Let’s start domestic

Over the last 6 months I’ve been trying to concentrate on finishing that Masters dissertation that keeps getting mentioned. I figured that if I didn’t write much in my blogs, I would be more focused on the Masters. It was OK up to a point, but when I hit a low patch mid-April, I wasn’t producing much anywhere in my life, let alone “on paper”. Now I’ve decided to stop pressuring myself to finish the dissertation and just let my efforts at writing come as they will, although there have been so many possible topics, choosing just one for the plunge has been hard enough.

So here’s a short dream; quite mundane; probably no meaning – but it’s a start.

Last night I had a number of dreams, including an unfortunate one involving someone donging me lightly on the head with a heavy saucepan! The dream forced me into wakefulness because I lunged out with a left jab and punched poor Spotrick in the head!! I awoke as my knuckles met their unintended target! Thank goodness he was a reasonable distance away and I have short arms! [Sorry Spotrick xx]

Apparent house interior

That wasn’t the dream with the most detail- here’s that one:

I was at a friend’s place helping her with a big casual lunch for a group of about 15. She is a real friend, involved in a social media job, but she’s never had me help her IRL [in real life]. We put piles of crockery and cutlery on an outside table, then brought large platters of food out for everyone to share. Everyone chatted on cheerfully until all the food had been consumed and most people had drifted off home. A few people stayed to clear up and we loaded the dishwasher.

So many dishes

Then disaster struck. The dishwasher filled with water, started to wash, then made some alarming pop-clunk sounds and stopped, dead. Nothing we tried worked, so we had to take everything out and make piles of dishes all over the kitchen table and benches. It looked ominously like about 3 or 4 sink-loads of manual washing up. Blerrgghh

Anyway, we sorted ourselves out to work in pairs, doing a wash and rinse for each pair. I was sitting on the sofa doing some red knitting when the sounds of breaking dishes came from the kitchen- uh-oh, more trouble. I ditched the knitting and went out to help. What a mess! One person started crying and another one hugged her and decided to take her home, leaving S, C and I with the debris. Yuck!

Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”, there was a knock at the door and who should appear but my friend J, wondering if he could help! Goodness knows why he was there as we were in a suburb miles away from ours [and the house more resembled an old maisonette I used to rent than the actual house owned by S!; but it's a dream...].

Maisonette

Apparently he had been walking past and heard our dish-clunking noises, deciding to investigate, as knights in shining armour tend to do.

In came J and attacked the dishwasher. He thought he could fix it. However, when he took a closer look, it seemed to have turned into something like an old-fashioned wash-copper! It appeared as a cylindrical appliance on short metal legs, with a round lid!

Old wash copper

Definitely NOT a conventional dishwasher. J quickly admitted defeat and shooed us out of the kitchen. He proceeded to wash, dry and put away every single load of dishes, and what’s more, he apparently vacuumed the whole house as well!

Goodness knows where I was (or the others), as I seemed to have fallen asleep with my knitting on the sofa, completely oblivious to the washing up and vacuum-cleaner racket! I was awoken by sounds of two loud female voices coming into the house (god knows who they were – probably 2 characters out of “The Bottle Factory Outing” which I had been skimming IRL before I fell asleep on the sofa!) Anyway, the chief complaint of these two (who claimed to be the owners – poor S had suddenly been evicted and dispossessed, LOL!) was that J had put all their shoes on the beds when he was vacuuming! They thought this was dreadful and wanted to give J a good talking to! Meanwhile, he had vanished without being thanked or scolded by these crazy women.

Red knitting

PS. J had trodden on my knitting in the dream and made it all brown and yucky looking and I was NOT pleased! Where did this stuff come from??

Day 25 NaBloPoMo:THAT Gift-exchanging Public Holiday

It’s very odd- my Day 23 Post hasn’t appeared- what happened?

Not a lot to say today- Christmas Day- we had a quiet day. Last night there was a huge feast with friends round the corner- about 20 or so people- and the host, John, prepared enough food to keep us for a week! He’s like that- cooks a monster stack of prawns, chicken, lamb and steak, plus there is a giant ham prepared earlier by his wife. I folded after the entrees followed by the chicken and skipped straight to dessert. Dessert was an agonising choice (well, not for some, who had both), between a chocolate peanut butter cheesecake of a mango trifle/tiramisu hybrid, which was very light and tasty. Cheryl is the dessert supremo- she won’t ever let anyone bring sweets to their place! I do some great desserts, but I can’t share them there!

Tomorrow we have another feast at another friend’s house nearby. She is almost as prolific as our other friend with the huge amount of food she dishes up! I know these days which courses to skip so I can fit in the ones I like best. One year she made a traditional French bouillebaisse and it was so delicious- the best I’ve ever had, even in Marseille. I wish she would do it again, but she hasn’t for about 10 years! I always take some of my homemade dukkah and olive oil which we eat using crusty bread for dipping. You can have the recipe if you wish! It’s based on one by Claudia Roden, but mine is more anise-flavoured. We used to go olive picking with a gourmet group in winter and have our own olive oil crushed at a small commercial mill. That oil was so terrifically tasty and sort of buttery- commercial oil doesn’t hold a card to it. These days the olive-picking has been cornered by people with lots of money, so the shares to join the picking group cost too much for us. We’ve gone back to Woolies!

On the 29th we’re having our previously homeless friends around for a Christmassy feast at our place. There will be ourselves and 3 guests so we’re having a Turkey Breast Roll roasted with apricot sauce and macadamia nuts. We’ll have traditional roasted vegies and a green salad with our own pickled and spiced olives. For those olives we were allowed to pick at a commercial orchard the winter of 2009 because they had lost their contract with a major hotel and had no other market left. So we got them free, I used the fresh water method to pickle them and then froze them for a while before putting them into oil with herbs and garlic. They are mostly delicious black olives, except a few containers are still bitter from not having been leached enough in the rainwater.

For dessert we will have lemon-lime delicious pudding which is really quick and yummy, plus vanilla icecream. I have already cooked the miniature Chunky Christmas Cakes for people to take home with the, afterwards.

Spotrick and I exchanged presents this morning- mostly a big heap of rectangles. We giggle about all the rectangles under the tree every year, we’re both such terrible bookworms! Spotrick gave me Sarah Gruen’s ‘The Ape House’ and ‘Them & Us’ by Will Hutton. The latter was on my wish list and having skimmed a few chapters, it is a great read- of course not half because Will Hutton’s views on the political economy closely coincide with my own! He also gave me a very welcome laptop cushion to replace the collection of magazines (Winsletts we call them) and a heat shield pad that I balance on my lap usually. In a tiny package which was wrapped like ‘pass the parcel’ in multiple layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper, was a tiny glass perfume bottle with long glass stopper for dabbing. This came from the local university and community glass works where lots of artists rent facilities and time on the furnaces. I wish I could do that style of glass work, but I couldn’t afford the fees, so I just use my kiln. Lastly was a tube of lavender hand cream for my housewife’s hands (mainly from gardening lately, in fact).

I gave Spotrick 4 books including one that had me absolutely cacking myself in the bookshop- ‘The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo’, with principal character Lizbreath Salamander!!! rofl I also gave him a new pair of lounging trousers (happy pants?)- they are just like light cotton pyjama pants. I made them from some batik-printed dark blue Swiss cotton with a red waistband and stitching- he really likes them and is wearing them already!

So I hope everyone had the sort of Christmas/Hanukkah [or whatever you were celebrating], that you wished for- we did!

 

Day 25 NaBloPoMo: Feasting, reminiscing

It’s very odd- my Day 23 Post hasn’t appeared- what happened?

Not a lot to say today- Christmas Day- we had a quiet day. Last night there was a huge feast with friends round the corner- about 20 or so people- and the host, John, prepared enough food to keep us for a week! He’s like that- cooks a monster stack of prawns, chicken, lamb and steak, plus there is a giant ham prepared earlier by his wife. I folded after the entrees followed by the chicken and skipped straight to dessert. Dessert was an agonising choice (well, not for some, who had both), between a chocolate peanut butter cheesecake or a mango trifle/tiramisu hybrid, which was very light and tasty. Cheryl is the dessert supremo- she won’t ever let anyone bring sweets to their place! I do some great desserts, but I can’t share them there!

Tomorrow we have another feast at another friend’s house nearby. She is almost as prolific as our other friend with the huge amount of food she dishes up! I know these days which courses to skip so I can fit in the ones I like best. One year she made a traditional French bouillebaisse and it was so delicious- the best I’ve ever had, even in Marseille. I wish she would do it again, but she hasn’t for about 10 years! I always take some of my homemade dukkah and olive oil which we eat using crusty bread for dipping. You can have the recipe if you wish! It’s based on one by Claudia Roden, but mine is more anise-flavoured.

 

We used to go olive picking with a gourmet group in winter and have our own olive oil crushed at a small commercial mill. That oil was so terrifically tasty and sort of buttery- commercial oil doesn’t hold a card to it. It made the dukkah taste even better [not strictly possible]. These days the olive-picking has been cornered by people with lots of money, so the shares to join the picking group cost too much for us. We’ve gone back to Woolies!

On the 29th we’re having our previously homeless friends around for a Christmassy feast at our place. There will be ourselves and 3 guests so we’re having a Turkey Breast Roll roasted with apricot sauce and macadamia nuts. We’ll have traditional roasted vegies and a green salad with our own pickled and spiced olives. For those olives we were allowed to pick at a commercial orchard the winter of 2009 because they had lost their contract with a major hotel and had no other market left. So we got them free, I used the fresh water method to pickle them and then froze them for a while before putting them into oil with herbs and garlic. They are mostly delicious black olives, except a few containers are still bitter from not having been leached enough in the rainwater.

For dessert we will have lemon-lime delicious pudding which is really quick and yummy, plus vanilla icecream. I have already cooked the miniature Chunky Christmas Cakes for people to take home with them afterwards.

Spotrick and I exchanged presents this morning- mostly a big heap of rectangles. We giggle about all the rectangles under the tree every year, we’re both such terrible bookworms! Spotrick gave me Sarah Gruen’s ‘The Ape House’ and ‘Them & Us’ by Will Hutton. The latter was on my wish list and having skimmed a few chapters, it is a great read- of course not half because Will Hutton’s views on the political economy closely coincide with my own! He also gave me a very welcome laptop cushion to replace the collection of magazines (Winsletts we call them) and a heat shield pad that I balance on my lap usually. In a tiny package which was wrapped like ‘pass the parcel’ in multiple layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper, was a tiny glass perfume bottle with long glass stopper for dabbing. This came from the local university and community glass works where lots of artists rent facilities and time on the furnaces. I wish I could do that style of glass work, but I couldn’t afford the fees, so I just use my kiln. Lastly was a tube of lavender hand cream for my housewife’s hands (mainly from gardening lately, in fact).

I gave Spotrick 4 books including one that had me absolutely cacking myself in the bookshop- ‘The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo’, with principle character Lizbreath Salamander!!! rofl. I also gave him a new pair of lounging trousers (happy pants?)- they are just like light cotton pyjama pants. I made them from some batik-printed dark blue Swiss cotton with a red waistband and stitching- he really likes them and is wearing them already!

So I hope everyone had the sort of Christmas/Hanukkah [or whatever you were celebrating], that you wished for- we did!

What happened Monday? Ummm…

It was a public holiday and I needed reminding what we did??? Oh yes and Tuesday was a work day and I ummm…? Must have done something.

Wednesday I did a lot of cleaning and the vacuum cleaner was so clogged with dust I got drowned in it! We had dinner at Wah Hing and learnt some interesting news. Amelia came and stayed the night so she could go to band practice with David.

Thursday was uni day and I watched the rest of Michael Moore’s “Sicko” online. We had a good old debate in the tutorial about funding of the Australlian health system and the USA crept in quite a bit!

Today I printed out some dog-coat patterns for Amelia and her friend Reannen to knit, went to Norwood to have a coffee/lunch with friends, SPotrick started 2 weeks holiday and we are going with a group of friends to Regatta’s tonight for dinner (consequently blowing next week’s budget in advance).

I’ll add more later maybe. Where did that week go?