Sunday 3rd November - on saints, and shoeboxes, and so on

Yesterday was All Soul's Day, and the day before was All Saint's Day.

I wondered what today would be; Hello Wikipedia!

November[edit]

• 1 ALL SAINTS' DAY
• 2 Commemoration of the Faithful Departed (All Souls' Day)
• 3 Richard Hooker, Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith, 1600
• 3 Martin of Porres, Friar, 1639
• 6 Leonard, Hermit, 6th century
• 6 William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher of the Faith, 1944
• 7 Willibrord of York, Bishop, Apostle of Frisia, 739
• 8 The Saints and Martyrs of England
• 9 Margery Kempe, Mystic, c.1440
• 10 Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, Teacher of the Faith, 461
• 11 Martin, Bishop of Tours, c.397
• 13 Charles Simeon, Priest, Evangelical Divine, 1836
• 14 Samuel Seabury, first Anglican Bishop in North America, 1796
• 16 Margaret, Queen of Scotland, Philanthropist, Reformer of the Church, 1093
• 16 Edmund Rich of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1240
• 17 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, 1200
• 18 Elizabeth of Hungary, Princess of Thuringia, Philanthropist, 1231
• 19 Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, 680
• 19 Mechthild, Béguine of Magdeburg, Mystic, 1280
• 20 Edmund, King of the East Angles, Martyr, 870
• 20 Priscilla Lydia Sellon, a Restorer of the Religious Life in the Church of England, 1876
• 22 Cecilia, Martyr at Rome, c.230
• 23 Clement, Bishop of Rome, Martyr, c.100
• 25 Catherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century
• 25 Isaac Watts, Hymn Writer, 1748
• 29 DAY OF INTERCESSION AND THANKSGIVING FOR THE MISSIONARY WORK OF THE CHURCH
• 30 Andrew the Apostle

So Today is shared between Richard Hooker, an important theologian and Brother Martin of Porres, a Peruvian monk 

                                   

                                                             and Martin of Porres

You can read up all about them (in wikipedia).  What is known of Hooker (according to wikipedia) is mostly gleaned from Izaak Walton's biography. Wasn't Izaak Walton the one who wrote a book about fishing?    Ah, I see he wrote short biographies as well

    

(Not to be confused with J R Hartley who also 'wrote about fishing'.)

Wikipedia gives lots of information about Hooker, and in the middle of it suddenly states;

"Walton is described by Christopher Morris as an "unreliable gossip" who "generally moulded his subjects to fit a ready-made pattern,"

which rather ruins it. Who is Christopher Morris? Google informs me that he is a satirist, writer, director, actor. That doesn't sound like someone who would have an interest in sixteenth century Protestant theology. 

Here's the wikipedia summary for Brother Martin. I include it for the list of miracles attributed to him in the final sentence.

Martin de Porres Velázquez, O.P. (9 December 1579 – 3 November 1639), was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order who was beatified in 1837 by Pope Gregory XVI and canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. He is the patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers, public health workers, and all those seeking racial harmony.

He was noted for his work on behalf of the poor, establishing an orphanage and a children's hospital. He maintained an austere lifestyle, which included fasting and abstaining from meat. Among the many miracles attributed to him were those of levitation, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and an ability to communicate with animals.

Enough rambling on and on - blame wikipedia and google. It's like trying to look up a word in the dictionary - one thing leads to another. Every time. You are safe from saints for another few days. 

I came home from church this morning chilled through and through. The heating was not working and I actually went and fetched a blanket from the car and stayed wrapped up. One man simply took note of the temperature and went home again. However before he went he had a go at the controls, pressing the buttons in some magic combination, so by the time the service ended the church was heating up a bit.

We didn't have any trouble with the hymns today, probably because I wasn't playing the organ. Although the tune for 'Fight the Good Fight' was a lesser known one, most of us still knew it. I emerged from my blanket to play the piano while people came up to receive communion ('Here is Bread, here is wine' by Graham Kendrick, if you were curious.)

It was 'make-Christmas-shoe-boxes for Roumania' day at church. If I had any doubts about whether this activity had real value, it was dispelled by the video showing how the recipients are living, in Roumania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and somewhere else. It looked like scenes from the nineteen-thirties and before. I know that there are places in this country where there is extreme poverty, but this is on a different scale. More like Indian slums, but with snow. Truly shocking. I added my hats to the stack, and also some notebooks, and a kazoo. I wonder if anyone there knows how to play a kazoo? 

The great pots of puree experiment is still in progress. Prising the vegetables out of the metal bun tray is a mugs game. We did manage, but it involved lots of hot water, tapping, prising and splattering of bits of carrot puree everywhere. We are going to try silicone moulds   Anyway it is a week before we make the round trip again.

                                        

 Meanwhile I have another vat of rice pudding on the go, and it is time to give it a stir, and then I shall return to my new knitting project, and try and clear the dining room table ready for theory lessons tomorrow afternoon.

Have a good week!

Saturday 2nd November - Mostly pots of puree

Like this;

Mostly half-and-half carrot and potato. These will go in the freezer when they are cool enough, and then the testing begins...

It has been quite a long to work out how to manage all of this; my god-mother is 91 and on the whole is very well able to do what she can do. But she has decided that all the home-delivery foods are inedible - we brought a sack home of rejected foods from her freezer at her request and binned them yesterday - wasteful? Yes. Did we want to eat them ourselves? No. Not even as soup, to be honest.

So I think we are going to have to try and deliver home-made equivalents, with more flavour.

This is step one - vegetables.

So there are so many questions...

Will they come out of the moulds? We can try the bendy silicone ones if these don't work.

How long do they need to be reheated for?

How do we go about heating them in the microwave?

We have had to think long and hard about what she will be able to manage this safely. The current plan is to use this egg-poacher;

 
as there will be no problem about clips on the lid, or remembering to open the vent. I will use the two potato-only portions as testers; somehow get them out of the bun tray, and then find out if they fit into the poacher, work out how long they need in the microwave to heat up.

If all goes well, we will move on to experimenting with slow-cooked meats. Then we will be able to supply her with a bag of frozen portions of vegetables, and a bag of frozen portions of meat. The idea is that she puts a veg in one cup, and a meat in the other, zaps them for however minutes and - hey presto - lunch. A very small lunch - there are about two tablespoons of gloop in each portion. But at least it is food. A major consideration is that everything has to be gluten-free.

I'll get the next batch of rice pudding done in the next day or so. She had three defrosting in the fridge ready for supper and breakfast and lunch!

The state of the Brambly Hedge kitchen makes me feel much better about the state of ours. Look! It's okay to have every shelf filled and all sorts of bits and pieces wedged into every space and balanced in all the corners. You can stash bags and baskets under the table and leave bowls of fruit lying around on the floor. It doesn't matter if there are cracks in the plaster or washing draped everywhere. What a relief.

1st November 2019 - NaBloProMo begins

It's that National Blog Promotion Month again, when one tries to post every day for a month. Except it started without me.

We went to see my godmother yesterday, bearing dettol wipes (to clean her bathroom - I do this on the sly every time we visit) and a stack of pots of delights;

that's eight mini-pots of home-made rice pudding, and seven mini-pots of apple and blackberry puree. Himself had to go out to Tesco to buy more pots - how wonderful that they happened to be reduced in price! My godmother says she eats rice pudding twice a day.

Recipe;
In large microwave bowl, put 100g pudding rice, 50g sugar (I mix white and dark brown sugar - more brown than white for us, about half and half for her), 25g unsalted butter and 700ml milk.
Bring to the boil in the microwave - that takes more time than you think, but less time than you thought, so I suggest zapping for 3 mins and stirring and repeating until just before it boils over, or just after if you are unlucky). Then zap on simmer, With No Lid, for 30 to 40 mins, stirring after every 10 mins to stop it going lumpy and forming a skin. We don't like the skin.
This is much easier than in a saucepan, on the stove as it doesn't burn, and much easier than the oven as it doesn't stick to the side of the dish.

The 1st of November has been the first really, really autumnal day. Yesterday afternoon was dark and drizzly. There's one kind of tree, with leaves shaped like a maple but I think it may be a sycamore, which blazes out from all the others like a yellow firework. The other trees are mostly only just beginning to turn, so the contrast is quite stunning. I noticed them on the long drive through the miserable afternoon.

I've got the Bamboo Paper drawing and writing app on my tablet now; there's so much one can do... getting to grips with it will be a l o n g job but I prefer it to the other apps I have tried.

Thursday 31st October - Still in Europe

Still in Europe, but for how much longer? I don't even want to think about leaving. It has been such an ill-tempered, badly-thought-out, warped and distorted wrangle from start until - well, it's not finished yet.

Moving on, moving on...

If anyone comes trick or treating tonight I'm not sure what we'll be able to give them. I've eaten every scrap of chocolate, and we have no biscuits in the house. They can have a carrot - maybe that will help them see in the dark. I'm not a great Halloween fan, and I've never been trick or treating. Aha, I've just remembered - I think there may be some party blowers in the drawer left over from Christmas - just gone to check - yes. Good.

I've been at home all day. Luxury. Although I earned it by sending out invoices to the piano pupils. Then I discovered that I forgot that lessons at one school are meant to be £11 for twenty minutes, not £10. So I have diddled myself out of £25. I really can't be bothered - I made such a mess of last term's invoices that I'll live with the consequences.

The next big thing on the list is The Dreaded Tax Return. Ugh. One of the real pains is that my teaching year is September to July, and the tax year is April to April. I start a new register and folder and everything in September for the school year, and then have to wangle the information across two school years - which means two record books -  to get the figures. That's the bit I did this afternoon. I deserve chocolate.

Yesterday was a Major Achievement Day -  I stayed home then as well, and took on the kitchen floor. The kitchen isn't that big - I scuffled over it tile by tile, doing it pretty thoroughly, including the cupboard doors and the trolleys where the cats sleep and various things are stored.

But then, because I was working at floor level, I came nose to nose with the oven door. I like stained glass as a concept, and would love to have some panels in the house. But maybe not the oven door, even though it had become a pleasant caramel/brown colour, as in a good creme caramel desert topping. Unfortunately it is meant to be clear glass.

And here's some useful information; if you coat the surface of the glass with neat fairy liquid, and leave it to do its stuff, adding more from time to time, the fairies in the liquid will soften up all the grease and a moderately light effort with the nylon scourer will deal with it in a most satisfying way. Even the little hard lumps of brown-ness gave way eventually. See, see, lookee, lookee in the second picture above. Looks like newish.

The piano is looking very clean and dusted - that's because the piano tuner came yesterday morning. However the dining room table has reverted to its usual state of overloaded chaos. Hey ho. We should up-size; down-sizing is never going to work for us.

The triffid grows apace;

That picture is from yesterday afternoon. It was warm enough, just, for me to sit outside in the sun for half an hour with a cup of coffee;

   but I chose the chair that was further away from the triffid, just in case....

And now for 'show-and-tell'

I am immensely proud of having completed six hats for the 'Shoeboxes-for-Roumania' appeal; we will be packing them at church on Sunday.

These are crochet - I learned how to make them from youtube, and even how to start with a magic circle - whoop whoop. Our Canadian friends may notice the similarity between the smallest hat, on top of the pile, and a tea cosy in their possession...



These are knitted. I switched to crochet after making these, as sewing up knitting is not a favourite activity, and knitting them completely in the round brings other challenges when you start decreasing the stitches.

However, that's four lots of odds and ends of yarn used up, gone, removed from the house. Hooray and worth the effort.

Saturday 26 October - Half term!!!!

Half term! We got there!

Working backwards from right now;

I have dealt with this morning's mini-crisis involving cat litter and granola. Now I remember exactly how prickly cat litter is when you walk on it with bare feet. (Why have we got a litter tray in the kitchen - all will be revealed soon.) Anyway, I had come down to make breakfast to take back upstairs for it's-half-term-at-last-and-I'm-not-working-this-Saturday breakfast in bed. As I pondered whether I would sweep up the litter now or later, the problem was resolved when the packet of chocolate chip granola threw itself down from the top of the fridge, landed upside-down on my head and filled my world with toasted crunchy nutty grains and chocolate flakes. Sweeping suddenly became a priority.

So, the current crisis is a complete cat flap fail. At half past eleven last night we discovered that our electronic catflap's electronics are finished, done for, over, dysfunctional, kaput.

We spent a fruitless hour changing batteries, changing the changed batteries, pressing the reset buttons, removing the batteries, leaving it for ten minutes and starting all over again, going back to factory reset... nothing, nada, rien.

At least that meant we didn't have to reconfigure the microchip recognition whatsits, which entails feeding each cat in and out of the cat flap several times (in the dark, at midnight.

But we did have to investigate the shed to find the cat litter tray, (luckily we had litter left from when Leo had her teeth out in the Summer).

We went to bed early this morning leaving the cats taking turns trying to force the cat flap open.

Later this morning - like - as soon as the shops were open - he went to try the local pet shops for a replacement, and our current in-out arrangements for the cats look like this;

the kitchen door wedged open with the cat scratch pedestal which is a real pain in our small kitchen and never gets used for scratching. I'm thinking of replacing it with a stool which we can sit on as well as the cats. Fortunately the wind is blowing away from the back of the house and it is not a frosty morning.

Yesterday morning was dentist day, which is why we have the tribe home for the weekend. If you know us, you already know that historically going to the dentist (the surgery is 20 miles away) is an all-day family outing. This is because I started going to this practice before I was born, as, back in the 1950s, this was the first dentist that my mother ever managed to go to more than once. (All the others in her experience must have been fiends.) It was a complete shock to me the first time I went to another dentist when I was a student a long was North, and discovered that you had a checkup one day, and returned a week or so later for treatment. We'd always been checked over and had the fillings done at the same time.

The dentist from the 1950s has retired and gone to dentist heaven, and his successor has more or less retired, but his daughter is there, so all will be well for the future.

We all escaped with checkups and clean-and-polish.
Excellent.
I was working hard at mind control, projecting the following commands with all my mental strength;

'I do not grind my teeth and do not need a mouthguard at night'
'There are no cavities'
'Whatever it is you are probing at is fine, you can stop doing that anytime soon'

I'm clearly improving my psychic control powers.

We visited my godmother - she seems to be living on a diet of

breakfast - rice krispies and cocoa chimps (a version of coco-pops, and monkey is not listed as an ingredient), hot chocolate to drink
lunch - a few bits of marinaded herrings with a small bit of boiled potato and a ryvita-style cracker, and a cup of boullion made with vegetable boullion powder
supper - baked beans and a small portion of stewed apple and a fortisip drink
and about half a small bottle of fizzy water per day

I'm not sure that I would thrive on such a diet... but she seems none the worse for it. She has abandoned the frozen meals service she was using - 'they don't use any garlic, or onions or anything with any Taste!'

We buy various meals and items from the supermarket to see if we can tempt her - avocados worked for a couple of weeks, and Waitrose Duchy soups, but not any more. Hey ho. You can but try.

                                                                    **** **** ****
If I am sounding out of breath, it is because I have paused from sitting comfortably on an ergonomic chair to type the blog, to crouching down at floor level to push cross and irritable cats through the flap of the new cat flap in order to register their microchips. 'Mioul, mioul,' they cry, slithering out of my grip as I try and cram them through the little porchway to the flap. They are not grateful for all we are doing.

Last Thursday, and Wednesday, and Tuesday, and Monday, have all evaporated into the mist of 'Les temps perdu' and I'm not sure that it is worth 'cherchez-ing' them - I'll have notes in my diary, no doubt, for someone to write up when I am famous. Like 'it rained all day' or 'we were able to sit and have a coffee in the garden this afternoon' - that was Tuesday, come to think of it, when he - now read this, and admire him - he walked up to the school where I had been teaching to meet me and carry my bags home as we walked back. Yup. That's the kind of lovely man he is.

Saturday 19th October - Finding my balance

Seven hard weeks of teaching this half of term and all other things that needed to be done...

Yes - I was coping fine - and would have coped fine for next week as well - I am a grownup, I have had children, (my usual mantras) and I have a husband who looks after me brilliantly even though he, too is having to deal with all the driving and housekeeping...

But this unexpected weekend off, thanks to the car being out of action until it goes to the garage on Tuesday, has been a real blessing.

Today has been an oasis of time - time without other people - Saturdays are usually filled between 8am and 6pm with teaching and travelling and so forth.

Today has been sleeping in, and reading and writing stuff.

It has been finishing off another of the shoebox-for-Roumania Christmas hats and getting going on the next

It has been sorting out the poor camelia that I was given about four years ago, which has been sitting it a tub of the wrong kind of earth, in full sun ever since. Today we planted it up in a tub of ericaceous compost in a shadier spot.

We have also discovered a small holly bush at that end of the garden which survived the Great Upheaval, so cleared away the nearby weeds to see how it will get on.

I've planted some beans - whether they are Magic ones which will lead us to the Giant's hoard of gold, or just plain ol' broad beans like the picture on the packet remains to be seen. I guess I'll know tomorrow.

I even got out my paintbox and did a bit of painting in my diary...

It was only after I'd finished that a realised I'd used the page for the first week of November. They are scenes to remind me of my walk home from school on Thursday. I think I'm ok about the duck on the right looking like a dog, and one of the ducks in the pond looking more like a puppy having a swim. As dogs they are pretty good.