Contemplating

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Limes drying

This morning I woke to the smell of limes – a spicy, sweet, pungent aroma that filled the house, leaving me feeling relaxed and content. 36 limes in 1cm pieces had spent the night in the dehydrator, the steady hum of the machine lulling me back to sleep when I woke in the wee-smalls.

It’s often the little things that make the difference to how the day pans out. As often as not they remain unremarked, so today I thought I’d try to notice some of the things that made me smile.

  • a house that smells like a combination of spiced tea and mulled wine (drying limes)
  • puppies that snuggle up and make little wuffling noises on my shoulder
  • a friend explaining a crochet pattern and making it all seem super simple and much less scary
  • knitting in public in the library with like-minded people, all of whom thought my vanilla cake with carrot cake marmalade was super-delicious
  • shopping for our mid-winter feast (next weekend) and planning all the things
  • coffee in the winter sunshine with Himself and the dogs
  • the decorative plum tree all pruned and the prunings tidied away > success
  • a hot toddy to sooth my (suddenly) sore throat – thank you Sandy. (I confess to altering the recipe slightly to accommodate what’s in my pantry, but it definitely works anyway. Turns out lemongrass is tasty with ginger and apricot liqueur can substitute for scotch)
  • the thought of a bubble bath and an early night

Writing this up, I found that the more things I listed, the more smiley-things I thought of. I guess that’s the whole mindfulness thing, right?

Friday is baking day

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The first cake I ever baked was a plain vanilla cake. I was about ten years old and had only the vaguest idea of how to make it, but I did know that my mum never – ever – used a recipe book when she made it. So I rang her at work to ask her how to to make one.

This was the first, but by no means the last, time we had this conversation under these circumstances…

Me: Hi Mum. How do you make a cake? I want to make one now…
Mum: Hello, dear. Okay, have you got a pen and some paper?
Me: Yesss…
Mum: Good. Write this down. Take 4oz of butter…
Me: How much butter is that?

And that’s how it went for a while. I always had to ask the butter question and never seemed to hang onto the recipe, until my mum eventually got me to write it down in the back of one of her recipe books. That way I could find it whenever I needed it – and I rang her less and less frequently as I became more confident.

Thanks, Mum – I still use your never-fail vanilla cake recipe whenever I make cupcakes. I’m pretty sure that DaughterDearest and Boychilde do as well, since it was the first cake they made too. We also use it as the base for a number of tasty winter desserts 🙂

My Mum’s Vanilla Cake Recipe
Oven to 350F/180C
Take 4oz softened butter – that’s about 125g; you can use margarine instead if you like – it actually works better.
Add 3/4 cup of sugar – just regular sugar, whatever you have to hand. I use raw sugar since that’s what I usually have in stock.
Cream the butter/margarine, then beat in the sugar until it’s smooth.
Add 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence and mix well.
Add 2 cups of flour (sieved) and 2 teaspoons baking powder – mix this in gently whilst slowly adding 2/3 cup of milk.
Don’t over beat the mix
Bake in two pans for a layer cake (about 20 minutes) or in 12 cupcake cases (about 15 minutes).
Cakes should be well risen and starting to colour up by then.
Check the they’re done – use a skewer – then allow to cool for 5 minutes in the pan/s before turning out onto a wire rack
Ice the cake/s however you like – or just a sprinkle of sifted icing sugar does the trick if you’re lazy (or ten years old!).

Today I chose to bake it in a rectangular pan, cut it in half, fill it with carrot cake jam and then sprinkle it with icing sugar. Hopefully the recipients will enjoy eating it 🙂

friday cake_17jun16

Multigenerational living

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When I was about nine or ten years old, my maternal grandparents came to live with us for a while. Grandad was poorly and Gran needed help, so my bedroom became theirs and my kid brother and I shared his very large room. It was no big deal for the two of us – and having the grandparents around was fun.

Perhaps that’s when I first took on board the idea that multigenerational households are a logical way of life for families. Clearly I’m not alone in thinking so. According to the City Futures Research Centre, more and more Australian families are choosing to live this way. For some families this includes adult children who either continue to live at home or move back in for a while, and/or ageing parents or grandparents who move in with their children rather than entering an aged-care facility.

This shift could be happening for any number of reasons, but it seems to me that it’s at least partly a practical response to increasing societal pressures. The job market is uncertain and very mobile, house prices, childcare and living expenses continue to climb whilst wages remain static or, at best, creep up gradually. We’re all living longer, but may not have anticipated the sharp cost increases or our continued longevity. The result in many cases is that superannuation/pension schemes may not provide an adequate income to last the distance.

There are any number of pluses to multigenerational households, such as shared expenses, assistance with child-care and transport, shared cooking and shopping duties, company and conversation, and being able to keep an eye on one’s ageing parents. It also provides ongoing training for children, adults and older people in getting along together, and can narrow the generation gap through sharing.

However, adult children often feel that parents never quite view them as having grown up, which can result in ongoing conflict. Ageing parents moving in with a family may also experience this roadblock. Other issues that could arise are differing needs for quiet, privacy, special diets, personality conflicts, mobility assistance, sharing of chores, and clarifying financial arrangements – to name just a few. If not addressed up front and managed on an ongoing basis, any or all of these things can result in a household imploding.

Whilst I acknowledge that it’s not something everyone might want to do, I believe that the positives of multigenerational households far outweigh the negatives. But it does require ongoing mindful engagement from all parties. As long as the group communicates respectfully, plans and remains flexible, most things can be worked out.

Last year our household grew by three cats, four chicken, a number of quail – and an adult child and her partner. After 11 months they were ecstatic to finally move into their own house – and we were pretty happy to not longer have the noisy (!) chickens in the front yard. But the four of us managed to work around each other pretty well all year, having talked about how to manage issues in advance. It can work 🙂

chickens and mollypup_dec2014

Chaos is puppy-shaped

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Despite having had dogs all my life, little did I know what I was letting us in for when I embarked on my cunning plan of acquiring a puppy to keep our half-grown dog company. I’ve had up to four dogs at a time in the past, but these two… wow. Just… wow. Oddly enough, this does remind me of how I felt at times when I had two small human children…

There is endless competition for food, attention, toys, space – admittedly mostly happily, although not always. The puppy’s also taken to bringing as many rocks as she can indoors every day – many of which are really far to big to fit in her mouth. She’s a determined little terror and it’s game-on as she and Molly compete for the latest rock. They chase each other around, through and over all obstacles – including people. Eventually the rocks get annexed and put out of reach to calm things down. The pile on the kitchen windowsill gets bigger every day.
windowledge rock collectionIn short, they’re a pair of unholy terrors at present, belting around the house and garden leaving a trail of chaos behind them. And that’s on the good days 😛

Gardening dogOf course, when the pups are asleep – or cuddled up beside us on the couch – or playing happily with each other without the chaos-factor – or bringing us their toys, my heart melts. Those are the moments when I remind myself about the bigger picture – the one in which they’re both a little older, Cassie’s a lot bigger, Molly’s a lot calmer. They’ll keep each other entertained and I’ll be able to abandon my various Nik-be-calm strategies. Bigger picture. Yup.

For now they’ve conked out  – the sounds of bread dough being slapped around on the kitchen bench is clearly very soothing. It’s also therapeutic 🙂Peace, however brief

On keeping a Journal

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Do you keep a journal? It might be an actual diary in which you record daily events, or a notebook you keep in your bag to record things you see, or even a collection of scrap paper than you’ve scrawled ideas onto and then collated or stuck into a book.

Joyce Carol Oates once commented that memory is our domestic form of time travel. I like that idea. It occurs to me that if I were to pack for such a journey, it might be helpful to have a memory-map to guide me. A journal can be such a map.

I’ve found that keeping a journal allows me to be honest with myself about my life, to capture thoughts and experiences and provide clarity. These words and phrases – the various things that occur to me in odd places at random times – might otherwise be forgotten or lost sight of in the hurly burly of living.

Finding the snippets later on provides me with reference points to establish or confirm events, to compare my past thoughts and actions to those in my current situation. These are the strands that, as I get older, form the basis of the map back to my past.

Effectively, my journal is my personal external hard-drive in many volumes. As it’s also an invaluable tool for me as a writer. I sometimes spend time paging through one of my notebooks and usually find a key phrase or idea, something that can kickstart my writing – or at least make me smile.

One such was a note I made after seeing the film Lady in the Van. Miss Shepherd (the van lady) makes a comment that captured my imagination. It made me smile then and I’m glad I made a note of it so that I could smile over it again on my time travels: Onions can only take you so far, medically speaking.

Beautiful, yes? Not only that, it turns out that onions actually do have a bunch of medicinal properties, so Miss Shepherd did actually know her onions – even if they couldn’t cure her in the end 🙂

So, do you keep a journal and, if so, what format does yours take?