New inhabitant in Frog Land

I had lots of pets as a child, starting with a hamster in the US when I was seven or eight. Things got more interesting when we moved to Indonesia, where I had a menagerie of tupai (mini squirrels), song birds, rabbits, a civet cat (thankfully for a very short while) and a myna bird. But what I always really wanted was a cat.

My wish was finally granted when we moved to Malaysia. In fact, at one point we ended up with four cats, but my favorite was always Aelin. We got her from the local SPCA when she was half grown. I picked her out because she was a lovely silvery grey, darker at the roots like a wolf. But it turned out to be dirt - she was actually pure white. I had to feed her chicken soup through a turkey baster for the first week or two after we got her because she was too weak to eat, but somehow she survived.



My first cat Aelin



She was never very healthy, but she survived moves to Bangladesh, India, and finally the US, so she did pretty well, considering. My parents ended up looking after her when I moved out on my own and collected more cats in succession (Sasha, Alex, Baby and Buddy).

When I moved to the UK I discovered it was slightly more difficult to aquire cats. I never had to make any effort in the US - I mostly inherited them from friends. But if I had ever had to make an effort to get a cat, I know it would have been easy. When we tried to get a cat in Glasgow we contacted the cat protection league and they sent out a team for a house visit. Apparently we were judged to be unsuitable hosts for a stray cat, because we never heard back from them again.

The British have completely opposite views on the best environment for cats than Americans. In the UK it is considered cruel to keep a cat shut up indoors, so naturally in their eyes our little flat in Glasgow was not ideal. Personally, having had too many of my cats run over by cars, I'm not such a fan of the outdoors. Unfortunately you don't find out if your cat is not savvy enough to avoid cars until it is too late. I figure, if a cat is kept inside from kittenhood it really doesn't know what it is missing.

There are plenty of cats running around the streets of Oxford, but I sometimes wonder how high their fatality rates are. I've heard there is at least one bike fatality per year on St Giles street, and I can't imagine the odds are much better for cats. But anyway, I have better things to do than start a cats indoor campaign - I have my own kitty to look after!

We finally got our own kitty, from a friend of a friend. She was eight weeks old when we got her, a bit young to be separated from her mother, but she's a fiesty little thing.



Harlequin, aka Quinny, Little Miss Quinn, the Quinster, etc.



She has settled in really well, and only confused our bed for her litter box twice (fortunately kitten pee does not seem to have the potent odor of cat pee).

Naturally she is a big fan of yarn and knitting. Who needs the outside when there is yarn?



Biggest ball of yarn she has ever seen!

 

Now where's that ball of wool gone to?



It is a bit difficult getting knitting done with an attack cat in the house, but fortunately she is pretty easily distracted by socks, and also I can always fit in some quick knitting while she is napping. I imagine she will eventually grow out of the desire to chase anything and everything that moves, but meanwhile she is a very entertaining new member of the family. I'll leave you with one more cute kitty picture.




Hi kitty!



Summer garden

Now is the time of year that the garden starts bursting at the seams, and we begin to despair of keeping up with all the produce. All that hard work planting and weeding starts to pay off, and I begin to wonder what ever possessed me to plant quite so many beans and pumpkins! We've had a rather mixed year, weather-wise. The Winter was really cold (killing off my lovely artichoke plants!), Spring was too hot and dry and Summer has been relatively cool, but fortunately we have at least been getting plenty of rain.

I'm still a novice when it comes to gardening, this being my second year on our allotment. My general mode of operation is to learn by making mistakes (I'm just not a firm believer in reading instructions). So not everything is doing great. Which is almost for the best, because otherwise we really would be drowning in produce.

I tried out the three sisters this year, a planting method used by Native Americans to grow squash, corn and beans. I modified this to two sisters, not being sure I could rely on corn growning well enough in our climate to serve as a sturdy climbing structure for the beans. So I put the beans with squash and corn with pumpkins. Unfortunately I put the squash in the middle of the bean teepees, so the poor things are not getting enough light. I had hoped they would trail over the ground and escape outside the teepee, but they haven't been growing fast enough to keep up with the beans. Next year, squash outside, beans inside!

beans overshadowing the acorn squash

My other squash and bean combination will probably work, because the beans (borlotti) fortuntely turned out to be bush beans instead of climbers.

borlotti beans and butternut squash

I planted a lot of pumpkin seeds because I absolutely adore pumpkins. This year I tried a French variety, not realising quite how big the plants would get. The corn has only just managed to keep its head above the pumpkin leaf cover.



courge musquée and corn

Just so you don't think I'm limiting my diet exclusively to beans and squash, I should tell you about my real gardening success - beets and swiss chard. I like to make a warm salad with the beets, because then you can use the whole plant. I don't use a recipe, but here is the general procedure: (you need about 2 beets per person to get enough beet greens, but I only use about 1/2 of the actual beet per serving):

• wrap beets in aluminum foil and roast in oven at 375f/190c for up to an hour, depending on size of beet
• while the beets are roasting make vinagrette - I like this one shared by David Lebovitz - and chop some walnuts
• when the beets are out of the oven and cooling, wash and chop greens and saute in a bit of olive oil.
• when beets are cool enough to touch, peel off skin (comes off easily with minimal finger staining) and chop up beets
• put sauteed beet greens on plate, sprinkle on chopped beets, goats cheese or feta cheese, and chopped walnuts. Top with vinagrette.

If you can't get hold of beet greens, swiss chard or wilted spinach would work as well. Another good recipe for swiss chard it bacon and swiss chard pasta. I could eat this meal once a week and never get bored of it - fortunately, because we have a lot of swiss chard to use up!

Habu Heaven

I went to Knit Nation in London this weekend. This was the second one I attended, and although I came away with a lot more yarn this time my approach to the marketplace was similar to last year. Essentially, I found the most unusual yarn and spent ridiculous amounts of money on it.

Last year it was Quivik, this year Habu Textiles. I had barely heard of Quivik before I blew a pile of cash on two skeins of the stuff (see last year's blog post), but I've been obsessed with Habu for years, ever since I encountered it at K1 Yarns in Edinburgh (which sadly doesn't carry it any more). In fact, I decided not to sign up for a class this year because I preferred to spend the £50 on yarn rather than skill building. Plenty of time for skill building later, I wanted to stock up on yarn you can't buy anywhere in the UK.

I exaggerate, you can buy some Habu in the UK, at Loop in London and at Addicted 2 Knit, which is a London-based online shop. But their selection is pretty limited. Le Comptoir in Paris has a slightly better selection, but still not the full range. So when I saw the Habu booth at Knit Nation I was quite overwhelmed.

Like a kid in a candy shop

My original plan had been to do a whirl around the booths, retire to the tea salon to consider the plan of action, and then return to the targeted yarn purchases. However, it turned out I had not actually signed up for the tea salon after all - in fact, I had erroneously purchased marketplace tickets for two separate days, which I blame on the needlessly complicated registration process. Anyway, I didn't have any time for reflection, as I had to immediately snap up the last two skeins of this gorgeous yarn from Old Maiden Aunt Yarns:

Kelpie superfine alpaca/silk sport/DK
(named for the mythical Celtic water horse)

The yarns are made in a studio in West Kilbride, Scotland - after seeing their lovely selection I'll definitely have to make the effort to visit next time I'm in Glasgow.

After that brief aside I returned pretty promptly to the Habu motherlode. There was almost too much choice, but I was particularly excited to discover they are now offering linen-steel as well as their usual silk-steel, wool-steel and bamboo-copper. The Habu metal-yarn combos are becoming a staple in my knitting - I love the structure they gives when mixed with other yarn, and they come in a really good range of colours.

Linen steel in gorgeous shimmering shades

After some frenzied collecting of an awkward pile of yarn, I came away with a rather obscene stash of wonderfully unusual fibres. I'll have to feature some of the particular yarns in later posts - I chose 3 projects worth of yarn and a selection of random bits and pieces I'll have to decide what to do with later. Which leaves me with an fabulous collection of Habu, to keep me entranced and entertained for months to come (oh, who am I kidding, make that years to come).

My Habu collection, give or take a couple of skeins currently being knit up in projects

After Knit Nation we headed over to the Toulouse-Lautrec show at the Courtauld Gallery, where I was particularly taken with this painting. Makes me want to knit myself something in orange and chartreuse.

Jane Avril, the Moulin Rouge dancer

Driving on the Continent

In our family, I do the driving on the right, my husband drives on the left. Which means I get the continents (namely Europe and the US) and he gets the islands (namely the UK). You might think this sounds like an unfair division of labour, but trust me, I get the better end of the bargain. Driving in the UK is horrible, with too many cars on too few roads. Whereas in the US and Europe it is mostly just you and the endless open road.

I used to drive a lot in the US, particularly when I moved from Maryland to go to university in Arizona. There is nothing quite like driving across the US continent - the landscape changes are dramatic and the four or five days on the road lull you into a traveling stupor. But driving in Europe is pretty enjoyable as well. So far I've driven in France, Spain and Italy. The highways are mostly in better condition than US highways, and the traffic is usually pretty sparse. The views can't quite compare with the Southwest (I'm partial to deserts) but they are quite stunning.

Our latest driving trip was in Tuscany. We went along with my husband's parents to try to find some of the places his grandfather fought in during WWII. We knew we might be driving into some relatively inaccessible places, so in the interest of not getting hopelessly lost, for the first time ever we rented a sat nav.



Fredo the monster truck sat nav


As with many technologies you manage to survive without until you try them, I never want to go without one again. The best part is how they cut down on shouting. I come from a pretty shouty family, where my husband fits in well. But his parents are more peaceful types and probably wouldn't have appreciated our normal operating procedure, which is to voiciferously criticise each other's methods of driving, map reading, directing, parking and turning around. And when we are not criticising each other we turn out attention to shoddy map design and the country's inadequate and/or misleading signposting. With the sat nav there was still a small amout of shouting, but it was mostly directed at the sat nav (nicknamed Fredo) when it (infrequently) led us astray up one way roads or (frequently) confused twists in the road with turns.

And there were many twists in the road. I usually averaged about 40 kph, even though the speed limits said I could go 70 or even 90. Fortunately we didn't meet many other cars.


twisty roads in Tuscany


Tuscany is hilly country, and we went pretty high up into those hills - to 1000 meters at one point, which is  pushing mountain height for the UK. And consequently we saw some spectacular views.



Farming on steep hillsides

 


View from the highest point

Due to inadequate planning (poor maps and no compas) we were unable to locate the place where we thought grandfather was wounded (rather luckily on his trigger finger, ending his participation in combat duty). Upon our return home we did more thorough internet search and discovered we had probably gotten within 250 meters of the hamlet, so another visit may be warrented. 

We were able to visit the Castello di Vincigliata near Florence, which grandfather's company tried to take (unsuccessfully due to its defensive position). It offered more spectacular views and a vision of luxury - if anyone is interested, they rent the place out for weddings and functions, and offer wine tastings of their very own wine produced on the estate.



Castello di Vincigliata



Castle courtyard

 

Castle garden with view

All in all an enjoyable introduction to Italian driving. Next step, Sicily!