100 Days - 64th : supercharged flapjack

 

I have been learning all sorts of things while we have been gymming, mostly from Tish as she has been doing this stuff for several years already. I know the names of quite a few muscles, including the supraspinatus muscle, and how to stretch them. The stretching can take as much as 20 minute when we get home, but to be honest it is worth the pain because we have (mostly) not suffered from aches and stiffness from our efforts. The other important thing when exercising is protein. When you work your muscles you need to help them recover, and a hit of protein when you finish can help. I have always added bits to the basic Cranks flapjack recipe but it is a wonderfully easy recipe to supercharge with good things.

5oz margarine (butter if you fancy)

3oz dark brown sugar

couple of big spoons of golden syrup

big spoonful of molasses (for the iron)

4oz porridge oats

4oz rye flakes

2oz desiccated coconut

4oz combination of your preference: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, linseeds (I whizz up the pumpkin and linseeds in the blender) or chopped nuts

This is way more dry ingredients than their recipe so it can be crumbly but I find theirs much too syrupy. Press firmly into a tin and bake 180 degrees 20-25 mins -ish. Keep an eye on it, it's a fine line with flapjack, I like it still a bit chewy, it's easy to slip over and make it too crunchy, unless of course that's how you like it. Chop into pieces while warm, it's impossible once it's cooled. Take some with you and eat as you walk home.

#100DaysToOffload

Pandiagonal magic squares

The last week started on Monday evening with Simon Armitage (cool portrait on his website, do go and see), a Manchester Literature Festival event to launch his new collection 'The Unaccompanied'. Julie and I have seen him several times before and it was an excellent and entertaining evening, where I resisted buying the book. 

Monkey and I have been hard at work learning the capital cities of the world, so she made me a birthday cake with a map on it; she was disappointed to be unable to fit in Greenland once America was stuck on, but Africa is excellent. There were candles to mark specific capitals that I mainly failed to get right.

Then we did a charity shop trawl around Chorlton and came home with quite a substantial pile of books. I am particularly pleased with Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and Sebastian Barry. Candide and the two Asimov are for Monkey, and Ulysses is just to sit on the shelf for that moment when I feel inspired to tackle something hard.

Today Julie took me out to Elizabeth Gaskell's House to see a performance called 'Exploding Women', part of the Manchester Histories Festival, produced by the dynamic duo LipService Theatre. The show presented the chequered history of Manchester women of science, including Caroline Birley, Marie Stopes, Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker and Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw (The pandiagonal magic squares are one of Kathleen Ollerenshaw's significant contributions to mathematics.) We also had an interesting conversation with one of the volunteers at the house, about Mrs Gaskell's friendship with Charlotte Bronté, and, after my unexpected enjoyment of Emily Dickinson's biography this time last year, I am definitely inspired to read her biography of Charlotte. 

10 X 10 X 10 Giveaway post

It has been creeping up slowly over the last couple of months, but finally I have reached my 1000th post! It feels like a huge milestone, who knew I had so much to say. I decided to celebrate the things that I have enjoyed about blogging with a 10 x 10 x 10 post. 
Up first are my ten most visited posts:

10: Cool Aid Dying with 1031 visits
9: Cooking and Sewing Post with 1114 visits
8: Carol Ann Duffy with 1124 visits
7: for the home educators HESFES : long self-indulgent holiday post with 1216 visits
6: for the reptile fans Tegu Walking with 1123 visits
5: for the Philip Pullman fans Midsummer's day with Will and Lyra with 1496 visits
4: Engelby by Sebastian Faulks with 1158 visits
3: Luscious Lemon Cake with 1565 visits
2: an early poetry post, visited by many students I think Margaret Atwood Poetry with 3247 visits
1: (not quite fair on Margaret Atwood but combining two as they go together) Lizard Cake and Lizard Cake Tutorial with a total of 4985 visits

Next I give you, with much torturous decision making, my ten favourite books of the 462 that are labelled at book reviews (alphabetical for I could never rank them one to ten):

Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Words from a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie

And the final ten posts are the ten that I love, either because they mark significant things that have happened over the last few years or just times when I wrote something important to me or that I was particularly pleased with:

Don't Apologise speaks for itself, I was angry, I should write like that more often.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be is a brief post that celebrates 15 years of friendship with the Ridley Birks family. 
Two Deaths, Three Kisses and a Punchup was written in 2011 when I blogged for the Library Theatre's production of Hard Times
Monkey Quilt the Final Chapter is the result of over two years working on our beekeeper's quilt.
Favourite Moments gives the best bits from my visit to Costa Rica with my mum in 2014.
Dead Dog Poems is one of many many post written during my longstanding involvement with the Manchester Literature Festival, it was one of my favourite events.
What I Think is a course review of 'A Brief History of Humankind', of the many courses I have done with Coursera since 2013 it was the most interesting and engaging.
Night of Writing Dangerously: Monkey and I have participated in NaNoWriMo several times, and are planning to again this year.
Luggage: I have taken part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge every year since 2012, several years I have done flash fictions, and this is one I particularly liked.
Blogger (a poem) that I wrote back in 2010

I hummed and hawed about what to do to celebrate, and thought that of course there should be a give-away. I know people visit when I post stuff and I hope you get some interest or enjoyment out of reading but I thought it might be nice to know who you all are. So here are three outrageously unique tote bags that I made for my short-lived Etsy shop, so maybe if people just say hi and leave their email contact/blog link and I will pick three people at random to send them to.

Red and Black flocked satin lined with white cotton.

Brown satin with gold spirals lined with pale pink satin.

Pink paisley satin lined with pale pink satin.

The Read-a-thon cometh

Hello fellow readers, how goes the reading? We are quarter of the way through already, where has the time gone. Here is our read-a-thon cake ... it's supposed to look like a table with books and tea and cookies. We are currently waiting for dinner to arrive.
Monkey has been reading 'Cell' by Stephen King and having reached page 232 she has decided to take a break and try something else for a bit ... Mansfield Park perhaps?
I am reading 'The Martian' by Andy Weir, and have reached page 216. It is all very exciting so far, though there is a touch too much complex maths going on, explaining how to 'make' water and calculating how many calories he will need until the next mission arrives to rescue him. Things go from bad to worse but he is pretty resourceful.  I am going to stick with this until the bitter end, though I am guessing there is going to be some major heroics some time soon (I think the film will be excellent.)

The Year of the Monkey

Anything that happens in our house is a good reason for cake, but celebrations are the best reasons. The daughter formerly known as Creature has now been promoted to 'Monkey'. Alongside her application to drama school this year she applied to The Fourth Monkey Theatre Company

to join their training program, which is called 'The Year of the Monkey'. On Saturday the 1st of February she went to London for an audition. On Wednesday 5th I was at Claire's when the email arrived that offered her a recall. She returned to London on Sunday 9th for a group audition and then we waited impatiently for a week for the promised decision. Yesterday afternoon the 16th we counted the hexipuffs and realised we had 298, so we sat and knitted one each to reach 300. After she finished Creature went to check her email yet again and there was a message that said she had "made an exceptional impression on the entire auditioning panel" and offered her a place. Along with all the normal theatre stuff she will also do circus skills, stage combat and film making, and then at the end of a hectic year of productions in London they will perform at the Edinburgh Festival.

So she now gets to call herself a Monkey (participants unofficial title). 

We have done a lot of jumping up and down with excitement and then been very sensible making plans for saving the money for the fees and hunting for trusts to apply to for grants. I had spent the morning listing items on ebay because they had a free listing weekend; I can see it's going to be a regular activity over the next few months.

Techno-wizard strikes again

Creature's computer returned from the dungeon of despair today when I fitted its new SSD hard drive, in a technically demanding exercise that required a deconstruction of the case, removal of various minute screws and plastic restraining devices and the replacement of a small rectangular metal box with an almost identical small rectangular metal box. We pushed the button and waited with baited breath, only to be told to try again, which Dunk ominously said was not a good sign. Fortunately Dunk's technical wizardry far exceeds my own and we reloaded the operating system from the boot disc he had made. Now we can write at the same time and both our NaNoWrimo totals are looking much more healthy this evening.

Fortunately for Dunk my cheesecake wizardry is unrivalled in the northern hemisphere so a treat was enjoyed by all this evening ... apart from weird people who love cheese but do not like cheesecake. 

Wuthering Heights and all that

October is nearly over, the Read-a-thon has come and gone, the Literature Festival has come and gone, and NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us. I went to a lot of interesting events during the literature festival but Catherine O'Flynn's event at Waterstones on Saturday was my favourite; I reviewed her first novel 'What Was Lost' back in 2009 and treated myself to a signed copy of her new book 'Mr Lynch's Holiday'. She was a lovely unassuming woman who made you feel that ordinary people are capable of good writing and you don't have to be some kind of driven 'creative' type to make a living at it.

I didn't strictly finish 'Wuthering Heights' during the read-a-thon, I read the last few pages after I got back from an afternoon festival event. I am not sure what to write about a book that has no doubt been analysed to death. It was not what I expected, though I don't know what I did expect. It was gripping in the way that only really nasty characters can make a book; it was following a litany of people who's only pleasure in life was the manipulation and control of others. I did like the way that the tale is related by a servant, so you get a very particular view of the characters, because of course she was close and intimate with their lives in some ways and yet kept at a remove in others. Because of course it is partly about social boundaries, like the one that divided Cathy and Heathcliff, although I felt it was less a commentary on the position of women than Austen manages. I liked it much better than Jane Austen because the emotions are more real and there is less of the tedious formal politeness that blights the lives in Pride and Prejudice. I pulled out this one quote, just because it encapsulated for me the whole thing about their relationship. I definitely did not find Heathcliff very loveable or romantic but it helps you appreciate what he meant to Cathy:

"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I have watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary." (p.81)

I have been doing various bits and pieces. This is a pattern called Corinna which I have been working on for a while out of some lambswool/silk from Kingcraig fabrics. It is sort of a replacement for my lovely yellow cable jumper that I managed to shrink just very slightly, enough to make it less of a pleasure to wear ... such is life.

And here is the cowl I knitted with some homespun yarn for my sister Claire's birthday, knit to this nice simple pattern. I was a bit iffy about the whole idea of a cowl but I really liked it once I had made it so might very well do another for myself; all the benefits of a scarf but none of the bother of the dangly bits getting in the way.

 

When we were at HESFES I bought this quilted jacket. The peachy colour did not really appeal so I transformed it with a dark red dye:

And finally just a quickie of Creature's birthday cake; she didn't want to be photographed with it as usual, but Tish and I were quite proud of our efforts here.

'tis Read-a-thon time

OK, How I Live Now was a bit of a mixed bag as a film, if you're precious about the story you may find it irritating. We were more annoyed by the personality changes than any messing with the story line. Oh well. 

This Saturday we are doing that crazy thing again that is the Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-thon. Back in April Creature and I tried and failed to stay up all night but we still got a lot of reading done. I have decided to read Wuthering Heights, I feel slightly ashamed to have never read it, but we are also planning to read aloud some of The Hobbit that I started ages ago. This time we will be starting the 24 hours a little later because we are going down to Tish's open day at work; she started this term as a teacher of Animal Management at the Northenden Campus of Manchester College. Good luck and happy reading to all the participants.

It is the twins birthday today so there will be cake for tea.

This is the famous 'Hedgehog Cake' (which is the only thing I know how to say in sign language), that I have been making since the children were very small. He is made by baking the cake mixture in a pyrex mixing bowl and then covering the entire thing in butter cream icing and chopped up chocolate buttons.