Sunday 26th April 2015 - Sour Dough, episode 1

Last week I had enough spare energy on Monday and Tuesday to make Oaty Chocolate Brownies (that used up the last of the Easter chocolate very nicely) and make an attempt on Muesli biscuits. No pictures, because we've eaten them all. The Brownies weren't bad - a little dry maybe -  and the biscuits tasted good but were dangerously tooth-breakingly hard towards the end. I need to work out how to make them a little gentler - less syrup, more sugar, maybe.

Over the Easter holidays I wanted to try making sour-dough bread - that was going to be the holiday project.

It was not to be.

So, a couple of weeks later, I'm going to have a go.

Here's the "starter"; a mixture of four, water and fast-action yeast. Now it has to be left, covered with cling film, at room temperature for about 24 hours.

(to be continued...)

Sunday 26th April 2-15 - and another week rushes by

Apple blossom and lilac flowers have suddenly appeared while my attention was else where. I'm glad I spotted them before they disappeared again.

Last Sunday I dug out a load of earth from the bottom of our compost bin/wormery. That was properly hard work. You have to open a little hatch, no, first you have to clear the weeds, THEN you prise open the hatch and then you delve in and grubble out the thick, black, soft, claggy, compost, and all its accompanying worms (sorry, little fellas). That's as far as I got with the garden.

He managed to mow the grass, no first he got the mower out from the bag of the mini-shed, then he found the thingy for sharpening the blades, then he sharpened the blades, then he replenished the petrol, and THEN he mowed the grass.

Mowing makes an instant difference, although I was sorry to see the single cowslip that had appeared in the front lawn disappear. And all the tiny violas.

This week he has painted the concrete rain shelter over the new front door - oh wow - that smartened things up. Once we have replaced the door number and the door knocker (hopefully NOT with some horrible synthetic push-button "Westminster chimes"), and got rid of the weeds and put grass seed on the bare patches on the front "lawn", and dug out the front flower bed, and replaced the weeds and twitch with some carefully chosen evergreen shrubs, we will have a respectable and inviting front to our house. After 31 years.

Meanwhile we have changed the dead daffodils and gone-over camellia and hellebore with two of these, one either side of the front door, using up the earth extracted from the wormery.

Nice.

Oh, and we also took about 10 bags of accumulated unwanted stuff to the British Heart Foundation. Just another half-dozen bags to go. You remember - the things that I started clearing out back in the first week of January? And the bags of clothes etc from my parents' flat when they moved in February? 

So that's caught up with the New Year Resolution, the one that said "Two bags to the charity shop every month".

That's happiness-making.   

 

Sunday 19th April - Holcot, Northamptonshire

This is where my grandmother lived in the sixties and seventies.

Back in those days, there was a chain-link fence between the garden and the "gitty", one of the little footpaths that connect the streets in the village, so everyone going past could see in. I'm not at all surprised that this has been replaced by a tall wooden fence, so this is the only picture I took of the house.

On several occasions I stayed there for a number of weeks at a time; when my parents were abroad, and when I was getting over a bad dose of measles, or was is chicken pox? I usually slept in the room to the right, under the tiled roof, with the window in the gable end. It was furnished with a single bed, chair, and an ugly sixties cocktail cabinet which I thought made a very special desk. I expect there must have been other items in there as well.

The beds were covered with Indian print cotton cover; hand-printed? Probably. I wonder where all those went when she moved?

The window under the thatch was Oma's bedroom. Sometimes she had her bed at this end, sometimes under the window at the other end of the room, opposite the church.

I used to lie in bed and listen to the church clock chiming the quarter hours.

That's the old school behind the tree. It closed in the seventies, and Oma ran a youth club there for a while. The telephone box has become a book exchange.

I was surprised at how well I remembered the church, after nearly forty years. I remember Bert, the Churchwarden, having a battle with one of the candles on the choir screen at a Midnight Christmas Communion one year. It insisted on slowly revolving around its spike throughout the service.

I have played the organ. Back then it had a tracker action (probably still does) and an incredibly uneven and cranky keyboard. You needed strength and determination to play. They keyboard is only about four octaves.

I didn't know about the wall paintings behind the font, and I had forgotten about the crooked arch behind the Lady Chapel. 

There you have it.

Sunday 19th April - Still Easter

We've finished the Easter eggs, just two packets of chocolate bunnies and a couple of chocolate lollies left.

I'm a bit concerned about the lollies, can't see them anywhere. Maybe I've eaten them already?

Here are some of the Easter Gardens I've seen this year;

 

All Saints Church, Buncton, West Sussex

Parish Church of St. Mary and All Saints, Holcot, Northants

All Saints' Church, Brixworth, Northants

The season of Eastertide lasts for fifty days. Longer than you'd think. I guess most people are finished with Easter after the Bank Holiday Monday.

Some years I make my own Easter Garden, some years we make them at church. I took the two Northamptonshire pictures on Friday 17th April, nearly two weeks after Easter Sunday. I'm so glad that they are still there, looking as fresh as when they were first created.

The Christmas Cactus on my kitchen windowsill, in flower for Easter 

The last photograph isn't a garden, of course, but I have enjoyed the symbolism of the Christmas cactus unexpectedly producing a single blood-red flower in time for Easter.  

It's a bit like the Christmas Season which lasts at least until Epiphany, and really until Candlemas on 2nd February. But I suppose if you put your Christmas Tree up and decorated the house on 1st December (which is in Advent and a season of reflection and fasting rather than festivity) you would be more than happy to rip the whole lot down and take it to the tip on Boxing Day (which is still a time of feasting and rejoicing!)

 

My merry little Nativity characters are still in place, where I put them ready for Christmas 2013. They seem to be having such a merry time that I still can't bring myself to shove them in their box. Anyway, it's only another eight months until Christmas 2015.

Someday in April - The Company Plan/Statistics/Elections

I hate the months before elections. It seems to be just a long slanging match with people becoming increasingly shrill and extreme, and every newspaper and television interview and tweet becoming more full of

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

(a phrase describing the persuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point.
The term was popularised in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Several other people have been listed as originators of the quote, and it is often erroneously attributed to Twain himself.
copied and pasted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics)

I remember this one doing the rounds when I worked at **** many, many moons ago. A friend sent me a copy recently.

The Company Plan

In the beginning was THE PLAN

And then came The Assumptions

And The Plan was without substance

And the Assumptions were without form

And the darkness was upon the face of the Workers

 

And they spoke amongst themselves saying

"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

And the Workers went unto their

Supervisors and said,

"It is a pail of dung,

and none may abide the odour thereof."

 

And the Supervisors went unto their

First Engineers saying, "It is a container of

excrement, and it is very strong

such that none may abide by it."

 

And the First Engineers went unto their

Managers, saying "It is a vessel of

fertiliser, and none may abide its strength."

 

And the Managers spoke amongst themselves

saying one to another, "It contains that

which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."

 

And the Managers went to the

Directors saying onto them, "It promotes

growth, and it is very powerful."

 

And the Directors went unto the

Chairman, saying unto him, "This new plan

will actively promote the growth and

vigour of the company, with powerful effects." 

And the Chairman looked upon the Plan,

and saw that it was good.

 

And The Plan became Policy.

 

I remember reading this book as a teenager, and being simultaneously enlightened and outraged:

 

 

The cartoon appears to be in tune with the times.

Saturday 11th April - Why things take time and effort

If you are not prepared to put in the effort, you won't get the results.


http://www.joe-ks.com/archives_may2011/HowToDrawAnOwl.htm



There are so many home-truths in this picture.

It is worth using as a meditation on life, the world, and everything.

Saturday 11th April - Applied Maths

£££££

Dilbert's "Salary Theorem" states that "Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives and sales people." This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two postulates:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.

As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time and since: Knowledge = Power and: Time = Money, it is therefore true that: Knowledge = Work / Money

Solving this equation for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work done.

Conclusion: The less you know, the more you make.

And as Knowledge approaches infinity, Money approaches zero.

Saturday 11th April - Memo to self; Book that I WANT!

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/gallery/2015/mar/28/what-to-draw-and-how-to-draw-it-by-eg-lutz

I'm blogging this here and now because I don't want to lose the reference.



The book is now available as a reprint (originally published in 1913) and is just a series of pages like this

 

and this



and this



I have downloaded a public domain pdf to be going on with.