Hot - and not in a good way

Oh. My. God. Today it hit 44 degrees here. FORTY FOUR or 111.2 in the old scale.  And guess where I was?  In an un-air conditioned classroom attending a parenting seminar.

Urgh does not really cover it.

The seminar was fantastic, I have been discovering the slow parenting movement and Forest pre-schools - pre-schools where the kids spend all day messing about in a forest with no toys except what they can find - I kid you not. They do have a shed or similar to hide in when the temperature drops below -10 (yes MINUS TEN DEGREES CELCIUS) or there is a storm, but other than that they potter about outside playing with sticks and lighting fires with flint stones, none the worse for wear. 

I also experienced my first encounter with an attachment parent.  I'm an each to their own kind of person in most things and parenting style is no exception.  Personally, attachment parenting has always been one of those things that I was sure if I tried my head would explode within twenty minutes and I'd have to retire to bed with a valium and a large glass of bacardi.  But yanno, if it works for you...

When I realised that the mother in question had eschewed the offered child care and was bringing her two kids aged 6months and 2.5 into the lecture with her I was all you are KIDDING me, and how totally selfish is she, and great, 40+ degrees and I'm stuck in a room with her screaming kids.  But these kids were without doubt the happiest and most beautifully behaved I have ever come across. Not a peep out of either of them. They ate, played happily and silently and then napped.  Woke up, got a hug, and went on with their playing.

I honestly never thought that children could behave like that in a crowded room - mine certainly wouldn't.

Arrived home with Miss nearly 4 in a sweaty heap and the sum total of achievements since then has been sorting out my bumper 13kg plum harvest into those for drying (the perfectly ripe ones), those for jam (the under-ripe ones) and those for making into plum butter (or puree or fruit leathers) - the over ripe and blemished ones.

OH AND... we got a new shower head.

:)

Bushfire Survival Queen and Hunter of Lost Car Keys

Hmm, so its all happening on the meteorological front tomorrow.

The Bureau is telling us that not only will there be a duststorm with vile air quality but we're expecting severe fire weather in Sydney as well.

Ye Gods.

I blogged a while back about how helpless I felt knowing my area will at some point be threatened by bushfire (you get that in an extreme fire danger area).   Since then I've done some research and talked to people and have nutted out a When To Leave plan.

So, for what its worth (and because its been a slow hot day in Chez Nicholas) this is our bushfire evacuation plan...

• Severe fire danger
• See or smell smoke - locate fire (internet, radio, phone RFS)
• Fire 20kms away - stay put and monitor
• Fire 10kms away 
• Moving towards us - Leave
• Moving away from us - stay put and monitor
  
• Fire 5kms away - Leave
• Extreme fire danger
• See or smell smoke - locate fire (internet, radio, phone RFS)
• Fire 20kms away
• Moving towards us - Leave
• Moving away from us - stay put and monitor
  
• Fire 10kms away - Leave
• Fire 5kms away - Leave with extreme urgency
• Catastrophic fire danger - leave

We've got all sorts of contingency plans and whatnot, but I won't bore you with them.  Except to say that the shirt below is my official Fire Fighting Shirt.  Pure cotton flannelet and striped pink, pale pink and cream.  Should there be the slightest hint of fire I'll be slipping this stylish baby on (bought in 1986 - thank goodness flannelet never goes out of fashion) and hurtling down the highway to have coffee in Killara.  Yes, I am a seasoned survivor. Seasoned I tells ya.

In other news My Wretched Husband - let's refer to him as SOMEONE - buggered off to Chatswood this afternoon leaving me to discover that the SOMEONE had decided to play hide the car keys five minutes before I had to pick up Miss Five from pre-school.  Ten minutes later I was just pulling on  my sneakers to RUN through the 37 degree heat the 2kms to the pre-school and get her (desperate phone calls to friends had gone unanswered) and I glanced at the pram. A suspicion dawned and sure enough there in the back pouch were the keys. WHERE HE HAD LEFT THEM.

Argh.  Don't worry, I've made him suffer and I'm not done yet.

Manic drive and I got there late but not so late that she was sitting forlornly alone on the mat waiting for me. PHEW - bless the other slack mums in the world. Bless. Them. All.  Had to recover sitting in the bed with the kids eating ice-blocks and writing letters to Santa (for the kids - Santa already knows what I want, same thing as last year... a pirate).

Also the dog has eaten a lot of unripe plums (yes, I feel that is going to end Very Badly).

sigh.

Gingerbread Part Two

Ta daa... one fully functioning gingerbread house. Every bit of it edible.

The square bit in the garden is a vegetable garden people. A. Vegetable. Garden. (and not a "square bit with hamster-dropping-things in it"). And the green stuff artistically scattered about the dish is grass - and yes I put grass in the garden and not your usual snowmen because it is an Australian Gingerbread house.  Was going to put in an above ground pool (blue jelly in a ramekin dish) but didn't have room.

Back view.

Note cunning jelly belly wall down on the bottom right there. Covers monumental cock-up involving a lot of very runny icing.

Tips for anyone interested.

1. Reinforce roof with wooden skewers - stick them on the back with icing
   
2. Use glass headed dressmaking pins to hold structure together when gluing with the icing - dont forget to remove them :)
3. Once you've added the icing sugar to the eggwhite beat on high for a long time - ten minutes or so. If icing is dripping off the house then its not been beaten enough. Icing should hold its shape and lollies shouldn't drop off.
4. Dont mix your green food colouring into the coconut 'grass' by hand - green thumbs!
5. Even though you think it will be fun to include your children when decorating - don't do it to yourself. They only want to eat the lollies, nag, whine and bicker and then go hyper on you the minute their little system tries to process all that sugar and food colouring.  Do what I do and save that part for when you have your entire extended family present.

Of course because this wasn't enough, I also harvested about 10kgs of plums from next doors tree. They taste wonderful and I'm almighty chuffed about it - they'll ripen in the next few days - if we leave them to go ripe on the tree the birds get them all.

Watch this space for a thousand plum recipes...

:)

Gingerbread Part One

Am making a Gingerbread house for a family thing on the weekend.  However, before I get to that I'd like to point out that I have a migraine and feel completely crap - am not even hungry. Yes. That is how sick I am. 

So today's post is short and sweet.

Semi cooked gingerbread, with crushed boiled lollies about to go into the oven.

And the result... WINDOWS
 (sorry for the unfocussed look - sigh)

And we did make excellent use of the leftovers

Sunburn

So Miss Five spent the day at her big school today, and I got to hang out in a cafe with No Children and get a taste of what next year will be like (yes, that's rejoicing you can hear).

Now yesterday hubby took the kids to the beach. There was a breeze off the water and it was overcast - and I just know that every Aussie reading this is howling 'perfect sunburn weather' - and indeed it was. They were all slathered in suncream with hats on but...

Miss Five copped it around her eyes and the side of her face.

And hubby got his legs to medium rare. Check out the lobster feet - poor love (snicker).

Its an easy mistake to make, and I know it won't happen again. Live and learn as they say.

However, I did have to turn up as a new parent at the new school with a slightly baked child.

Yes, parent of the year me.

sigh.

Drive

So I've been going on (and on and on) about editing Drive.  Thought it was only fair to share some of my hard work. Here is the first couple of paragraphs. (OH WHAT - I'm doing nablowrimo and I am all out of blogging inspiration and energy today after about nine hours of editing and Very Small Screamy Children).

Drive Me To Distraction
by C Nicholas (me)

“If he doesn’t slap my arse, make women driver jokes, or tell me to brace myself because he’s the most shit-hot race driver I’ve ever seen –“

Mike’s eyes continued to glaze over. They’d paused when she’s said the word arse, but now they continued their journey to complete ambivalence.

“- then we’ll get along just fine.” Alex finished with a sigh.

“You’re never going to get anywhere unless you lose that chip.” Mike stepped close and brushed an imaginary chip from her shoulder. His gaze wandered down from her shoulder to her chest.

Alex knew from experience that elbowing people in the nose hurt a lot, but even so, the urge to damage Mike was unusually persistent. She had her racing overalls unzipped to the waist, it being a rare hot English summer day, but now she pointedly zipped them up to her neck. Heat exhaustion was preferable to Mike trying to peer down her tank top.

Again.

She snatched her clipboard from her desk and departed the small administration office of Thruxton Motorsport Centre with enough force to make the windows rattle in their cheap aluminium frames.

Outside the smell of baked tarmac and hot oil hung heavily in the warm still air. She glanced at her clipboard as she undid her racing overalls a couple of inches, Rob Dryden was her next client for the Race Driving Test, and had elected to drive the Lotus.

She strode up the pit lane to where the Lotus was kept. A man waited for her, turning as if he’d heard her coming, though she wasn’t nearly close enough. He smiled as she approached, a warm sexy grin.

Tall, lean, brown hair flopping across his dark eyes and the pale skin of an office dweller, all came together to make him meltingly handsome, in a laddish way.

Surrounded by men, working in an industry that only saw women as decorative, Alex had learned to be aloof and matter-of-fact. Especially with the distractingly handsome ones. But the hint of kiss-me-nowness about his grin unsettled her.

She zipped her racing overalls all the way back up again.

“You’re a girl,” he declared as soon as she got within earshot.

“And you’re yet another idiot,” she muttered.

“Pardon?”

She ignored him. “Hi, I’m Alex. I’ll be taking your racing licence test today –“

“Sorry,” he interrupted her spiel. “That sounded really sexist of me. I was just surprised.”

She stared at him for long enough to make the confident grin falter.

“I’m sure you were surprised -” She consulted her clipboard, and kept talking so he wouldn’t start on about female driving instructors, and how he was totally for equal opportunity and well done her for being a girl. She’d heard it all before. “- Let’s get in the car and we’ll see what you can do.”

Alex didn’t bother to hide her reservation. Rob Dryden’s variety of driver was all too familiar. Couldn’t drive a racing car to save his life. It was easy to tell after seven years in this business, if he’d been examining the Lotus and reeling off its vital statistics the moment there was someone close enough to listen then chances were he’d be a decent driver. But those that ignored the car and looked at the view were never any good.

She handed him the keys, stamped around to the passenger side and wrenched open the door. Best get it done and over with.

“Accelerate up the pit lane and then we’ll turn out onto the track.” She pointed the way. He stamped his foot down on the accelerator. The car made a strangled whine then lurched into second gear with a shuddering clunk.

“Watch it,” she muttered. He shot her a startled look. The kiss-me-now grin was entirely gone.

They staggered around the track. Rob Dryden went out of his way to ignore Alex’s instructions. He accelerated too fast into the corners, and hurtled down the straight barely in control.

“This is a tricky thread the needle. You can do it at about seventy but you have to take it from the far left of the track.” She braced herself against the dash and blew out a sigh. If he didn’t listen then at their current speed there’d be only one outcome.

Rob Dryden remained at ninety in the centre of track. The tyres squealed like fingernails down a blackboard as he tried to take the hairpin corner and lost control of the car. It spun in a graceful circle on the loose gravel at the side of the tarmac, and ended up pointing in the wrong direction.

“What the hell are you doing?” growled Alex, when they came to a halt.

“Driving the sodding car -” He stopped talking so abruptly that it was as if he’d inhaled his next words. Then he sat, staring at his knuckles which gleamed though his skin, white against the black of the steering wheel.

Alex sighed again, remembered her anger management course and tried to let the tension go. It didn’t want to leave.

Spring has Sprung

Spring has sprung at our house, you want to know how I can tell?

Well the plums are ripening on next-doors plum tree (and being eaten by the King Parrots - which I was planning to photograph but the wretched dog started barking).

And today I pulled out the last of the Broad Beans and am drying them in the sunshine (some to plant next year and the rest to use in cooking)...

And the flowers on the Hydrangea have gone from this...

To this...

But the most telling sign of all is that we've taken the cover off the World's Most Boring and Pointless pool...

Fancy a dip anyone?

sigh.

Old

I find peculiar satisfaction in old stuff.  Anyone who's been reading The Blog for a while is entirely too familiar with the couches and trays and furnitures that belonged to my Grandmother and now reside in my lounge - some call it too tight to fork out for new stuff - I call it filling my home with antiques (or "recycling" when I'm in an environmentally friendly mood - you see now I want to expand on being in an environmentally friendly mood and move that into a call for a No F*rting Day (and add a few jokes about hubby exploding). But NO. That would be Crass. I am writing about Old).

Of course my most favourite old things in the world (apart from mumndad) are my teacups.  They are all handmade bone china and were produced in the UK by a company called Shelley China between 1882 and 1966.  The company was then sold and all the moulds for the teacups were destroyed.  This means that no more teacups could ever be made - and attempts to recreate the moulds since have failed. 

*I'll note for the purists that the company was originally named Wileman and it became Shelley China in 1910.

This teacup, which has a backstamp that dates it between 1910 and 1916, is one of my oldest.  The shape is called Gainsborough and the pattern is glamorously called 7084.  The artist has signed the back with their unique mark, which is `x`.

Because it is hand painted, if you look closely there are spots where the gold guilding has missed a bit, or a delicate dot is slightly off line.  This is what makes me love these cups the most. The mistakes. I think about the artist working in the factory a hundred years ago and wonder what they were thinking, or if they were chatting. Is that dot out of line because they were distracted, upset, excited, tired.  Did they mutter a curse, but decide to leave the mistake anyway, or simply not care less. Who was `x`?

The other thing that charms me is wear on the guilding in the centre of the cup, where a teaspoon has gone around and around.  Who held that teaspoon? What was her life like (I always assume her)? This cup has survived two world wars, imagine the things its seen and the experiences of the people who's fingers wore away the guild on the handle.

I also wonder where the cup will go next. This one, I think, may become an heirloom, and maybe it'll be passed from my daughters children to their children. Perhaps one of them will break it and have to keep the accident a secret so she doesn't upset her mother.  Now that would amuse me.

I'm not one for locking treasures away.  My teacups are here to be used and I am quite resigned to them breaking.  The dresser in my kitchen looks like this... (sorry the light is awful for photography today)

And when I have guests I invite them to pick their favourite cup to have their tea in.  Kids as well. I have half sized or demi-tasse cups for them to use.  My mum always, but always, picks the one that has a dead fly in it - sigh. 

Of course my girls have their own favourites - and this is one of the main reasons I started collecting in the first place - so that as they grow up we have a firmly established tradition of drinking tea together and talking, the cups are just an excuse to do it really.  Hubby has his own cups as well, less lavishly decorated, but still sleek and beautiful. 

So yes. Old. My Teacups. There you have it.

:)

Plaiting Garlic

Harvested garlic from the garden

Tidied it up

And plaited it (insert lame vampire joke of choice)

Other than that today has passed ferrying Miss five to the doctor and paying $57 for seven minutes and the information that she has a double ear infection - which was another $20 on antibiotics.

Sigh.

Ruckus in the Australian Publishing Industry

Today there was a large ruckus in the Australian Publishing industry.  Its a long story regarding opening up of the Industry and allowing parallel importation of books.

Parallel importation would allow booksellers to import overseas editions, irrespective of whether they’d already been published in Australia. It’s a measure resisted by most authors and all Australian publishers, who fear that exposure to open market will wipe out the local industry. Full article here

The recommendation by the Productivity Commission—that the market be opened and that parallel importation of books be freely permitted except for the first 12 months in a book’s life—appears to be nothing other than meddling with an existing successful model with no predictable outcome, except the dismantling of an industry. It is excellent news for publishers and distributors in the United Kingdom and America. The amazing Agent Sydney has the full story.

Well yesterday the Australian Government released a statement saying that the rules in place will not be changed and that the recommendations of the Productivity Commission would not be put in place - largely because it would lead to the Government having to subsidies the publishing industry if we were going to have any industry at all.

This is brilliant news.  BRILLIANT. My dream of walking into an Aussie bookshop and seeing one of my books published by an Aussie publisher is alive. ALIVE I tells ya.

:)