good and bad
Good:
1. Us knitters of Wetville are busily knitting peggy squares to turn into a blanket to send to Samoa for tsunami hit people who no longer have blankets. My lovely friend Nina has also organised a whip round of clothing and toiletries and linen and bedding and a local courier has gifted the delivery cost to get it to Lower Hutt to go on a container at the end of the month. I even knitted on the sideline of the boy's swimming lesson today.
Bad:
1. Nasty council. We have a wonderful swimming school here in Wetville where the leader tries to make lessons as affordable as possible and sets it up as pay as you go and you don't pay if you are away sick (or any other kind of away). But now the council are muscling in and today I discoverd I have to find a term's worth of fees all at once and suddenly attendance has dropped because lots of people can't find that kind of money all at once and next year the council are taking the whole thing over and want more revenue from it. In low income coastal town like ours, this spells an awful lot of children not learning to swim and upping their drowning risk.
Good:
2. We are going to get a piano. My very very kind parents are letting me have the family piano and Mum got a quote to get it over from their place to ours and offered that they would pay up front and I could repay over few months. I am super excited. Now I know why I got our daughter out of our bedroom - so that there is room to put the piano where the children's bunks were. Our lounge is a shade too small and probably too hot on winter evenings.
3. The clematis has flowers. I also have marigold flowers and for dinner had a home grown salad of tatsoi, another nameless asian green, pak choi and various kinds of lettuce. Yesterday I repotted some tomatoes and sewed seeds of pumpkin, squash and zucchini, plus one echincea seed, some beans and lots of coriander. I used these peat circles which you soak and then they grow into a cylinder and you put the seed in the top. Then you put the whole thing in the ground later on. An unnecessarily expensive way of growing things but Fionn was keen and sometimes I indulge my offspring. Sometimes an icecream, sometimes a special kind of gardening pot.
4. I have been sewing, but not much since I started knitting for Samoa. My party skirt is over half made.
5. The solo parenting stint while Fh was off tramping went well. Even better, it is now over.
6. Not a lot of experimentation in the kitchen lately. I've got a cromarty cob mixture in the hot water cupboard as I type, making the production sourdough part. I'm going to alter the rise times and method to hopefully get it ready for baking in the morning. Following the instructions has worked very well in the past with this recipe and now is time to see how flexible it can be. I do hope and plan on it being more successful than the chocolate cake which Fionn and I made earlier in the week. Altering three ingredients plus the method of mixing the ingredients together is a little too much altering.
7. I had some gorgeous rhubarb cake at coffee group today and Ruth kindly gave me the recipe to take home. It is from a playcentre recipe book, though I don't remember better details than that.
8. Writers' group was a great evening on Wednesday with another new and talented writer joining us and last month's new person sharing some wonderful writing and enticing stories with us also. I'm still writing far too much stuff on bad motherhood. I live it, I write it, I guess. Some time I hope to grow out of bad motherhood. But since Wednesday I have started writing some of my cousin Mary's stories down and I want to get a photographs to go with it. Family but not mothering. Progress perhaps?
8. BEST OF ALL, my brother is coming all the way from Perth, Western Australia to stay with us tomorrow night. He has never even seen Brighid, who is now 2 years 8 months.
Bad:
2. This government. People who I have encountered too often including today who think that poor people are bad and deserve only to pay taxes, not to receive services.
1. Us knitters of Wetville are busily knitting peggy squares to turn into a blanket to send to Samoa for tsunami hit people who no longer have blankets. My lovely friend Nina has also organised a whip round of clothing and toiletries and linen and bedding and a local courier has gifted the delivery cost to get it to Lower Hutt to go on a container at the end of the month. I even knitted on the sideline of the boy's swimming lesson today.
Bad:
1. Nasty council. We have a wonderful swimming school here in Wetville where the leader tries to make lessons as affordable as possible and sets it up as pay as you go and you don't pay if you are away sick (or any other kind of away). But now the council are muscling in and today I discoverd I have to find a term's worth of fees all at once and suddenly attendance has dropped because lots of people can't find that kind of money all at once and next year the council are taking the whole thing over and want more revenue from it. In low income coastal town like ours, this spells an awful lot of children not learning to swim and upping their drowning risk.
Good:
2. We are going to get a piano. My very very kind parents are letting me have the family piano and Mum got a quote to get it over from their place to ours and offered that they would pay up front and I could repay over few months. I am super excited. Now I know why I got our daughter out of our bedroom - so that there is room to put the piano where the children's bunks were. Our lounge is a shade too small and probably too hot on winter evenings.
3. The clematis has flowers. I also have marigold flowers and for dinner had a home grown salad of tatsoi, another nameless asian green, pak choi and various kinds of lettuce. Yesterday I repotted some tomatoes and sewed seeds of pumpkin, squash and zucchini, plus one echincea seed, some beans and lots of coriander. I used these peat circles which you soak and then they grow into a cylinder and you put the seed in the top. Then you put the whole thing in the ground later on. An unnecessarily expensive way of growing things but Fionn was keen and sometimes I indulge my offspring. Sometimes an icecream, sometimes a special kind of gardening pot.
4. I have been sewing, but not much since I started knitting for Samoa. My party skirt is over half made.
5. The solo parenting stint while Fh was off tramping went well. Even better, it is now over.
6. Not a lot of experimentation in the kitchen lately. I've got a cromarty cob mixture in the hot water cupboard as I type, making the production sourdough part. I'm going to alter the rise times and method to hopefully get it ready for baking in the morning. Following the instructions has worked very well in the past with this recipe and now is time to see how flexible it can be. I do hope and plan on it being more successful than the chocolate cake which Fionn and I made earlier in the week. Altering three ingredients plus the method of mixing the ingredients together is a little too much altering.
7. I had some gorgeous rhubarb cake at coffee group today and Ruth kindly gave me the recipe to take home. It is from a playcentre recipe book, though I don't remember better details than that.
8. Writers' group was a great evening on Wednesday with another new and talented writer joining us and last month's new person sharing some wonderful writing and enticing stories with us also. I'm still writing far too much stuff on bad motherhood. I live it, I write it, I guess. Some time I hope to grow out of bad motherhood. But since Wednesday I have started writing some of my cousin Mary's stories down and I want to get a photographs to go with it. Family but not mothering. Progress perhaps?
8. BEST OF ALL, my brother is coming all the way from Perth, Western Australia to stay with us tomorrow night. He has never even seen Brighid, who is now 2 years 8 months.
Bad:
2. This government. People who I have encountered too often including today who think that poor people are bad and deserve only to pay taxes, not to receive services.
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