Ania M

My enthusiasms tend to wax and wane like the moon (yes, OK, so I’m a looney 😉 and after stalling on DH’s Kilt Hose earlier this year, my knitting muse left me in disgust. I lost track of where I was in the pattern and had somehow ended up with a stitch short one one sock, so when I volunteered to knit Hestia a pair of new bed socks to replace those tragically murdered by Tartarus, I  decided it was easier to just frog it all back and start from scratch rather than trying to work out what was going on. I quite enjoyed making them and found myself at a loss as to what to do next when they were finished. (I haven’t sent them off yet, so no spoiler pics yet, I’m afraid. They will be in the post tomorrow, promise 🙂

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Welcome to the Samhain/Hallowe’en edition of the Tarot Blog Hop. You can find links to the posts preceding and following this one and also the master list at the bottom of the page, as usual. The theme of this Blog Hop is “Exploring Your Shadow Side”. Well, if you’ve tuned in to find out about all my dark secrets, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. You see, as a well-adjusted as a schizophrenic as a Gemini, I don’t have a shadow side as such; all of my facets are on display…in carefully selected doses…to carefully selected people of course, but essentially, what you see is what you get , dark bits and all 😀

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I was at my school reunion at the weekend. It was…well, hard to describe unless you were there, in which case, you won’t need my inadequate attempts to explain the gamut of emotions. If, as is more likely, you weren’t there, I hope this may give you an inkling: it was amazing and comfortable, funny and sad, euphoric and exhausting, novel and familiar…I could go on with the contrasts, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Meh! you might think, it was just a bunch of people you probably lost touch with for a reason and won’t want to see again, but you’d be wrong. When we were there, it was a convent and private boarding school*. (Yes, that’s right, I’m a convent girl and I’m not a nun, make of that what you will).

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The title of this post refers not, as you might suppose, to what remains of a football team formation after two players have been sent off for kicking chunks out of the opposing team or, indeed, having been caught out diving and rolling around on the ground UNlike big girls*  No, 4-2-2 is the magic formula for baking a basic cake.

*see Olympic ladies hockey team playing on with broken noses/jaws and blood pouring down their faces

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As you may be aware, I quite enjoy tinkering with photos, both in terms of taking them (I used to do a lot of photography once upon a time) and also tinkering with exposure, colour balance and effects to create, well, something that makes me smile 😀 All of these things used to be a case of getting the photo itself absolutely right and praying that the D&P shop wouldn’t mess it up, or dicking about in the darkroom creating print after print for hours on end, but have been made so much easier (and more fun) but today’s digital tools.*  I love being able to try things out and revert instantly before trying something else until I am satisfied. So imagine my delight at discovering another little time-saving bit of software for messing about with making photo collages in the form of CollageIt.

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The weather this summer has, for the most part, been beyond a joke, even by this country’s motley standard. Three of my events this season have been cancelled due to heavy rain making the site a bog/river/lake.  Night time rain has traumatised myself and other survivors of Kelmarsh into lying fretfully awake in our tents, fearful of waking up to similar scenes of flooding.

We made it to Herstmonceux on the Bank Holiday Friday in good time and had the tent up and the trailer emptied before the rain started (to fill it up). We watched with growing trepidation as the ground assumed sponge-like qualities: water visibly squelching up as you trod down, and this was inside the tent. As it turned out, the rain did not linger and although it was most definitely welly weather on Saturday, the ground dried out nicely and Sunday was glorious, ending with a breathtaking view of the very starry, starry sky.*  Of course, just as we were packing up on Monday evening, it started to rain again, against all probability and just to be annoying. Naturally, now that I am not camping out and have started to write about the rain, we have wall-to-wall sunshine. It’s enough to make an atheist wonder if there is a god, who not only plays dice but loses heavily.

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I left you last time with two courgettes still to use up, which I did manage as you will see, but picked three more large ones. At this point, you may be expecting me to sigh in a faintly exasperated fashion but, in fact, I am rather looking forward to trying some more courgette-based recipies. So, once again, I’m going to share with you the fruits of my culinary adventures so far (and if you think three posts on the topic of courgettes is excessive, just wait until my two already-really-quite-large pumpkins are ready). Gluttony for punishment 😉

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Encouraged by my success with the courgette fritters yesterday, (which were also a hit with DH), I went on to make a courgette-based main course for dinner: namely, Lasagne with strips of courgette instead of pasta. I wimped out a little and did have a layer of actual pasta (fresh lasagne sheets) but, in truth, it was rather superfluous and barely noticeable. If anything, the slight crunch of the courgettes was an improvement on the usual slight rubberiness of the pasta. DS reverted to his usual stance of “I don’t like courgettes”, despite wolfing them down in the form of fritters earlier, and left his courgettes uneaten, but DD did eat some, including the courgettes (bins were checked to ensure no cheating), and apparently enjoyed it. (The promise of an ice cream if she finished it all may have helped). I thought it was absolutely luverly! 🙂

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Pile of fritters

“I’m doing some fritters”, I say to the children, “Who wants some?”

“Me!” says DS, our resident food dumpster.

“Are they apple?” asks DD, guardedly.

“No. Courgette” I reply.

“Er, no, then”, DS back-pedals rapidly, announcing, “Courgettes are evil!”

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Welcome to the Lammas Tarot Blog Hop. This time, the theme is “Pentacles: The Fruits of the Harvest” and the idea is to connect with the Pentacles suit and write about which of the cards you can relate to right now.

When I first signed up at the end of June, I thought “Fab! The garden is taking shape nicely, by Lammas there will be very literally a harvest, so the 7 of Pentacles is obviously going to be the card for me!” Sure enough, I have a pumpkin plant bent on world domination, a courgette producing fruit on virtually a daily basis, the green stuff is growing well (peas, beans, lettuce, cauli,cabbage, etc), the tomatoes are just starting to swell and there are cute little knobbly cucumbers forming behind the flowers. Yes, indeed, I can definitely relate to the 7 of Pentacles  – a little light weeding, liberal sprinklings of slug pellets and leaning on my hoe waiting to pick the fruits of my labours is the order of the day. You can see how my garden grows here.

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