Is it that time again?

It's suddenly autumn. It's got cold, and it's dark early at both ends of the day. And I'm doing the weird organisational thing again. (Briefly, I was relieved to see that Deb Perelman at smitten kitchen also does this - then realised she has the excuse of a procrastination-inspiring book tour. No such excuse here.)

The weird organisational thing seems to happen every year, or often enough that there's a pattern emerging. It may be something to do with the September light, which is still bright but at a low angle, and highlights every single speck of dust on every vertical surface. (It may do the horizontal ones too, but I suspect I filter those out. There's only so much impending houseework you can safely become aware of at one time.) The housework urge gets rapidly transmuted into tidying up other, unrelated things - perhaps because they're not housework - and soon there are lists everywhere of unfinished projects, to-do lists, and grandiose organisational plans get written and rapidly forgotten. It may be that this is all distraction to get me away from looking at walls and cupboards until the light drops still further. If so, I suspect most years it succeeds. Looking back through my data on various computer systems at home, there's an awful lot of this stuff lying around with an October datestamp of one year or another.

This year, however, things have been a little bit different. Things are actually getting done, which is a bit freaky. (Things on a to-do list are to be done? Who knew?) The last couple of years have not been great, and this last year has been a sod, and I don't think I'm alone in that - there seem to have been a lot of people having a shitty time of it this year, and it can't just be the weather. The climate seems to have become a metaphor - how we can push systems till they break, or feel like systems are out of control because they work to a longer timescale than we do; we're not here for very long, and really know squat about what we're messing with, when it comes right down to it.

So - given that control (or at very least the illusion of it) is essential to a healthy mind, perhaps it's no wonder that the reorganisation has started with renewed zeal.

Caaaaaake!

Today's is Paul's birthday, so I baked a cake. This is the first cake I've made in months, and the first two-pan cake I've cooked in years - in fact, I can't remember the last time I did. It was our ninth wedding anniversary on Thursday, and I might have made a Victoria sponge at some point in the last nine years, but I don't remember.

Three years ago, for his 40th, I made a large carrot cake for the party. This year, I did coffee and walnut, just to ring the changes. It didn't turn out too badly...



...so I thought I'd put the recipe down so I can remember how I did it.

Reblogged from BigMouthedWoman

In fact, the ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms, not to mention the further and more fulfilling gift of getting again all over again — never resting upon the oars of success or in the doldrums of disappointment, but getting renewed and revived by some further transformation.

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others."
~ Seamus Heaney | excerpt from his commencement ceremony speech at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | May 12, 1996

Re-blogged from BigMouthedWoman at Tumblr.

MOTH!!

(I apologise to anyone who thought that heading should've had a trigger warning.)

The thing no knitter wants to see. Having registered at Ravelry last night, I collected up some choice yarn and works in progress to take photos this morning so I've got a bit of non-identifiable content up there. Imagine my feelings when a dead moth - small, and very beige, but (at least) also very dead - fell out of my favourite skein of yarn.

Said moth was squished to oblivion (no point taking any chances) and the yarn is now soaking in the sink. Touch wood, there was no evidence of any larval activity. But it did make me think that, as my production speed isn't great at the minute and the lepidopteral season is upon us, I really ought to have the works-in-abeyance under cover. The thought of baby moths chomping through Paul's new aran before it's even done really doesn't bear thinking about.

(Although, it does make me wonder about The Kilt Hose That Will Not Die - that wool's been knocking around for the best part of 3 years, most of it spent out in the open or in open plastic bags, and nothing's touched it. A project's got to be bad if even moths avoid it.)

There was another clothes moth I found, up on one of the sealed stash boxes in the spare room. The fact that both were dead makes me wonder if there's some mystical guardian spirit in the house who sees its mission as the protection of all things yarny from voracious insects. One can fervently hope.

Edited to add: A moth just dropped out of another project - I think the kilt hose. Obviously this is a Sign that I need to take a bit more care, and spring clean the works in progress! (The only yarn that was out was the strokable stuff, and that's now going to be washed.) Again, no larval activity and the moth was dead, so it adds a bit more weight to the Yarn Guardian theory, at least.

Twisted butternut squash soup

Well, there is a post with actual content on the way, but wisdom teeth on the move resulted in me feeling like someone had punched me in the head today, so not much got done.  Late afternoon, @guineapig66 tweeted about making soup with butternut squash, which started me drooling so I decided to make some.  And it turned out so remarkably well - albeit more like purée than soup, but that's not a criticism - that I decided to write it down so I don't forget it.

The best go-to advice for cooking butternut squash I've found is at Kalyn's Kitchen.  I discovered this site a few years ago while low-carbing and, though Paul and I both fell off the wagon, there are a number of recipes on Kalyn's site that have become regulars, roast squash with Moroccan spices among them.

Ingredients

1 medium squash, peeled, deseeded and diced
2 tsp spice mix
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, quartered
2 sticks of celery, trimmed
2 medium (or 3 small) carrots
1 pint (or more) vegetable stock

Pre-heat oven to 200°C (about 400F, gas mark 6ish).
Mix the spices with the oil, and coat the squash with it.
Put the carrots and squash in the oven for 20-30 minutes. Then add the celery and onion and cook for a further 30 minutes. Stir every 15 minutes or so.
When the vegetables are soft (but not coloured, unless that's your thing), add to a saucepan, add the stock and simmer for 10 minutes - to help the flavours meld and make sure the veg is cooked right through.
When done, cool a little then blend with a stick blender. The soup will tend to thicken as the veg breaks down, so you may need to add more stock, or just hot water. If you don't have a blender you can mash the veg, though the onion might give you a bit of aggro. Stick blenders are well worth the money for soup-making.

My only slight criticism of this was that it was very sweet in the finish - probably from roasting all the veg, but partly from the squash being the type of squash it was. Younger celery, or more of it, might have offset this (as celery tends to be slightly bitter); alternatively, potatoes could be boiled in with the stock to make the flavour less intense. It's only a minor quibble though - with bread and butter this was a very good tea.

A quote from Devil Miyu

Too long for the "Quote of the Week Arbitrary Time Period" box, but I rather like this...

Some of us are paralysed at the possibility of making a mistake. We act as if our errors are like watercolours which, once brushed on, sink indelibly into the paper, set forever with no possibility of being rectified. Being so inclined, we make even insignificant decisions traumatic experiences. Eventually, such people ruled by their inactivity and indecision, must put their lives on hold.

On the other hand, there are those who see their errors as opportunities. When they make mistakes, they are not suspended in agony, nor do they stop trusting themselves.

It may be comforting to note that everyone, no matter how wise or sensitive, makes mistakes, and what is more, will probably continue to do so. So why not relax, accept your imperfections and join the human race?

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. This journal serves as a reminder of my mistakes. It is, after all, through mistakes that we gain experience in Life. I hope to learn from these mistakes whatever lessons there are to learn, gain more experience from learning and hopefully, by doing so, I won't repeat those mistakes ever again.

Quoted from the personal journal of Devil Miyu.