Letters from Wetville

New project.  Refashioning, re-laceing and making slips.  The photo doesn't show my blue slip to the left.  I bought it for 50 cents from the Sallies and now the lace hem looks grey and is unravelling.  I bought black lace to change the hem.  The back middle is an enormous slip I bought on trademe which I can probably turn into two half slips or more.  I've bought matching lace for the hems.  The lilac fabric on the right is nylon elastane and four way stretch and I'n going to make  stretchy slip drafted from a bought one I own, except a bit wider and longer.  The bought version doesn't come in a big enough size for it not to wriggle upwards to my knickers during the day.  I bought lace to match that as well but probably won't use it as it will restrict hem movement. The green envelope in the foreground middle is my Cake Patterns Hummingbird which arrived today!  I'm in Susan 's house for the sewalong.  I've just now reali...

So I've now read The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck.  I don't know what the 'S' stood or stands for, but obviously Mrs Buck thought it was important.  I can't call her "Pearl" because really she is an author of stature and old and dead to boot, and I keep thinking of the song "Pearl's a Singer " which isn't quite seemly. I liked the cadences of the prose.  Really, I did have such a pretentious thought.  I like how it has a fable-like quality which I have decided is because of all the Bible saturation which Pearl S Buck, daughter of a missionary, experienced.  I quote: "Men labored all day at the baking of breads and cakes for feasts for the rich and children labored from dawn to midnight and slept all greasy and grimed as they were on rough pallets on the floor and staggered to the ovens the next day, and there was not money enough given them to buy a piece of the rich breads they made for others." (p.113) It reads like the Bi...

8.25am Climb in car in dressing gown.  Deliver husband and children to work and school. 8.40  Get dressed.  Hang out washing. 9.00  Turn slow cooker on high. Slice two onions, and three carrots and put in slow cooker.  Roughly chop one black pudding, one white pudding and three chorizo and put in slow cooker.  Pick four bay leaves from tree outside and add to slow cooker, along with some red lentils, a tin of tomatoes and some water.  Stir it up and put the lid on. 9.15  Eat leftovers from last night's dinner for breakfast (noodles and stir fry).  Put a pear and a banana in a bag to take to work for the rest of breakfast.  Clear table of breakfast things, and remove the laundry the laundry monsters scatter through the house. 9.40  Drive to work.  Do busy work things at work. 2.00pm  Drive home.  Drive back to childminders to drop off hockey gear.  Drive back home.  Bring washing in.  Pick kale from...

This morning was lovely.  For starters, I slept in.  Next, my husband and lovely children all hugged me and wished me happy mothers day.  This is especially touching considering they did it all two weeks ago.  There's no Mother's Day advertising on National Radio and we don't have a telly, so somehow I got my dates wrong. At some point in my deliciously lazy Sunday morning, I checked my email and facebook, and a friend had sent me a link to a Salon article on the politics of food and gender .  It's a very interesting article, but don't be fooled by the title: "Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?"   I'd wager that Emily Matchar didn't choose any such title, or indeed the subtitle: "Femivores" have made DIY domesticity cool. But critics who blame feminism for obesity and fast food have it wrong." Matchar's analysis has, I suspect, been plundered for impact and sensationalism by the Salon editors, something which this rebuttal i...

I was all set to buy a bag off Felt.co.nz until I remembered about the mechanic's bill. So I found the inspiration and time to make a bag I've been contemplating for a long time.  The outer is red wool tweed which my sister gave to me after a trip to Wales. I boil-washed and dried it to get the strength I wanted. The inner fabric and the lace are from the wonderful collection my father in law gave me after my mother in law died. The inner fabric, red and blue hats on calico, was probably meant for dresses for my twin sisters in law more than four decades ago (I have the same version with green and blue hats as well). The beautiful lace is from my parents in law's travelling shopping trip through the traditional lacemaking towns of England. Even the toggle and the thread are from either my mother in law or grandmother in law's collection.  The pattern is from Tiny Happy .  Thanks Melissa for making this available online for us all to use - I've made...

Some parents take their children to church.  We take ours on marches. I love my garden.  I've been out in it, even just tiny bits of wedding and caterpillar squashing, almost every day this past fortnight.  I planted out seedlings of crimson kale. green kale and celery last weekend, and have packets of coriander and rocket ready to scatter this weekend. In The Rushing Woman Syndrome , Libby Weaver talks about exposing ourselves to seratonin through daylight as soon as we get up.  This is supposed to have the effect of helping us start the day bright and full of energy.  I think it is helping.  We have blackout lining on our curtains (I like proper dark to sleep in and also it blocks the street lighting), so it's good to go outside as soon as I get up.  Even when it is raining, I can stand under the lean-to by the old shed and look at the chooks and my garden and greet the day. Although I haven't dared ask my loved ones for accurate feedback, I ...

How dare this government?  The government which was happy for Don Elder to be paid a salary of $1.3 million and an increasingly top heavy, highly paid arsenal of non-mining bureacrats to suck up profits.  The government which presided over a mine safety regime which was so grossly unsafe that TWENTY NINE men died and are still underground.  A safety and management regime at Pike River which was so inept that endless lies were peddled as they scrabbled to have any idea what to do when Pike exploded. I've met Trevor Bolderson a few times and I have enormous respect for him.  I've heard him talk about his experiences in the 1984 miners' strike in England.  He is an astute, intelligent and hugely hard working man.  It was Trevor who presented the proposal from the workers for Spring Creek to Tony Ryall today.  Tonight at 5pm on the National Radio news, I learnt that Tony Ryall openly admitted he didn't bother to look at the miners' proposal.  No...

There's a rally in our town tomorrow .  A rally to save Spring Creek, a rally to save our town.  A rally where already I see our young people discovering something worth fighting for.  The older people in this town already know it is worth fighting for. Maybe, if you've known me a long time, or read my blog in earlier years, you wonder where my greenie principles have gone. Like many women, I honed my greenie interests and passion as a new mother, thinking at home instead of being out at work, looking for a better future for my children and grandchildren by treasuring the natural resources in our world.  I used cloth nappies, grew vegetables, made food from scratch as much as possible, experimented with home made lotions and potions and campaigned for better recycling facilities. Tomorrow's rally is also about creating a better world for our children, for the young and old, those single and those in families, in Greymouth.  I do realise that coal is vilifi...

There is a lot of tripe written about marriage.  People bend it to whatever suits their purpose, and so long as that purpose is consensual between the parties involved, that seems quite realistic and acceptable to me.  I quite like being married to Favourite Handyman.  I love it a lot actually, primarily because I love spending my life with him (I'm in particular thrall to his talents tonight because he is fixing the broken toilet cistern).  If we hadn't gotten married to each other, we could have still shared our love and life, though we couldn't have gone to England together as he had ancestral visa status (English grandparent) and I did not and de facto doesn't work for that.  We pulled our marriage forward in order to go to England.  The colleague who thought it funny to call me a 'passport slut' at the time missed his aim - I didn't find that funny.  "Congratulations, Sandra" would have been better. In tonight's local rag, I happened to ...

Over at A Bee of A Certain Age, Deborah has posted a review of the reports looking into the absence of women in the top police jobs.  It's a good post and the issues are worth reading about and I really hope the culture changes in the police force. It's just that I can feel a rant of my own coming on.  Why is it that I never see articles about the under-participation of men in caring sectors?  Yes I know many of us mention it in private discourse and it can be found on feminist websites etc., but why doesn't it look like: Grave concern over lack of men in kindergarten structure. or Report identifies that only 1% of cleaners in schools and hospitals are men.  X from the Advisory Board of Hygiene Careers is very concerned about the messages this sends to young boys.  "Boys, explained Mr X, are hugely shaped by the roles they see around them.  When they grow up surrounded by women cleaning at home and at school, they feel excluded from the skills ...

Rape bait. Tonight in the supermarket I was catching up with a friend I hadn't seen for a long time, a woman who has not been sheltered from much that is nasty in the world, a woman who I respect. I was horrified when she used the term rape bait. Challenging people on their assumptions that womn are responsible for not getting raped (passive responsibility, as if such a thing has any logic) rather than men responsible for not raping (active responsibility) is something I am trying to find ways to do.  So far, I'm not very good at it.  Tonight I tried to say that it isn't a young woman's fault if she is raped.  I wasn't brave enough to challenge this assumption strongly, and I find it so deeply ingrained in our culture that what should be so simple, is actually radical and difficult to express and discuss.  Rape bait. The notion that women need to protect themselves from being raped by their choice of where they go, who they go with, how they dress, and when t...

People who have annoyed me most recently: Cherie Blair, who assumes that there is only one way to parent. I guess she has a lot of experience with getting up most of the night to a vomiting child, doing all the resultant laundry herself, ringing in sick to work, and cooking meals for everyone else throughout the cleanup and recovery period. Then going to work as soon as possible and trying to catch up and then rushing home as soon as possible to support still fragile child. Good on Cherie Blair for pursuing her successful career and parenting. Stink on her for judging other people's choices about which she has no clue.  Source: here . Anne Tolley.  We don't laugh and gloat in court if someone is sentenced to jail for a crime, but somehow it is okay for an MP to stand gloating and laughing on someone's crushed car.  Seven nights without alcohol.  The chocolate stash in the fridge is disappearing instead.  I've settled on turmeric, mostly ...

On Stuff recently, there was an interview with a number of young people living in Huntly West.  These people shared their views on the government proposals to offer free long term contraception to sole parent beneficiaries and their teenage daughters.  There has been a lot of discussion on the pros and cons of Paula Bennett's latest plan in New Zealand this week.  On the one side, there are those who say "support everyone in need, no matter how or why' and 'walk a mile before you judge' and on the other are those who believe that to prosper is to be good, and any who do not should be punished, and certainly not 'encouraged' by any form of state support. But I read the piece in Stuff on the young people in Huntley West, and I wonder why nobody asks what would positively give these people something else to aspire to, to find in their reach, to fulfil themselves with?  Because no matter what you do about disincentivising repeat solo parent pregnancies and ...

Saturday 21 April breakfast : variously, cornflakes, leftover crumble + yoghurt, coffee.  All assembled/made and eaten at home. lunch : sandwiches or wraps with salami, tomato sauce (a major food group for the short people), pesto, fish. dinner : beetroot and feta salad, tomato salad, broccoli and sausages, which I made, and fruit salad and ice cream contributed by our lovely dinner guests.  The four children contributed a sign reading "desert! and now!" as part of their campaign for a second round of pudding. Snacks involved feijoas, brasil nuts, corn chips and hummous. After seven days without alcohol, I enjoyed tonight's wine. Today's virtuous achievement: I cleaned the entire kitchen bench and kitchen windowsill. Thank you Blue Milk for drawing my attention to this analysis of class and motherhood .  It is excellent.

Oh there have been some good things to read on the internet today. First up Olivia McRae on the ways in which the views of parents are ignored by the government, even as they claim to be interested in improving life for vulnerable children. I cannot decide which bits not to quote, so can only suggest you go over and read it. It is on the Otago Daily Times website. For the moment, here is part of her piece: I know that research tells us that socioeconomic factors play a large role in child abuse and the overall health and wellbeing of children. Yet poverty is carefully omitted from most discussion documents, in case the Government should be forced to admit that real poverty does in fact exist. The Salvation Army recently released its annual report, The Growing Divide, which clearly shows that a deepening gap between the haves and have-nots is having negative effects for our children and society. People often refer to the p...

Coal and the Coast: A Reflection on the Pike River Disaster by Paul Maunder was launched this weekend in Greymouth. Canterbury University Press published it, Tony Kokshoorn spoke at it and when Paul spoke, he also performed a waiata to go with the speech which I would love to see the words of. The food was great. This morning I read Coal and the Coast from cover to cover and I think it is a special book. Maunder begins with a preface on Alain Badiou's theory, explaining that Badiou, a French philosopher and postmarxist, bases his thought on set theory. I loved set theory as a primary school child, pondering subsets and supersets and intersections as I ate my breakfast. I am disappointed to report from a learned source that, at least at high school level, set theory has been abandoned. So Badiou is interested in the are(s) where different groups overlap, as they are areas of multiplicity. So is Maunder. As I write this review, it strikes me that I could fruitfully come back ...

I've been sewing. Sewing with fabric which feels silky and soft and most likely luxurious to wear and yet slips and slides in my machine in a most tricky fashion. The top is going to turn out okay, but I might go for a cotton knit rather than another luscious jersey next time. I watched/listened to The Lightbulb Conspiracy while I sewed tonight. I think it is very good and absolutely worth watching. I thought I knew a bit about planned obsolescene, but I learnt a lot of new and fascinating information through this documentary. If you haven't discovered Harvestbird on my blogroll, then I recommend you read her posts. They aren't frequent, but they are very eloquent and sometimes haunting evocations of one person's journey through post-bigquake Christchurch life.

The supermarket. For many adults, they have little choice about going to the supermarket. You people in your flash big towns of more than ten thousand people, you might assume that online grocery shopping is available to us all but you are wrong. Somehow, we all need to get some food. Our local supermarket has a Lotto shop in it. It is depressing watching how many people line up for Lotto (sitting on a raffle stall opposite the Lotto counter makes it hard to avoid), but equally who am I to say that spending $6 on a Lotto ticket is better or worse than spending it on a glass of beer or wine at the pub. After the checkout at our supermarket, you have to walk past the Lotto shop to get out of the building. There is no other exit. But the new development which annoyed me so considerably is that there is now the phrase "What would you do?" written on the floor with footprints painted on going towards the Lotto counter. For people with gambling addictions or vulnerable to ov...

and that's just the front page (12 Feb 2012). A deliberately inflammatory and pandering to racist persons lead article: "Ethnic rights advice stuns communities" The largest image is of the head of a burka-clad person with just eyes showing through. The three images below are of men with names . That pissed me off quite enough without dealing with the flimsy nature of the content which isn't substantial enough to warrant front page news for any reason except playing to a red neck and racist audience. Can someone tell me why covered and heavily veiled, unspecific and unveiled Muslim women are invoked as a symbol of danger in our media so ridiculously often? As for the next article: "Spoonful of obesity anyone?", I can only reflect on my own stupidity for paying money to people who litter their front pages with such drivel. Some flimsy piece of research showed that babies who led their own food intake by using their fingers rather than being fed by a spoo...

Today was Brighid's party. Thanks to a very helpful husband, lovely friends and lovely children, we all had a great time. I'd also give credit to my streamlining of the party process. Home made cake and everything else bought. Only cooking at the event is the barbequed sausages and FH took care of that. Chips from the fish and chip shop for the actual lunch part. Otherwise chips (crisps), animal biscuits, juice and fizzy. My one concession to my usual nutritional concerns is there is no raspberry fizzy, no fanta and no cola. The giant bouncy pillow and the go karts were pretty fabulous. Of course I didn't do anything taxing like have it at home. Imagine the cleaning involved, not to mention the scaffolding - how many small children dancing on a roof is wise exactly? We went down to the nearby holiday park and hired their facilities for a very reasonable sum and almost no cleaning up involved. The roof painting continues, with just a few hours off for partying. I...