Well, yes. That’s one of my garden gloves and it’not empty. It’s kind of silly, we know to always shake out our shoes or garden clogs before sticking our toes in them (our scorpions aren’t deadly, but their sting does hurt like crazy). But it never occurred to me to check my gloves.
Luckily this glove started moving when I picked it up, so I didn’t stick my hand in it yet. You can imagine I dropped it immediatly (I may have screamed).
And then it took me ten minutes to get that lizard out. They act dead when they feel threatened, so poking with a stick didn”t work. I was too scared to pick the glove up with my hands (some of these lizards have a nasty bite), so I used my long handled but very blunt pruning shears and accepted the risk that I would cut off the finger of the glove.(I didn’t). After a few shakes the lizard dropped out. It ran off so fast that I couldn’t take a picture of it to complete this story (how rude!).
I finally found the library! Yeah, I know that sounds silly, but they moved in the summer (when we were away) and I just couldn’t find the adress they listed on the website (google maps isn’t all that acurate here). But two weeks ago, I suddenly saw them, right at the side of the road I drive on almost weekly, because it connects the two supermarkets I go to most frequently. That’s so great!
I usually get books on alternative medicine or regional history and stories from the library. They have a lot of books in their collection that are no longer for sale.
What I took home with me this time, top to bottom: – in the 60’s a priest asked local people for stories about the past and lore. He wrote them all down without comments or analyzing. His books are such a great source! – a book about menopause. I’m still trying to figure out some facts about that. – the first book of our famous island herbalist. I bought the other one, but this one is out of print. I have borrowed this many, many times and I’m slowly copying the information in my notebooks. – a book about the healing powers of water. Could be interesting if they don’t go over-the-top with the spiritual stuff (that’s an extremely fine line with me)
I think they also have a good selection of fiction, but I read a lot of novels on my e-reader, so I’m never really checked those out. Since I know people will ask what fiction I’m reading: I’m on a Morgana Best binge – if you like cozy mysteries with a bit of paranormal, you should check her out. I just finished 18 (!) books in the Kitchen Witch series and now I’m binging her Vampire and Wine series. I also read Practical Magic and it’s prequel Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman. Yeah, there’s theme in my reading these days 😉
I’ve been wanting to make a post like this for a while, but I really hoped to get a list of ten and I never got that far. Oh well, baby steps. Three is good too.
One: Tea. Tea in general, but this tea is very good. And yes, drinking that specific tea means… let’s just focus on the good stuff, okay? (part of me wants to whine about being sick all the time, but I’m trying to keep myself from doing that – and isn’t this a sneaky way to do it anyway?)
Two: The birds are back! We stopped feeding them because they hardly ate any of that sugar (they are called sugar thieves for a reason), but I guess there aren’t as many flowers anymore. It’s so fun to watch tem.
Three: The sky. I know, I’m a broken record about this. But it’s true. It’s so beautiful, Sometimes I forget to look, but when I remember it always makes me feel so much better.
I’ve been browsing around on “plantstagram” and, like with most social media, I have a love-hate relationship with it. It is inspring to see other people working with plants and loving plants as much as I do. I find it relaxing to see them watering or repotting their plants. But I also have to be mindful not to get too involved with all the millenials that think they are experts because they’ve been “collecting plants since the pandemic”. It seems I’ve been doing it wrong all those years (about 40 – I got my first plants when I was 12) that I’ve been dealing with house plants. I’m using the wrong soil, the wrong pots, I water them the wrong way, I stress them out by repotting them too early and who knows what else I’ve messed up all these years.
The most silly part of this is that I actually am intimidated by these girls (and a few boys).Or at least, I was.first.
(I do that often, being intimidated by 20- or 30-year olds and their infinite confidence in their limited knowledge. That’s stupid, I know… I am working on my own confidence – it’s part of the healing I need to do.)
But then I looked around and saw all those thriving greens around me. Even after being away from home for almost five months last summer, I only lost a few. Some were suffering, but I safed them. Maybe I am doing something right?
Yesterday I bought myself two new plants, at the supermarket. not to “add a special item to my collection”, but because I felt like it (we just expanded our porch and I need more plants to dress it up) and because they were cheap . I have this “rule” not to pay more than ANG 20 (about $ 12). These were even less. I didn’t clean them, let alone quarantine them. I repotted them despite the fact that they weren’t rootbound yet, used standard potting soil and pots without holes. I did it all wrong again. So what? I’m pretty sure they’ll survive. Or at least the croton (the reddish one) will. The other one was kind of suffering when I bought it, but I like a challenge, so we’ll see what happens next.
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” — Dolly Parton (quote found here)
I was looking for a quote that would sound more beautiful, poetic, literary, magical, spiritual, I don’t know. But this one resonated with me. Because it’s the simple truth.
I’m having one of those I’m-not-feeling-so-well-weeks (actually it’s week two already) and I’m running out of blogposts. I usually have some prepared, or at least a list of ideas of what I can write, but I’m coming up empty today. I browsed last week photo’s and saw I took pictures of the clocks in our house, but I can’t even remember why I did that. Was I going to talk about time? I do think a lot about time, so I probably was.
But what was the POV for that post? That you might want to stop time, stop aging, but you can’t? That I suddenly find myself to have moved up a generation? It’s true. Since my mom died I am (at 51) the oldest woman in our immediate family and now that we have a grandson, I feel that shift even clearer. I’m “oma” now (people have been asking what I’m calling myself. “Oma” is the usual word for grandmother in Dutch, so I’m sticking with that). Lots of thoughts and feelings about that, but was that really what I wanted to share? I don’t know.
Or was I going to say the opposite? That no matter how much time passes, I find that I actually didn’t change all that much, even though I have so much more life experience? I can cope with things better now, at least on the outside, but on the inside? Still that shy, insecure little dreamer I was 40 years ago.
Maybe I was just going to muse about how time seems to fly some days, while other days just won’t end. But we all know that, don’t we? Time flies when you’re having fun.
Or was I going to write about my poor time management? About the fact that I’m just not capable of keeping a schedule and fitting everything in? I wrote about priorities a few weeks ago, but well… eating my own words now. I’m having a really hard time deciding what is most important. All the things I want to do seem equally important and I really want to fit them all in, but I could use an extra hour (or five) every day.
Anyway, to be honest I don’t even have time to write elaborate blogposts today. I have a long list of other things to do. And a headache. Oh well, I’ll manage. And at least this ended up being a blogpost of sorts.
We have an abundance of Aloe Vera growing on our property (this is only part of one of three patches). Which is very fortunate for what’s been going on with my skin these days. Yes, I’m aging and there’s not much what I can do about it, but being sick so often has kind of edged some lines that I hope are not permanent. Also, I’m losing weight and while that is not going as fast as I’d like, I can see some sagging skin happening and I want to at least try to help my skin to tighten up.
Aloe is so wonderful in itself, you don’t really need to do much to use it. I always have pieces of it (taking only half of the skin off) in the freezer for burns, insect bites and other incidents that might need aloe.
This time I took the skin off completely, after letting it drip out. The brownish stuff is very laxative and can be used medicinally, but I usually just rinse it out of the container it leaked into. I cut off the spikes, used a knife to slice off the flat part of the skin and a spoon to scoop the gel out of the curved part.
The first time, I used a food processor to make it more liquid. I read that you shouldn’t proces it too long – the more air you get into it, the faster it goes bad. I was too careful though, there were quite a lot of lumps left. It lasted over a week. I used it up before it went bad.
The second time I used my juicer and that worked even better. No lumps at all and it also lasted over a week. I kind of fell of the bandwagon using it when we went to the Netherlands, but I did notice some improvement before we left, so I made a new batch this weekend. Let’s see if we can get that skin a little bit tighter…
I’m still not sure what I’m going to use it for, but I’m sure I’ll find something. It turned out 21″ by 15″ (not stretched out), so it’s a decent size for a towel. It’s just a simple basket weave, K10, P10 5 times and repeated that for 16 rows and then switched to P10, K10. I did that for a total of 12 repeats. I added a little crochet border, but it’s hardly visible.
Oh well, good enough.
But what do I do now? I think I need a palate cleanser to be able to start a new palate cleanser 😉
It’s funny (or I try to convince myself it’s funny – it’s also a bit frustrating); everytime I write a gardenpost I am so, so sure, that the next one will be a more cohesive and structured one, one with “see how much this grew”, and “look, I planted this”. But gardening here just isn’t structured, especially not when I sometimes leave for weeks (or months) and also sometimes just don’t have the energy to do all the work. Things get out of control pretty fast here.
So, I’m back to the chaos of digging out our driveway and the paths to my garden. I don’t really mind (it’s good exercise), but it doesn’t make for beautiful pictures and informative blogposts.
But wait! There is still beauty in the chaos. Flowers, buds, beautiful leaves. So let’s focus on that.
Ah, that’s better. My next gardenpost will be… Ha, let’s not fool ourselves. It will probably be much like this one, and that’s okay. It’s real life. And isn’t it great that my life is full of beauty if I just look beyond the chaos?
I have been hesitating to post this, because maybe this is just common knowledge. But then again, I didn’t know it and it was kind of lifechanging (in a small, domestic way) for me. So here it is: did you know you can freeze eggs?
You just have to beat them and they will stay perfectly fine. I tried this for the first time in April, when we had to fly to the Netherlands suddenly and I still had eggs for a whole week in the fridge. For us, that means 35 eggs. We knew we wouldn’t return for four weeks, so it would have been such a waste.
We do leave the fridge and freezer on when we’re away. We’re on solar power, so it doesn’t cost us anything. That alone has been wonderful. I usually make sure I have some food in there to get us through the first day(s) after arriving back. We’re usually so tired and jetlagged that driving to town for groceries (a 45 minute drive) is just not an option. But we always had to make do for breakfast, because of the eggs. I tried making omelets and freezing those, but we weren’t to keen on how dry those came out. So when I heard it’s possible to freeze eggs raw, I jumped right in.
I was kind of worried when we thawed out the first batch. The color is off and the consistency is a bit lumpy. But I just beat them a bit again and make an omelet like Í’d do with fresh eggs (I don’t add milk though – just eggs fried in hot butter) and the endresult looks and tastes perfectly normal. I’m pretty sure you could easily use these for baking too.
Disclaimer: I don’t know how long these are supposed to last, but we ate the last of the April batch in August and those were fine.
So, there you have it. Just a little tip from my kitchen. Did you know this?
NOT A STATION 