Things I like.

We have been making rather a lot of window thingies. Well, technically, I have been folding things like a mad creature, while Hero menaces tissue paper and glue. They are quite addictive, though, these things – I so love looking at the colours with the sun coming through the window, and anything which reminds me to look outside, that the world will not always be covered either in rain or in mud, can only be a good thing. (I shouldn’t say this, really, given that the last three days have brought bright winter sunshine and crackling starry nights.)

Hero has a new coat, and pink and purple boots made for her by the very lovely shoemaker in Exeter. Her choice of colours, which was nice. The buckles are a complete sod, it must be said, but ultimately they are lovely boots, and how many people get to choose not only the colours but the style of their shoes, from a virtually limitless list of suggestions? If you can’t do it when you’re three and a half, then when?

Our newest familiar, Hecate, is settling in well. Wixon is, shall we say, quite taken with her.

The aforementioned winter sunshine. Good, isn’t it?

Both the heart-shaped casserole (full of rice pudding, a rather unlikely favourite of mine of late; sadly I am alone in this as neither Hero nor Quercus can be persuaded of its divinity) and the cow coffee pot visible in the background are things which make my heart sing whenever I spot them.

My ridiculous magpie-like love of shiny colourful things took over when I saw this sling (a Girasol Earthy Rainbow, if you’re interested) for a very good price indeed. We have bought next to nothing new for Mirth; it seemed nice that she should have a sling to herself, given how much use it’s going to get!

Our bedroom, post-transformation. Look! A ceiling! Which stays up and everything! Not particularly neat at the moment and covered in baby-related paraphernalia, but the room is blissful, and I am quite in love with the increasing quantities of wood which are becoming visible in our house. (Not least as their presence means the roof is not about to join us for afternoon tea.)

Mirth, aptly named both here and in real life, sporting a rather fetching bib and velvety suit passed on to us by some very lovely friends.

Mirth investigating this whole sitting malarky. Note also Pink Mousey, who looks like Sniff of Moomin fame, and who was sent to us by the lovely L-Q-S.

Mad hair and mad exploits with a new puzzle house and a plethora of animals. Hero’s ‘farm’ now includes – but is not limited to – a camel, a fox, a wolf and a wild boar. She is quite the connoiseur.

Such a smiley baby, it is just not true. Also, note plumptious legs – this babe is already nearly 20 lb! That explains all those night-feeds, then…

Star lights on shelves of jars with various bits and bobs. Including plastic reindeer. As you do.
It’s February already, somehow. Mirth will be six months old on the tenth of the month, and, in between sanding and waxing a Stokke highchair bought for £20 at an advent fair, I am wondering how on earth she can on the verge of joining us for dinner, yet her careful attentive watching as she sits on one or other of us while we eat assures me that she is, as does her poise when sitting and her reaching hands as she sees glasses and cutlery move. January has been a difficult month – one of those where everything goes wrong – and we are still finding our feet in its wake, but Mirth and Hero provide me with daily joy, genuine glee, at having two such bright souls in my life. (Yes, even at 3 a.m.) So, I am reminding myself of the happy things as I reach for the strength, the persistence, to sort out all the irritations, the challenges, the oh-you-just-bloody-well-would-wouldn’t-yous. (Current tally: frozen pipes = no washing machine or dishwasher and only sporadic sink water; new washing machine as last one gave up; car breaking down intermittently since Christmas Eve because of a veg oil conversion; my car’s brakes decided to stop working properly due to Comedy French Wiring (a well-known term on sad-git car forums); sleep, the lack thereof; money, the lack thereof; hard-drive dependability, the lack thereof.)
And in less than two weeks, we begin the next phase of work on our house, and Mirth, Hero and I will be heading to West Sussex for a few weeks (anyone local, do say hello!), to stay with Quercus’s mother while Quercus takes ceilings and plaster down. As part of this, we are meeting a central heating engineer later on today; I am quite excited (though I’d be so more fully if I had worked out an infallible bank-robbery strategy first, given that we are probably looking at about six thousand pounds to do the sort of thing we need to do). Our pipes are frozen for the fourth year running today; we had a heating plan and a plumbing plan designed for us by ex-friend David, and basically the latter sucks and the former never materialised. So, we’re finally taking the bull by the proverbial and seeing if we can at least fix the heating problem. At the moment, we have a woodstove in the living room, and that’s it. What we’re hoping for is a larger stove (12kw or so) with a back boiler, and thus a radiator in the kitchen, a towel rail in the bathroom, and radiators in each of the bedrooms. Of course, our house being difficult and minute, it is a tricky job and the heights and levels are all wrong. But it would be so, so good to get this sorted once and for all – I would not miss the lakes which appear on our windowsills each morning, and nor would I miss the mould which forms when things get damp, and nor would I miss the searing heat we achieve in the living room combined with the chilling see-your-breath cold of the bedrooms.
Still to come: the saga of the Steinway piano sale (or not), the rice pudden recipe to end all rice puddens, and the fact that I appear to be sliding towards vegan cooking.
So, that’s where I am at the moment. Where are you, internets?
Anyway, recent activities have included the acquisition of a reclaimed pine table for our kitchen, which genuinely feels like a kitchen now, and which has really changed the way we’re living in our tiny house to an extent I hadn’t anticipated. It’s so nice to have space for the small girl to toddle about the place without having to think about table saws and screwdrivers as potential weapons in tiny hands. We’ve even got space for a rug where she can sit and explore some of her recent haul from her grandma; she is loving the extra space, and we are breathing out, collectively.
Woo! It’s the first of October! Which means, er, that, um, it’s… October, she finished, flatly. Well. Despite this slightly lacklustre start, I confess that October is one of my favourite months. Not only is it Quercus’s birthday (the twenty-third, since you asked; send extravagant presents at will), but it’s also a month of last tomatoes, illicit rosehips glowing in the morning sunshine, crabapples juicing gently on the stove, and hens pecking around in the warmth of afternoons still light enough to mistake for summer. Oh, and of course, at the end of the month, there is Samhain, or Hallowe’en, if you prefer, to look forward to; our two cats would make excellent hire choices for this particular occasion, being both black and vaguely sinister, though I have to say they’ll be spoken for. This year I am in hopes that the tiny daughter will take a little more notice of the pumpkinage we are sure to acquire; last year’s number came from the post office a mile or so away, and despite the fact that it was most splendid, she remained largely above its charms, being only four months old at the time. Add a year, and hopefully she’ll be up for helping me to hollow it out a bit too.
Yesterday, for the third time, Liquorice, our Barnevelder hen, managed to escape somehow. I don’t know where the hole she used is – Quercus and I have looked all around the hedges several times, down on hands and knees, and blocked up any holes we could see with wire – but still she found somewhere. I’d noticed twice before that she was disappearing somewhere in the afternoon, and it had been a while since we’d seen an egg which was definitely hers (darker than the Buff Sussex eggs, and often speckled), so I thought she’d found somewhere to go and lay in peace, following the broody Sussex saga last month.
This is the sight that greets me most mornings when I open up the cupboard which now hides the fridge away: we’re getting about two dozen eggs a week, lots of them blue, and Quercus, whose real life is interrupted daily by a large office, is doing a roaring trade in selling; so much so, in fact, that we sometimes find ourselves eggless, which is ironic, given that we’re the ones with the chooks. I’m particularly delighted with the blue eggs, I confess; the colour of them is simply gorgeous in person, and it’s particularly touching that one can tell which hen laid which egg by the colour. Cobweb, who came into lay before Nightshade, lays eggs which are on the yellower-end of blue (two of hers are at the back of this photo), while Nightshade delivers turquoise confections which you can see in the foreground. Then we have darker, speckled eggs courtesy of Liquorice, our Barnevelder, and the paler ones from the two Buff Sussex hens, who – and I swear they do this on purpose to increase the frustration of not being able to tell them apart because their markings are so similar – seem to produce identical eggs. I’m starting to think that white eggs might be nice too… Or perhaps green ones. Anyone got any breed suggestions? (And yes, I’m playing with fire here – I remember a conversation with Quercus, oh, two years ago, where I said ‘it’ll only be two of them; no, really!’.)
Well, it looks like our new arrivals have now settled in. We’ve had the
Oh dear. I remember quite clearly the day that I mentioned, with the sort of assumed carelessness which comes only after at least half a dozen preparatory sessions in front of a mirror while on one’s own, that a friend had offered me some chooks, and that I’d, er, sort of said yes, despite Quercus and I having agreed only quite recently that we had far too many things to get on with (in house terms) to start having animals about the place. Ahem. Oops. (Blame it on