Who likes cake?

We all like cake!

http://theafterschoolcaketin.wordpress.com/

My sister-in-law to-be has started a blog about her baking experiments. I can attest to the fact that she is an amazing cook and baker. She has kicked off with a peanut chocolate brownie recipe and it looks amazing.

So this is basically a plug for her skills. After all, I have to keep her sweet to keep the flow of baked goodies coming. Please go visit her :)

Busy busy...

The great pumpkin/haribofest of 2012 has been and gone, birthdays, anniversaries, bonfires, barbeques (yes, you can get away with that sort of thing down here in October), fireworks, playdates, commitee meetings and more overtime than I ever care to do again.

Most of these things are good things. I literally look forward to halloween all year. Electronic zombie door chimes on sale in August? Well there's a form of gratuitous consumption everyone should get on board with! I like bonfires and fireworks too. But good god did it all get a bit much these past few months. I feel like I have lurched from event to housekeeping crisis to event to work crisis, day in and day out since September. The clocks going back just after a run of night shifts brought things to a head and I still haven't quite recovered my rhythm. The ridiculous thing about all this? It was partly by design.

Money is time for most people, me included. For every hour of overtime I do, the wispy threads of my daily routine snag and break. The rest of life falls apart. I have written entire posts over at The Simple Green Frugal Co-op encouraging others to manage their time wisely and to see that paid work can actually cost money not only  in terms of transport and other overheads, but how much you spend trying to catch up on all the cooking, cleaning and domestic productivity. 10 days straight and I am spinning, and not in a nice producing yarn sort of way. £40 in taxi fares where I failed to wake up at 5am and get my rear into gear on time for the bus. £15 in nice comforting food for my shifts, beacuse I sure as hell couldn't turn my bodyclock around enough to prepare anything from scratch.

Still, I can do better; and in the light of all of these fails, I am grateful. I have  job to go to, many others don't. I have a job where I can take on a few extra hours as needed, again many people would dearly love that opportunity. I have family and friends still with me whose birthdays and anniversaries are to be celebrated whilst we are all still together on this earth and for that I am truly grateful. This past halloween, I lit candles for the few who have left us during this past year; and those who vanished long before whose influence reverberates down the years as is they have merely stepped out of the room for a moment - and once again my habit of losing touch and not quite getting round to sending that email has left me smarting. A lesson for this year.

For those of you across the pond who are celebrating  Thanksgiving, I wish you a lovely day and hope you have much to be grateful for. I hope the same for all of you home here too.

♫ Oh we did like to be beside the seaside...

 Oh we did like to be beside the sea ♫...

We have just returned from a week away at my favouritest place on this side of the earth. Oh how I wish we could have stayed. There were a good few family arguments, rainy days and toddler meltdowns. And yet...

there was sand and sea and sun:

there were sunsets (and a Nick chilled out enough to pick up his camera after a long hiatus and take photos of them):

there was the delicious local food:

there was even (the tail end of) Hurricane Katia:

It brought rainbow spray. Sigh.

Thank you to all of you who left comments in my absence. I hope you have had a good week wherever you have been and whatever you have been up to.

The marrow patch kid

We are back - you may have guessed where we have been?

This is Elsa and she is just peachy. The most lovely thing I have ever clapped eyes upon, bar her brother, who she is the spitting image of.

Unfortunately for her, cute only gets you so far in this house and she is already singing for her supper - hence we will be measuring all marrows in Elsas from here on in. This one is exactly one Elsa in weight and length - a courgette gone rogue in our week long absence from the allotment.

I haven't done much more in the last twelve days than look at The Girl in awe for hours, defend her from her very loving but over enthusiastic brother and try and catch forty-winks here and there. I think I have got the hang of it now. I don't know why it should be easier with two, but so far it seems everything has slotted into place. All is good with the world. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Waiting

I am three weeks from my due date and mental and physical energy really is escaping me now. I have to confess I haven't done much of anything this last week. I have pottered about, I have tried to keep on top of all the things that need to be done - but mostly I have done an awful lot of lazing around. The nesting instinct is still strong and housework is getting done in short bursts of activity. Walking anywhere seems to take three times as long and sap my strength 3 times as fast.  Mostly I don't feel much like leaving home, or the sofa for that matter.

I have taken the chance to socialize a little the last few weeks, forcing myself even, when necessary. I regret that in the past I have been reluctant to socialize regularly, partly out of shyness, partly laziness, partly that my house was too messy to have people round - even close friends. A barbecue, a few evenings with friends, a visit to the local community arts cafe today, even dinner out with Nick - a once a year occurrence these days - have all been enjoyed, even if they have left me shattered. New babies don't leave much time, will or energy over for socializing, so we might as well make the most of it whilst we can. I am naturally a bit of a homebody, but once I am out of the house and amongst good company I am as happy as the next person - something I will miss out on perhaps for the rest of the summer.

One of my focuses for the next year will be to become more involved with my local community. I am quite reserved and find it hard to just turn up to things where there are big groups of people, but it would be good for me to involve myself a little more. We have good friends, we know a few of our neighbours, but I can't describe us as being embedded in a community. I am yet to take The Boy to any form of structured toddler group and know very few people with children locally - and as a result have probably made this parenting lark a lot harder for myself than I needed to. Now I want to go out and make connections with people and better late than never.

On Saturday we went to a healthy living picnic event at a local park. Considering my lack of energy I surpassed myself and we took along a bean salad, vegetable sticks, sweet potato wedges with homemade smoked paprika mayonnaise, homemade bread and some fruit and ate a leisurely picnic amongst all the other families, surrounded by trees, healthy living stalls and children tearing about in sack races, making the most of all the sunshine. The Boy had his first go on a bouncy castle; a terrifying ten minutes for me; thankfully he just giggled every time he came close to being flattened by the overly energetic seven year olds sharing it with him.

This week has been a good one, for which I am very grateful.

Frugal fun

I have had a week off from work, which for once coincided with family visiting - which in turn, for once, coincided with another week of fine weather. Usually we end up spending a small fortune when we visit people or they visit us, possibly because we feel like kill joys if we say no. A steady stream of eating out, coffee and cake, small gifts and visiting various attractions that are usually less entertaining than the blurb suggests gradually eats away at our budget and leaves us short for the rest of the month. This was not a month however for overspending our budget and we explained the situation with as positive a spin as we could.

Sometimes (funnily enough, usually always coinciding with time away from my paid employment) I manage to get my act together, make a plan and stick to it. A few hours work resulted in our contribution to a delicious and frugal picnic lunch, all made from scratch (mayonnaise and all, including the first salad pickings from the garden). In a word, I am...smug.

We ate the picnic lunch in the garden of the holiday cottage and then paddled in the sea at a lovely sandy beach in Sussex. We tried to engage toddlers in a sandcastle building project that was blatantly more fun for us adults than it was for them. We went to the woods for a barbeque that didn't get rained off.  We have spent a fair amount of time driving around beautiful countryside, just as the hedgerows are in full bloom and the spring babies are out in the fields. We had cream tea in a quaint little tearoom followed by (slightly wistful)  window shopping around an equally quaint town.

In short, I have spent more time gadding about in nature than I normally would being city bound - and I realize I need to make an effort to get out more to green leafy places. I have eaten more strawberries and whipped cream in one week than I normally do in a whole year. All very frugal, all very relaxed, all great fun; which is just how I remember my childhood holidays to be.

What frugal fun have you had this week?

Knitting nemesis

 I have a head swimming with ideas for things I want to design and knit (or crochet) with my yarn stash. Winter is a coming, and autumn and winter are knitting seasons. They are also the seasons of wind chilled ears and numb fingers and toes; hence I needed to start stitching, ooh say, in March 2010.


Unfortunately I have a knitting nemesis apparently determined to thwart every swatch I cast on. Especially the ones with the complicated lace patterns, variable stitch counts and fiddly yarns. High surfaces, closed-tight cupboards and  knitting bags are apparently light (but absorbing) work for a toddler, as is pulling my starter rows off of the needles and trailing a knotty mess around the house. It takes him about the thirty seconds it takes me to put milk in my tea and walk into the living room.

I read a lot of those gorgeous crafting blogs,  the ones where lavishly heaped skeins in decorative ceramic bowls happily coexist with small children that, whilst the bowl is at eye (and therefore pingling) level, ignore it, instead seeking joy creatively but tidily elsewhere, leaving mummy to knit in peace.

Which makes me wonder...where do I get one of those magical decorative ceramic bowls that adorable  toddlers find so repugnant?

(Secretly I am of course delighted that one of the men in the house admires a hand dyed silk-merino 6 ply when he sees it. That child is going to be one screwed up yarn crafting genius when I am through with him).

Time to reflect on how far we have come

A few of my activities today have put me in reflective mood. Our little baby boy is no longer a baby, but a talkative and independent twenty-two month old! Time has flown and much has changed since he was born, in the last year especially.

Some of the important things that we have done in the past twelve months:

Finances - We have paid off £2000 debt. This is perhaps the most exciting thing to reflect on. I know that we could have done even better than this, but we afforded ourselves a few luxuries along the way. Even so, two credit cards are now gone, and we no longer have overdraft facilities. Every month we have a little money put aside spare, which is a position I never imagined we would be in for the next decade! We have also transferred the majority of the remainder of the debt to 0% interest rates, which means that we will be able to pay it off faster every month.

Home - We have been on a massive decluttering mission this year. We have charity bagged, chucked out and car booted possessions that I had deep emotional (read 'hoarding instinct') attachments to just a few years ago. the house is clearer (though by no means complete) and our lives are lighter. Hopefully other people benefited from our stuff too. We also invested in some solid furniture as ours wore out; I think we finally grasped the importance of quality and beauty and functionality over quantity.

Practical skills - Over the last few years we have been knuckling down and learning the skills for true self reliance. So new found money management skills aside:

• This year I have put much more effort into the garden and developing my food growing skills; and from just a few containers our harvest over the next few months is looking promising. I am branching out into winter crops this year too. Unfortunately I haven't learnt the art of war against caterpillars. There's always next year...

•  Our home brewing (OH's) and wine making (mine) enterprise is going well and is very satisfying work . OH is about to start his first non-kit, from mash brew. I have plans for lots of foraged fruit wines and perhaps some cider in the months ahead. As well as the finished product (which has an uncanny ability to win you friends and influence people!), I find the whole process fascinating. 

•  I have developed my knitting and crochet beyond basic stitches and simple shaping. Now I wonder every time I need a soft furnishing or item of clothing, 'can I knit that?'. Being able to make basic items like socks, hats and gloves to keep us warm comforts me deeply.

• I can finally bake a loaf of good bread, along with lots of other baked/skillet staples.

Parenting - we have had to learn patience, tolerance and a  good dose of selflessness. But thankfully our little boy teaches us as painlessly as possible, with the most fun and smiles he can muster (which is a LOT). Oh, and when handed a pooey baby, I can close off my smell receptors and have that baby cleaned and pinned in a terry cloth before others have stopped retching - which is good progress for an only child that was never entirely sold on being a parent.

I realise now that we are closer to living our dreams than I usually give credit for. It is so easy to focus on what we don't have, what we want to be doing and what we don't feel we are doing well enough. I know now that goals and dreams are built one and every moment at a time, until you arrive at the place where you want to be. If the goals are the right ones for you, then the journey will be as enjoyable as the destination.

Back home

I have been away for a week visiting relatives in sunny Derbyshire. OK, it really isn't very sunny, but it is fairly picturesque in the moments when the cloud cover breaks and the sun illuminates the peaks. Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera, so I can't show you. It is well worth a visit if ever you pass that way.

A week away from the city calms and clarifies the mind beautifully. As a child I used to wander for hours in the countryside if I had a decision to make or was feeling out of sorts. I never realised until last week how much I missed the opportunity to roam free, physically and mentally, for just a few hours.

Which leads me to the decision I made whilst we were away and my mind was peacefully rambling. I am not an urban girl, I never will be. Sure I can cope, but I don't thrive. Too much noise, too much commotion, too much competition - and for want of a better word, too much fronting. So when we move, as the darling OH is also not overly enamoured with city living, we will be leaving the city. This will be in a few years when he has finished his nursing training, but I have made peace with that and will throw myself into enjoying to the full all the pluses of living in the most densely populated city in the UK (awesome 'Indian' restaurants and takeaways, for one) and of course, spending time with all of the lovely people here that we call our friends and neighbours.

We are still undecided  just how rural we will go. At the moment I am keen on the outskirts of a town. Being landlocked in Derbyshire, followed by a stopover in the equally pretty-but-landlocked Oxfordshire, also taught me that reservoirs and lakes and streams are no substitute for the open sea and a beach nearby - and therefore we will not be heading too far inland anytime soon.

But knowing where our eventual patch of the earth will not be is a step in the right direction, don't you think?

The beach

Today we went to the beach for an impromptu picnic, with last nights leftovers and a freshly made salad. We love this beach. It is a rarity in that it is vegetated shingle - there are very few parts of the world where shingle beach is stable enough to allow the few specially adapted plants that can live on it to thrive. The photos are ones that I took a few weeks ago and I will probably post plenty more, because the beach changes with the seasons and looks beautiful all year round.

 A year or so ago a letter turned up in the local paper from a woman suggesting that the council should have gone out and cleared all the 'weeds' because it would encourage more tourists to use it, that the beach was somehow a disgrace to Portsmouth. This woman could not see the beach for the beauty of the stately pale green sea kale bending with the breeze. The mauves, the greens, the blues, the pinks and yellows of the vegetation against an ever changing sky. The birds that this habitat supports. She couldn't even see that the vegetation provided a further layer of sea defence for a city that sits barely above sea level. Apparently the tens of people scattered along the beach enjoying the relative tranquilty (to the 'tourist' beach a mile down the coast) were not enough for this woman; she would not be happy until the entire beach looked like Brighton on a bank holiday weekend.

 

 I think that that woman was wrong.

So did someone else:

Memorial benches line the promenade, as they do in most seaside towns. They are poignant reminders on sunny days of the brevity of life and what really matters. Someone took a lot of time to decorate this bench with knitted panels (looped through and stitched at the back). At first I thought it was a totally awesome bit of random knit graffiti, until I saw the top middle panel, which had 'Isobel' stitched in pearl beading, the name the bench is dedicated to.

I think that when I go, I would like a bench overlooking the sea someplace; and I would like some good crafty friends to come and embellish it once in a while, to remind others to stop and look at the flowers and feel the breeze on their skin; and be filled with thanks that they are alive.

Peak denial

"But let’s be perfectly honest: Any steps we might take to prepare for a potential environmental, societal, or economic disruption, no matter how grand, are nearly certain to be insufficient. Nevertheless, they are still necessary. They will be insufficient because being perfectly prepared is infinitely expensive. But actions are necessary because they help us align our lives with what we know about the world. In my experience, when gaps exist between knowledge and actions, anxiety (if not fear) is the result. So it’s not the state of the world that creates the anxiety quite as much as it is someone’s lack of action." 

-Chris Martenson in Resilience: Personal Preparation (The Post Carbon Reader Series: Building Resilience)

In 2006 I first came across the concept of 'Peak Oil', first from an article in National Geographic and then through 'The Party's Over' by Richard Heinberg. It is an excellent introduction to peak oil theory and I highly recommend it as a starting point. Where initially I had enthusiasm for preparing and reskilling for a powered down future, in recent months I have been steering clear of anything related to peak oil, climate change and financial meltdown. Quite frankly, it all got too much and it left me almost paralysed with foreboding and despondency.

It becomes hard to to ignore something when it goes mainstream. At the same time as I was trying my best to pretend the issues away, this report was launched, not from the usual suspects, but from some of the largest corporations and businesses in the UK. This was followed swiftly by dire warnings from the US military and the British governments former chief science advisor David King who was scathing about our approach to energy security. Still, I have persevered with my magical thinking.

Unfortunately my blue sky approach has just hit a storm front in the form of this report from Lloyd's of London. I haven't waded through it yet and I probably never will, but the fact it comes from the heart of La-La land (that'll be the City), it is a wake up call just for its very existence. Its existence, combined with the horrifying images coming from the Gulf of Mexico over the last few months; and the tales of financial woe coming from regular people on some of the forums I visit; has led me to re question my attitudes.

My wake up call was followed by a period of anxiety for the future. The quote from Chris Martenson (creator of The Crash Course) sums up my mood. I realised that as a family unit, we were not doing what we needed to do with the knowledge that we have. I wasn't entirely sure that my OH and I were even singing from the same hymn sheet - he is a total petrol head and is more likely to be found on PistonHeads (I'm not even going to countenance it with a hyperlink) looking for old fuel guzzling bangers than The Oil Drum looking for crude production statistics.

Yesterday we sat down and had a short chat. I started by asking him what kind of world we would be living in as Gus grew up. We agreed that we had probably reached, or were close to peak oil production. We agreed that the climate was changing and that food and political security were uncertain. We agree that the West's time as the global superpower was over and that whatever is left over will be going east. We envisioned that within the next 10 years, there will probably be oil shocks, blackouts and economic hardship for many people.  We agreed that people that "could never live without their hair straighteners/mobile/weekly nail appointment" would probably learn to. We agreed that technology would adapt, but the level of energy use and convenience provided by the oil binge we have been on would never be matched. Our vision of the future looks somewhere between the home front of WWII and the appropriate technology experiments of the 1970s, hopefully with the internet and progressive attitudes thrown in. We both agreed that the future was not destined to be apocalyptic.

I feel better, because I know that we both broadly agree where the world is going. Which means that we will be able to broach the subject (in all fairness, it will probably be me doing all the broaching...at least until PistonHeads shuts down) with each other and make plans and changes as as and before the need arises.

I will document what we are up to in this blog, which is probably going to take a slightly different direction to the one that I was expecting. Simplifying doesn't necessarily mean powered down, but with a bit of extra thought it can be just that.

Holiday

This week has been a holiday week. I actually worked my regular hours whilst my OH took the week off and entertained family who came down for Goodwood. Whilst wistfully staring out of my office window, thinking about the rest of my family (and it seems, the rest of the nation) who were out picnicing and paddling and generally chilling, I had time to mull a few things over.

First, I realised that I am rubbish at booking holiday. I have used about 3 days of my allowance this year so far and have nothing booked. I always end up saving it because I know it causes my boss hassle to cover it and it generally causes grief to whichever colleagues get left short staffed that partcular day. It sucks, however, because I know deep down I prioritise not wanting to cause a little bit of work for others way above taking time out for myself and my family.

I also thought long and hard about how much I enjoy the days off I have; and I realise that the answer is actually 'very little'.  I end up focusing on the things I hate doing and seem to have very little time for the things that I would love to do. My life is filled with too much routine and drabness, which is about as far as you can get from the life I always envisioned for myself and my family when I was growing up. Whilst I am beginning to appreciate the importance of some routines (life is more enjoyable, for example, when you keep on top of the housework and laundry pile), I realise that days can go by without me learning anything new.

I have now requested some holiday for later in the year and resolve to be less kind to my (admittedly lovely) boss and request holiday to suit myself and not feel guilty about it. I still managed a few trips out this week, which were fun, because I was forced to actually do things that were life and knowledge expanding; and spent time in good company. My 22 month old son sees the world with such wonder (his current most used word is 'Wowwwwww') and is always looking for new things to explore; I don't see why adults should be any different. If we were focused on the things that matter and were seeing the world clearly, we should probably be saying 'Wow' several times a day. Anything else is a waste of a life.