Blogging and Life in General

I've spent the past week thinking about my blog and where it fits in the scheme of my life at present. I've tried to come up with some times I can blog, and some guidelines for myself so that it remains enjoyable and fulfilling without taking up too much of my time.

Here's why. I realised that while I love blogging, it can end up being something that distracts me from the other priorities in my life. Here are some priorities I have identified (not in exact order of importance, but close-ish):

Me – I came up with 'me' first because I don’t tend to look after me otherwise. There always seems to be something more urgent or important that needs to be attended to. By me, I mean, making sure I get sleep when I need it, and exercise daily, and eat properly – all things that I struggle with around Munchkin’s ongoing needs and the constant pressures of study.

Boyo – because he can end up feeling rather neglected between study and baby! We are together quite a bit, but often not personally connected, so trying to spend more quality time together to build our relationship and enjoy one another's company.

God – because my relationship with him is the backbone and inner strength of my life. He’s also been rather neglected. It’s not that I don’t still talk to him, I do. Every day. Lots. But the listening has not been working so well. Doesn’t help that the Bible sits unopened. So I came up with an idea just now. I’m going to read the Word for Today each morning while Munchkin and I eat breakfast. Out loud. I figure there’s no time like now to encourage my son’s relationship with his Creator. As for other actual Bible reading time (the Word for Today is a small daily devotional), I am trying to do that in the evenings Boyo is at work. Mixed success.

Study – because I need to graduate in 4 years time for all this to be worth it! I’ve been finding it incredibly hard to get back into the study mindset after the summer break. I am enjoying my 2 papers (50% studyload) immensely now that I am 2 weeks in and starting to feel like I am beginning to connect to my study-brain again (it went on complete holiday when it wasn’t needed!). The hardest part of studying is finding the concentrated time to do it in. I can’t read while Munchkin plays. Either I read a paragraph only to realise at the end that I have absolutely no idea what I just read, or I read a paragraph and look up to discover my son has crawled halfway across the room and has something suspicious in his mouth! Crawling baby and absent minded mother are not a good combination. Munchkin’s been sleeping oddly too – sometimes long sleeps in the morning, sometimes short, and resisting the afternoon sleep no end. He desperately still needs two sleeps a day, but you try telling a 9month old that they need more sleep! So I keep thinking he will wake up, and don’t start on the heavy study, only to discover I ended up with an hour of quiet after all. I got up at 5am two mornings this week to fit the study in. And have been wondering why I feel so totally wiped out. Yeah. Combine that with one 11:30pm bedtime (lifegroup – long story), and another 11pm one (did go to bed earlier but was wired for some weird reason and didn’t sleep), and suddenly things are much clearer.

Gardening – because this helps keep our food budget lower and our quality of eating higher. And I like it. It helps keep me DE-stressed. Obviously haven’t been getting enough of that in lately then, have I?!?

Blogging – so finally we come to my blog. And discover that it is somewhere at the bottom of the priority-pile. Sadly. Necessarily. This is a hobby. I would love to have an in-depth blog with gorgeous design and pictures. But blogging takes up valuable time that I need for other things at the moment. When I started this blog, I had few hobbies, no baby, and no study. I was free. I am now fettered. Which makes it sound so depressing, which it isn’t. I have chosen to combine baby and study. I want to be qualified as a teacher. I want to be here with my son. It just means that I have less time for other things, blogging included. Maybe one day I will have more time for it. Maybe. In the meantime, I will still be here, blogging a little bit of me each week.

So here are my blogging goals:
Blog once a week.
Don’t worry whether it is deep and meaningful or not, just share something from my week. Don’t worry too much about linking or other technical stuff…unless someone helps me learn in study breaks or something.
Don’t blog when I should be doing other things.
But do keep blogging, because I enjoy it.

So there you go. I think those should be manageable goals.

Amy

Sunday, 20th February, 2011

22

22 squares and counting!




I've been watching a few tv programmes the past couple of weeks, as well as doing a bit of knitting right before bed. I'm rather chuffed with my progress and deciding when I should start putting them all together.





Amy



Sunday, 13th February, 2011

Lacklustre

It feels as if my blogging has been somewhat lacklustre recently. It lacks force, brilliance or vitality (a perfect dictionary definition of lacklustre)! I have been plodding along hoping that things might improve on their own, but now I fear that this may not be so.

Several issues are to blame for my lack of enthusiasm and drive in the blogging world. Firstly, I am now a full-time Mummy. Many bloggers are, I know. But probably most of them are not being a mum and studying. I started study again this week. Only a 50% load this year, which I must say feels incredible! I have no practicums this year. This semester I have only 2 papers. That's 4 assignments and 2 exams. Wow. Compare that to the 6 papers I had last year, and the trouble I had just working out if anything was due this week, and you can understand why I feel so much happier now.

It was a hard decision to make, as we were living day by day with the help of my student allowance. This decision has meant further upheaval which has also impacted on my desire to blog. Boyo is looking for full time work. Now that doesn't sound so bad, does it? The thing is that he has been looking right around New Zealand and even Australia. The thought of moving again is somewhat daunting. I have not felt as 'at home' in a community as I do now since I was a young child growing up in Wellington. So obviously I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave the close contact we have with both sets of parents, the amazing lifestyle of being right next to a beautiful walkway, with a private backyard, my parents garden to potter in, and an absolutely incredible church that has literally opened it's collective arms to us. Yeah, so it has been a bit hard. I think the hardest thing is not knowing what is going to happen. And not having some inclination as to what we 'should' be doing. When we moved to Australia, and then back again, I felt that God spoke to me very strongly. At present, I have a few 'gut' feelings, but nothing concrete to go on. So we've been following pretty much every conceivable opportunity we can think of, and then some. With Boyo being out of his industry for the past 18months, due to the recession and then helping me with study/baby/surviving life, it's hard for him to get back in. We're still unsure whether he will or will head off in another direction instead. So anyway, all the unsettledness has affected my desire to write. In saying all this, the fact that I am now writing about is is a good indication that I have worked through some of the issues and am feeling a bit better about things overall. Still don't know what will come next, but I am feeling more optimistic, less panicked, and more trusting that my Guide has not gone on holiday but will be working away helping us out!

I am also finding that I just don't have the brain space I need to write really good stuff. I mean, I can post pictures of the garden and little bits and bobs here and there, but I'm not getting to the nitty gritty stuff that I really want to talk about...I just don't get enough concentrated time to think it through and formulate my thoughts, let alone manage to write it all down. This blogging thing can absorb a huge amount of time, I am finding, and huge amounts of time are simply something I do not currently possess. At all. If I blog, the washing doesn't get folded (like now) or the baby ends up grizzling because I have forgotten all about him, or my study gets behind. You get the idea.

So, what I have concluded is that maybe I need to rethink what blogging is all about for the next few years. I started this blog before I had a baby. And I'd been wanting to do it for a few years before finally getting started. I really had no concrete aims for the blog, so much of my disappointment has been from unconscious ideas about what a good blog should or should not be for me. Time to think more clearly about it, and decide on some boundaries, expectations, and hopes. So now I just have to find a space to do that in! Watch this space...


Amy

Thursday, 10th February, 2011

Free Food

What do you do when someone offers you free food? Accept it of course! Only, what if you already have more than enough of your own? Hmm...

Find some friends and/or family who need it instead!

We were recently offered some cucumbers, lemons, and rhubbarb from someone's garden. The problem was that we already had cucumbers galore from the Big Garden. But we were visiting family that week, and a few quick text messages confirmed that they, and their friends and neighbours, would all gratefully recieve some cucumbers! Sorted. The lemons were also duly divied around among us all. We kept a few for ourselves, and I have been squeezing them to freeze in our silicone mini-muffin trays for using later. Tonight's dinner is salmon rice risotto because for once I have some salmon, some chicken stock, and some lemon juice. It invariably seems that whenever I feel like making this dish one or other of the main ingredients is missing from my cupboards, so I thought I'd get in quick while I know they are all here! The rhubbarb has been cut and cooked, and almost all eaten. Boyo, it turns out, is quite a fan of rhubbarb. I always forget this. There is rhubbarb up at the Big Garden, but while he is happy to eat it, not being gardening inclined he forgets that he can pick some anytime he likes. I also quite like rhubbarb but tend to forget it exists during my gardening forays. Munchkin has informed us that he also likes rhubbarb. At least the great gulping swallows of it would seem to indicate as much. So there you go. It is so nice to receive free food, and especially when you can put it to such good use.

Have you received any freebies lately? What did you do with them?

Amy

Monday, 6th February, 2011

How to Knit a Peggy Square - Part #2

I thought I would continue with peggy squares, seeing as I have finally downloaded some photos. Now I am not going to attempt to teach you how to knit. That is in my 'too hard' basket just right now. And besides, plenty of people have already attempted it, so you can always find someone else on the web to learn from if you don't happen to have a knitter next door in real life. What I did think might be nice, was to show you a few tips and tricks I have picked up over my years of knitting.

When you knit in garter (knit) stitch, if you want to add another colour, change it when your first tail is on your right. Not here. This is a photo of the front of the square.

If you look at it from the angle of the knitter, you'll see the tails are on the left. If you add a new colour here, you will get a line along the front of your square similar to the one you can see here, as if it was the back of the square (which sometimes you could do deliberately if you want a different kind of look, of course - I have even seen a whole blanket made using the technique).

When counting rows in garter (knit) stitch, each fat line is actually two rows. So I've got 12 rows of blue in the square above.

Here is the front of a finished square.

Here is the back. See all the extra lines between each colour join?

To finish off the squares, all the tails need to be tucked into the back of the square. I take mine up the rows, away from the edges, as I feel they get in the way a bit when I'm trying to crochet the squares together otherwise. I weave the tail (with a big, blunt knitting needle) in and out of one row of stitches, then double back. Doesn't need much, just enough so that it won't unravel itself. Here's one I've just done. Cut off the extra wool after you've finished stitching them in.

You might also notice there is not a tail for every time I changed wool. If you're only doing a few rows of a colour (say, 6 or less) you can just tuck the wool up the side of the knitting and keep going rather than cutting it off each time. If you want it really nice and neat, pull the old colour (the one you just finished with) in front of your current colour as you do the first stitch.

When you go to crochet or stitch your squares together, you might want to know which way around to put them. You can just randomly do them - if you are a nice even knitter you will be able to have some sideways and some top to bottom if you want to. This gives some lovely texture variation. If you're doing a pattern though, it helps to have them all facing the same way. The top and bottom do actually look different. Here's the bottom of one of my squares. See how soft and holey it is? While the top is sort of straighter, a cleaner-cut edge we could say.

Right, that's it folks. I do hope this helps with the knitting endeavours.

Amy

Sunday, 6th February, 2011

Plums

I have never really been a plum girl. I just didn't ever warm up to them much. I like the deep red fleshed Black Doris plums that my grandfather grew (I think that's the one, otherwise it might have been Omega's). Other plums have never tasted all that good, and so I just ended up assuming that I simply don't like plums.

Well, I am now rediscovering plums. Last year, we got some Louisa plums at the local Farmers Market. They were not for me, but for my parents and hubby. I tried one though and discovered they are quite nice. They're a yellow fleshed plum with yellow skin that gets pink tinges when ripe. After that 'taste' of success, I decided this year to try some more plums. The last few weeks I got some Billington and Hawera plums from a lady at the Farmer's Market. She grows just the two types of plums and picks 500 trees herself. By the end of a season she is heartily sick of plums! Understandably. She told me these plums were red fleshed like Omegas, which sealed it. I had to try some. My verdict? The Billingtons are okay. I thought they were quite nice till I got the Haweras. The Haweras are better. They are also bigger so you get more plum per stone (pip). I have decided to add both to my possible tree-growing list, which is getting longer and longer as the months go by! I really had no idea there were so many different types of plums. I guess some of that is because we get so few in the supermarkets here in NZ. In Australia, I did buy plums occassionally when they were in season - there were often 3-4 varieties to choose from at my local Woolworths supermarket. Still, I imagine that is only a fraction of the number of varieties of plums.

Lousia's are the three yellower ones at the back of the photo, Hawera's are the redder ones, and Billingtons the smaller deep purple/red (they are just a bit bigger than the little Christmas plums). Munchkin rather likes the Billingtons. He can manage to eat one per sitting (minus the seed and skin, popped in his mouth piece by piece as we have discovered plum is a rather slippery customer when faced with small fingers just learning a pincer grip!).

What's your favourite type of plum?

Amy


Tuesday, 1st February, 2011

Even More Squares!

I've completed another 3 squares while on holiday, yay! Here they are.

I suspect that may be the end of my knitting blitz for at least a few months though. Grin.

Amy

Tuesday, 1st February, 2011