Smokey the Magnificent

1. How can teddy bears still be “unawares” when they get attacked by bananas in pyjamas every freaking Tuesday? Isn’t that the sort of incident that might stick in one’s mind? Don’t you think after the fifth or sixth horrifying incident, one of them might say as he contemplated his own fluffy viscera, “Y’know, old sport, I’m beginning to think these attacks aren’t random”?

2. This is a portion of my small sister Ruth, along with some biscuits I made her. The photo was taken by my larger sister Betty Scandretti, because she knows how.

I’ll be interested to learn if she remembers us taking this photo. She wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders at the time. Mostly just lay there, seeping. I don’t mean to criticise, but a true hostess would have made us a cup of something.

3. By popular demand, by which I mean, Trish asked me: here is a photo of the cake I made for the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the parents-in-law of a friend.

It has a slightly angsty history.

See, I had done a cake or so for the friend in question before, and as a result, she rashly trusted my judgment on the decoration front. “Whatever you like; I’m sure it will be lovely”, quoth she, and I, in a fit of sentiment, responded with “Was there a particular Bible verse or something they had at their wedding which I could pipe on the cake?”

Friend - Mrs K, I’ll call her, because she is, sort of - said “Ooh, that’ll be lovely” and went to find out. Apparently fifty years of marriage had destroyed both the orders of service and the memories of the bride and groom, so we never did learn which verse they had: but Mrs K still liked the idea, so decided to go with a bit from (brace yourselves) 1 Corinthians 13.

Which was all very well, except I couldn’t think of a way to decorate the cake, and now I’d locked myself in to covering much of it with a piped verse, which rather limited my options. So I masked the cake, and then sat and stared at it for a few hours. Eventually I hit on the idea of using more fondant to create a textured tone-on-tone picture of a little wee church-house on a hill, with a spreading tree and a path and a demure little bride and groom standing at the bottom, and then I could write the verse around the edge.

So I tried that, before remembering that I am too autistic to create credible representations of the human form. Every bride and groom I created looked like American Gothic crossed with Tim Burton’s idea of a Waldorf doll. It was unnerving. I toyed with the idea of merely suggesting the bridal pair with a dress and long gloves, and a suit and top hat, hovering in the air, and had actually gotten as far as cutting out the dress before I reluctantly acknowledged the idea was a bit too Picnic at Hanging Rock for a wedding anniversary. (It was rather late at night by this time, you understand.)

So in the end I thought: stow it all, I’ll just leave the bride and groom out altogether. Just have the church-house and hill and tree, and write the verse in the empty space on the sky and grass.

And thus I did. And it was pretty nice, I thought. But then, at about six minutes to midnight, as I stared tiredly down at the finished product, my fondant-addled brain went “One sec”. And I realised that sans bride and groom, the white church-house on its white hill with its white tree looked rather… well, stark. And “Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” was suddenly seeming a tad more poignant than I intended.

In short, I had accidentally created in glorious ivory fondant a picture which tastefully suggested to the loving couple, “One of you has DIED”.

I tried to fix it. I got up early next morning and put some tiny hearts around the church - the kitsch factor was regrettable, but I hoped it might indicate that Joyful Events were Happening Within. It could have just indicated extreme religious fervour, though. And then I thought a couple of birdies might indicate spring and fertility and general canoodling, so I made one, and it turned out looking like a raven. I nearly decided to just go with it and make some vultures and a little fondant graveyard, but rallied and eventually produced two slightly less sinister birds. Then I waited with some trepidation for Mrs K.

Fortunately, she liked it. And apparently, so did her parents-in-law. I don’t know if they were all just being polite, or if the symbolism of the thing simply did not occur to them; but it was a great relief. Personally, I’m still not sure. But here is a (somewhat rubbish) photo, so you can decide for yourselves.

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.

This post is only for the eyes of those* who commented on the last one. The rest of you: clearly you have failed to grasp my awesome pwnage of the sonnet form. Go back and read it again… peons.

1. Miles has awesome abilities. According to the smell of his lone tuft of hair, he has mastered the art of being sick onto his own head.

2. If your lover was beheaded in front of you by a savage madman, which bit would you cradle in your arms as you wept? I think I’d go for the body, even though it seems sort of counter-intuitive, just because my sense of decorum would probably fail at the vital moment and I wouldn’t want Sven’s** last ebbing image to be of me wearing a horrified smirk.

3. I have decided to become a medical man, just so I can waggle my fingers archly at patients and say “lobes”. Try it. “Mr Smith, I’m sorry to tell you that you have a tumour in your [waggles fingers] lobes.” “Inform the Countess that she will live until the season ends, but we will have to remove her [waggles fingers] lobes.”

*Mother.

**I mean Helpdesk Man.

***Probably isn’t though, honestly.

****To the disappointment of the snortlepig, who, upon being gently told about her Grandpa’s impending operation, simply responded “Will they use scissors?”. (”Do they gots trolleys?” would probably have been her next question, but she lost interest. Curiously, upon meeting my great-grandmother today for presumably the first time in her tiny memory, the question she most wanted answered was “Do you got a red wall or a white one?”, which threw said relative a bit. She rallied, though. White, apparently.)

Tonight the snortlepig threw up. It was a cough that went wrong, not actual nausea, and it didn’t seem to faze her. Nevertheless, Helpdesk Man prudently presented her with an ice cream container, saying “This is for you to be sick into”. Whereupon, without missing a beat, the snortlepig took it and obligingly attempted to hurl once more.

Now, bear in mind that this is not a child given to unquestioning obedience. When we say “Jump”, she does not say “How high?” But apparently when we say “Vomit”, she says “How chunky?”

Discuss.

Also, I apologise to my occasional reader who has emetophobia. I did try to be euphemistic in the title. If you read beyond that, well, heaven help you.

You know what pretty much defines misery? Running out of Gaviscon in the middle of the night, while coming down with a sore throat. Not just a sore throat, neither, but a full-blown leak-from-the-face teeth-aching winter cold. When desperately wishing to sleep, however, it is the combination of a throat rasping with infection at the top end and being sizzled away by gastric juices at the bottom end that really makes life worth living.

So this morning, I sent Helpdesk Man out on a mission to bring me back pizza, which I was inexplicably craving, and enough Gaviscon to neutralise a citrus grove. Poor man, he tried. First he went to the Warehouse, which didn’t have any; but brought back the pizza as a peace offering, which the pig and I contentedly ate. It was a good one - pine nuts, apricot sauce and cubes of cream cheese. Then he kindly took the pig for a walk to the pharmacy. It was shut. In a burst of right-brained brilliance he headed for the local Indian grocer. The woman did not stock Gaviscon, but pressed upon Helpdesk Man a number of Indian herbal heartburn tablets. Unfortunately she did not specify what was in them, nor whether they were safe for pregnancy, so I didn’t quite fancy them (and Helpdesk Man, having been forced to taste one by the lady, was sympathetic. Apparently they were vile.) So he valiantly made a fourth trip to the supermarket, where the life-giving elixir was finally found and brought to justice.

That was several hours ago. Thanks to the Gaviscon, I managed a few hours of fitful, fevered sleep in a semi-upright position. Then I woke up rather suddenly, bleated a shrill and unwifely demand at Helpdesk Man, and was flamboyantly sick all over the bed while he was hunting around the kitchen for a bucket.

I do not reveal all this out of a base desire for pity, Gentle Reader. Rather, it is mere preamble to the next event, which was probably the highlight of my year so far. Several minutes after divesting my innards of chunder, I blew my nose in a fretful way… and a pine nut flew out.

Helpdesk Man is a lucky guy, I like to think.

Never succuss a baby. It doesn’t potentise them; not as well as you’d think.

Aww, man. Auxiliary Pig is a fiend from heck. I keyed in my credit card number at the supermarket checkout today, and woke up shortly afterwards on the floor with about five Pak’N'Save staff members fluttering with embarrassing solicitude about me, and the checkout operator saying without conviction “I tried to catch you”. (I think it was lies, but I cannot blame her; minimum wage and all.) The good news is that I scored a free bottle of Pump, the congratulations of the floor manager and a free pass from loading my groceries into the boot. The bad news is that my head hurts quite a bit, and I probably cracked my skull and will have a bleed in my brain and will radically change personalities, which one might argue would be a Good Thing, but I might also lose the ability to count or something. People do that. My hair cushioned the blow to some degree, but not enough to make me cheery.

So there’s that. Oh, and I went an exciting colour. One would not think a person as pale as me could actually look whiter, but I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror on the way home and squeaked in fright. If I am ever tempted to take up vampirism, remind me that it is not flattering.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those angsty blog posts where I wail about my directionless life and volumeless hair. As it happens, today I finished an article about child-led weaning, made dinner (to a certain extent) and did an hour of housework, making this one of my more productive days since Operation Auxiliary Pig commenced.

No, I’m actually falling to pieces. I was eating dinner and bit down on either a bit of rock salt or possibly a piece of burned potato (see above caveat re dinner), and a chunk - or cusp, as we say in the biz - of my back molar just up and left me. And I was like “Whoa”, and had to pause Wonderfalls - which is cool, but not as awesome as Pushing Daisies - and go and shove a hand mirror in my mouth.

I saved the tooth bit in an empty pill box full of milk, but I don’t imagine we shall be reunited. Oddly enough, it doesn’t hurt… kinda put me off my dinner, though. A brief Google search informs that it will probably be capped or filled. They’d better do something - I have a razor-sharp edge that could cut my tongue to ribbons if I held it at a really peculiar angle and waggled it about, and let’s face it, I most certainly will.

So… life, innit. Tralala. Flatmate Man thinks the auxiliary pig is leaching calcium from my teeth and causing the disaster, but that seems impressively speedy for a pig who has, like, a teaspoon’s worth of bones right now. Google said it could be caused by tooth-grinding, for which I blame the snortlepig, who has recently been behaving badly… and my mother, because once when I was a child - and lying on a motel bed, I recall, though I do not know where - I ground my teeth softly for the first time ever and Mother said “Don’t grind your teeth” and I was like “Whoa, that’s grinding your teeth?” and then did it for years. True story.

On the bright side, this has given me a good baby name: Cuspid.

Well, it’s been such a hideously long time since I blogged here that there’s no way I can segue back in gracefully, so I’m just gonna do it via a Facebook-esque pretend fill-in-the-blanks quiz. K? Also, I’m only here because I’m supposed to be writing an article on child-led weaning.

I have not blogged for a hideously long time because… if I can put it real subtle-like, Operation Auxiliary Pig is go. I am eleven weeks pregnant. The previous nine weeks - gestation calculation being a weird and tricksy beast - have largely been spent horizontal, dizzy and abject. On the upside, the snortlepig has come up with a brand-new euphemism for upchucking - “spitting one’s dogs”. As in, “You gonna spit your dogs, Mummy?”. Current aversions include the smell of the butchery and fish aisles, large wodges of protein that require much chewing, and John Travolta - although the latter aversion significantly predates the pregnancy.

Also, practically my only sister got married last Saturday, which joyous occasion required me to make a dress for myself, ideally one which hinted at pregnancy rather than lax diet; a sort-of-flowergirl dress for the pig (she being cute in the face, but not responsible enough to do anything as vital as walking down the aisle); and a clockpunk wedding cake the size of THE WORLD. In between attacks of low blood pressure, of course. The smell of dried fruit soaking in sherry is strangely calming to the tum - why do you think this is? And as it turned out, the wedding cake was far more enormous than it had to be, and the father of the groom accidentally left the remains in the trunk of his car for several days after the wedding, but apparently it was still good. A really groggy fruit cake has the survival capabilities of a Twinkie made of roaches, and that is a comforting thing.

Today I reached the pinnacle of happiness when… I discovered a whole new method for cooking chicken. In the past, I’ve either made chicken stock by using the carcass from a roast, or by buying some frozen chicken carcasses from the butcher. Either way is fine - stock, yummy, frugalish. But the other day I sent Helpdesk Man out to buy the carcasses - a manly kind of task - and in his innocence he came back with a $13.99 bag of frozen chicken portions. So I was like “!” and then “.” and decided to roast the lot. So I did that, and poured off the juices into a jug, and then shredded the meat off the bones and used the bones for stock. And aha! I now had delicious stock, and enough shredded chicken meat to make toasted sammies, fried rice and a chicken pot pie, plus snacks for the pig, and a jug of delicious, nommy chicken fat with a kind of demi-glace beneath. And when you consider that a single pair of moderately-cup-sized Boneless Skinless go for $10 on a good day, this struck me as No Bad Thing. I will do this again.

My Christmas preparations are… happening. Smug? Why, yes I am. Today I bought the snortlepig’s first two presents - a packet of those twirly drinking straws to celebrate her recent mastery of drinking from them, and a pair of scissors with bees on. She also wants a baby Christmas tree. Where does one buy a baby Christmas tree? Also, this year I SWEAR I WILL MAKE STOLLEN. For the past decade and a half I have spent every year saying “Ooh, I should make stollen” and not doing it, and it has become like unto a splinter in my mind, driving me mad. Similar situation with hot cross buns, actually, but I conquered that this year.

Tomorrow night I am going to… watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One, and eat a chicken Caesar salad at a nice-looking Italian restaurant. It is exciting. It’s a shindig for a friend’s birthday, but unfortunately she is inviting several friends I do not know, and they will probably be competent and scary and have coordinated handbags and haircuts that are actually styled, and maybe know secret things about bronzer that I do not. So I am naturally angsting about what to wear, and the pregnancy issue isn’t really helping; but in a fit of feminine competitiveness, I have decided to wash my hair. Only I was supposed to do it tonight and I forgot. I will, though. Probably. Or I could just pretend I had taken a vow.

The snortlepig is currently singing… “You Raise Me Up”. Only it’s “I am scared when I am on your shoulders”, which makes a deal o’ sense.

When your snortlepig’s library book about Homes features a mole in a burrow and she has never heard of moles, being in the Antipodes, and says “Oooh, possum!”, do not do a Google image search for “mole” in order to give her a crash course on the species. You will see things you will wish you could unsee.