Shameless Brag

click to enbiggen

This was a long haul in the making, over 15 months. My daughter's birthday is tomorrow and this is the gift. I've designed and made these afghans for years, often as wedding gifts or family gifts. They always incorporate facets or hallmarks or talents or aspirations of the giftee and family connections.

In this one, there are the trees symbolizing family and grounding,. There is a garden representing my daughter's annual vegetable and herb planting. There are the honeycombs representing health for her (she has MS) and the blackberries representing the wild fruits of the hedgerows that she loves, cables of friends and relationships, there are boats symbolizing the ocean and then there are music notes representing her passion for music and her skill as a flautist.

Finally there is the surrounding edging of tulips which represent the month of her birth, April.

Oddly enough, it was the tulips that were the biggest challenge. I could not manage to get the pattern (it was an 18-rower) into my head until I'd made about 20. As I like to watch movies or DVD series or read a book as I knit, this was a serious challenge, having to concentrate and read the pattern so many times and tick as I went. But finally it sunk in and I was able to multi-task successfully (even to reading blogs as I completed so many of these tulips!)

My daughter's a woman who appreciates all things hand-wrought, so I know she will just love this.

closeup of music notes

Important Flow Chart

click to embiggen

H/T Bartcop

A Couple of Oopses

Oops - apologies to all re my hotmail account being hacked and everyone on my hotmail addie book offered some crap, supposedly from me. As it is a brand new laptop and I do have firewalls and anti-spam, etc, I wonder how this was accomplished and I have reported it. Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

And another oops, the last post omitted some significant data on the 'sexy men'.
I should make clear I do NOT like misogynistic cavemen. Never have. So-called 'rednecks' and "cruising for a bruising" types also seriously chap my hide.

The 'sexy men' of my post are completely rounded. Along with being outdoorsy and sometime shed-inhabitors, they also cook, clean and are totally comfortable with women. Among the many I know, there is only one who continually degrades his wife verbally. The others, single or partnered, are as at home with holding babies as they are with making jam. A couple continually provide me with their homemade bread and homemade soup. None of them drink to excess. One is gay.

The sexy part to me is the fact that they are so completely diversified. Equally at home with woodsy hunting or stormy sea-fishing or boiling up a Jiggs dinner for family and friends or discussing politics or books.

And in all the time I have spent with these Newfoundland men, I have found my opinion as equally respected as that of their male friends. And if they are married, they speak of their wives as equal partners. Always.

Maybe I'm in a particularly wonderful part of Newfoundland, or maybe they had exceptional mothers, or maybe, just maybe it's the water around these parts, but hell, 99% of these guys are dudely wonders of the world!

Truly Sexy Men

I became citified at a very early age. Six. Prior to that, I lived in a small provincial town in East Cork, Ireland, with frequent visits and sleepovers in 'the country' where my grandparents lived on their acre of tenant holding, existing on the flora, fauna and fish of the landscape around them.

One of my first crystal clear memories is of getting up before dawn and being taken by my grandfather to check the snares for rabbits, which would subsequently be cooked as our midday meal. I remember the tramp down the meadow, our little cottage down the way with the smoke puffing up from the chimney to thread its way through the early morning fog. The dog leaping and bounding, catching the scent of the rabbits tied with a cord and slung over Granda's shoulder. The smell of Granda's tobacco, clinging permanently to his heavy tweed jacket.

Then we moved to one of the first suburbs of Cork City. An alien frightening world to a small child like me. A world, it seemed, full of boy-children, scary and catapulting and hurling and forming gangs to throw rocks at each other. (Sub-suburban life, who knew?). I was never a dolly-playing child so to offset incredible boredom, I joined those frightening creatures and climbed trees and played hurling and became a spot-on stone thrower at the many gangs who attempted to dislodge us from our 'fort'. Heady days. The seeds of equality were set right there, at six.

What fun the boys and I had ! I became truly one of their heroes when a gorgeously huge toy pram I'd been given by the 'other' grandmother was immediately stripped of its hood and covers and converted into a two-person trolley for careening down hills and shipping fresh boulders for further fortification of our HQ.

And now I'm living on an island of men who've never seemed to have moved away from the boy-children they were. In the best possible way.. They have cabins in the bush. They have quads (ATVs to the uninitiated) and wooden boats, and rifles and won't walk down a road without a fishing rod. They talk motors and refittings and wells and where the best berries are and the size of the moose in their freezers. And they toss rocks around to make retaining walls. And they drive trucks carting unidentifiable large pieces of equipment from place to place. And they tow big boats. And they all have sheds (clubhouses) where they congregate and build more stuff.

Wonder Boys, Pg 182

“Irv had rediscovered, as surprisingly few men do, that the secret to perfect male happiness is a well-equipped clubhouse.”

And I've built a shed of my own. With electrical tools hanging on the walls. And a huge workbench. And I just might be buying a small old stick-shift truck to move some stuff around. And one of these days, the boys might just come and play with me.

Collateral Damage Statistics

Marvellous article in The Telegram here today about war. Specifically the Afghan war. As any regular reader knows, I hate the word 'war' when a more accurate description would be 'invasion'. But I digress.

We all like to imagine our old soldiers proudly marching in annual parades but the truth is far different. The articles goes on to discuss the after-affects of war on its soldiers apart from the obvious: the senseless deaths of comrades, the horrific injuries, the shattered illusions. It talks about the lingering damage to society created by the soldier long after combat is over and her/his military career has ended.

An intense study of the aftermath of military engagement was conducted from 1983 to 2007.

There were:
1710 deaths in the period.
289 were suicides
384 were traffic deaths - 75 of those alcohol related.
186 of all the deaths, when further examined, were the result of excessive drinking.
374 deaths were of cancer.

Combat only accounted for 70 fatalities, less than 5% of the deaths.

The continuing effect on Canada, and particularly in Newfoundland which has the highest percentage of any province in Canada in the military, is unimaginable.

Extrapolate all those numbers outwards and the toll on the USA will be in the millions. MILLIONS of deaths outside of direct combat. Deaths on the streets and in the homes of Americans. Deaths that often take further collateral damage in the shape of their own families or innocent stranger-victims.

And we're not even talking about the millions and millions who are already 'merely' injured. We're talking collateral death long after military engagement.

Someone's Got To Do It!

That is:

Buy a new laptop to replace Ye Olde Crashed.

Download all relevant applications.

Undergo another massive computer FAIL.

Reboot, restore, re-load, reconnect, replug.

Still FAIL.

Cry.

Call Main Man, Mr. Computer Genius Wallah.

Go into under-stairs cupboard to retrieve computer bag. Trip over wooden box.

Slide to end of tiny (but long) cupboard.

Realize one is stuck with bloodied and badly bruised leg jammed in wooden box.

Take ten minutes to evaluate this ridiculous situation.

Slowly, through pain, unjam leg, then block further movement by slamming aforementioned wooden box against tiny doorway of cupboard.

Rotate body to plate face on floor and use healthy leg to push box through door.

Think "arse over teakettle position attained," privately, to oneself.

Slowly slide oneself on tummy to hall.

Say casual hello from this horizontal position to Leo who is carting in big box of firewood.

He doesn't bat an eye, which leads one to believe that this is the behaviour he expects from one.

Go to office. Examine the damage to injured leg. Worse than expected. Huge lump down shin, scraped skin all the way to ankle and blood seeping into jeans. Clean up as best one can. Ignore pain like a tough little soldier.

Take computer 50km to Mr. CGW. Who turns it on. And it performs all suckuppy- beautiful, innocent-like.

Next time, he sez kindly, try firing her up without all your peripherals?

But he checked it over anyway for a oouple of hours. To save one's face.

Which was a waste of time.

As it was now all bruised too.

From pounding it off his desk.

And how was your day?

Disasters & Delights

Disasters:

A really, really evil system crash. Total. Complete. Major hardware fail by laptop manufacturer (looking at you, HP!). Neglected to advise individual customers, but did issue (if you were looking, and why?)warning on web. Extended all warranties for 24 months. But of course this didn't help me. System was toast. And also, so was the backup which had overridden what I had selected for backup and went into 'default' and copied lots of nonsense and ignored the more serious files. I was offline for 5 days and unable to work during the busiest time of my year.

Running around looking for a new laptop without tech-expert daughter or granddaughter in tow and then discovering none of these newer models are equipped with dialup modems, so gallopped around looking for a USB modem, fortunately located, but at a super nasty price. Realizing that downloading programmes such as Itunes, etc. takes a total of 32+ hours here in Dialup Dementia. Take time to fire off more blistering emails to political poobahs (Dem Wot Rulez Me) once email viable on new system.

Having to load up tax and accounting software - and for the archives that I maintain, this takes an inordinate amount of time, so what's a girl to do? Blog about it, of course.

Delights:

Finding a truly remarkable expert in disaster recovery who managed to retrieve most of my most crucial data on a spare backup hard-drive that is in most older laptops. He spent 2 days on this and would not hear of charging me for all of this time, billing me for only 3-1/2 hours as he felt so badly for me. A saviour. I'm his for life.

Taking time this morning (it is Tshirt and shorts weather here) to take a long walk around St. Mary's Bay and capturing this picture of Ansa in our ongoing series of Panoramic Picnic Bench Pics.

Sheila’s Brush

Legend has it that Sheila was especially close to St. Patrick back in the day. Whether sister, mother, mistress or wife is up to speculation.

Here in Newfoundland, a final winter storm that falls between St. Patrick’s day on March 17th and any time during the month of April is known as “Sheila’s Brush”.

Sheila brushes out the old weather to make room for Spring. Whether she did it mighty early this year is a matter of debate, but our unseasonably warm weather is marvellous.

Most old fishers and sealers won’t hit the waters until Sheila has been and gone with the brush.

They have been proven to be 100% accurate.

We’re not too sure if the last March wee storm has been it for Sheila or just a trial run for something more in the lines of one serious big wallop.

PS I’m overloaded with work so blogging and blog-reading are sporadic until end of April.

Voyage

{Topsail Beach, Newfoundland)

He folded his jacket and placed it just so, high up enough on the stones of the beach that the tide wouldn’t get to it.

You’d think he was going to do what he always did every morning for the last ten years.

Ever since he moved back home from the mainland.

His own routine. If you were watching you’d say tai-chi and change your mind and say qi dong and then you’d catch those karate moves followed by some push-ups on the grass above the beach and think it was a unique workout of his own. Which paid off because for a man in his sixties he exuded health and a physical elasticity rare at his age. A very positive man, you’d say.

But this one morning there last week, after his workout, or maybe not, along with the jacket he took off his running shoes and lined them up right beside it. Neatly. He was a neat man. You’d never see a sweat on him after those workouts and his entire repertoire of moves would take about an hour.

The truck was what was noticed first. And that was the following morning, very early. It stood out as it was the only truck there in the parking lot at that hour. Frosted up, so it was there for a while. And then you walked down the steps to the beach and there was this jacket and those shoes. Covered in frost also. Alarm bells went off. The police were called.

It looked bad, they said. It was the shoes that were the giveaway and then to top it off the truck held all his ID, his wallet, even his passport.

So the divers from St. John’s were called in and they spent days and days. And lots of volunteers combed the beach. And volunteers sailed in on boats with grappling hooks and those complicated telescopes for looking down to the bottom of the sea.

And six days go by and not a trace and no one comes forward either to claim a relationship with him. And maybe he just left his old life and began something new somewhere else. But you’d always go back to those shoes lined up which put a stop to that line of thinking.

And it was a young lad that found him on the seventh day, twenty kilometres down the coast at another beach. He thought it was a big bundle of rags at first. And then he spotted those swollen, naked feet and had sense enough to run home and tell his mother who called the police.

And yesterday, I drive the coastal road beside that long, last, lonely voyage of his. And think of the distance he travelled. And ponder on what his last thoughts were as he sank shoeless into Mother Ocean’s waiting arms.

An Internet Romance

As told by Woody.

It was just one of those things.

I was browsing the web over her shoulder as I’m forced to do, not even accorded the courtesy to surf alone as she thinks I lack the most basic web savvy. Ha! I’ll have news for her one of these days.

But I forget myself.

For there he was. Mr. Pinkie. To say my heart pounded as soon as I saw him is to understate the matter. I was entranced, fixated, bewitched (not to mention bothered and bewildered). My soul mate in the pink flesh, so to speak. A little fluffier than me, due to the respect he receives vs the rough handling I get from time to time.

So I exerted my usual mind control over her and then sat in front of the webcam and took the snap you see above to send to my, ahem, Darcy from his Lizzie, and write this post.

And now I await, breathlessly, his response. I just know I can help him with his self-esteem issues.

Just look at how assertive I am!

Consumption

She's old now. And you'd wonder at the bitterness that she wears like a jacket pulled tight around her. But finally on a snowy cold Saturday evening your patience pays off. The flames of the fire create the intimacy of the confessional. A couple of glasses of sherry and the story slides right out of her.

Did you ever love a man so much that when it finally all turns to acid you get to experience a hate you can’t even imagine?

A hate that makes you want to hurt him so badly that he lives in pain the rest of his life? You don’t want to kill him because that would be too good for him and you couldn’t handle the grief anyway of him being dead. But you could handle him suffering every day of his life. And part of his suffering would be hating you.

Have you ever felt that kind of hate? It curdles your stomach every morning when you wake up.

Sure we all pretend to be above that kind of thing, don’t we? Well some of us are. But the some of us that are have never felt the kind of love that wants to draw blood either, right?

Like you could never get enough of him. Like six of him would be ten too short. Like if he were ten thousand drinks you could never get drunk on him.

It’s like a disease, an addiction. There’s something mental about it. Like you’re not living in this world at all, like you can’t work or eat or sleep.

And part of you knows how insane it all is and part of you never wants it to end but part of you is weeping for the end of it all the time, because you know it has to end. No one could handle this kind of passion every day for the rest of their lives.

And then it does. Ends. Like it burns out. But something else gets lit. That hate. And it makes you doubt the love you felt. As if you don’t know what love is about at all.

And that’s your hell right there. So you make a hell for him. There are all sorts of ways of making a hell for a man. Women are far too clever and devious for their own good and only get caught if they want to be, right?

And you become this person with the hate pouring out like sweat. Every single pore leaking it. And it never seems to go away.

And you can’t seem to love anyone else when you wake up with that sour in the belly every morning and that sweat waiting to leak all over everything. It doesn’t matter - be it a child or a cat or an old lady.

That hate takes everything away. It puts a face like mine on you. And you’d think the fire of that hate would light up something else.

But it’s like one of them black holes. All it throws out in front of you is darkness.

Lost Leaf

I watch last year’s
Amber leaf travel
All by itself,

In from the bay.
Across the bridge,
Turning right by the

Bonfire pilings.
Then up onto
The hard stones

Skittering left.
Now straight across
The road changing

Its mind halfway.
Chicken? Back again
To pause

Looking left and right.
An obedient child.
Going home.

I Play Well By Myself At Recess

There are about five berry seasons here. Immediate bottling, pickling and jamming are things of the past with the advent of the ubiquitous deep freeze so these lovely berries are all bagged and frozen right after harvest.

I still have a dwindling stock of frozen bags of cranberries, marshberries and blueberries left from summer’s happy picking.

Yesterday, which was wet, cold and stormy with multi-footer waves (who goes out and measures these things anyway? A measuring tape would get too wet, so do they use a ruler?) crashing on the shore, I cancelled my plans for a trip to town and hauled out my daughter’s recipe for oatmeal cranberry scones. I also made the loaf of Irish soda bread you see in front of it. I use a loaf shape and not the traditional round with a cross shape as I find it much more workable to slice into squares to enable an easy pile-on of the sangy filling.

Outport Woman uses cast iron cookware (I am the fortunate giftee of most of these pieces) on the woodstove fire for these housebound, unexpected-storm-event-baking days. And there’s something about the woodsome taste of such wonders.

It makes all those tax returns preparation go down so much easier.

(Recipes will be posted subsequently - they need to be keyboarded from my brain to paper - upon request)

Old Dog + New Tricks

I spent a day tidying up my office last week, as there were far too many work projects in, completed projects needing to be filed away in archives, and also a couple of columns due.

I am a classically chaotic person by nature; I thrive under deadlines, stress and procrastination.

But these traits have not been serving me well lately. And I ponder on the causes of such behaviours such as mine (as if knowing the underlying reason for anything will automatically cure it, ha!) whilst I endeavour to change how I do things.

For the first time in my life, I put back to its place everything I move in the office, whether file, pencil, reference book or pen before I leave it. I know where every piece of blank stock, equipment (yeah even unto the battery charger) is.

And I find, as I work, and work hard, that it is all just a little more peaceful and OMG, organized.

Is it possible to change the deeply ingrained traits of a lifetime?

We shall see.

Picture above is the view I am having today from my desk of a very stormy sea while the fire behind me warms the room.

PS And I just found out I am BLOG OF THE WEEK at the Newfoundland Blog Roll. Thank you, Stephen!

Duck Tale

Last night he says to me:

I was out there in my spot by Two Pond Tickle about five years ago now. It’s some hard to catch one of those big black ducks with the creamy chests, you know? You have to lay in the cover for up to four hours sometimes, not even breathing, their hearing is so good. Patience of Job you’d need, let me tell ya.

And out she comes from behind the rushes. Gliding out she was, I could hear her feet in the water, that’s how quiet it was. Beautiful colour - that black that looks like navy blue contrasting off the cream. She was putting herself upside down from time to time, all in a kind of rhythm, catching the little silverbacks in her beak, tossing them about before she swallowed them. I could hear the sound of the water drops, the paddle of her feet, the toss of her head, the way the breeze stirred her feathers.

I remember thinking, that’s like poetry out there. Herself reflected in the water, doing a dance, almost like that fancy ballet stuff, down to catch the silverback, up to toss it a little, then swallow it down, me all alone in the bush, not even breathing for sure as night she could hear me if I did. Those ducks are some good to eat. Lots of good meat on them.

It seemed like it took me an hour to raise the gun and get her in my sights. One clean shot and it was all over. Sunday dinner all ready to be plucked and gutted and roasted.

So I waded out to get her and took her by the neck. And something happened. Now you won’t be laughing at me? But I felt my heart breaking in two. And then, damned if I didn’t start to cry with the water up to me thighs in the waders and me holding the stupid dead bird by the neck. Me, a tough old hunter in me fifties, imagine! And I splashed back to the shore and dug a hole with the butt of me rifle. It took me a fair whack of time, it did. And then I buried her and put a cairn on the top and said a little prayer when I was done with all that.

And I went off and got myself a good camera, you’ve seen it.
And I threw away the rifle.
And the only thing I’ll ever shoot now are pictures.

A Bit of Bea is all I need

I loved Bea Arthur, and I previously wrote about her here.


And now I can get a daily reminder of her wit and wisdom as one of the Golden Girls, a series far ahead of its time. She lives on at a website called That's What Bea Said which has me chuckling, remembering her droll delivery of those lines.

The Three Letter Word

I imagine we’re all pretty much immune to further shocks in the continuing saga of the Catholic Church and the systemic abuses which have been ongoing for centuries I would imagine with only the victims of the last fifty years coming forward to shout the truth.

We’ve all been reading the staggering but unsurprising revelation of the child abuse scandals in Germany one literally touching the pope with his brother, Georg Ratzinger, the choirmaster of a group of boys who have now alleged abuse.

Paedophilia charges against church officials continue to surface across Germany, and allegations have included the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir, which was led for three decades by Rev. Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's brother.

Read more here

But a tiny word caught my eye in the latest church saga in Ireland. Cardinal Sean Brady is now implicated in the massive cover-up of the abuses – you can read about the Irish scandals in a previous post here.

Cardinal Sean Brady was a priest in 1975 when abuse allegations were raised against another priest, Brendan Smyth. At a meeting at that time, Brady asked two victims — boys aged 10 and 14 — to sign letters agreeing they would remain silent. The church did not share the information with police.

Cardinal Brady ASKED two abused children, victims of horrific paedophilia, aged 10 and 14, to sign letters agreeing they would remain silent about their abuse.

ASK, such a tiny word, such unconscionable implications.

Think about it, look at the definitions below.

(1)to make inquiry; inquire: to ask about a person.

(2)to request or petition (usually fol. by for): to ask for leniency; to ask for food

And ASK yourself if they were his equals. ASK yourself if they had a choice.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit

My daughter was kind enough to wish all her family "Happy St. Patrick's Day" with a link to the National Library of Ireland Archive Glass Plates which have all now being digitized and are on line.



The above picture is from the collection.

I am fascinated rolling through them all, they are an extraordinary insight into Irish life between 1870 and 1954.

So I pass the gift on to you.

With a

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit.

And a picture of the real thing:

A Mango Tale (No, Virginia, the Fruit Kind)

I was given a bag of mangoes the other day. Yes, here on the edge of the Atlantic in an outport in Newfoundland’s sort-of-Southern-Shore, I was handed this ginormous bag of frozen mangoes by this puzzled and frightened-seeming local who held it out to me like it was a dirty nappy.

“You’ll know what to do with this,” he said as he handed it to me and raced off into the sunset at the speed of a bullet before I could say anything.

Well, of course. I’m a CFA*, used to alien mainland fruits and vegetables. Not to mention meats.

But it’s far from mango groves I was born.

So what the hell do you do with the “You’ll know what to do with this?”

Go on the interwebz, of course and find a recipe. Lots of mango recipes as it turns out, but the one that would most apply to this situation would be mango muffins.

Now, I’m one of those who can never let well enough alone.

Give me a recipe for anything and I will immediately add to it, subtract from it, substitute stuff in it.

So I have to meddle, don’t I. I have to add pecans, and nutmeg, and take away the limejuice and add vanilla and yer better quality oil. And by gum the damn thing is very thick, you could paste the lino to the floor with it as my old Granny was fond of saying (she was a pretty awful cook, sorry to burst another myth about Irish grannies and I haven’t even mentioned the brandy yet, have I?).

And today, you could hear the Mango Muffin Mix (sounds like a tropical dance, doesn’t it?) thud into the muffin pan from the spoon that strained under the weight of it.

And there was too much of it for the muffin tins. But I sorted some into ramekin dishes and loaded everything into the oven. And crossed my fingers and toes.

And guess what? OMG what gorgeous, incredible, scrumptious, tasty things these are….

Anyone know of a mango dealer in Newfoundland?

*Come From Away

POSTED LATER:
Here's the Recipe:
Mango Muffins


Original Recipe Yield 18 servings

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour adapt for 12: 1& 1/4 cups
1 cup sugar or honey 4 oz
2 teaspoons baking soda total of 1&1/2 powder & soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon go for ginger or nutmeg 1&1/4 tsp
1/2 teaspoon salt sprinkle
a splash of vanilla
3 eggs, lightly beaten 2 eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil ½ cup oil
1 tablespoon lime juice ¾ tblp – or omit
2 cups diced ripe mango 1 & ¼ cups
1 medium ripe banana, mashed I use more mango
1/2 cup raisins 3 oz
1/2 cup chopped walnuts 3 oz walnuts or pecans
Directions
In a large bowl, combine the first five ingredients. In another bowl, combine the eggs, oil and lime juice; add to the dry ingredients just until moistened. Stir in the mango, banana, raisins and nuts.
Fill paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks.

A Second Helping, Please.

That Blue Pie b’y, cut her up with a knife
And serve her on them white plates
With yer white napkins on the side of her.
Then slurp her down yer gullet hard and fast
And she’ll fix whatever ails ya.

Today, as the sun stays with us until nearly 8.00p.m., I take this picture from my porch and humbly write in praise of blue.

Spring, she has sprung.