Walking's the Thing.

They grow so fast @ this age!  Each time I visit our Little Man has a new skill, is achieving different milestones, has grown up just that little bit more. 

Despite not being either particularly energetic or sporting myself, what the Little Man & I do together is walk to the park.  The Little Man knows I'm good for the swing & the  peddle see~saw ~ & no, his little legs can't reach.  I hold him & run till I'm out of puff. And we do the slide.  I used to climb up & sit him in my lap to go down.  Then I lifted him up & we did the whole *sit & slide* thing but last time he was determined to haul himself up the ladder all by himself but of course he is tiny & it was exhausting. Now mummy is suffering from morning sickness we have extended the walk bit by going from park to park ~ only I exhausted the Little Man @ the first one so we just walked.

 The shire is weird in that there are still farms interspersed amongst the neat suburban lawns & where there are farms there is bush & where there is bush there is wildlife. Just before our regular park is a rather scraggly farm with a dirty bit of swampy creek & horses, chickens running amok, & either egrets or ibis perched on the rails & up the trees.  These are ibis, world renowned scavengers!

The other way is even stranger. Beside the scraggy farm is the best park with loads of different things for the kiddies to do, including a half court with a hoop, but the area is full of rentals & tradies ~ not upper crust.  The other way is definitely upper class. Every back yard has a pool. The front yards are immaculate grass oasis & the cars are posh ~ so posh I have no idea what they are but obviously new, undinted & gleaming bright.  Here the park is hidden between 2 cul de sacs ~ but what a sad dreary little park, all uncut grass with a lone swing & a sad little slide.  Even the seat sits forlorn in sweltering sunlight rather than under the dappled shade of a gum tree.

However...

If you walk to the end of the park by the right~of~way & through to the back streets it is a different world again.  Here lie the big houses & the old gardens.

 I know they are old established gardens because  even  the elkhorn in the tree has some size about it.  We have an absolutely enormous one but it has taken 30 years to grow it to the size it is. This isn't quite so big but it is a lovely garden.

At the end of the street someone else has gone all tropical, which must be lovely in the summer heat but there is always that one neighbour who doesn't seem to know which country & period they are in...

 Elizabethan England with pines & palms???

Oh, & the Golden Pendas are flowering just now.  Aren't they super?!

Of Old Ink Pots.

 Beautiful things have often come into my life by default.  Such is the case with my ink bottles.

They are neither very old nor particularly rare & I only own a handful ~ exactly 5.  However...

When we first moved to the island we were the only house on our side of the point & I am an inveterate beachcomber, so naturally the first thing I did was clamber down our hill & scramble through the mangroves to poke & pry amongst the piles of sea grass & driftwood to see what had been caste upon the shore.

The clear glass ink bottles were discovered @ different times.  Wedged into the mud they have actually survived the ravages of time quite well & cleaned up nicely but in all honesty probably only date back to the 50's or early 60's because the ballpoint was invented in the 30's & by 1966, when I entered the 3rd grade, we phased from pen & ink to ballpoints by the end of 2nd term. Pity.  I loved working with the old pens.  They weren't pretty.  The nibs rusted & bent & the holders were ugly red plastic but when you wrote with them the ink did lovely things going thick & thin, dark to faint.  I know.  Small things...

For ages 3 clear ink bottles is what I had. Then when Jossie entered school I bought an old school desk ~ you know the ones: they had a sloping lid, hinged at the top so you could lift the lid & shove your belongings inside, a long groove cut above the hinges for pens or pencils & a hole in the exact middle of the groove.  I'm sure later generations wonder about that hole.  I didn't.  I wondered what had happened to the tin or enamel ink pot that had once rested there.

So I asked, as you do, the friends you know who are always @ the garage sales or the thrift shops, or the 2nd hand places if they would keep an eye out for an ink well ~ one that had once belonged in an old school desk.  And my friends, being my friends, arrived with ink bottles, teal & old & bottle green & though quite charming, useless as regarded the desk. I think they are pretty & not quite useless.  They hold feathers rather nicely.

Doing the Ginger Cake Again.

Kitchen window sills are for beautiful things.

At the moment the MOTH has brought his flowering orchids inside so that we can enjoy the blooms.  The sprays are a little long for comfort but the flowers are gorgeous.  Besides the mauve & white there is an unknown 3rd just starting to bud.

It has been some years since I had a fully working kitchen but our renovations mean I have a new oven & that means baking!  What else would I use it for?  Even more years since I had *helpers* & these days there is no~one to eat the goodies bar us ~ which means they should last, yes?

Perish the thought!  My MIL passed along, @ one time, the most scrumptious ginger bread cake ever.  Just ask my children.  I know there are some families who are *chocolate only* people.  We aren't that fussy.  We're more the licorice allsorts types. Carrot cake, coconut cake, orange cake, cheese cake ~ & definitely ginger cake!

I had to buy a new pan ~ drama, drama, drama ~ because these days everything is metric & very rarely do you get the old imperial as well.  I have never converted.  I am a feet & inches, pounds & ounces girl so there I stood in the IGA cooking section surveying their array of pans hoping that my rather unreliable memory for sizes was good enough because an 8" pan is what I needed & when I nabbed a ruler from the school section to help me out it was all in cm's & mm's too.  Useless!  Sad to say my girls cook in pounds & ounces too but I must say, after years of my battered & dinged & rusty old things new ones are very nice indeed.

Hot out of the oven with real butter melting into each slice ~ nothing yummier!

The recipe can be found here ~ which is my older, older blog [for which I have lost the password] so you need to know this recipe requires a cup of milk as well as all the other things. I do like me some ginger cake!

All That Remains.

Too sad.

Moping Up.

We are, quite literally, moping up.  Everything to do with my MIL is now officially out of our hands & in the grubby paws of the legal beagles who will have to sort out the Power of Attorney & lack of a will... *sigh*  A lesson in what not to do.

Actually, what I have found most horrifying ~ & it is a very salutary lesson, is how we very much become the sum of our days here on earth.  My MIL may be saved ~  but as one who has escaped through the fire. All that she was meant to be in Christ will never be fulfilled & there is nothing deep in her spirit for her spirit to draw on in these final days.  So very sad.

Meanwhile We are left sorting out ODD's insurance, which is still in our name & under our policy because when she bought the car she wasn't licensed yet & I was the primary driver.  As details emerge we are realising what a very narrow escape the girl has had.  According to ODD, she had just taken her foot off the brake & engaged the clutch preparatory to changing gears, so the bus pushed her forward, crumpling the back of the car into the front seat, rather than steamrolling right over the top of her as it so easily might have done as it was travelling @ 80k in an 80 zone.  She has some whiplash ~ but although a little sore & bruised in remarkably good spirits.

All this to try & stop the work of God as our ministry seeks to move in a new direction under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Satan is a very slow learner...

Something Kipling.

Having spent the best part of 3 days looking for power of attorney papers [found eventually in the shredder pile] we headed to the mainland Monday morning to finish our tax, hand over the papers, attend a doctor's appointment & bring Gran's car back to the island so she wasn't paying for parking.  In the nature of these things great swathes of time are spent waiting... interminably ... & so I grabbed a book from my well read pile of children's classics because all that waiting is not conducive to great powers of concentration, but boredom is lethal. What I grabbed was Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.

Technically, I suppose, Stalky is a school story... Certainly it is set in a school but me being me Stalky was the very first Kipling I read, though not my first exposure to him.  My beloved Aunt could, & did, lie in bed in the dark & reel off verse after  verse of All England is a garden, Full of stately views... & so I knew Kipling first as a poet.  Only much, much later did I come to The Jungle Book & finally The Just So tales. Naturally the first time I read Stalky a great deal of it went over my head ~ I was that young. 

The thing is I belong to the Nowhere Generation.  Technically I am part of the Baby Boomer Generation, those children of the post war era who began life in a time of peace & affluence who flowered into Hippies & peace-nicks ~ only I was born @ the tail end, too young for Woodstock & love~ins but old enough to remember the hugeness of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Make Peace, Not War protests, Vietnam on the nightly news & I still think now, as I did then, that lowering the drinking age to appease the young men you want to send to the killing fields was a disgusting thing to do.  Shame on our government! My brothers, born 2 to 4 years later, do not share these memories.

So really, I should be a certain kind of person, far more liberal in my outlook & world view than I am but Stalky is symptomatic of a great schism in my life.  I understand Stalky's world far better than the one I presently occupy.  That 2 years difference is a whole other world.  I began school when you learnt to write with a pencil before transitioning to pen & ink, when all the pink bits on the map were *us* ~ the British Empire ~ an Empire, so we were told, on which the sun never set. 

There were lots of us grew up thinking *Empire* only to watch England betray the idea of empire for economics & the whole thing crumble & decay into something unrecognizable. 

But...Not everybody had my family.  My family are story~tellers.  They have it down to a fine art.  We grew up knowing perfectly well anything we had from my Aunt should be taken with a generous pinch of salt for she was well known to value the Romantic over the Truth but that heady mix also held all the family archives & so I grew up under the shadow of both the Edwardians & the Victorians for the older generation were valued & I am, perhaps, the only one of my siblings old enough to remember  a generation of long skirts & high collars, long hair & hairpins & a sense of family that at one & the same time offered security & condensation.  

Naturally the family, as a whole, were monarchists & I have, in my possession, transcripts of many of the family papers penned by deceased relatives who forged their way into the unknown to make a new life in a land that was far more jungle than garden, but when I read them it is Kipling's world view I hear for they had a sense of purpose bigger than themselves & politically correct they certainly were not! 

However it has left me with a sense of not fully belonging anywhere, straddling the generations, neither wholly modern nor fully prehistoric, but certainly with a huge awareness of the shifts in time & history, & the way we are shaped by our time & place in the grand scheme of things ~ which is why Kipling, a hugely conservative man, is now so derided for his Stalky was certainly a bully & corporeal punishment is definitely out of fashion in our schools.  I do wonder though, the sort of experiment that's not ever likely to happen, how this present generation would do if faced with the same sort of challenges because it is far to easy to mock & deride the Kipling sentiments:

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating...

Orwell wrote, “every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.”  And therein lies the ultimate irony.  *IF* is the most searched for poem on British poetry sites.  For all the wrongness there was an idealism for people to aspire to & people are still drawn to idealism.  That is @ the core of humanism ~ that somehow people can be more than they are ~ & certainly of Christianity, which provides a way for us to rise above ourselves. 

Ultimately 2 things remain for me about Kipling:

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ~ George Santayana

&

• eat the meat and spit out the bones.

Seriously, political correctness is a curse.  If you focus on stuff like that you miss all the pleasure of something like Stalky which is, @ it's heart, a very, very funny book! If you haven't already, have a read.  It's a hoot.

Goodbye,Little Blue Barina.

The thing about family disasters is that you never have to wait long before the next one

puts the previous one into perspective.  ~Robert Brault,

There are some texts you never want to receive like: Mum, I've been in a car accident.  That they are texting is probably a good thing; it means they are alive.  Coherent.  Probably functional.  It leaves a lot of unanswered questions like: who was driving?  Whose fault ~ because, you know, insurance premiums...

So according to the girl [yes, that one] the car in front of her slowed for a galah [the bird sort, not the other sort] & ODD slowed for the car but the bus behind her did not slow for either of them, straight up ODD's rear end. Ike! The 4 year old she was transporting in the back seat was carted off to hospital in the ambulance.  The car, her prized little blue barina, so very nearly paid off, is totaled.  I cannot think how she is to manage for work @ present. *sigh* Why is it my girls, who are better drivers than any of their brothers, have both managed to total a car while the boys have not?

Meanwhile I have been dealing with the social worker who is dealing with my MIL & talking nursing homes ~ where my MIL does NOT want to go & I am so over this year!  Roll on 2019.  May it be heaps better than this one has started out!