angharad_gam

I think I may have mentioned a couple of years ago the difficulties I was having getting a passport on account of how hard it is to prove that you exist when you don't have a driver's licence. Well, this problem has arisen again in the course of trying to sell our old house. As of Monday (this coming Monday) the laws about signing transfer papers for land are changing to require fairly stringent identification (it must be more than the 100 points of ID criteria because one of the options is providing both a driver's licence and a passport). The only currently valid passport I have is a government passport used for travelling for work, and this passport is held by my work (in a safe in Canberra). It's not very clear that they would be willing to release it solely for identification purposes. Since I have neither a driver's licence nor a passport then it looks like it might be necessary to haul a third person along to the paper signing who could testify that I am who I say I am. Fortunately the conveyancer has decided they will be happy with my work security pass (which has my photo on) plus a bunch of other standard things.

It's been a pretty quiet week. Mostly I have been lazing around at home sleeping late, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing Skyrim, refereeing child fights and various other things. I finally got around to planting those seedlings. It would be nice if we could actually have some of that rain the BoM keeps talking about to help them get settled in. I cut out the fabric for my late 15th century gown, then realised that I didn't actually have any thread of the right sort and/or colour to start sewing it together. I wrote up the recipes from the feast. So, a quiet week, but I think I needed it after the mad, mad last few months. There's a small amount of madness remaining, but most of the big things for this half of the year have been ticked off.

In other news, I just got a two month subscription to the Elder Scrolls Online. I don't think I'm going to start it until our internet allowance rolls over, because we're not far off dial up speed oblivion for this month.

So I had the feast dream last night. This one was a bit different from the usual one. Normally, in the feast dream, I turn up to the hall only to discover that I've somehow neglected to bring most of the food with me, or we don't have all the proper gear, or are in some other way seriously disorganised and we have to muddle through and scrape together what dishes we can. This time round I dreamed that I myself forgot to show up - or rather that I turned up to the event but didn't remember I was actually supposed to be cooking until the food started to come out. It's funny how these things seem perfectly normal in dreams.

Anyway, I thought I would post the planned menu for Baronial Changeover (5th April - there's still time to book if you are interested). This is what we'll be eating assuming that I don't forget to turn up (or catch 'everyone crammed into a tiny room at work so they can rearrange the furniture' crud (although I think it might be too late for that :-()).

First Course
Lombard pasties (chicken and bacon)
Spinach tarts
Sallat
Urchines (little meatballs made to look like hedgehogs)
Darioles (custard tarts)
Entremets (cheese, olives, etc)


Second Course
Potage d'Ognion (your basic (and original!) French onion soup)
Brouet de Cannel (chicken, almond and cinnamon soup)
Makerouns (pasta)
Pollastri Uva Negra (Roast chicken with Black grape sauce)
Haedus in Alio (Roast lamb with rosemary and garlic and a verjuice sauce)
Cavoli ala Romanesco (Broccoli)
Rapa Armata (turnips, but cooked like potato bake)
Cariota (roast carrots)

Third course
Strawbery Gely (yes it is period!)
Trifle
Bizcocho (cinnamon/anise cookies)
Caliscioni (marzipan pastries)
Tartis in Applis.

It's a bit of a mix of times and places, but I think it will work.

I have also been thinking a lot about garb lately. It's been a while since I've made any. Or at least, it's been a while since I felt like I accomplished anything by making any. There was an attempt at a new kirtle that just didn't seem to come out right, and a new shift that I've been noodling away at off and on for ages. But I think that putting all my garb books right there on the shelf, and reminding myself about all the fabric that I have (in the course of moving) has sparked the juices. There are three things urging me to make them right now, which means if I am careful (not to push it with the RSI) and persistent I might actually get one done in the next year. I think I've decided to go with a late 15th century gown. I bought a length of yellow-orange wool a couple of years ago that is an almost perfect match for a shade you see a lot in manuscripts of the latter half of the 15th century (which is not, of course, any guarantee that people were wearing that colour). I am not very keen on Burgundian, but I have long had a yen for a style that appears briefly and almost exclusively in England for a fairly short time in the 1470s and 1480s. There's a few examples of it illustrated here (most notably the portrait of Elizabeth Woodville).

I found a variant in a drawing from a brass (evidence for these kinds of gowns comes almost exclusively from brasses) in The Mediaeval Tailor's Assistant, which does not fit tightly to the torso, but falls into full skirt folds from just under the high-waisted belt. It's probably a more transitional form from the earlier Burgundian style, but struck me as a bit more middle class as well. I am finding myself drawn a bit more to middle class outfits these days as easier to pull off in a sufficiently authentic way than noble outfits. If I can't find anything more suitable I have some brown velveteen to use for the collar and cuffs.

I started drafting a toile this weekend. Because it has been a while and I am feeling a bit rusty I wanted to go slowly before hacking into my lovely wool. I haven't quite gotten the pattern right yet, especially the collar shape. I don't know why I am drawn to these off the shoulder styles. They are not suited to someone with narrow, square shoulders and a large bust ie me. However, having had a look around at some more images it is clear there is a wider range of variation there than I thought, so hopefully I'm not quite as far off as I thought. Anyway, I took some photos and I'll take some more as I go along, so there might be a dress diary in this yet.

Sorry, I meant to be getting back to this sooner, but between hot weather (the kind of hot weather where it's too hot to do anything but scurry between air-conditioned boxes always seems to discombobulate me as much as if I actually had to be out in it) and toying with having a bit of a cold, and the new place not quite as well set up for sitting at my laptop, I couldn't really summon the energy for it.

Anyway, where were we...ah yes, we'd just gotten the keys.
So we drove over to the new house, let ourselves in and marvelled at it a bit. Then we poked around a bit, discovering the confusing range of air-conditioning and heating options (there seem to be two of the former and three or four of the latter), the very large number of picture hooks (good) and the fact that we didn't seem to have keys for all the locks (bad). Then the removalists showed up and started hauling stuff out of the truck.

I spent the next few hours doing the 'put that in there...no just dump that there for now...' thing while Andy went to get the kids from school and then he and the removalists went back to the house for round two and I actually started unpacking. The new house was a bit dusty because no one had been living in it for a while, and also there's no obligation when someone sells you a house that they do the kind of clean you need to do when you move out of a rental property and have to pass an inspection or lose your bond. So all the shelves and cupboards had to be swept out before we put anything in them.

The removalists came back about 5pm with the remainder of the stuff, and once they had gotten all that inside, it was time for them to reassemble the furniture that they had disassembled to move - principally the beds and the dining table. There were a number of problems with this as a) they could not understand how to put Andy's and my bed back together, so Andy had to help them, b) they had managed to lose a large number of the bolts from Liam's bunk bed, rendering the top bunk unsafe to use and c) they put Erin's bed (also a bunk but with a desk underneath) together the wrong way so the ladder and the guard rail were against the wall. This latter meant that Andy and I had to half disassemble it, turn it around and then reassemble it again.

We ordered pizza for tea, bathed the kids, managed to actually find all of their bed linen, and put them to bed. Then, for want of anything better to do (we couldn't find the antenna cable for the TV) and a great many boxes urging us to unpack them, Andy and I did more unpacking. Until finally about 10:30 we packed it in (ha ha) and went to bed. Unfortunately for us, we couldn't find the bedding that was on our bed just that morning, and although we managed to dig out a couple of sheets, we could only find one spare pillow.

And so we passed our first night in our new house, passing the pillow back and forth between us. Since then there's been a lot of unpacking and sorting out of various teething issues.

It turns out we were missing some keys - the real estate agent rang us up on Monday and said they'd forgotten to give us them all.

We never found the antenna cable for the TV - Andy went out and bought a new one. And then went out and bought another, because he got the wrong kind first time round. And even then we couldn't watch the telly, because the reception was terrible. 'Maybe this is why the previous owners moved out', he said. 'People don't sell their house and move to Canberra just to get better TV reception' was my response. Eventually we had to call out Mr Antenna, and he discovered that the house appeared to be wired up in a more elaborate way than most TV studios, with a large number of TV points and far more sophistimacated connections than were actually necessary. So he snipped a few of those out, and now the TV is fine.

The internet took just about as long to sort out. They would have connected us pretty much immediately on disconnecting the old place, except there was some kind of issue with the phone line to begin with (or so they said - by the time we dug the phone out of a box and plugged it in, if there was a problem it was gone). The there were no more ADSL ports left in our area. So we eventually had to get a man out (Adam from Adam) to put an antenna on our roof. Now we have wireless, and because it is more expensive we reduced our allowance from 200Gb to 100Gb. We had used 13Gb within the first 36 hours of it being put on. Stay tuned for us being shaped well before the end of the month...

We managed to get about 50% unpacked by the end of the first weekend, and maybe about 80% by the end of the first week (with no internet and no TV there was not much else to do but unpack). We got most things in order, but some things had to wait on furniture. We lost one bookshelf during the move (it was too fragile to move so we basically threw it out), and we also decided to put all the cookbooks on shelves (in the old house they were in one of those large kitchen pan drawers), so we were going to need more shelf space. Last weekend Andy did a run to IKEA and picked up some bookshelves and some deeper shelves, so we could unpack both books and board games. At this point the only thing that's still awash with boxes is our room. This is because we need some new bedroom furniture, and we can't unpack our clothes properly until we have drawers to put them in (although technically we have drawers, but I refuse to unpack things into the grungy old drawers only to have to move them again when the new furniture comes). There's also some figures and garb that has yet to be unpacked.

We have the following furniture on order: a lighted glass display case (for figures); a new bedroom suite for Andy and I; a custom gaming table.

We still need: a sofa bed or futon for the back/family room; a new bed for Liam; storage for DVDs and CDs

The new house is very awesome, and I think it will be even more awesome once we have it all set up to our satisfaction. There are a few small irritations and things that aren't quite how we hoped they would be, but for the most part this move has been pretty good.

Casualties: four fingernails (not a bad tally all told); the aforementioned bookcase; the last of our favourite set of wine glasses (it was already broken, but Andy's superglue fix was not sufficiently strong); The Big Fella (Andy's large 60cm high Alien figure) - like the wine glass he was already broken and the fix came unfixed during the move; Andy's left leg - which he somehow managed to impale on his replica Conan sword.

Right now we're gearing up for crazy birthday week, and then it will be off to Canberra for me.

Last minute packing still happening. The internet will shut off here at midnight, and we're not quite sure when it will be on at the new place (certainly not until we plug in the modem and router somewhere). I'm also pretty much out of mobile data. I am filthy right now from having squirmed right under the bed to fetch things out (the bed is up against the wall, so we can't reach under from each side).

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. I need to get up, empty the fridge and switch it off. Drinks will be going in the laundry sink in a whole heap of ice, and anything else we want to try and keep in a cooler bag in the bathtub.

The removalists will be here at 8am. The kids will be off to school at 8:30am. Then it gets a little hairy. Some time between 11am and 2pm, settlement happens. I thought settlement was some kind of automated event, like an electronic payslip, that ticks over at midnight (or 9am) on the day in question. However, it turns out what actually happens is that your conveyancer goes down to the lands and titles office, gets in a queue and performs all the transactions in person. If I had known this, I might have chosen a different day to move, because we can't actually get the keys to the house until we technically own it. Also sometime between 7am and 6pm the electrickery people will be showing up to switch the electrickery on. Until that happens there will be no air-conditioning at the new house. It will be 40C tomorrow. It's going to be interesting...

Odd things that have turned up while we were sorting through stuff and packing: a Yr 11 report (for me), my student diary from 1994 (second year uni), a letter to Andy announcing the closure of the last place that he worked, a copy of the original Civilisation game, a Lego viking fort we totally forgot we had, any number of nostalgia provoking old letters, photos and cards.

Packing tally for today:
8 boxes (full size moving cartons) of board games
15 boxes of books
1 box with yarn stash
1 box of handmade quilts

That's not all the books. But we've run out of book cartons. I guess the moving guys didn't notice that some of our bookshelves were piled three deep.

Also the yarn stash had to go in a moving box because it was mostly loose in a cupboard. The fabric stash, which is five of those (large) plastic storage tubs, is kind of prepacked.

Tomorrow: garb, Erin's room.

We've spent most of the last week rushing about doing house buying things. With the consequence that we are pretty much now guaranteed to have a new house on January 31st, but this last week has not felt much like a holiday. I am back to work tomorrow, and I can't say I feel like I have much enthusiasm for it at the moment. However I'm only back for 2.5 weeks, and then I was going to take a week off while Mum and Dad were visiting, but I think I'll extend that to 1.5 weeks and slap moving time on the end of it. I don't suppose that will be much of a holiday either as we try and pack up and clear up eight years worth of clutter. Still I am excited, and finally now allowing myself to think thoughts like 'soon we shall have a linen cupboard that is not in constant danger of towel avalanches' or 'I can't wait to have a pantry that we can actually fit all of our food into'

We've also pretty much decided to keep our old house and rent it out. It will still need a lot of work - it needs painting, and the floor boards repolishing, and we've already arranged for the gutters to be replaced (because it is nice to have proper gutters and not rusty sieves). But we can worry about that after we have moved out.

I've spent most of the last week with a really horrible head cold. Andy has also had said cold.

Ashwyn has managed to get an infection in a patch of eczema on the back of his knee. The whole back of his knee is peeling and gooey and gross, but he is now on antibiotics, so we are hoping they will help. We have to bribe him with lollies actually take the antibiotics however.

Today I did some calligraphy for what I reckon must be the first time in ten years. I discovered that a) I am badly out of practice and b) I badly need some new nibs

I've always been susceptible to superstitions. I know not why, except to suppose that I am an especially credulous person. One that's stuck with me for a while I picked up from one of the Moomintroll books, that I first read when I was about six or seven. It goes like this: if the first butterfly of summer that you see is white or yellow then that is good luck, and you are in for a lovely summer. If the butterfly is brown or black then that is terrible luck.

I've often wondered at the logic of this, from a gardener's perspective. After all, there's a reason they call them 'Cabbage Whites'. But I was reminded of it recently when I saw my first butterfly of this spring and it was black and orange. So I looked it up (well, I googled it). And while there are a couple of 'see this colour butterfly, expect good weather' superstitions there's nothing I could find that more precisely matched the Moomintroll superstition. Curse you, Tove Jannson, you have misled me for thirty years!

(Pronounced cla-foo-tee because it is French).

Because I seem to be doing this thing where I post nothing for weeks and then do all the posts at once, here is one more thing. Today was one of those filled every minute with doing things and now I'm completely knackered but in a pretty good way kind of days.

So I got up this morning and gave Andy his Fathers' Day present, and made him blueberry and strawberry crepes for breakfast. And then I went out and planted a bunch of plants I bought recently. The gardening I mentioned early was basically a massive weeding of the front garden, which now has a lot more space since the bottle brush fell down. Today I covered a large portion of the weeded area in bark chips, to discourage more weeds and also make it look a bit more tidy (we will possibly be selling this house soon, after all), and put in alyssum which is a small, creeping plant with purple flowers, and parsley, and a passionfruit vine, and spinach and shallots.

And then I made lunch, and spent half an hour playing a new game I have called Memoria, and then we went to see Andy's dad, and then we came home and I made lamb with red wine and quince glaze and a cherry clafoutis for dinner and then after dinner I made muffins for the kids to take to school next week.

I like clafoutis. It is a French version of what in English is called batter pudding, which you've probably never had unless your family was into those old-fashioned English desserts like spotted dick and cobbler and so on. So here is a recipe.

25gms/1 tblsp butter melted
4 eggs
1 cup/250mls milk
1/2 cup plain flour
1/3 cup sugar
Filling

Preheat the oven to 180C

Mix the flour and sugar very well in a large bowl. In another bowl beat the eggs one at a time into the melted butter, and then whisk in the milk. Add this to the dry ingredients and whisk together thoroughly until smooth.

Take a greased pie dish. Put in the filling. You could use a punnet of blueberries or strawberries (hull and quarter the strawberries first), a big handful of stoned and halved fresh cherries, or as I do, a large jar of cherries very well drained. Generally you want some fruit that is small and lightweight as the pieces will float to the top when it bakes. Pour the batter over, and put into the oven.

Bake for about 30 mins or until the clafoutis is evenly puffed up and golden brown. Take it out and dust it liberally with icing sugar and eat it straight away.

This really is one of those things like soufflé that needs to be eaten pretty much straight away. After a few minutes it starts to sink and when it is cold is kind of dense and rubbery (I actually don't mind it like that too much, but it is infinitely better when freshly out of the oven). Nice fresh eggs, a well-preheated oven, a strong arm with the whisk, and making it really quickly and getting it in the oven straight away will all contribute to a great clafoutis.

I thought a few weeks ago that we were likely in for an early Spring. Those few sunny days we had I managed to get out and do some gardening and it seemed like everything was on the verge of flowering. I got back out to do some more gardening this weekend, and it's full on Spring out there. The plum and cherry trees are in blossom, the daffodils are just about over already, and even the grape vine is starting to show spots of green. And it's not even 24 hrs into September...

I guess I'll be going out to get some antihistamines.