Well, That's a Fail

I'm talking about NaNoWriMo because let's face it if I've only managed about 6,000 words by now the hope of reaching 50,000 is long gone. I have reasons - of course, I have - and they are quite genuine but I knew much of this was going to come up before I started so I should have known better.  There were things I couldn't factor in as well - a funeral, weather which is scorching and drains the energy, medical 'stuff' for both of us (not serious but time consuming) and that's only part of it.


So I've faced reality which is that NaNoWriMo is a step too far this year. Instead I'm turning my mind to Christmas and trying to get myself organised earlier rather than later. These days I don't go crazy with Christmas decorations but I do like to do a little and this means it's time to pull the tree out of the shed and give it a hose down -  the amount of dust it accumulates even though it's sheathed in plastic always amazes me. Then I'll sort through the decorations and decide what has passed its useful time - and there's always something that has apparently spontaneously decided to crack or fall apart - and from there decide whether or not I need to invest in anything new.


We have a family tradition of putting up the tree and other decorations on the first weekend of December and then taking the whole lot down on the traditional date of January 6 and I think that's quite long enough for it to be up. There seems to be a tendency these days - largely due to commercial drivers - to extend the seasons for festivals of all kinds and I think that's a pity. One of our local supermarkets has taken to selling traditional Easter hot cross buns year round for example. This irritates me not so much because it's a break from tradition but because it takes away something that's unique to a particular time and something that could be looked forward to and savoured. If you have Easter buns all year there's nothing special about them, is there, so why bother?

It seems to me that this is all part of the way we live now where we seem to seek instant gratification and waiting for something is just too hard. Well, I refuse to give in to this because often anticipation is as much part of the delight as the actual event itself. This means I try to live by the principle of 'to everything there is a season' although others might find it odd and in line with that I'll keep to my traditional rituals and let each spark some pleasure because small joys are the things that make our lives worth living, don't you think.

We Will Remember Them

This handsome young man is my great uncle, Captain Horace Chamberlain King MC, and this photo was taken just before he joined up.

Horrie was born on 25 September, 1895, so he was 19 ½ when he joined up on 4 March, 1915. He was promoted rapidly becoming a sergeant on 27 July 2, 1915, second lieutenant on 14 March, 1916, lieutenant 21 August 1916 and finally captain on 23 March, 1917. He fought at Gallipolli and later in France where he was awarded the Military Cross on 2 September 1916 'for services rendered during recent fighting at Pozieres'. He was wounded on 2 November, 1917, and mentioned in despatches at the same time. He was wounded again in action on 7 April, 1918 and died as a result on 1 May, 1918.

A much loved youngest son and brother, his sisters, my grandmother and great aunt, mourned him all their lives.

Lest we forget.

Cultural Appropriation

After my successful return to yoghurt making I wanted to do more. With my Dairy-o kit came an instruction booklet - and since I had the foresight to cover it with plastic back in the day it's still pretty well intact. I had read it, of course, back when I got it but never gone beyond basic yoghurt making for some reason. There are other interesting recipes in it starting with how to make 'thickened yoghurt'. This is what we now know as Greek style yoghurt so it turns out I could have been making this for myself for years instead of waiting until it became a popular food item in the supermarket refrigerator shelves. Doh. Then there's how to make other cultures - buttermilk, sour cream, creme fraiche and cottage cheese - and buried among these is drained yoghurt cheese.

This last really caught my eye because I was recently watching an excerpt from The Feed (from public broadcaster SBS) in which the presenter, who is of Lebanese descent, was saying how she had come across this somewhere and how she felt there was some cultural appropriation taking place where someone had taken an item of Lebanese culture - labneh (a cheese made by draining yoghurt) - and misrepresented it by calling it something else (that is drained yoghurt cheese). I can understand how this might feel. Labneh is one of those traditional foods in Lebanese cooking that appears in many guises and I'm more than happy to acknowledge its place in that cuisine. I read a lot of cooking blogs and the further I looked into it the more often I found Lebanese folk claiming drained yoghurt cheese in the form of labneh as their culture's own.  They turned up writing critical comments about how their culture was being mistreated in some way which sometimes became quite heated - and I do understand.

But, the thing is drained yoghurt cheese is made all around the Mediterranean - it's found in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and Egypt and many other places. It's known by different names - it's labne in Egypt for example - and used in different ways in many places. There are even some slightly different versions of drained yoghurt in Asian and southern Europe cultures. Some might even view Icelandic skyr as in the same tradition although it does use rennet as part of its ingredients so maybe not.

This is where my dilemma arises because cultural appropriation is very tricky and as a writer it's something I have to be aware of. The trouble is when is it appropriation? In the case of drained yoghurt cheese I think I come down on the side of no, it's not cultural appropriation because it's a staple in many places and doesn't belong specifically to the Lebanon. I'd be interested to know what you think, too.

While I investigated a lot of things came up that I'm very unsure about. One thing about cultural appropriation seems to be that someone from a dominant culture lays claim to something which is unique to another culture and uses that for profit. So I can see why a fashion designer putting catwalk models in Native American war bonnets is definitely not on. Apart from anything else such headdresses are not merely meant as ornamentation and have other cultural significance. But another example given was of an incident where a manufacturer had used without permission paintings and designs by indigenous Australian artists on items like T-shirts and tea towels. To me this isn't simply appropriation - although it is in part - but more accurately it's outright theft of the artists' work. If someone makes something - a piece of art or written words or whatever - this belongs to them and they should be the one who profits from it. Just like movie and book piracy if you take and use what someone produces for your profit or to avoid paying for it without either the creator's consent or permission in my view you're a thief. Again I'd like to know what you think.

Look!

Guess what this is.

No? Well, here's the story. A while back I was reading a post on The Simple Country Creative. This is the blog of Polla Posavec, a local West Australian artist (she's also part of my extended family just so you know). She writes about aspects of her life on a bush block outside Perth and that includes food. When I had kids at home I used make yoghurt but somehow since it's just down to Pisces and me I never seem to get around to doing. I've no idea why I stopped - it's simple enough to make - and as I've recently started getting interested in making fermented foods I had been toying with the idea of starting again. So when Polla wrote about making yoghurt using UHT milk it piqued my interest and I wondered if you could use powdered milk.

I made a few enquiries of my Facebook friends and it seemed possible so I got out my trusty Dairy-o yoghurt kit. This is basically an insulated container - that's what the slightly wonky photo is of - into which you put your jar of yoghurt mixture and then leave it alone until it ferments to your taste. It also comes with a handy heat resistant thermometer that clips on to the side of your saucepan. I have no idea how old this is but I seem to remember having it before Virgo was born so it's probably very old but being low tech it'll last as long as I can get replacement jars in case of breakages.

So yesterday was the day. I mixed up a litre of instant powdered milk according to the directions plus an extra tablespoon of milk powder (not essential but it makes for a thicker, creamier end product), heated it to between 85-90°C, left it to cool to 44°C, mixed in the starter - I used one heaped tablespoon of commercial natural yoghurt, poured it into the jar, loosely screwed on the lid and put the jar into the flask where it fermented for around six and a half hours before it reached the degree of tartness I like. Into the fridge it went overnight and this is the result.

And this is it as I ate it with a handful each of blueberries and flaked almonds. Yum.

Spoon Theory

A reminder about this came up in my Facebook newsfeed yesterday.

For those who have diseases of the invisible kind - and there is a wide range of these nasties - chronic pain is only part of the problem. An equally devastating part is what happens when you overdo things. This is where the cost of doing some activity - which for the able-bodied may seem quite insignificant - wipes you out for days. This is why those with chronic pain from any of a multitude of causes have to pull out of social activities or can't do something that seems perfectly simple - and which they managed a few days ago - today. Because it's so hard for the healthy to understand this the sufferer is seen as unreliable and lazy and this impacts on everything from friendship to employment.

You may have heard folk with these kinds of conditions refer to 'spoons'. This refers to what Christine Miserandino calls 'spoon theory', where you are dealt a set number of 'spoons' every day. Each 'spoon' represents a specific amount of energy and how you 'spend' them correlates to what you can do on that day and often for days following. Have a look at her website But You Don't Look Sick where she talks about living with lupus (one of the invisible auto-immune diseases) and if you want to find out more about Spoon Theory in particular it's at this link https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/  It's worth a read.

Well, Keeping On Top of Things Didn't Last Long

I'd barely clicked on Publish for my last post when the real life decided I needed a few short sharp lessons. I got sick - this happens when I try to do too much and keep going and ignore the warning signs and you'd think I'd have got this by now but, no, of course I haven't. So that meant hitting survival mode - which in my world is managing to do the washing so we don't run out of clothes and meals from the freezer then falling into bed again by mid morning and sleeping for hours for several days. This in turn meant I didn't get anything else done and there's a lot that needs to be done.

I'd recovered enough that I was thinking as I got up on Saturday that things were going to be tight but manageable. Then Real Life struck again when Pisces came into my office just after nine and said, 'Can you look at this?'

This turned out to be a very swollen and discoloured leg. He'd been having some pain for a couple of days but nothing dramatic and no swelling but now it was obviously serious. So we headed off to the Emergency Department where there were tests and examinations and then more tests and more examinations by different doctors when they decided that it was probably a DVT and started him on precautionary blood thinners.  But to be sure he had to go back the next day and have an ultrasound scan then it was back to the ED doctors. It was a DVT so he's been medicated and referred on the haematology department of the hospital.

He could have timed it better since we had quite a few hours to wait on the results of various blood tests as well as the scan results and he kept being bumped back as emergency after emergency came in but that was inevitable because the ED on the weekend is a very busy place. There were overdoses, sporting injuries - oh, so many sporting injuries, as well as all sorts of other health problems, some minor but many coming in by ambulance. ED cubicles are not the most private of places so whether we wanted to or not we now know all about the constipation problems of the lady opposite, the chest pain the quadruple bypass man was having, the back pain of another woman, that the hysterical crying of the young woman next door was because she was terrified of needles and that another man had gut pains to list but a few. You learn quite a lot sitting around in an ED I have to say.

That said, and while no one wants to spend the best part of two days hanging around in the ED - they're not the most comfortable places in the world - what I came away with, apart from a husband who has been very well taken care of and some random virus acquired from a coughing and spluttering patient in the waiting room, was how fortunate we are to be able to go to a public hospital ED, hand over our Medicare details and receive excellent treatment at no cost. We are so lucky to have this health care available.

Eeeep!

So a few weeks ago I booked a window cleaner. I've mostly done these myself but not anymore. Too many aches and pains to make it possible and that's been the case for the past couple of years truth be told. Basically in that time it's just been hosing them down outside and doing the inside when it got irritating. Obviously this couldn't go on indefinitely and when I looked at the state of the sliding doors and their attendant windows looking out onto the verandah the other day I realised I had to do something. Doesn't sound so hard, does it.

And it wouldn't be except for the fact that someone - not me I hasten to add - regards window sills as storage spaces and below them an ideal place to put items of furniture (in his study he's lined up several filing cabinets for example). This means before the window cleaner comes we have to clear the way for him. The inside 'stuff' needs to be sorted and hopefully rehoused in more appropriate places but then there's the mess that's accumulated on part of the verandah - the bit under the window, of course. Himself thinks this space should double as a storage area and no sooner do I clear it than it refills.

It's not all down the other resident, I confess. Added to his accumulations I've been decluttering and so there's quite a bit that needs to be gone from the house. This is sitting in boxes to go to recycling, the charity shop or dare I say it, the tip and is waiting on someone who can drive to pick it up and get rid of it for me.

This all seemed quite feasible when I booked the window cleaner. It's not as if we live in a hoarder's hovel. In fact so we should've been able to achieve it 'in a canter' to quote our Prime Minister when he's talking about our government's inadequate climate change plans. But I've just looked at the calendar and in the build up to the date a fortnight off we have two lengthy medical appointments - both will take up around half a day by the time we factor in travel and waiting times, Pisces has an overnight hospital stay, I'm booked to go to a writer's meeting which will again take up most of half a day and which involves some time intensive preparation beforehand, we're meeting up with family for lunch before one of my nieces heads back overseas so that's likely to stretch out beyond lunch, there's a whole day extended family reunion and somewhere in there Virgo is due to give birth so there's likely to be child care with Miss Three and a Half for who knows how long.

As I said, 'Eeeep!'