one, and it is now the size of Miles. I’m torn between leaving it, just to see how big it can go, or harvesting it before it gets too watery and making a bunch of zucchini loaf or soup or something. And I harvested a colander-full of basil the other day (the colander was lying around the back yard, being awesome) and made pesto. So there.

6. We have a wedding to go to on Saturday. Do I have anything to wear? No, I do not. Neither does Miles, but I’m making him a sweet Ottobre outfit - pants, a button-up shirt and a cute little short vest. We went shopping yesterday and I tried on five dresses, and fell into a deep depression for the rest of the afternoon.

7. Our internet, as the cunning among you will have surmised, is back up. This took some doing. Helpdesk Man threatened Xnet with litigation. Handy tip: it worked. Being without the internet, daily trips to my parents’ to check emails notwithstanding, was actually rather pleasant. I pulled weeds out of the front lawn and everything.

That said, I am now going to read a week’s worth of XKCD. Excuse me.

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. At this very moment, as we speak, my large, smallish sister is being laid open on a gurney, having bits of her spine chipped off and packed back in and augmented with metal rods and whacked back into shape, in order to render her less wonky. She asked them to take photos. I want to be that awesome when I grow up.

2. The pig and I have made cinnamon salt dough cookies to go on the Christmas tree. We brushed some of them with gold powder, and iced the others with white icing.

3. I am in the throes of creative angst. This Friday I am entering a pavlova competition at Nosh, a gourmet food store which sells unpasteurised cheese and strawberry balsamic vinegar, and other items too classy to come within a mile of our fair city, until now. The prize is Nosh vouchers, and a fair chunk of them too: so I am determined to win.

There’s only one slight problem: while I can churn a mean batch of sorbet and poach an egg without breaking a blood vessel in my eye, I’m not much of a pavlovier. I made a nice one a while back, but I can’t remember how I did it. And with Nosh vouchers at stake, I can’t risk presenting the judges with a mere white-on-white, strawberries-and-passionfruit monstrosity like eveyone else. My pavlova has to speak. To sing. To dance, if you will. To fly, to swirl, to plummet, to skim the moon-limned clouds of glory and come back to rest feather-light like a dove on an unsuspecting beetle, &c.

So last night I started experimenting. Pavlova 1.0 - theoretically a mocha pavlova with coffee-infused cream and the potential for adding hazelnuts later - was something of a disaster. Too much cream of tartar, cornflour and vinegar, and not nearly tall enough. Plus, interesting fact? If you heat cream and infuse coffee into it, it won’t whip no more. I’ll turn it into panna cotta, so it’s no great loss, but still.

Nothing daunted, I am preparing Pavlova 2.0 for dessert tonight. This one will be pink (potential pitfall: browning in oven. Maybe I should omit the initial 10-minute high-temperature in favour of preheating it high and then cooking it for longer at a lower temperature); covered in chocolate curls and strawberries (raspberries for the real deal, but they’re expensive), and possibly dusted with gold. A girly pavlova. I need to find a big star-shaped nozzle for the cream, though. Would rosewater be a pleasing addition? No, possibly not. And I’ll need to put the dehumidifier on - this is the worst pavlova weather ever (although at least all the other contestants will face the same problem).

4. Today the pigs and I went to a hangi at Playcentre, except we were the only ones who showed up. I think it was an elaborate plot to scam me out of my contributory pumpkin - which was not cheap, let me add. $3.99 a kilo is very different to $3.99 a pumpkin, but I didn’t want to disappoint the nice grocer lady.

5. I am becoming quite the gardener. (Gardeness?) Our soon-to-be new landlord rototilled me two enormous patches of dirt for veggies, and there’s also a huge flower bed out the front of the cottage. So for the past few weeks I have been dragging Helpdesk Man and the piggies out to the new house to plant, water and mulch my tiny seedlings.

During this process I have learned a very important lesson: no matter how many dozens of pots you have on the deck, and how many trillions of seedlings you think you’ve planted, a really decent-sized plot of earth will take about four times the quantity you have.

So in an insignificant section of the flower bed I’ve planted nigella, sweet peas, echium, cornflowers, snapdragons and a few other punnets’-worth of flowers I can’t even name; and I have fifty pots on the deck containing seedlings for sunflowers, Canterbury bells, dianthus and poppies.  But that still won’t be enough… which is super, actually, as it justifies my new impulse purchase habit. Seeds. $2.99 a pop and very fulfilling. I got clary sage, gypsophila and dwarf sweet peas last time I was at the supermarket, and I plan to sneak off to the Warehouse today to buy more. And for the first time in my gardening career, I’ve actually used up an entire packet of seeds at one go (partly because they’re stingy with sweet peas, but still). It feels marvellously profligate. I even borrowed some rooting hormone from a friend and am trying to grow geraniums and roses from cuttings.

[Later]

1. Sister is out of surgery - apparently minus a good dollop of blood, but still in the land of the living.

3. Pavlova 2.0 refused to crisp up on the outside, but was pleasingly shmallowy and a tasteful shade of pink. With some minor modifications, it should be suitable.

5. White geraniums, dwarf lobelias and a perennial petunia. Or was it a primrose? Pink and bushy. Miles disgraced himself by ripping off half the plant when I wasn’t looking, and then beaming gummily. Probably my fault for letting him fight trees when he’s bored.

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.

Yawn. Moop. Well, we are finally more or less absolutely moved in. Pretty much. Kinda. A woman off Freecycle is coming to collect the empty likker boxes for her house-move tonight, which will make the kitchen look considerably more respectable. And I have been seasonably afflicted, as usual, with veggie gardening fervor, so the back entrance to the house is littered with wee pots and dribbles of potting mix exhumed from them by the snortlepig, who is apparently anti-veggies.

More impressively, we have a raised bed. Slightly raised, anyway. More of a token raise than a legitimately rheumatism-saving waist-high raise; but a raise nevertheless. It was a bit of a mission , nevertheless. The raised beds on TradeMe go for ridiculously inflated prices, and after seeing a few dead simple four-plank affairs go for over $100 my Scottish blood revolted and I said to myself, How hard can it be? Which is a thing one should not say. So I called upon my mother to take me to Bunnings, which sold cutesy little prepackaged veggie-bed-building kits with planks and nails and the like for $129. Puh-leeze, thunk I, and trotted off to the loose lumber. Four planks of that turned out to be going for a good $50, which by that stage I was meekly prepared to accept; but my mother is made of sterner stuff. “Dreamin’”, quoth she and drove me to a place I had previously only known as a legend: Demolition Traders.

What I knew is that it used to be Mum’s favourite shop and you could buy old French doors there. What I didn’t know is that it’s essentially a decayed urban Disneyland - a tumbleweed-blown, dusty Main Street USA and the perfect setting, if anyone’s interested, for a student horror film. It isn’t a shop at all, it’s an enormous lot filled with old houses transported onto the site - some of which were cannibalised from other old houses - and filled wit bits of yet more houses. One is filled, as Mother predicted, with French doors; another with bathtubs standing up against the walls like a hotel for hygienic vampires; another with amputated taps. One warehouse was full of whole kitchens, extracted neatly from houses and standing around just  chillin’. And just to add a ghoulish Western B movie effect to the place, the legitimate goods for sale are intermixed with ancient carriage parts and wagon wheels, as well as seats made out of bathtubs a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s totally uber, and if I were left there alone after dark I’d very quickly end up gibbering in a warehouse, probably under the rowing boat named Titanic.

Anyway, an old chap eventually emerged from the gloom to help us sort through the piles of old weatherboards and such, while the pig courted tetanus playing amongst the gravel and rusty nails. To our request for H3 treated timber he snorted derisively and pointed us to H4 - apparently H3 rots like tissue paper when placed in contact with soil, and whose advice had we been taking? (Dad’s. Never trust an infralapsarian in the matter of treated timber.) A slightly younger and less picturesque individual cut the timber for us and manned the EFTPOS machine, clearly resenting us as lightweights who weren’t planning on hauling away any kitchens in our teeth. Nevertheless: wood obtained. $30. My ancestors would be proud, in a “Couldst thee not have cut it thyself from yon kindly greenwood, feeble wench?” kind of way.

Making the bed was likewise a heavier task than expected. I gave it my best effort with a hammer and galvanised steel nails, moving from one plank to the next to avoid the fingers of the snortlepig, who kept trying to hold the nails as I pounded ‘em. (She also had the disconcerting habit of waiting until I had nailed them in to - I thought - a considerable depth, and then casually reaching across and plucking them from the wood. That dude has fingers like biceps.) I got a few in straight, but the vast majority buckled and wilted and had to be extracted by Helpdesk Man. Fortunately he was so repulsed by my incompetence that he finished the bed himself, thus demonstrating that he is surprisingly manly. I want him to build a pergola next.

Anyway, the raised bed is now wobbling danergously on the back lawn waiting for a trailerful of dirt to stabilise and strengthen it. At least, that is what I’m hoping it will do. As it happens, however, we are now too broke to afford dirt (poetic, no?); so I’m making do in the meantime with $6 worth of supermarket potting mix and some seeds scrounged off a friend. Life remains snortly.

In other news, I am abandoning the Points system. My Suite101 earnings have better things to do for the foreseeable future, such as buying chests of drawers and bookshelves and stuff; and my tally marks got lost in the move. Instead this week’s Challenge will be as follows:

• Henna hair
• Write one article a day
• Query one article a day
• Do one thing every day to make the new house look more homelike
• Do one organisational thing a day
• Do Bible study homework
• Do singing group practice