In A Few Weeks

In a few weeks we should be eating our first tomatoes - an exciting event in the life of any vegetable garden.  And I can hardly wait.

BBC 100 Books Meme

I saw this meme on my friend Ben's Facebook page and thought I'd join in.  After all, I haven't done a meme in at least two years.  

Although I can't see any evidence for this claim on the BBC website, the BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed here.

I have read 70 (if you count most but not all of Shakespeare's Complete Works), which is quite good but I think could be better. Shamefully, there are some great classics such as War and Peace, The Heart of Darkness, Anna Karenina and Les Miserables that I haven't read.  I don't thinking that having Les Mis as my favourite musical counts, do you?  As an Australian I should probably have read A Town Like Alice, but haven't read that either, although I saw the Bryan Brown miniseries as a kid. 

I was pleased to see that there was only two books of which I have never heard, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

Even if ths meme isn't authentic it's a lot of fun and gives bragging rights to bookworms.  Why don't you join in too?

I have marked in bold the ones I have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Soccer Medal

My young son is very proud of his soccer medal - even though everyone who played got one.

He gelled his hair for the awards ceremony but then his older brother squirted him with the hose, making his hair all sticky - and much flatter than planned.

Angelic cherub meets Norman Gunston.

Post-Heatwave

It is so lovely, when it is softly raining after a heatwave, to open all the windows and let the cool, damp air in.

Wang Wang and Funi

 A work training day held at the Adelaide Zoo gave me the opportunity to see the two resident giant pandas, Wang Wang and Funi for the first time.  I was very happy about this!

The only giant pandas in the Southern Hemisphere, Wang Wang and Funi have been brought here as part of an international breeding programme.

 While Wang Wang sensibly slept in his air-conditioned enclosure, Funi was very active.  Despite the extreme heat of the day, she walked around constantly, took a bath, and even climbed a couple of trees where food was hidden.   It was a wonderful sight.

I don't know how she did it, in that thick fur coat.  I was wilting in a skirt and tshirt (and heels, of course)!

 

Laundry Room and Spooky Cellar Tour

At first I thought I would show you some photos of my laundry for Show Us Your Life Friday this week as I haven't posted any pictures of this room before.  Then I realised that the theme for the week is Playrooms, Bonus Rooms and Laundry Rooms, so I decided to share some pictures of our spooky cellar as well.

I'll start with our laundry room, or just plain 'laundry' as we Australians say.  This laundry is by far the nicest one I have ever had because it has so much cupboard space.  The only disadvantage is that there is not really a spot for the clothes dryer.  Since taking these photos I have moved the dryer out of the way - we don't use it at all during the warmer months anyway.

Looking towards the outside door; the room is fairly bland and functional and will stay that way for a while as decorating the laundry is very low on my list of priorities!

The pretty ceiling.

Finally, an essential feature of every Australian laundry: the outdoor clothesline.  We have such a hot, sunny climate there is really no excuse to use an electric dryer for most of the year.  And our electricity prices are rising at the rate of about 20% per annum at present, so using free sunshine to dry clothes makes a lot of sense.

To visit our underground cellar you go down these stairs.  You can feel the air get colder as you go down.

The cellar is built into the bluestone foundations of the house and would have been essential during extreme Adelaide summers in the days before refrigeration.  Since these photos were taken I have begun to store food down there - things like long-life milk and jars of home-made marmalade.

As I wrote in my previous post about the cellar, two of my children would like to use this room as a clubhouse.  However, my youngest really doesn't like going down into the cellar at all by himself because it is so cold and rather spooky.  Visiting children always want to hang out in the cellar.

I hope you have enjoyed my laundry and spooky cellar tour.  I hope you have a lovely weekend.

How Fresh is Fresh?

Like most people, I imagine, when I buy fruit and vegetables in a shop I often leave it in the fridge for a week.  Or even longer.

However, when I have grown the food myself the opposite happens.  I rush it into the house and want to eat it immediately.  If lettuce leaves are not eaten the day they are picked they are too old, so I throw them into the worm farm.  Likewise, when we had chooks we ate their eggs much sooner after they were laid than we do with store-bought eggs.  I have no idea how long ago the eggs I buy were laid.

One day, hopefully, I'll be able to grow enough food in my backyard to have some left over for storing and preserving.  Even then, I hope to process it at the peak of its perfection, not after it has been sitting in the fridge for a week (or two).

It seems strange, I guess, that I have lower standards for food for which I pay good money than for food that only cost me the price of a few seeds, yet that is indeed the case.  It is probably a consequence of our commercial food system that dissociates us from the place and time of production and gives us a distorted view of what fresh food is.  Eleven month-old cold-storage apples, anyone?

In any case, when I have grown something myself I know exactly where and how it was grown, and when it was picked.  I value the food because I dug the soil and planted the seeds myself.  And I know that when I tell my children that we are having a fresh salad for tea I really mean it.

carrots and onions

strawberries

My Backyard Blue Tongue Lizard

Let me introduce you to a very important friend of mine, a blue tongue lizard who lives in my backyard.

He often lies out in the sun warming himself, dashing back under the pavers if we get too close.

Australians like blue tongue lizards because they eat snails and slugs and other pesky creatures.  I'd much rather have a resident lizard than need to put down toxic snail baits.

Although I know he is a blue tongue lizard, I have never seen his tongue.  Blue tongue lizards only stick their tongues out when threatened, and we have never threatened him - well, not intentionally, anyway.  There are a lot of bouncing balls and other perilous things in our backyard, when seen from a lizard's perspective.

And while I have been referring to the lizard as 'he', I really have no idea of its gender.  It would be rather nice if the lizard was a girl.  Then we might have some little lizard babies to admire.

Snowy White

The standard white iceberg roses in our front yard are now in full bloom.  Under the grey light of an overcast spring day they are snowy and pure and heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

Cream and Red Bathroom (with some Green and Pink)

Show Us Your Life Friday over at Kelly's Korner is featuring bathrooms today, so I thought I would show you some pictures of our ensuite bathroom.  There is one other bathroom in the house, which is shared by our four children, and it's not a pretty sight most of the time so I won't take you there!

As you can see, the colour scheme in the ensuite is cream and red, with a little green for contrast.  The tiles have a rose pattern on them.

There is absolutely no storage in this bathroom, so we keep all our toiletries in those two baskets - minimalism by necessity!

The door is a bi-fold door with a rose pattern in the glass.

While pedestal basins are a lovely idea they are very impractical. I would much prefer a vanity basin with cupboards underneath!

One of my favourite features: the pink and green ceiling.

Finally, a detail of the tiles, with their rose design.

Thank you for visiting me this week.  I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

First Strawberries

Yesterday I found the first ripe strawberries in the garden.  I wasn't looking for them, but noticed their glossy redness as I walked past on the way to the letterbox.  They were scented and sweet and absolutely delicious.  I am amazed that the birds didn't find them first.

A Tip for Managing the Lego Monster

Please accept my apology if this was your idea.  I saw this tip somewhere in the last week or two and can't, for the life of me, remember where I saw it.  I can't even remember whether I saw it on the internet or in a book or newspaper.

The tip is this.  Pour all your Lego blocks out on an old bed sheet.  Tell your children that they can spread the Lego out, but it must stay on the sheet.  When it comes time to clean up you wrap the Lego in the sheet and tip it back into its storage container.  This idea would work for any kind of toy with many small parts.

I wish I had thought of this years ago.  At very least it would have saved my bare feet from painful midnight contact with stray bricks.

Essential Edibles Food Swap November 2010

Today was the third Essential Edibles Food Swap organised by Sustainable Communities SA.  

I love this monthly food swap.  People bring along anything they have grown themselves, such as fruit, vegetables, herbs, seeds and seedlings, flowers, and even occasionally some home-made preserves.  Running from 9 until 11 on the first Sunday of each month, the food swap builds community, cuts down on food miles, encourages generosity - and not a cent changes hands.

This month I contributed yellow roses, radishes, broad beans, rosemary, and lettuce, coriander and geranium seedlings.

I was thrilled to bring home a couple more tomato seedlings (you can never have enough!), an aloe vera seedling, a couple of globe artichoke seedlings and a jar of preserved lemons.

If you live in Adelaide we'd love to see you at the next food swap, which will be held on December 5th at Joslin Reserve, between 3rd and 4th Avenues.  If you don't live locally but enjoy growing things, why not start your own food swap?  They are lots of fun and you meet the most interesting people.

PS. I discovered tonight that there is a photo of me at the last food swap on my local state member of parliament's website here.

Gold and Chocolate

I finally brought some of our yellow roses into the house.  They look just right in a chocolate bowl against the deep gold of the walls in our hallway.

Wordless Wednesday: Gold, Peach, Pink, White

Our L'il Aussie Halloween

Although I didn't grow up celebrating Halloween, I like it more and more each year.  I know Halloween is often criticised for being over-commercial and too American.  But it's just so much fun.

For the third year in a row we went to a Halloween party at our friends the Holmeses' house.  It was great fun and the kids had a marvellous time eating way too many lollies with their friends. It was so cold I could almost imagine it was autumn, although the roses in all the gardens were a reminder that we are actually in spring.

This year for the first time many stores were selling those round, orange American pumpkins that are so different from the blueish-grey ones we have here. They do seem to make a superior Jack o' lantern although at about $4 a kilo they were very pricey.

trick or treat?

Jack o' lantern

my little necromancer (that's what he said he was!)

I hope you had a happy Halloween, wherever in the world you are!

gingerbread skeletons