I'm a Stylish Blogger - or so the Award says!

I was chuffed when I got this award recently - it's been a couple of weeks ago but better late than never, Stylish Blogger no less! - from Laura in California who blogs at Our Scented Cottage, well worth a visit. Thanks a lot Laura!

I will now tell you what the Award sharing entails, for those of you who will receive it from me - if you wish to share with your fellow-bloggers just follow the guidelines below. I don't think this one is too onerous; I have refused to pass on Awards in the past that were too difficult or intrusive, so it's entirely up to you what to do. It's all a bit of fun, not something to agonise over accuracy or factual verification thereof - even if you're using a bit of poetic/artistic licence to embellish it's not a hanging offence!

To Accept The Award Requirements: Thank and Link Back to the Blogger Who Awarded You With The Award and Share 7 Things About Yourself. Award 15 Recently Discovered Great Bloggers and contact the bloggers, inform them of the award.

Right - here goes - Seven things about me (that you were afraid to ask?!)

1. I love reading - I am in a real-world book club and an online Bloggers' Book Club - which is worth checking out and much thanks to Lily for setting it up. I am not always great at reading the required books as I am always short on time - but I try. I enjoy sharing the reviews and seeing other people's opinions on a favourite read.  Our house is full of books - hubby keeps wondering where we're going to fit any more and yet there's a certain elasticity in our bookshelves! I am always reading some book or other, usually multitasking it with something else like knitting (see 2 below!)

My latest socks project - ribbed wool socks

2. My current favourite hobby is knitting - small projects like socks (See photo) which can be done anywhere - in the car, the coffee shop, watching TV, waiting around for people, hospital appointments - it makes the wait tolerable and combined with No. 1 above is the perfect relaxation. I do enjoy crochet but I am not as good at it as I once was so I defer to my daughter-in-law-to-be who has become a whiz at it since I showed her how to make a pot-holder a few short months ago - now she's teaching me her wonderful projects! Check out her Facebook Group (Jany's Cozy Crochets) for her work. Also the advent of YouTube tutorials on knitting and crochet make it accessible to the masses and the plethora of wonderful crafty books now available have reawakened interest in these terrific pastimes.

Sofia's No. 1 Cake!

3. I have always loved baking since learning the craft from my late mother as a child - I also had a friend whose grandfather had a bakery and she taught me how to make yeast bread, something not very common in Ireland - home of the Soda Bread (brown bread made with buttermilk and with Bread Soda (Soda Bicarbonate) as the raising agent. No waiting around for proving or rising and knocking down, it's a simple fast mixing method - can be wet or dry as wished, depending on whether you want to bake in a loaf tin or shaped round or whatever you fancy. Now I mostly bake cakes, buns (cupcakes) and tarts and pies. And I have a Facebook Group (Cakes, Bakes and Tasty Treats) which showcases some of my favourite recipes, all of which I've blogged about. My most recent was Sofia's First Birthday Cake which you can see here - we celebrated the big day yesterday!

4. I never travelled outside of Ireland until I was 17, when I went overland on a youth pilgrimage to Lourdes in southern France, the famous Marian shrine. I was a helper to a disabled girl, as were a a number of classmates who'd signed up for a bit of adventure, which was in short supply in the Black and White TV days of the early 70s! We had a blast - something not usually associated with pilgrimages, but perhaps there's a clue if I say the pilgrimage  was led by that notorious party animal Bishop Eamon Casey. He was quite the man-about-town then, little did we know then what we knew twenty years later - that he was a father in more than the religious title, which was disclosed by the mother of his then 17 yr old son, a handsome American lad, whose mother had fallen for the popular Bishop's charms all those years earlier. Sadly, he was vilified by the church and sent into exile in the South American missions, in contrast to all those paedophile priests whose crimes came to light years later which were covered up by the institution all the way to the Vatican. If ever there was a case for married priest and an end to compulsory celibacy, Bishop Casey epitomised it. He was a coward of course, in that he ditched Annie Murphy and embezzled diocesan funds to pay maintenance for the kid, and he never acknowledged him until Annie Murphy went public. But theirs was a consenting adult relationship, and as such should have been acknowledged by the hierarchy. 

5. I never flew until I was 22, when I went to Tenerife on my first and only package holiday after I'd finished my midwifery. Nine of us went, all girls, all just-qualified midwives, and we were ready to party. I remember being more excited by the flight than the holiday destination - until I arrived. I had little experience of sub-tropical climes to then, and revelled in two weeks of glorious sunshine in a then largely unspoilt island just discovering its tourist potential. We climbed Mount Tiede, the highest volcano/peak in Europe (not the mainland of course, but the Canary Islands are part of Spain so they are European even though they lie off the coast of Morocco, near the Western Sahara end.

6. I lived without electricity or running water for over a year - in the African bush in the mid-80s when we worked withTutsi refugees from Rwanda near Lake Burigi, the most beautiful place between Lake Victoria and Rwanda. We drew water from the river and in the rainy season collected rainwater in a tank. That was our most basic living ever - we had a small generator which would run a light bulb or two but if you put on the cooker it would dim the lights. I cooked on charcoal and got very creative - anyone who knows those little charcoal jikos or stoves knows they're slow to fire up and can be temperamental, but I ended up baking bread with two African cooking pots - like a bastable oven, one had the bread, the other sat on top with more hot coals in it, and that baked perfect bread. Murder on the tin pots though, as the heat of the charcoal on a dry pot burnt it away after a couple of uses. Happy days, the kids were small and it was pretty idyllic for them, aged 4 and 1, and I was 8 months pregnant with no. 3 when we left for the relative civilisation of Wales and a study break.

7.  I was taught Irish for 13 years in school and I still don't speak it comfortably or anywhere near fluency. This is probably a damning indictment of the school system in how it teaches Irish as a compulsory subject which was foisted on us, as it still is. In fact, it was so forced that if you failed Irish in the Leaving Cert you failed the whole exam, regardless of the rest of the exam - straight As or not. That requirement is now gone, but the baggage it carries for my generation is irreparable. I work in an Irish-speaking area and did a conversation course a few years ago which showed  me how  much I could recall and it was a fun way to learn. I see kids going to Gaelscoileanna where they're taught everything through Irish and they seem fine with it, and there's a resurgence outside Gaeltacht areas. I think future generations will be okay with the language but the teaching has to change and be relevant to everyday life. I speak near-fluent Dutch, am very comfortable in Kiswahili after years in Tanzania, and could even cope with some Lao, a tortuously difficult script and tonal language (like Thai)e that would make Serbo-Croat look like a walk in the park! 

So that's some random things to share - I tried to get a different perspective than in a previous  list for the Versatile Blogger Award I got from Mimi last year, so I hope I achieved that. I will now forward it to the following bloggers I enjoy and who won't mind being tagged with an award - I will not send it to any award-free zone! 

It's been fun to do and I hope you enjoy it too, pass it on and hopefully bring a lot more readers and followers to your blog - which is always nice. Though I write this because I enjoy the process of writing an open diary - as I see a blog - and it documents my life in a way I'm happy to share in the blogosphere. 

And the Award goes to.....

1. Mimi @ MimiinDublin 
2. Rudee @ A Knitting Nurse
3. Ann @ Inkpots n'Quills
4. Alycia @ The Curious Pug
5. Susan @ Joyous Flowers
6. Brownieville Girl @ Brownieville Girl
7. Corry & Heleen @ Dutch Sisters
8. Michelle @ MichelleTeacress
9. Peggy @ Organic Growing Pains
10. ShannonAnn @ One Size Knits All
11. Lilly @ Stuff I make, bake and love
12. Barbara @ Tanzania 5.0
13. Maeve @ The Delights of Tea and Other Things 
14. Kitty Cat @ Red Lemonade
15. Barbara @ From my Kitchen Table 

Knitting - the perfect antidote to the Irish winter

After years of abstinence, I have taken up knitting again in the past few years - I already posted on an earlier project here. I knit primarily in the winter, which as any of you familiar with Ireland know is a grim affair that calls for endless reserves of creativity and diversionary tactics, some good and some not so good, depending on your perspective.

Examples of the latter abound - vegging out on the couch watching late night trash TV, overeating every kind of calorific comfort food, and risking rickets from lack of the Sunshine Vitamin D, and osteoporosis from lack of any meaningful weight-bearing exercise - a walk around the block with the dog or to the shops for the paper at the weekends is as good as that gets.

The former - reading all those books you didn't get to bring on your summer beach holiday in the sun thanks to the punitive Ryanair restrictions on luggage and the second mortgage you'd need if you decided to bring a few blockbusters that took you into excess baggage territory. And blogging - it seems to be more a winter activity, sitting in front of the computer of an evening, whereas if it's daylight till 11pm there's an imperative to be out and doing, or agonise about wasting the daylight. Baking comes into winter activities as well, as it seems to go with the comfort eating the bad weather induces.

As usual I went off on a tangent there - but it does come back to knitting in a roundabout way. I find it relaxing and enjoyable and I can multi-task nicely - knitting goes well with reading and watching TV so I can incorporate a number of the above-listed activities -even the eating fits in!

I've been having a ball knitting little baby clothes for Sofia - a matinée jacket with a bonnet or two, and another bonnet in progress right now - and I've made a few hats for myself, along with a few scarves and the furry waistcoat I showed in my last knitting post. The more intricate patterns of the baby clothes are a nice challenge and it's very satisfying to get the desired results.

You can see some photos of them being modelled by Sofia and myself. One of the caps (the blue random-dyed cotton one) was a new style, knitted on 4 double-pointed needles from the crown to the brim, in a sock-like circle. I was pleased it worked out and it's very cosy, down to even looking like a tea-cosy!

I've been having fun this past week showing our old friend Tandy how to knit - she is a whiz at crochet but knitting was new territory for her, so we spent the evenings she was here when we weren't otherwise occupied clacking away at the knitting.

I showed her the rudiments of casting on and off, which she practiced to perfection, both the thumb and two needle methods, and then she did samplers of garter stitch and of stocking stitch. I have this book which seems to have American knitting terminology and I've had to do some mental adjustments - Casting off is Binding off in this book, and Stocking stitch is Stockinette stitch. Everything is well illustrated so I should be able to cope.

I have some knitter followers - should that be Knitters on Twitter? - and I love their blogposts on their craft, but they are so advanced I feel quite inadequate - then I remember all the fancy stuff I did over 20 years ago when the kids were small - Aran jumpers with their intricate textured patterns - Moss stitch, Blackberry stitch, Cable stitches of every variation - and themed jumpers (sweaters) with cartoon characters - Dennis the Menace of Beano fame and Desperate Dan of Dandy fame -beloved of me in my childhood and a generation later their appeal to our boys was no less diminished.