Poppalina

4(8c-3) = 43 + 15c

Go on, then, you work it out. Don't forget to divide each side by 5 and 10, respectively. If you manage it in under 5 minutes, congratulations - the rest of tonight's worksheet should only take you three hours.

Welcome to Year 10 Algebra. And if your kid's only 4 years old and you think you don't have to worry about this kind of bullshit yet, think again. Blink, and it will be upon you, so I strongly advise you to get practicing, toot sweet.

I was actually pretty good at maths in school. I studied both pure and applied all the way to VCE, without ever really understanding a thing. And that's when I had The Epiphany, declaring to anyone who would listen that I wanted to be (back of hand settles limply on forehead and eyes turn heavenward), an Actress, thereby shattering my mother's dreams of me becoming a doctor, forever.

(which was a good thing, really. I loathe hospitals).

And so ended the maths.

All this happened, like, 30 years ago. None of what I learned had any bearing on Real Life. The little maths ability remaining to me has been archived in the deepest recesses of my memory and can only be accessed by......um.....

Nothing, actually. A frontal lobotomy. It's pretty much all gone, folks.

 

That said, I have been bent over algebraic equations, night after night, for weeks with the Creative Genius, whose considerable visual talents, as impressive as they are, developed at the expense of and in inverse proportion to, her numeracy skills. Just say the word, 'maths', and my baby will turn pale and need to lie down for awhile.

Leaving not a lot to go on.

You see, as far as I can tell, they don't actually teach kids maths in school, they just give them worksheets.

To take home.

For you to muddle over after dinner. Then teach your kids how to do it. And you haven't even done the dishes yet.

Yay.

So, yeah.

Good luck with that.

 

ps. Thankfully, the actress thing wore off. After that, I did something much smarter.....I became a singer. Thirty years on, I have a CV that reads like a dog's breakfast, but I can carry a shitload of coffees from one side of a room to the other.

Too Many Tomatoes

Look, I don't mean to brag, but...

My tomatoes all kind of ripened at once,

And there were a LOT of them.

 

I've harvested about 5kg every couple of days for the last few weeks.

I've given them to friends. I've taken them to work (to impress the gardeners). I've slow-roasted them (a la Maggie Beer, and very good they are, too). I've cooked pots and pots of napoli. I've even thrown them at the dog, just for fun.

I know I should have had my act together and made passata, but I didn't. Next season I will be prepared.

It's ridiculous. We're running out of horizontal surfaces. We've eaten so many tomatoes that the Creative Genius broke out in a rash, and I think I know why...

Of course, I could always stage a neighbourhood version of this:

 

 

but it seems a bit of a waste.

It should all be over in another week, and I'll go back to having no tomatoes at all.

I dare say I'll miss them in time, but right now...

This springs to mind:

 

 

 

Shula's version of Maggie Beer's oven-roasted tomatoes

Slice enough tomatoes (preferably roma, but cherry tomatoes are lovely, too) to cover two shallow baking sheets (lined with baking paper). You need to leave some space between them.

Drizzle them with your favourite olive oil and then sprinkle over a strong, fresh, finely-chopped herb, (I favour oregano, but thyme is fabulous, and I suspect tarragon would also be good. Do the same with brown or white sugar and salt and pepper.

Slide them into a very slow oven, somewhere around 140 degrees celsius, maybe even lower, depending on your oven, and leave them for hours (if you're using a fan-forced oven, turn the fan off, or make the temperature even lower. The slower they cook, the better. Keep an eye on them after a couple of hours, you don't want them to shrivel and die, you want them to slow go soft and collapse. If they show signs of caramelising or burning, take them out. Anyway, you'll know by the smell that they're ready, because your house will smell delicious.

Put them in a container, perhaps with some more olive oil, and cover. Use them in anything you want - salads, sauces, or just eat them on bread with a good, sharp cheese. They should keep for a couple of weeks, but twenty bucks says that you'll have eaten the lot by the end of the day.

Enjoy.

Joys of Summer...er.. or something like that

The Summer harvest continues. Actually getting to eat your own produce makes all that shit-schlepping and all those blisters totally worthwhile. Not that I don't enjoy shit and blisters, you understand. I garden for the hell of it, but it's such a BLAST when it works and you get this beautiful stuff that tastes.....well, tastes of anything, really. (memo to me: get that chicken coop fenced, Shula, even if you have to sell your body to do it; then you could have EGGS that taste of something, too, imagine that?).

This season's Big Discovery is the Golden Nugget pumpkin. More a sort of punklette, really. I suppose they must be a pumpkin/squash hybrid, they're so little and cute. I can't tell you what they taste like because I can't bring myself to cut one open. Because then it would be gone.

So much for yogic non-attachment.

So.

Pumpkins currently featuring as an offering to the Elephant on the Altar (and yes, I do have an altar and elephants totally dig pumpkin, everybody knows that).

 

More baking. This dough proved so fast and so violently that it escaped from the fridge and was last seen heading north towards Yarrawonga, no doubt for the exceptionally cheap gin and tonics to be had there.

Disaster followed, the final result being that every bird in my garden is now lurching about like a drunken pirate, a direct consequence of having gorged itself half to death on two loaves of freshly baked.....concrete.

I have NO sympathy for any them.

 

 

Speaking of birds, a little one told me that my spinning wheel is returning home after a long sabbatical. I'm excited. I confess, I have been missing her lately. My fingers itch to spin again.

But first, I MUST finish this!

Violin recitals, doctors' surgeries, train stations, this baby has been getting around some.

  

 

Bread and Sunflowers and I Do Hope I'm Not Boring You

My New Boss's reputation as the Nicest Man in the World is no joke. He is just a love (don't read anything into that, Marj). My induction involved a Grand Tour of the nursery, and then out for lunch, where we discussed things of Great Importance over a salmon and cream cheese bagel (or kranskys with spuds, depending on whose plate you were attending). There's actually two bosses, and I'm having trouble deciding who is the nicer. They're both so bloody decent, it kind of freaks me out.

Tough gig.

Not.

Well, the job's actually pretty challenging, but nothing that a crash course in Microsoft Access won't fix.

Anybody?  sigh.... I didn't think so.

Meanwhile, the current fiscal crunch (I do wish someone would pay me between jobs, that would be good) has rekindled my interest in breadmaking.

Y'know, I really hate shitty bread. But excellent bread is so expensive that I was obliged to take matters into my own hands.

I'm a bit rusty. I so wanted it to look like Wild Yeast's bread. But it totally doesn't. It has that peanut on steroids thing going on.

It does, however, taste excellent, so I just ate it (all) with my eyes shut.

In Garden News, I scored just one perfect sunflower this season.

 

I'm absurdly happy about it. 

 

Living

I was home today, on a Monday, for the first time in a very long while.

I made my girl breakfast and a cut lunch for her first day back at school.

As I kissed her goodbye, we tried to recall the last time I was home to do this.

We couldn't.

After she left, I cleaned up, harvested some tomatoes and thyme, and then prepped them for a slow roast.

 

It doesn't matter that they take 4 hours to cook, because

I'm

not

going

anywhere.

A 2 hour yoga session and coffee in the garden later,

and I'm as content as it's possible to be.

 

This.

Is living.