This is the post where I learn to embed a video clip …
I started with a sentence intro’ing my post. ‘Stumbled across this video clip entirely serendipitously just after realizing I’m no longer living on a knife edge between two dramas.’
Intended to embed without a drama. The instructions are clear, can I follow directions finally?
I followed the directions and pasted a link to the content I wanted to embed. I clicked on the button EMBED. It tells me to paste an URL. Huh? Where? Like, the box where is filled with the link?
I click on ‘Learn more about embeds’ and I’m told everything I already know and that I have already done.
No. Wait … scrolling further down I learn that I need to paste in the URL which acts as a link. Never mind FB telling me to do it the other way round. I’ll give the WP way another go.
So I paste the URL.
I get a tell … ‘Sorry this content could not be embedded.’ And two blue boxes with ‘Try again.’ and ‘Convert to link.’
This post by Judith on https://artistcoveries.wordpress.com/ was a serendipitous find for me when I was casting about for a distraction from the on-going disaster that is the world out there. I had already weakened and thrown a train of the ongoing grief onto the page (previous post) when I recalled how soothing painting can be and thought that I should get back to it.
There’s nothing I can do about the ongoing train-wreck but keep myself sane and … I just don’t know what we as individuals can do.
Painting these miniatures my whole attention needs to go into every step of the process. They offer me three stages … I sketch, trace the important lines with black waterproof, and I paint. Six miniatures per A4 page, with two more to serve as a front door into the space and backdoor, or gate, out of the space.
Unfinished sketch of a corner of a living room. A few more elements before I can call it done. the flowers need a touch of color, for example. And so do the bricks in the fireplace. 10 x 9.5 cm or 4 x 3.7 inches.
Before I put pen to paper I need to set the scheme out, and it’s easy to make a mistake. As I did with this series. To put the booklet together with the least number of cuts and gluing, the six inner elements need to be positioned facing upward, facing downward, facing upward. That didn’t happen here:
… and I will need to do more cutting and more gluing to get a successful outcome. My fingers are crossed.
So called in my birth family. A wedding present to my parents, it’s been in use, mostly, for more than three quarters of a century. I may have had it sitting decoratively on a shelf for a few years but is now back in almost daily use.
And still going strong, though the enamel is a bit worn at the edges. I trust this eroding enamel on cast iron a lot more than eroding teflon and modern stone wear.
I do stir fries in it, and also fry-ups which are a more elemental and robust fare than the meticulously sliced and diced former dish.
For a fry-up I like to start with a tablespoon of oil. Throw in roughly diced cooked chicken, precooked sausage or other meat, about a tablespoon’s worth per person. Fry till meat starts to get brown. Add in about the same amount of diced capsicum. Give the mass a bit of a stir.
People not on a low FODMAP diet might’ve started with onion and garlic. But next in for me are a few tablespoons of cooked rice, or cooked pasta, or a root vegetable. I’ll hold back the carbohydrates if I’m having this on toast.
Pile the pan full of washed and dried green leaves … I use half a bag of prewashed three leaf salad from the supermarket … and stir to melt down. Break an egg over the pan and half stir that goodness in too. ( Yes! Discard the eggshell!)
Empty into a bowl or on toast on a plate. Salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy!
The ‘Dikke Koek’ of the title is something else entirely. if you know any Dutch or Afrikaans you’ll know already that Dikke means thick or fat, and koek means cake.
If you were going to say koek means biscuit or cookie … they are brothers and sisters of the same ilk. Baked goeds. Koek.
Dikke koek was a favourite birthday dinner dessert.
The savoury part of such a dinner often consisted of capucijners—in English known as marrowfats or grey peas—with bacon/spek, a green salad, fried potatoes and appelmoes (smashed apples). Yum!
You’d hardly think that after a first course as sturdy as that, anyone would still be able to fit in a serve of dikke koek met cinnamon sauce! But, you know, teenagers? They have hollow legs.
In the years when these birthday meals were cooked there would often be three teenagers at the table, plus an equal number of slightly younger kids.
Dikke koek is an old recipe—I’ll be very surprised to learn whether people in the Netherlands still eat it. Its formal name in the cookbook we get it from (published in 1939) is ‘broeder’… Why? A mystery to me.
The cookbook was my mother’s home economics textbook in secondary school.
One of my ongoing interests is how products are packaged. This began when I was about fifteen and my birth family hosted two Japanese engineers who were in Australia to install and test a huge new Japanese generator (or transformer) at the power plant where my father also was an engineer, and who brought us lots of presents.
During the week these men lived in a boarding house, and weekends Saturday or Sunday, they came to our place at Berowra, in the outer northern suburbs of Sydney in the 1960s.
At the time we had a garage which served as living and dining room and my parents bedroom, while kids had two bedrooms in the house built by my father on weekends, one room for three boys and one for three girls.
I don’t recall the power station. It could’ve been Lidell and that would’ve been a family shorthand nickname.
Lol, getting mired in backstory there!
Japanese packaging has always been superb! Classy! Stylish! Rave rave rave!
I saved all the wrappings of all the presents they gave us and kept them for years. And when I was in Japan, in 1976, I saved all packaging from vending machines and the like. I think at the end of my four months travel through Asia, Siberia, Russia and Scandinavia, a good bit of my luggage was souvenired packaging.
All to no avail, of course. My first night in London, the house where I was staying was robbed. All my precious collection was trampled through the mess left by two perpetrators breaking through the plasterboard ceiling, and getting away with all cameras, the family’s silver and jewellry. They even nicked my feather-down sleeping bag.
But. Getting back to the subject. Packaging. Enduring interest.
These cardboard ‘zippers’ fastened the lid of the box to the underside and nothing was torn taking them off. Bet they can be used again.
The laptop was covered with this simple envelope. The paper of similar weight to greaseproof paper. And similar to greaseproof paper, is coating-free, safe for recycling in the composting bin. (So called ‘baking paper’ is NOT safe!)
Several other bits of cardboard and paper wrapped the cord and power plug. All of it calm, plain, and functional.
People will say we pay for all that. True. And I’d rather pay for good design than bad. I’d rather pay for paper than more plastic bags. The bag handles in the first image are probably the only non degradable parts, but will be re-used as long as the bag lasts. And possibly after that if I can find a reuse for them.
Finally have it. Four years of obsessive isolating and six vaccinations were not enough protection.
I got sloppy, I guess, went shopping for a new computer not wearing a mask. Couldn’t face talking hi tech through a mask.
Hopefully the vaccinations will help prevent a full blown attack, though I am in the highest category of danger, being old, sick and immune compromised.
Trying to get some anti virals now, there’s misundestanding between the med clinic and the pharmacy.
Australia has 97 native mistletoes at last count. None grow in Tasmania, the author of the Wikipedia artice quotes that they died out in Tasmania during the last ice age.
Mistletoes don’t kill their hosts, though with a heavy infestation might shorten its host’s life. What I think will happen to this host.
I have not yet found the species or genus name of this one infesting the ‘big’ tree in my patch. New growth on the mistletoe is rust brown while the long eucalyptus-style leaves are a cross between sage green and grey, despite what they look like on this photo.
Nor have I seen anything that looks like a bud, flowers might give me an indication of its genus. The only field guide I know about Australian mistletoes is for the temperate southern half of the continent.
Plantnet doesn’t know it. If Mangroves to Mountains (field guide for local plants) has an online presence I might find it there. We’ll see.
The jury is out on the bug’s ID. Just found a similar looking one in the Wildlife of Tropical North Queensland, a cockroach probably immigrating from Asia.
Or it could be a sap sucker related to the bronze stink bug. There is a sap sucking bug species, like this one on the Angophra sp, for all major tree species in Australia.
European honey bees very busy among the Tuckaroo flowers …
I had a little video clip here, but guess I need to negotiate with WP on that, and am on my mobile just now. Think of the above as a place holder.
A bunch of tiny blue butterflies skipped in amongst the grasses
Fast fliers that never sit still they are one of approx 63 similar little blue butterfly species in the region, according to Helen Schwenke in her Create More Butterflies. I saw them among the above grasses.
If they were the Common Pencilled-Blue variety, they would’ve had plenty of food for their caterpillars for the Tuckaroo is a common host plant.
Rita de Heer 