Finalist in the Historical Inspiration Festival!

About a week and a half ago I entered a three of my doll costumes in the Historical Inspiration Festival - a costume festival hosted by a lovely costume blog - Story of a Seamstress.

I checked in on the blog today - and lo and behold, amazingly, one of my little outfits - the 1850s Child's Dress - was listed as a finalist in the Most Creative Category!

I'm feeling remarkably chuffed about the whole thing!

Los 33 Son Rescatos.

22 hours, 44 minutes.  Mision Cumplida.

Mr Tabubil-in-law is hearing the bells all over Vallenar.
"Chi-Chi-Chi Le-Le-LE!!  Chi-Chi-Chi Le-Le-LE!!"

The Better to See You With

My sister has moved on from Orthopedics and into Ophthalmology. 
            "And I have to tell you" she told me. "It's SQUEAMISH."
I laughed. "Really? Last week you sat in on a -and I quote - 'rather messy hip replacement' without twitching an eyebrow. Suddenly, eye exams are more disturbing/squeamy than some of the other body parts you've been playing with?"
My sister sighed. "Extend your imagination." She said impatiently. "I'm sit in a sterile room under very bright lights watching a gigantic magnified image of needles being plunged into EYEBALLS."
I extended my imagination and it went places. Terry Gilliam had mostly been there first.
            "Uh." I said eventually, inadequately, from where I lay curled up in a very tight ball in the corner of my chair.
My sister gave a gurgling laugh. "It's ALL relative. There's squeamy, and then there's EYEBALLS."

She graduates in December. She's one-third of the organizing team for the graduation ball, and has me designing the invitations. The work moves slowly.
            "I'm soooooo sorry I didn't call to talk about the drawings. I've been in conference with my fellow directors" she said, rolling her 'r's. "I'm working on my speech."
            "You get to give a speech?"
            "It's my party, isn't it?" She giggled. "You want to hear it?  It goes like this"  She paused portentously and cleared her throat.
            "AHEM.  Distinguished Guests. Families. Friends. Fellow doctors."  She paused again.
            "- and that's ALL I'VE GOT!" she shrieked, screaming with laughter.  "We're DOCTORS!"
The phone line dissolved into static and I didn't get any sense out of her for more than an hour.

Marmalade

Rain!  Lashing, sheeting, tropical rain! Rain that thunders on rooftops, washes hills into gullies, floods road and drowns whole towns. Rain!

Today was a service day at school - all the students stayed home to go puddle stomping, and we sat in classrooms and wrote term reports.
            Or pretended to. We watched the rain sheeting silver on the windows and listened to it thunder on the iron roof above us and opened the classroom door to watch the earth run deep and red below the stoop.
            We wrote no reports at all. At three o'clock it was still coming down like sheets of solid thunder, and I was editing patchy and piecemeal, so I left. I'd promised to help a friend make marmalade. Which presented a small problem - the oranges were still out on the tree.
            Sarah has an orange tree. Orange trees suit our (mostly) dry, Mediterranean -ish climate (for a given value of Mediterranean, if you're a sufficiently desperate garden center representative and you can count on your customers keeping buckets in the shower and under the laundry sink to save the overflow for their vegetables) and Sarah's was heavy and creaking with fruit. Something needed to be done before they all fell at once and turned her garden into a sweet, sticky orange swamp, and every bee in the neighborhood turned up for the feast - but it was a hell of a day for orange picking!
            We sat at her square kitchen table and waited for a lull in the storm - but each time it cleared, as we made the dash between the kitchen table and the back door, the sky spilled open again.
            So we picked oranges in a solid wall of water. Small fish swam around our shoulders and blew bubbles, and all of the plants in Sarah's vegetable garden slipped loose from the soil and floated away behind the garden shed.
            There was an air pocket under the tree. The tree was so heavy with fruit we could pick just as well from underneath as above, but the tree was so heavy with rain that every time I tugged a branch it dropped six pints of water down the back of my trousers. Which didn't notice. They'd grown gills.

Tropical rains I like. Up in Papua New Guinea, whenever the world turned to roaring water (every evening about six-ish, just in time to short out the satellite TV link and cut us off half way through the evening news) I'd go across the street and collect my two young neighbors and take them for piggy back rides.
            I went swimming when it rained. You couldn't tell where the pool ended and the air began. But the thing about tropical rains is - tropical rains are warm. You can go puddle stomping and stay out for hours without catching cold.
            This South Australian stuff was served on ice. The fish looked at me and sniggered.

We filled a laundry basket with fruit and the tree was still barely touched. Carrying the basket between us, we sprinted out from under the tree and ran for the back door. The sky roared and the rain tried to swat us flat against the ground. We slapped the screen door open and flung ourselves through. Sarah leaned against the wall  and whooped and flung her wet hair and we shook ourselves dry like a pair of wet shaggy dogs. Sarah scooted a school of minnows back out the door with her foot and we trod, our socks squelching, back into the kitchen and made marmalade.
           I have a row of jars lined up in my pantry to eat tomorrow morning with bread and butter.  It is the very best marmalade; tart and biting and only very delicately edged with sweet.

The Christmas Cake

Before the winter flu season hit, I baked my Christmas Cake.
            In Australia, if you're properly serious about it, Christmas starts in August. For Australians - at least those of us of anglo-Christian heritage - Christmas serves the same traditional role as the USA-ian thanksgiving. This is the holiday where families gather together. Come hell or high water, howsoever far we need to travel, we do our damnedest to get back home for Christmas week.
            This is the southern hemisphere, and Christmas is held in high summer, so the celebrating is done antipodean style - picnics on a lawn, BBQs on the beach. If we do a ham or a turkey it's leavened with seafood and salads and fruit, but when it comes to dessert, we live in a cultural blind spot: we cook the way our ancestors cooked when Christmas happened under six feet of snow and food was there to build bulk and sequester body heat.
            We bake and we boil. Steamed puddings, boiled puddings, mince pies, slow-baked fruit cakes. My parents have boiled Christmas puddings in the steaming heat of the Papua New Guinean Jungle and when it comes to the Christmas Fruit Cake - the Tabubil family embraces Tradition with both arms and goes well and truly off the deep end.

In August or September you gather your fruit. A pound or two of raisins, the same of sultanas, another of currants, candied citrus peel and cherries, crystallized ginger and pineapple, glace apricots and peaches and pears and figs and oranges and kiwi-fruit and quangdongs and cantaloupe (if you can find it) all chopped into little pieces no larger than a raisin. When you have a lasagna pan overflowing with sweetly aromatic fruit, you begin to add the alcohol. Slowly, pouring and turning and stirring and resting, over the course of a week you pour in bottle of brandy - and then another. As the fruit swells, you move the overflow into another great bowl and tend to both. The house smell thick and alcoholic - 
            "Like a distillery" Mr Tabubil sniffs ardently, "but in a good way."
            When the fruit is soft and swollen, and boozy sugar syrup oozes at the bottom of the pan, you make your cake.  Butter and sugar, eggs and apricot jam, flour for mortar, and spices (nutmeg and cinnamon and allspice) to earth the heady, alcoholic notes. Stir in the fruit. Slowly. Use a wooden spoon - metal spoons bend under the awesome pressure of the mix.
            Line the largest cake tin you own (and you have hunted down this one specially) with brown paper, building it up high over the edges of the tin to buttress the towering mountain of cake batter.
It’s a solid mix - like concrete. Fill the tin and drop it on the floor from shoulder height - Bam!
The impact shakes the kitchen and, only incidentally, flattens out the air pockets in the batter.
            And then you bake. Slowly, and for hours. Last year was my first solo - I started too late in the day and baked until eleven at night - and sat up until six in the morning, high on brandy fumes.
            Cool the cake and wrap it in glad-wrap and foil and kitchen towels, and tuck it away at the bottom of a cool pantry to mature and marinate for four months or so, and by the end of December, the cake is ready to ice: a coating of jam, a layer of marzipan, rolled thin, and then - c'est voila and sacre bleu - The Royal Icing!  You see it on wedding cakes - thick and white and silky. It tastes Terrible, but it gives the cake the look, n'est-ce pas?
            In Australia, you can buy your Royal Icing in bricks in the supermarket, but elsewhere we found the packaged stuff to be unobtainable - so we made our own.
            Icing the cake was the job of a full afternoon. We'd lay old sheets on the kitchen floor, put on disposable clothes and knead sugar and egg whites and glycerin until the entire kitchen was coated in a faint sticky sheen and we were just plain unspeakable.
            And last: a wrap of tinsel or Christmas paper, and a tableaux on top - a silver mirror for a frozen lake, small plastic fir trees and skaters and sleighs with reindeer, and you have a Christmas cake - a fruit cake with the density of plutonium and an envelope of solid sugar syrup - perfect for the end of an enormous meal on a sweltering summer afternoon.

Well, we think so.

In all honor, not much of that tremendous cake is consumed on Christmas day. It's served in thin wedges - intended for delicate nibbling around a cup of tea. For the remainder of the Christmas season, every visitor to your home - however casual or fleeting - is served tea and cake, and the visit becomes an honorary one. The cake is baked for the family, and as long as it lasts - so are they.

Spring Grass

The first mown grass of spring!
            The moan of a whipper-snipper outside your window, the thick green smell of freshly cut grass - intoxicating odor! Threads of it fizz and burst inside your stomach and brain like New Years fireworks, sending you wild to climb out the window and be off - somewhere- anywhere, traveling by cartwheels and handsprings and running for miles and miles without stopping until the long fuse sizzling inside your belly burns itself out. Sometime next February.
            Or whenever the flies get too much to bear - in November sometime, probably. This is the outback, and the warm weather is waking the insects up. Yesterday I saw my first fly-swarm of the season - a boiling black cloud, buzzing fretfully against an iron fence. Smaller flying things are waking too - tiny stingless winged ants, so small that they pass right through our window screens and make pale clouds around our ceiling lights.

Mr Tabubil is not particularly fond of Australian insect-life, stingless or not.

He does not like it at ALL.

Last night I caught him with the vacuum cleaner again - vacuuming tiny insects right out of the air.

I'll Huff and I'll Puff and - and....I'll, ah... Um.

I am developing my very own Teacher Voice. It's a good one.  Like a Bad Russian Accent in a Bond movie, my Voice is built up around a total lack of upward inflection-  flat and leaden and expressionless and telling you that this is how the world simply - very very simply - IS. There is no appeal, no exception, no explanation, no second chances.
Sometimes it even works.

But mostly it doesn't.
Like this:
"MOVE AWAY from the color printer, Robert. STOP TRYING to unscrew the lid.  NOW, please.  NOW.  Despite my use of the word 'PLEASE', this was not a request.  You are going to put your hand down, and move away from the printer and you have three seconds in which to do it or I'm writing you up in your diary.
Yes, I am very scarey.  Thank you Robert.
ONE. TWO - THR-

Oh, why THANK you, Robert.

NOW put down that filing drawerRobert.  Take that filing drawer off off your head, PLEASE. Notice, again, my use of the word 'Please'. Despite appearances, it is actually a threat, delivered with a great deal of menace. Oh yes. BELIEVE me.

Why, THANK you, Robert. How very kind. Now take your hand OFF OF MARK'S COMPUTER AND SIT DOWN in THAT CHAIR AND PICK UP YOUR MATHS BOOK -

At this point the Maths book is pitched, with a fair degree of accuracy, at the blackboard - or another student's head, losing half of its pages either way, and Robert is staring at me with his arms crossed, sneering, begging for me to try something.

I'm not trained for this. I'm an architect.  Clients send us passive-aggressive emails and refuse to pay filing fees.  They don't throw things.  And if they do, you can fire 'em.  I can't even give these kids a detention.