Skip to main content

Marvellous Miscellany

Seven things that you may or may not find interesting.  But first, a picture.

Weekend Cottage 2 by Toby White.  Note the numbers above the doors, the chimney (and are those solar panels?) on the roof, and on the right, a tap with hose attached.  All his houses include this feature.

1.  I have six growbags in the back of my car.  This is the cheap and cheerful approach to starting a vegetable garden.  Once the frost has finished, the plan is to fill them with courgettes, spring onions, rocket, green beans and tomatoes.  Out of all those, tomatoes are the only ones I have grown before, but apparently they are all easy to cultivate.

Shiny seed packets!
And yes, I will take the growbags out of my car first.  Unless the weather is so bad that I need an impromptu greenhouse solution, in which case mine's the vehicle with green beans hanging out the window.

2.  Toby at dinner tonight: "I've tried the fishcakes and they're not good.  And I have nothing to dip in my ketchup.  So... I'll just have a bacon sandwich."

So I'm running a restaurant now?

(Since he actually did try the fishcakes twice, we compromised with a tuna sandwich, as long as he ate his peas.)

3. Recently I saw a man walking along the cold, muddy canal bank - barefoot.  Apart from that, he was fully dressed, had a dog, and looked like any other man walking along the cold, muddy canal bank.  Was he doing it for the health benefits?  And are there any?  I think if I tried that I'd be amputating my frostbitten toes at the end of the walk.

4. My latest recipe trial was peanut butter and orange cookies.  I don't think I'll be sharing that one with you.  They're OK, but as I said to Graham, they lacked something.  He responded, "What, flavour?"  Oh, that'd be it.

You can have a picture.  They looked good.

5. Things that Theo likes doing that we don't like him doing, in order of disgustingness:
   - headbutting his reflection in the mirror
   - investigating the kitchen bin
   - peering into the toilet

6. Things that Theo likes doing that we don't like him doing, but are preferable to those other things so we let him do them anyway:
   - rearranging our carefully ordered boxes of CDs
   - emptying all the plastic boxes out of the kitchen cupboard
   - pressing all the buttons on the TV remote

7. I just found out that we will be able to see a 90% solar eclipse on the 20th of March!  Weather permitting, of course (please please please let it be clear.)  Googling "UK solar eclipse 2015" brings up several links to local newspapers, and I was amused to see that the one for my place of birth carried the heading, "Reading, Bracknell and Wokingham are set to be plunged into gloom on Friday, March 20."  Meanwhile, the rest of the country will be enjoying a spectacular astronomical event.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks!  I learnt a new word today!  I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian .  Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist.  Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials.  All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal.  That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter.  So why the need for a fancy new word?  Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal.  But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course.  The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess.  This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story.  Everything went right and it was a lovely day.  For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong.  I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing.  Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off.  Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok.  But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know?  Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil.  Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the number of peopl