Letters from Wetville

On the final day of May, I wore my new skirt, the one I finished earlier this week.  As is often the case, I had to give myself a little talk after I viewed the photos.  This talk: Voice #1: But my stomach looks so fat in this! Voice #2: Yes Sandra, that is because your stomach is that fat.  You can hide it by standing behind a child, but you cannot make it go away just by not liking it. Voice #1: Oh.  I s'pose.  It's a bugger really.  I can learn to make clothes that fit me, and I can learn to make clothes which are flattering, but I cannot make clothes which make entire parts of my body disappear. Voice #2: Yes.  It's good you are returning to a logical perspective.  Now remember how you have written about the need for diverse images of women in our media? Voice #1: [splutter] But I like pictures of different shaped women looking glamorous!   Voice #2: (which is by now most insufferable in tone) But women are no...

Morning. the constant refrain of lost shoes. Clean House. Reunited Pairs of Socks.

Today was the birthday party for the youngest of Brighid's wee friends from our coffee group.  Despite the rain, we all had a great time.  I spent no less than seven hours at work this weekend, and wondered how on earth I would work full time and ever see my family.  Food things: 1. Fast food chicken cooked slowly: bung one whole chicken in the slow cooker with a tablespoon of red Thai curry paste and a tin of coconut cream and some pieces of pumpkin (no need to peel them).  Cook all day.  Eat with boiled frozen peas. 2. I made vegetable and meat bones soup for dinner.  The mere addition of pearl barley and split yellow peas makes me feel all the hearty economical country cooker.  When my Mum did this, she did it properly.  She didn't squander the food budget on drinking red wine while she cooked.  The sun is supposed to shine on Wetville on Tuesday.  On Tuesday I plan to plant my garlic for the year.  If the ballet teacher wo...

Last year I had a very interesting time reading and engaging with Isa Ritchie's masters thesis on Weston A Price style food movements.  Now she's back, with a PhD project on no less than the 'democratisation of nourishment,' a phrase redolent with academic speak which actually translates to looking at very interesting movements of freeganism, free foraging and community gardening.  Today, Isa is thinking out loud about defining the parameters of her study (something I was never good at.  Like Isa, I fancied looking at everything).  She writes: "I want to focus on practices that either generate food (largely) outside of the corporate food system and aren't bought or sold using conventional currency or that glean food that would otherwise be wasted, and, therefore, do not contribute to the corporate food system.  I'm interested in concepts such as abundance, scarcity, freedom, community and participation - and I'm interested in what people invol...

Carbohydrates appear to be the new evil.  Low fat foods as a dieting mechanism is so last year and references to high protein-low carbohydrate eating, whether dressed up in the language of the flat belly or of the optimum gut flora, abound in the media.  I've read a bit about paleo eating over the last year and I guess some people would see paleo eaters as leaders in the anti-carb field.  I've seen wheat described as a poison which, before I got into all this nutritional discourse stuff, used to be a word reserved for insecticides, paint stripper and other people's medicine which you shouldn't touch. But before we get too carried away with the idea that grains, and particularly wheat, have contributed to the downfall of human civilisation (like hell they have; Carluccio's foccaccia is still one of my favourite taste sensations in my whole world), I think it's worth thinking about the contribution of food which fills and fattens us up easily to our choices as h...

So.  Three hundred and four dollars and thirty-seven cents is a big power bill.  It's not at all conducive to saving for a new car.  So I thought carefully about our power consumption and decided that: 1. The heater in the dining room should not go on so readily. 2. We should use the tumble drier less. 3. We should use the freezer more. On the second point, I worked hard at being a good brownie all weekend and washed about a million loads of washing while the sun shone and kept drier use to a minimum (not everything was completely dry at the end of the day).  On the third point, I thought about lentils and the general concept of making better use of the freezer.  I've wanted one for years and we were fortunate enough to be given a small one at the beginning of this year.  At the time, I was all about buying bulk amounts of red meat.  There are still quite a lot of sausages and some other meat in there, but now I'm cutting back red meat consumption...

Today I went down to our local art gallery and had a look at their current exhibition, "Celebrating the 'F' word" .  It's 'f' for fibre, but I think it has a wonderful explicitly 'f' for feminist tone in the confident celebration of both domestic textiles and domestic content. Some favourites included Mary Celeste's "Femicide Bomber", a sculpture of a woman in a black singlet with dolls, feeding bottles and kitchen utensils on the waist belt.  I also like Lindy Roberts' Colonial Cameos.  These medium sized frames in their traditional cameo style edging used fabrics from different countries in a colonial relationship, such as wool blanket, tapa cloth, shweshwe and cotton lawn hankies, with laser printed images in the centres.  Caroline McQuarrie had a crochet installation in the floor and on the wall, photographs framed with crocheted frames.  Catherine Moffitt is an artist who also works at the local state high school as a teach...