Shoshiplatypus

It’s been a busy week Chez Shosh.

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

Steaming ahead with the cat throw and reaching the next milestone – I have finished crocheting all the embellishments. This is how the chart looks now:

The bottom section is now blank! This means that there are no more “still required,” but all have been moved to the completed section at the top. Very satisfying!

I have also finished blocking them all now, and their appearance is much improved. Because I had so many, and they are quite small and therefore have a large sum total of circumferences, I had to do them in batches and even so, used all my T-shaped blocking pins and all my dressmaking pins for the final group!

Here is the first lot being blocked.

I have had to work on this while my hubby was out or had gone up to bed, so that he wouldn’t see what I was doing.

Here’s the next lot – paw prints.

Finally, the “peeking cats.” The shape of these is more complicated and each one required a lot of pins, so it’s no wonder I ran out!

Once they are pinned down, they can be sprayed with water and then left in the airing cupboard for 24 hours to dry. They come out lovely and flat and even. These blocking mats are so good because I can easily put them in the airing cupboard, and if necessary I could have stacked them one on top of another – they would be separated by the pins sticking up, enabling the air to circulate. However, I was able to spread them out in a single layer on the airing cupboard shelves.

I have now begun on the next stage: embroidering the features on the cat faces. I haven’t completed any faces yet but have made a start on eyes, noses and mouths.

On the left in this picture, you can see the blocked peeking cats. They have come out brilliantly.

As soon as I’d laid these out and photographed them, before I had a chance to gather them up again, guess who had to get in on the act! Ruby doing a spot of photobombing.

While my hubby was around, I obviously couldn’t be working on these because it is now getting a lot more obvious what they are. I therefore got out something else to work on.

Knitting – Purple Circles Jumper

If I hadn’t decided to make my hubby the cat throw, I would probably have finished this project by now. In fact I’d really hoped to have got it finished in time for the winter but it had to take a back seat.

I have started picking up the stitches for the second sleeve. Once this is done, I should be able to steam ahead with it while my hubby is around and we’re watching TV, and then I can return to the cat throw when he’s not around.

Once this knitting is finished, I am going to begin on the Persian Tiles throw for the new settee.

Kitties

Not a great deal of activity this week, but Ruby’s latest favourite place is sleeping up against my hubby’s arm on his chair. It does make it a bit difficult for him to do anything, though!

In this one, she is wearing what my hubby calls her “kitten face.” The innocent child asleep.

It’s all Ruby this week. Here are a couple of pictures of her in the garden – the first wandering among the daffodils and the second, sitting on her favourite rock, from which she can be mistress of all she surveys.

My other Lily

Yesterday I had an update from the Guide Dogs sponsorship folks. Here is my Lily now – she is really growing up!

They tell me: “Lily is loving life with her Puppy Raiser Carole and has been eagerly exploring her new surroundings. She shares her home with a retired guide dog Ursi, who makes the perfect snoozing companion. Look how quickly she’s growing into her fabulous ears!”

Her ears certainly look enormous! I expect her body will grow into proportion eventually. In her early photos, her ears were all soft and floppy but now she can hold them up beautifully. She is turning into a really beautiful dog, isn’t she. She’s certainly getting the look of a real German Shepherd now. Her colouring is beautiful. I love the soft gold of her legs contrasting with the strong black and white, and she has applied her eye makeup very nicely. I am glad she’s got a friend in Ursi – I said to my hubby that I wondered if Ursi was giving her lots of hints and tips on how to be a good guide dog! It’s good to know she’s now left the kindergarten (puppy breeding centre) and is now attending school.

More spring flowers

Our garden is looking so pretty at the moment. The primroses are blooming in the bank, and in the tubs where my hubby has transplanted them, and as usual we have the little wild violets. The new very pale yellow tulips are beautiful.

Food

A busy time in the kitchen this week. First of all, I made a large pot of vegan Madras curry.

Here it is, after cooking in my large stock pot. Ready for the freezer.

It’s a great recipe because it’s simply a basic curry sauce that you can put anything in. It’s a good way to use up any bits and pieces you want to clear out of the fridge before the next lot arrives, and it can be bulked up with a whole butternut squash and sweet potatoes.

Ingredients:

2 tabs ground coriander )
1 tab ground cumin )
1 tsp turmeric )
½ tsp fresh-ground black pepper )
1 tab chilli powder )
2 garlic cloves, crushed )
2 tsp grated ginger )
2 ½ tabs lemon juice )
2 onions
2 tabs tomato paste
1 14-oz tin chopped tomatoes
1 cup vegetable stock

Method:

1. Combine bracketed ingredients and blitz in a blender to make a paste.

2. Dry sauté the finely chopped onions until caramelised, adding a little water when necessary to deglaze the pan.

3. Add the spice paste and cook 1 minute.

4. Add tomato puree, tinned tomatoes and stock, bring to the boil, reduce heat and cover.

5. Cook for 15-30 mins till all is blended.

6. Cook uncovered 15 mins to reduce the sauce a little if necessary.

I can’t remember where I got this recipe so I shall feel free to share it! On this occasion, I made double quantities as I wanted to add a lot of vegetables. It took me an hour to prepare them all! Chop chop! Thank goodness for my lovely knives, especially the large chef’s knife which is the one I probably use the most in my food preparation.

Also made this week:

Allotment cottage pie. This is a Jamie Oliver recipe.

Chickpea ranch wraps. This is the filling. There is enough for the two of us for two days. It’s our favourite wraps recipe but I don’t do it every week because I don’t want us to get tired of it!

This is how it looks ready to serve (photo taken last year).

Unfortunately Tesco has stopped selling those particular wraps – there were several varieties with different seeds, herbs and spices in them. All I can get now is their own brand, plain wholewheat ones. They are very good, but I did prefer the others. I learnt the hard way with the Tesco ones, not to freeze the whole pack as it comes. The wraps stick together and it’s impossible to separate them without tearing them. What I do now is to open them up as soon as they arrive, and put a piece of baking parchment between each one, and put them back in the bag and then freeze them. This works very well.

Backing Up

This week I bought a new external hard drive for my back-ups. I’ve been running two smaller capacity ones and getting quite irritated by the tangle of cables (they are mains powered) and decided to get a large capacity drive that would hold everything. I have a huge library of media (music, spoken word, videos, photos etc.) and can’t store it all on the internal hard drive, so I have a separate “media” drive for all the music and videos, and also for the folders of photos which are complete, such as holiday photos, and various weddings and parties etc. I have been quite anxious for a while about this drive because it has no back-up and I was terrified in case it failed! I am now using that drive as the back-up drive for the media, and putting all the media and my regular laptop back-ups on the new drive. This way I only need to plug in the media back-up drive when I have created any new files, and still have easy access to the whole library.

My music folder also contains a large library of many years’ worth of Bible teachings from various conferences I’ve attended, and also downloaded teachings. There are also numerous audiobooks and audio dramas etc., and quite a lot of Dad’s old reel-to-reel recordings that I converted to mp3 some years ago. There are some real gems from the golden age of wireless (before it was called radio!). I’ve got the voices of both my parents, and my grandmother, and us as kids (mega-embarrassing!!).

Over the past few months I have also been working on converting a lot of my old DVDs into digital format to reduce space and make for easier access. This is an ongoing task and it takes quite a long time. There seem to be piles of discs everywhere… Some of my favourite old TV series and films are available really cheaply on Ebay because so many people are abandoning the format now. My hubby has reluctantly moved over to DVDs from VHS tapes in recent years (haha – he’s always a century behind everybody else!) so he is happy to take a lot of my old discs off me, although not all are to his taste, of course.

The new drive is tiny! It is also powered by the laptop via a short USB cable. It is small enough to sit on the front of the laptop and not be in the way.

It has a large 5 TB capacity, and after I had copied over all the pictures and music, it was still registering hardly anything in used space. The videos will make a difference, of course.

The backing up and transferring of files has proved more complicated than I’d hoped, because some of my collection wasn’t brilliantly organised and I had a lot of folders in various places which all needed to be rationalised. Also, the transfer of large media files between drives takes an age… It’s all coming together really well now, though, and I’ve freed up one whole 2 TB external hard drive ready to use for other things.

This has taken up quite a bit of my time this week, which is why I have got so behind with WOYWW desk visiting.

And finally…

Recently, a special close friend and I have been corresponding and chatting via WhatsApp halfway round the globe, and sharing what a blessing it is to know that despite all the awfulness in the world, those who trust in the Lord are safe. I have come back again and again to Psalm 91 lately, one of my absolute favourites:

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress;
My God, in Him I will trust.”

Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler
And from the perilous pestilence.
He shall cover you with His feathers,
And under His wings you shall take refuge;
His truth shall be your shield and buckler.
You shall not be afraid of the terror by night,
Nor of the arrow that flies by day,
Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness,
Nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
And ten thousand at your right hand;
But it shall not come near you.
Only with your eyes shall you look,
And see the reward of the wicked.

Because you have made the Lord, who is my refuge,
Even the Most High, your dwelling place,
No evil shall befall you,
Nor shall any plague come near your dwelling;
For He shall give His angels charge over you,
To keep you in all your ways.
In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.
You shall tread upon the lion and the cobra,
The young lion and the serpent you shall trample underfoot.

“Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him;
I will set him on high, because he has known My name.
He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will deliver him and honour him.
With long life I will satisfy him,
And show him My salvation.”

This was the Psalm which strengthened Corrie ten Boom as she languished in solitary confinement in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in WW2 for hiding Jews from the Nazis in Holland. The middle section of the Psalm with its references to pestilence, has particular resonance today. We were talking about the safety of being covered with His feathers and under His wings, and a couple of days later somebody sent my hubby this little video clip. Enjoy!