Bonsai!

I drove past a bonsai club meeting on the weekend, and saw a bunch of people putting their trees back into their cars (obviously the meeting was over). I thought it must be nice to be able to take your pet tree to a play date with other trees, but wondered what the trees thought of it all. Were they happy to have the chance to hang out with other trees who had experienced similar things, or would a bonsai tree be more of a shy, retiring type who resented being forced to socialise with others? Considering bonsai trees have their growth deliberately stunted, perhaps they regard it as more of a support meeting with other "suffers". I briefly thought of taking up bonsai, once. Then I worked out it was a thing for patient people, and acknowledged that I do not belong in that category.

Why can't we buy female superhero stuff?

I'm posting this everywhere, so apologies if you're one of the few weirdos who follow me in several places.

It's stirring stuff.

"Temporary" things

Have you ever worked for one of those companies that bring in a "temporary" solution to a problem... that sticks around for the next umpteen years?

Like a "temporary" building that's still in use twenty years down the track, or a "temporary" patch that then becomes part of the code and is still being repeated in new versions of the software a decade later?

Like a "temporary" office space that has been in use for song long that people have been hired, worked for the company for several years and then left without ever knowing a different office space, these things never become permanent, but may as well be.

They behave like a permanent thing, but offer no sense of permanence.  Always and forever, they are "temporary", and because of that, they can go on for an indefinite period of time.

You see, most of the time no one would put up with them as a permanent solution.  If you pointed to the building and said "this is what you will be using for the next twenty years", everyone would say "we don't want that building - it's not what we desire or need".  If you said to the software engineer designing the patch "this will become part of the product throughout multiple iterations", that engineer would say "I'd rather not, for a better and more elegant solution could and should be found."

And the people working in that office would all - every man Jack of them - say "we don't want to work here for long".

But the knowledge that it is going to be replaced with something "better" at some point distracts you from noticing that you never solve that problem.  You never find something better.  The "temporary" solution is still working, and there are so many other, more pressing needs to worry about right now... and so it slides into permanence without us noticing.  Even though we would never choose for that to be the permanent solution.

I realised the other day that this is my life.  I've been spending about 10 years living a temporary solution that was always "going to change", but simply hasn't.  I'm not sure what I want to do about that now.

Vegan Cooking (or, Vegan Schmegan, episode 2)

If I'm being perfectly honest, one of the things I like most about vegan cooking and vegan food is the "smartarsery" of it all.

It's like being on one of those cooking shows where they give you the challenge of making something fabulous out of a supposedly limiting range of ingredients:

"You must prepare a sumptuous five course meal, and ever dish must contain radishes and raspberries!"

Of course, the average punter at home is thinking "Radishes and raspberries! That's impossible!"  But, of course, the clever contestant manages to do something creative and interesting simply by assuming the "limitation" isn't limiting them at all.

I see vegan cooking in the same light.

It's my personal opinion that cake is the highest point of human achievement.  So the idea of making a cake without any of the standard cake ingredients (milk, eggs, butter - and, because wheat and I aren't on the friendliest of terms, wheat flour) means you have to do something a bit "smartarsey", don't you?

Granted, it tastes nothing like normal cake.  Sorry, vegans, but it just doesn't.  When your palate adjusts and you get used to the new ingredients, you can comfortably say "that's not bad at all!" but until then, what you have is something that doesn't taste like normal cake.  It's still clever, though.

As I'm going to mention in a future post, my culinary background is from two very meat/cheese focused cultures, so taking the meat and dairy off the table means I have to look at vegetables in a much more useful and creative light (rather than just boiling them to death).

When you take a carrot and say to yourself: "I'm not eating carrots with my dinner - my dinner tonight is carrots", then you have to take the time to make something interesting with carrots (like this, which I haven't tried yet, but want to).

This vegan experiment* is forcing me to do something interesting with vegetables, and I'm discovering that there is no end to the interesting things you can do with them when you actually try.

Plus, it makes me feel clever.  Slightly unpopular with the members of my household who would prefer I make something interesting with chicken, rather than carrots, but you get that.

Take away the meat.  Take away the eggs and cheese.  Look at the vast array of fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains, herbs and spiced that you have left.  Really see them. Do something clever.


*I'm not actually vegan - yet.  The reasons for this will be elaborated on in another post. However I'm sliding in that direction, and making more vegan decisions with my life.

The great window shortage of the late C20th

I’ve been house-hunting for quite a while now.  I know I should just hurry up and buy a house already, but I’m slightly hampered by the fact that, at the moment, the longer I wait the more the house prices seem to drop, and the bigger my savings get, so it’s a weird little gamble.

Plus, I have a roof over my head, and no one is in a hurry to kick me out, so I have no pressing *need* to buy a house, I just want to spend at least part of my adult life being the person who gets to say “I think a deck would look lovely, so I’m going to go ahead and make that happen.”

Also, my mother isn’t getting any younger, her hips are getting dodgier by the day, and she lives in a house with stairs - but she’s not going to buy a low-set house any time soon.  It will be much easier to turn around in five years and say “hey, Mum, why not move in with me in my comfortable low-set house where you don’t have to climb stairs everyday?” than it will be to say “just sell your house and buy a new one, already!”  This is the way it works with my mother.  She rarely takes suggestions and almost never accepts instructions, but occasionally falls for invitations.

One of my problems with the housing market is that I want to keep things cheap (if you take out a loan, you’re basically asking a bank to buy your house for you and then sell it back to you bit-by-bit for twice the price), but the houses in my price range at the moment seem to have be built by weirdos.

I know I’m not going to get a mansion for the amount I’m willing to pay, but is it too much to ask for windows?

It seems like most of the houses I’ve seen that were built in the 1980s and 1990s around these parts were constructed during some sort of window shortage.  I’ve lost count of the number of houses I’ve walked into that only have one window in each of the bedrooms, even if the rooms have two external walls.  They’ll cut a hole to fit in an air conditioner (which is necessary, because without two windows you don’t have any cross ventilation), but they couldn’t see their way to putting in another window.  Not even a small one.

I’ve even been in houses where, of the four external walls available, only two had windows in them.  Two whole walls of a house, completely windowless!

Why?  Were windows so expensive?  Was there some sort of window tax that I’m unaware of?  Do you save money on your rates if you aren’t using up so much of the council’s precious air supply?

What really weirds me out is the location of the windowless walls.  Okay, so maybe you don’t need a window looking out the side of your house and directly at your fence.  Fair enough.  But the majority of windowless walls I’ve noticed have been the wall at the rear of the house – facing out to the garden.

If you were going to pick any wall in your house and say “nah, I don’t want to see what’s outside there” – why, for the love of all things holy, would you make it the wall that overlooks your back yard?  Why would you position the window placement so that you could see the side fence that’s three feet away, but not your garden?  That’s just weird.

Call me crazy (go on, we both know it’s true), but I don’t want to buy a house where I can’t look out over my own grounds.

I might - *might* - end up buying a house that was a victim of the great window shortage (although I’m a big fan of air, so I’d like to avoid that , if possible) but I’ll be darned if I cough up good money for a windowless box that keeps me from seeing my own lawn.

How to eat an elephant

My biggest problem, I have found, is that I have great systems in place.  I just never use them.

There's an old saying about eating an elephant - it's best tackled one bit at a time.

So, the best way to keep on top of all of the various things I want to do for all of my various life-zones (work, home, hobbies), is to set aside some time during the week/day to do a bit of that.

I know this.  It makes sense.  For ages now, I've had lists of things I should do during the week and on particular days to make sure I eat my various elephants one bit at a time over the course of the week.

If I could only stick to these dang systems, I'd have my elephants mostly eaten by now.

But I don't.  Instead I do it a couple of times - maybe keep things going for a few weeks or as much as a month - but before it actually settles into a habit, I have a legitimate reason to not do it for a couple of weeks in a row, or I'm sick one day and distracted the next... and then it's gone.

A system that isn't implemented is just a suggestion.

And every time I look up, the elephants are still largely uneaten, and the task of eating them seems more and more overwhelming.  Stupid elephants.

I need to do a better job of taking my own advice.  I suspect this may require another personality adjustment.

New Rules for House Sitting

I’m hitting the last few days of a house sitting gig that has, shall we say, challenged me in some new and interesting ways.

Seeing as I’m still a homeless vagabond (in spite of the fact that I’ve technically been looking for a house of my own for a couple of years now – more on that later), when someone asks me if I can take care of their place and pets for a couple of weeks I usually feel like I’m in a position where I can help them out, so I probably should.

It’s always an adventure living in someone else’s house.  It’s “going away” without actually going on a holiday, so you get to experience a few weeks in a new and different place without cutting into your leave time.  And trying to find everything you need to, for example, cook dinner and eat it, can be an entertaining challenge.  I remember one house which seemed to have every kitchen utensil under the sun – except the one I wanted – and another where I spent days looking for a box of matches, only to stumble across a couple of them after I decided I didn’t want them anymore.

It’s quite fun wandering around a place opening cupboards and saying “oh, that’s where you keep the insecticide.”  Everyone has their “perfectly logical” places to put things, but they’re not the same places.  Trying to find stuff is like a cross between a puzzle and an exercise in mind reading, and I love that sort of thing.  “I know you must have a broom somewhere…”

Every house and family has their quirks.  Some of them can make you wonder what you signed up for, but most of them are just part of the adventure. 

In most cases, the “real” adventure is provided by the pets.  There was the grey cat who used to sit on my chest at 5am, and I couldn’t see it in the dark but I could feel it staring directly into my face.  Then there was the cat who “welcomed” me into its home by throwing up outside my bedroom door on the first night.  Oh, and the cat who brought a bird into the house and spread parts of it throughout three rooms was extra special.  I’ve only sat one dog, and it was a grumpy little beast who would ask for pats then try to bite you.

Most of it is par for the course and part of the game.  I don’t expect to be completely hitch-free in another person’s house.

This house, however, has taught me that I need to be a bit more discriminatory when I agree to take care of someone’s place.  Previously, I’ve just agreed, and then turned up to find out what I’m getting myself in for.  Now, I’m going to have a few stipulations before I agree to house-sit:

1. The house must have a completely functional bathroom and toilet.  This house has a few issues with its plumbing, so I’ve been instructed to avoid letting water flow freely down the plug hole.  This is not conducive to having a comfortable bathing experience of any kind or duration.  Additionally, the toilet cistern is wearing out, so sometimes it doesn’t stop filling, and sometimes it doesn’t fill at all.  I’ve had to fix it several times in the past two weeks, and at one point thought I might need a plumber.

2. All doors to rooms where one might desire privacy must both shut and open.  The toilet door (which you can’t reach from the toilet) won’t stay shut.  The bathroom door might break and leave you locked in the bathroom.  The bedroom door can be nudged open, and there’s no way to shut it more securely.  There’s also no security screens on the main doors to the house, and no way of seeing who’s on the other side of the door before you open it.  Given that the house is in a high crime area, this doesn’t make me feel particularly safe either.

3. If any animal is expected to sleep inside, but poop exclusively outside, that animal must be able to let itself outside for pooping.  If you don’t have a dirt box, then have a catflap.  My sleep should not be at the mercy of your critter’s bowel movements.  This cat either wakes me up in the ‘wee’ hours of the morning to be let out – or it doesn’t.  And then I’m wondering if there’s some surprise waiting for me somewhere in the house.

4. If I am expected to bring your mail into the house, then the mailbox should be safely accessible. The letterbox of this house is especially designed to throw the mail directly into an overgrown garden bed under a tree that is infested with spiders.  I’m not kidding.  The tree is festooned with spider webs.  And I found out yesterday that it’s actually worse if the mail stays in the letterbox, because you have to walk under more of the spidery tree to get to it.

This has not been a particularly restful and relaxing couple of weeks.

(Incredibly Uncomplicated) Cat!

Wow, it has been some time since I last posted anything on this blog.  Time flies when you can barely remember where you are from day-to-day.

I haven't been anywhere, I just haven't had much time/inclination to write things, and the few blog posts I have written have been more suited to my other blog.

In fact, I'm going to push you over there to read my post about Batgirl, if you haven't done so already.

I recently finished that cat I mentioned in my last post.

It wasn't terribly complicated, but it took me a while to make due to the fact that I hardly gave it any time at all and I was stitching it by hand.  I probably could have run it up on a sewing machine in a flash, but the point of this whole exercise is to have a skill that doesn't require electricity.

And, besides, sewing machines and power tools scare me.  At least the damage I can do with a hand tool is limited to the strength of my hands.

So, here is the cat:

I made it out of the sleeves of a recycled polo shirt.  I'm pretty much getting all of my materials out of recycled clothes.  I'll pay for actual material when I stop making a hash of the stitching.

I'm getting better, but I still need a lot more practice.  The tale was actually a bit of a sticking point for me - I spent a couple of weeks trying to convince myself I wanted to make it so I could finish the darn cat.  I might make a bear next (equally incredibly uncomplicated) just to avoid that dip in the momentum.

Mouse/vole!

I forgot to mention!  I finished my other pocket mouse/vole thingy!

I have now made two (count 'em - two!) toys.  And I've even started working on a new one (a cat this time, for balance).

There are a few mistakes that I've repeated on the second mouse/vole, but that's because I don't actually know how to sew anything more complicated than a back stitch and a cross-stitch, so it took a while for me to figure out exactly what a ladder stitch was (not what I was doing, that's for sure).

But I shall improve.  I shall make more toys.  I shall be a toy maker!

This one has a tail (so not a manx mouse/vole thingy), but I didn't give him any whiskers.  The other one had whiskers, but no tail.

I'm not sure whether I should have given Number Two whiskers or not.  I wasn't 100% sold on the whiskers for Number One, but now I think they add a certain something...

Vegan Schmegan

I've been thinking a lot about vegan food lately.  I've had a few friends and acquaintances over the years who were vegan, but I've never had to worry about feeding them.  Recently, however, I spent a couple of years working with a guy who was vegan, and noticed he was more or less resigned to having nothing to eat at the staff morning teas because no one would ever think of bringing food that didn't involve an animal of some description.

I started trying to think of things I could bring or make to help him have some options, and developed a bit of a habit of trying to work out if something was vegan - or if I could adapt a recipe to make it vegan.  It's a bit habit forming, and after he left I still found myself looking for the vegan alternative.

Like most smug jerks who never had a religious, ethical or health based diet to worry about, in the past I'd always dismissed the word "vegan" on something as being a bit of niche marketing.  Vegans are, after all, a group of people who just chose not to eat something.  There's no pressing need to cater to what amounts to a whim, right?

Now that I'm actively avoiding dairy products, I've seen the light and fully understand the wonder that is the "vegan" designation on food.

You see, if something is labelled "vegan" you know instantly that it won't have any sneaky dairy products in it anywhere.  Anyone who is allergic, intolerant or just plain "avoidant" of dairy knows that it's perfectly safe and they don't have to ask any questions.

The same goes for anyone who's allergic (etc) to eggs, honey, fish or shellfish.  It also covers anyone who is on a religious diet and can't eat animal products that aren't Halal or Kosher - and Buddhists, Hindus, Janists and any other religious groups that have controls around the consumption of animal products also know it's safe to eat.

That one word, "vegan", has more than half a dozen collateral benefactors.

It turns out that there were actually a few staff members who, although not vegan, had problems with milk or eggs.  They would also have great difficulty finding something to eat at the staff morning teas, and often didn't bother coming because of that.  When the vegan guy was around, though, these people came out of the woodwork because they knew they could eat whatever he brought to share (and he was a pretty good cook).

This makes me wonder why more food providers don't jump on the vegan bandwagon.  By offering a range of vegan products, you actually cater for a bunch of different interest groups - not just vegans.  You don't actively have to think about all of the different allergens and cultural groups involved, you just make it vegan and it will work for a variety of people.

Plus, vegans have a deep and abiding love for anyone who will feed them, so they make a point of buying stuff from them.

So, I started looking for vegan options to help out a friend, and now I'm looking at them because I actually benefit from them myself - and so do a bunch of other people.

I do have to report an interesting side-effect of thinking about vegan food, however - I sometimes forget that I'm not actually vegan.  I'll be looking at something for myself, to see if it has any dairy in it, and think "Oh, it's got eggs in it", before remembering that I actually don't have any issues with eggs (at least, not at the moment).

And, while I'm talking vegan things - I actually spent a night out at a restaurant the other evening and it did such a good job of catering for vegans that I went vegan the whole night.  It was fantastic.  It was a brilliant example of what could be done if you just gave it a bit of thought.  If I was vegan, I could consider this a good restaurant to visit with a decent range of options.