Autumn Zebra

I have finished making my compost bin (pictures later?) and today got grass from our garden rubbish pile to put in the new compost bin, and then was getting decomposing stuff from our plastic compost bin to put on as the next layer before covering it with more old grass and leaves. The plastic compost bin never really produced any compost in 5 years, but never got full either - it is a black hole of kitchen refuse and weeds. So I took off a layer with the garden fork and was stunned by how many worms there were. They were everywhere, crawling away from the light. There were big tangles of them squirming around getting in the others way so that they couldn't escape. All different sizes of worms. I'm not even sure how such a small amount of compost could support them all. Also, the compost was very dense, and there were areas that probably got little air and did not decompose much at all, so it didn't really look like a good worm-farm kind of matter. I decided not to put a...

First another sunrise... One of the cool things about snow is that you can see evidence of everyone who has gone that way before you; the signs they leave behind connect you through time, via space.

I made toad-in-the-hole the other day, which is sausages in Yorkshire pudding. I made it from this Jamie Oliver recipe . It worked out ok, except it sank a lot, quickly, and then the Yorkshire pudding at the bottom ended up very thick and more like an egg pudding. Well, it is an egg pudding, but like a heavy one with no air in it. Also, all my sausages floated to the top. Maybe if you use fat sausages they don't do that. A lot of people in the comments of the recipe said they had trouble with the oil burning, but I think that is probably because they used the wrong oil - different oils smoke and catch fire at different temperatures. I had a very small amount of smoke but really no trouble and used canola oil at 250 degrees C (or so my over claims, but it is old so who knows if it even gets that hot really?).

Just some not-terribly-good pictures of what I think is some kind of sheetweb spider that I took ages ago - by the look of it I took them inside at night in a plastic container. It is not only a sheetweb spider in that it builds sheetwebs, but is actually one of the Sheetweb Spiders with capital letters. There are 29 known species in NZ of Sheetweb Spiders with capital S's. This is a male because of the longer legs. Like with many spiders, it is written in my book that the males often come inside looking for a mate. I don't know why they all think the women spiders will be living in people's houses.

I found this cicada on the side of our house a month or so ago.

I spent two hours in the last two days trying to buy a bra and came out with nothing. To start with I need a 16B. Less than half of styles seem to go up to a 16. Of those that do, 90% start at 16C. Then, 90% of those don't have long enough straps over the shoulders. In fact, they're also barely big enough in the band at size 16, although I normally wear size 12-14 tops. 95% of size 16 bras only come in black, white or beige, and not that much black actually either. So I found one style that came in black and white that had long enough straps and was just big enough in the band to be comfortable, but it unfortunately wasn't one of half a dozen styles that wouldn't drive me crazy in less than half an hour. If we say that a bra with the greatest amount of uncomfortable, itchy features* is at 100%, most t-shirt bras come in at about 20%. There was one really good one that probably would have been only 10% or less, but the straps over the shoulders were way too short. So the...

I think I've mentioned before that I do poorly on facial recognition tests. And what's more, my conscious recognition is way below my actual scores. What they normally do is show two pictures side by side and you have to pick the one you've seen before. I won't consciously recognise either - as far as I'm concerned they're both completely unfamiliar. However, you have to pick a side, and I will pick correctly at a better rate than expected by chance. Similarly with the emotion recognition ones - I'll look at the face and think "this person is happy" and be fairly sure I'm right and then I have to choose one of the four options - angry, scared, hurt, upset (or whatever). Ummm... whoops. How did I think it was the complete opposite? Of course, they all look pretty much the same to me anyway. But I'll pick the correct one above what is expected from chance alone. So anyway, facial recognition is an interesting thing. There are a few experience...

Woohoo, you say, more pictures of food from the Farmer's market! Last week I bought a chicken and tarragon pie, an English pork pie, dried grapes from the organic fruit stall, camembert cheese, pickled walnuts, watercress, a really small half red cabbage, green tomatoes, plums (some of which are giant), corn already skinned, giant long capsicums. I haven't tried the pickled walnuts yet, Mum says they are yuck. And the week before I bought quinces, strawberries, yellow peaches, silverbeet, a turnip, tabouli, dried peaches, seconds tomatoes, a mixed bag of fancy capsicums, a zuchinni and two chocolate croissant things that turned out to be much heavier and more cakey than a croissant, but I think yummier. The strawberries were to make jam, but the lady selling them told me there was 500g in the packets when there was only 250g (I thought it looked wrong) and then one third were moldy by the next day, and many of the others were brown inside. And they were really expensive because...

At the University, when they have the flu vaccinations for the staff, there is also a stall selling stuff to raise money for the University Chaplains, apparently. I spent some money. That's a a bag made in Wales, where the fabric is double woven, in that the weaving creates two joined layers of fabric; two pairs of gloves, one of leather; a leather glove case; an old pattern for a slip which is quite interesting.

So, I don't know what it's like in your country, but here the fashion is (still) tunic kind of tops over tights. This appears to be a significant change in the every-day wear of most people, so it's quite interesting. I made a new tunic top top/dress for my work wardrobe. The colours I have chosen for work are blue, dark red, purple and grey, and I was limited in what knit fabrics I already had in large enough pieces in the right colour. This is what I made, the second or third thing I have made of a knit/stretch fabric. The decoration is sewn on by hand. Imagine the colours are actually blue and red in this photo. The binding worked really well around the arm and neck, so I might make a t-shirt or something out of the same fabric. Since the fabric doesn't fray, the binding edge is not folded under on the inside of the garment. This makes it some-what easier to sew with kind of annoying fabrics like this, and also reduces the bulk by one layer - if you fold under both e...

This is not a terribly good food photo, but all the food in this breakfast is from the Farmer's Market! Egg, tomato, ham steaks, bread. And then I had with it jam that I had made, out of fruit from the Farmer's Market.

I have done a couple more days of "15mins out in the garden". Today was actually 22min out in the garden, and I retrimmed a bit of the hedge that the neighbour had helpfully done, but I wanted to trim it back a bit further, and then I trimmed back some ivy that is growing out over the corner of the path from the fence and hedge. The other day however was more exciting, at least for me. I was clearing the aforementioned ivy where it was growing over the path, and I found.... That's the lid of my thermos which I haven't seen for months and was looking for the other day. It must have blown out the kitchen window sometime while sitting there drying. It is still good, presumably protected by all the leaves growing over it. So that was pretty cool, because a thermos without a lid is pretty useless.

Pretty much everything makes me stressed/nervous/anxious/scared/whatever (which we shall hence-forth refer to as nervous) - getting up in the morning, going to bed, going to work, coming home, doing things that aren't fun, doing things that are fun, the beginning, end and middle of all activities, etc. Sometimes, even doing nothing makes me nervous so that I am about to be torn apart by the anxiety caused by both doing nothing and thinking of doing something. You're wondering what this has to do with mushrooms. I like my garden, but going into it makes me nervous because of all the things I could be doing there. So then I don't go there, and feel bad about it and that makes me too nervous to even think about the fact we have an outside. Even though I really like nature and I am sad I don't get enough nature time. So I thought I would go outside for 15 minutes a day and commune with nature or something. So I don't have to do anything, I could just stand there, but on...

The Farmer's Market was good as usual, but I didn't take pictures of what I bought, and now we've started eating a lot of it! However, what I got is: Lebanese "pizza" - flat bread with cumin and other spices on it, pretty good, I warmed mine up in the microwave and wrapped it around bits of roast chicken Lebanese olive dip and hummus- two little pots go a surprisingly long way giant plums and apricots from my favourite, primarily organic, fruit place - they were about twice as big as normal plums and apricots! And yummy! also from the above people - a big bag of greengages. I was wondering why supermarkets don't sell these - and then yesterday I saw that they do, at nearly twice the price, and the Farmer's Market ones are organic! also one red pear - they have red skins and are yummy and good for preserving in jars. I'll buy some more for preserving later, because they are the best preserving fruit I've found so far again from the fruit place, I go...

When I did the draping class in the fashion design certificate, we obviously had to drape a dress for the assignment. In a way it wasn't much of a class. She just got us to copy a dress she brought in, draping it on a mannequin and basically we just made it up while she supervised. Then she gave as an assignment. Theoretically the brief was a quote (from Vionnet?) about how a dress is beautiful because it is well-cut. This didn't seem like much of a brief to me. Like, it didn't really inspire anything or send my mind off on any ideas... I created a slightly more restricting framework than the one given as it's generally a lot easier to create something within restrictions than within a completely open space (i.e. the frameword given was basically that it had to flatter the body and be well-cut. Not only was this both very open and a completely obvious and expected goal of making clothing anyway, as a beginning draper, I figured we would be lucky if my dress was human-sh...

I got some fabric from my favourite seller on TradeMe, with the intention mostly of using it for crafty things like bags, because sometimes it just doesn't work making clothes out of "fun" fabrics. I asked Mum which she liked, so that when I got round to making bags, I could whip one up for her too. Then, it was a couple of days before her birthday so I thought I'd make it to put her presents in. I started out trying to make a pattern from what I remembered of a bag I saw on the internet, but it wasn't working, and it didn't really seem actually possible. I booted up my computer and went and actually looked at her bag, and it was in fact different from what I had been trying to make. So the pattern for THAT bag, was obvious, and what I was trying to do had in fact been impossible after all. I try to make a lot of impossible things. It's annoying. I need a different type of material to make stuff out of. Anyway, the site in question is this one . I basicall...

As we all know, we're supposed to eat lots of different coloured vegetables all the time, etc. I don't like making more than one dish per meal, if possible. Today we had really easy nachoes - tinned beans in chilli sauce, wow, we're almost done already! Defrosted some ham and fried that with onion and garlic before adding the tinned beans, so that's most of dinner. Guacamole which I have made probably a couple of hundred times now, so that is easy. So, we get to have extra vegetables! Quartered mini capsicums that were on special at the supermarket ages ago and have somehow survived in the fridge all this time (the "baby" veges are always expensive, but as soon as they're a couple of days old, they put them on special, yay!), and yellow round beans and flat green beans from the farmer's market, fried over a high heat in some olive oil. Mixing them around every couple of seconds until they all have spots of browning, but are essentially only barely cook...

I love going to the farmer's market on Saturday morning, because I love buying all the yummy stuff there, and I'm always amazed at what you can buy. Since it is seasonal, the selection is always gradually changing, which keeps it interesting. This week I got this, plus a coffee, for $50. It's amazing how little you can buy for $50 now-a-days. The "made goods" cost a lot more - if I take out the falafel, broad bean salad and cornish pasties, cheese and coffee, then it goes down to only $20. But I really like buying the made goods here, because they are a lot nicer than supermarket ones, and although more expensive than the cheap mass-produced cheese and so on, they are cheaper I think than equal quality supermarket and deli sold goods. Full list, with prices as far as I can remember now: Falafel with a little pottle of tahini sauce $5 Two cornish pasties $9.40 Chedder cheese off-cuts (the best chedder ever! It actually says on it Tasty cheese, but I don't know ...

Ages ago we went for a walk over some farmland towards a beach on the peninsula, although it turned out we couldn't get onto the beach as it was blocked off due to breeding penguins or something. I saw lots of new bugs on this trips. I think I saw a native bee, and I saw a butterfly (I've seen butterflies on about 4 occasions in the last 5 years; they're not very common), and I think a stiletto fly - they live near beaches so even though I only got a quick look and had never seen one before, it's a reasonably likely identity. I also got pictures of this beetle, which is apparently a tiger beetle. They live in holes in clay banks, which matches the landscape in which we saw them. They are fairly well camouflaged. The ones pictured in my insect book are Cicindela tuberculata which looks very similar to these photos, and apparently looks very similar to the most common South Island tiger beetle, Cicindela latecinta . Since I am in the South Island, I assume this is what i...

In the late afternoon of mince pie day, my sister came over to cook various stuff. I think she made a crazy Polish cake, most of the trifle, and here she is doing her famous salad from the vegetarian cookbook with lots of Polish recipes in it because the author is Polish. Mum is becoming a hippie again, so she is not wearing shoes. I don't wear shoes much myself, but Mum has generally been a shoe-wearer. From the other photos I have, I see we were drinking beer and wine this afternoon. At some point, my sister and I went down to the supermarket to get crazy Polish cake ingredients, mostly. It was great fun, as for some reason when go places together, we often act quite weird. I guess it is a sister thing :) It's always stuff that is really funny at the time, that no one else finds funny, and isn't actually funny at all.

Every Christmas we make a zillion (fruit) mince pies that aren't anything like the shop ones. This year my brother got to help - as in, he was here and available. I also managed to take a photo of him without his hands over his face for a change. He enjoyed helping, which was pretty cool. Mum had to leave for an appointment part way through, and my brother had to leave to go to a nearby town to do a fire performance there with his group, so I had to finish them by myself. These are the mince pies we made. I made the giant ugly monster one last out of the left-overs. Since the buses don't come very often, my brother and I walked to Mum's from town, which took about 45 minutes maybe. The previous bus had come about 10 minutes ago, and they come every 40 minutes, so the 30 minutes wait plus actually taking the bus plus the 10 minute walk at the end made walking seem more sensible. As it does every time to anyone capable of walking the distance when they consider taking a bus...

So, it is 2011 already, as it is 1:22 AM here now. I have read a few people's "the year in review" posts and wanted to post something as I enjoy the occasional band-wagon. However, I'm not sure what to post as I want it to be positive but I don't have much positive to say. And then the negative things are rather personal things that I don't really want to share, partly because I'd have to explain for years to make sure you didn't get the wrong idea. However. This is more a review of the last 10 years or my life, rather than 2010. When I was younger, I used to be able to concentrate. Hyper-concentrate. And then when I got older, I didn't use that ability anymore because there was never enough time - at work you don't have enough time to really work before someone interrupts you. At home there is dinner to be cooked. And you have to go to bed at a reasonable time so you're not f*cked the next day because you have to get up early to go to work...