More on the SA Blog Awards

Loathe as I am to oust a classy shot of opulant chocolate from the top of my blog with this piece of blatant and tasteless self promotion, I just can't stop myself. Here at last is my widget for the SA Blog Awards!

If you haven't already voted for me and would like to, you can click on it - then all you need to do is supply your email address and submit. You'll get a confirmation email with code that you'll need to paste into your browser address bar to confirm your vote and make it valid.

I promised to share some of the other blogs I've enjoyed reading among the finalists.

Max Kaizen who plays with the cool kids of SA Blogdom and enjoys words as much as I do, frequently utilising polysyllabic epithets in appropriate contexts with great aplomb.

Trash Media whose deadpan humour is well written enough to be intelligible even to forty something mommybloggers like me.

I still haven't worked my way down the whole list but there only seems to be one other blogging mother, that is the internationally well-known Tertia, who has made infertility her special subject and written a book on her experiences. She is now blessed with twins and has the fun of double toddler antics to cope with. To see the full list of finalists look here, voting closes at midnight on Friday.

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Organic Chocolate

Green & Black’s Organic Maya Gold chocolate. I hadn’t tasted this in years. It used to be one of the weekly temptations lurking in the organic aisle of Sainsbury’ s or Waitrose, when we lived in London, a luxury but available for the occasional splashing out for a chocolate orgy. Since we came to South Africa, and rural South Africa without all the city delis at our disposal, anything organic has been a rare find. One of the things I missed at first was being able to shop for organic flour, pasta and the rest, at fractionally above normal prices, as part of the weekly grocery shop. Here we have to ‘source’ organic products or grow our own.

It is starting to improve now as awareness grows and farmers start to realise that there is money to be made from converting to organic. There are now several organic farmer’s markets around Cape Town and organic products are starting to have a presence in the city, but the market here is proportinally smaller than in Europe, trade standards not as evolved and the distance from other producer countries means that imported goods are expensive. Here are a couple of Capetonian blogs that can tell you far more than me about the state of organic living in our city: MotherCityLiving who is also a finalist in the SA Blog Awards - (don't forget to vote for us!) - and Urban Sprout.

When my husband arrived home one evening, having been requested to pick up some milk at the petrol station, not only did he bring the milk but he also triumphantly brandished a precious bar of Green & Black chocolate. Now this is a small service station beside the N7 out of Cape Town with a KFC and a grocery shop attached, busy catering to holiday makers off to the West Coast, but not a deli, nor a gourmet organic store by any means. Dangerous to have such an addictive substance available so close by!

If you are a chocolate lover and haven’t yet tried this chocolate, you must. Maya Gold is a dark chocolate with the addition of a hint of orange and spice. Unlike all other forms of chocolates in our house, which have a tendency to diminish rapidly once opened, this one has lasted a whole week, with a small taste of its intense flavour every evening enough to satisfy the senses. Seconds are possible, any more would be overkill. Think the book Chocolat where she mixes up exactly the right combination of chocolate for every customer, some with rare spices and exotic ingredients. Chocolate with mystique, a chocolate bar that lasts a whole week is a miracle indeed.

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Autumn Avo Feast

I know Autumn is on its way, when the avocados in the shops are suddenly affordable again. All through summer I’ve been turning my nose up at the over-priced facsimiles of avos that have probably been traumatised by cold storage to keep them going out of season. Yesterday the price had finally plummeted to its winter level, at last they are in season again. Now for licensed avo over-indulgence. Bread and cheeses lunches are transformed by generous quantities of creamy pale green ripe avo splurged onto fresh bread, maybe with the last summer tomatoes from our veggie garden sliced on top and the merest sprinkle of salt to bring out the flavour.

When winter is truly here and the tomatoes lose their flavour, an explosive taste combination can be had by spreading a thin layer of tangy black olive paste on the bread first before enveloping it in a mountain of avocado. One special jar from Kloovenberg, a wine estate, that does wonderful things with olives, lasted an entire winter by judicious application and jealous hoarding but now it is gone. This tapenade for me is streets ahead of caviar, which just doesn't do it for me. A visit to Riebeeck Kasteel is on the cards for when my mother visits soon! There are also the most exquisite green olives in a lime infused brine, from the Olive Boutique in Riebeeck Kasteel.

Another sign that summer is waning, is the sudden swan-song burst of heat theat often grabs us in March. It’s as if the unusually cool February we’ve just had, has frustrated the sun into a last outpouring of heat, just to keep us on our toes:

‘No relaxing into leaving windows open all day, going without suncream, leaving off the mozzie nets, thinking you don’t need to regas the car aircon, I’m still high in the sky calling the shots, we’re not at the autumn equinox yet.’

So we switch the ceiling fans on once more, put the fleeces and blankets away again, forget our ideas of getting back into cooking stews, pies and casseroles for a few weeks longer. Braais and salads are still on the menu for a while longer.

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SA Blog Awards

This is a Vote for Me post. I made the finalists in the SA Blog Awards for Best New Blog! Yippee, much excitement masquerading as sang-froid in this house! So thanks Charlotte for nominating me.

When I get the code for a pretty Voting button I’ll put it on here but in the meantime:

Please vote for me now by going HERE, ticking my blog name and any blogs in other categories you fancy. Then submit your vote. They will send you a confimation email, which has a button or link you have to click on or paste into your brower address bar to make the vote valid, don’t forget that bit. I’m just trying to rack my brains to remember if I did that with my nomination vote as none of the blogs I nominated showed up in the finalists and Charlotte's Web should have been there..darn it, I think I did but how can I be sure.... Closing day for votes is the 16th.

I have just discovered a great food blog by checking out some of the other finalists. Called Cook Sister, she is a South African living in London. Her latest post is a collection of 60 other bloggers’ pie recipes from all over the world. I was shamelessly drooling by the end, if only it wasn’t way too hot here today to even consider baking a pie. If ever you need inspiration for a pie recipe check it out – chicken pie to focaccia to venison to apple they’re all there. This is one for my blogroll.

Another great blog in the photo category is Thinking Picture. Just click on photo after photo to have an atmospheric tour of South Africa, from the comfort of your own computer...

I'll let you know any more discoveries as I work through the list

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Peace

Charlotte wrote a post about War recently, following on from a discussion that is going on about supporting the troops while being against the war itself. My initial reaction was as Charlotte says of herself to do an ostrich impression, avoid thinking about it and live my life, but then all these poorly expressed thoughts kept popping up in my head and I knew I would have to write something. The first thing that came to mind was Mother Theresa’s famous quote :

I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.
Mother Teresa

She was wise beyond measure in that simple assertion. Try for yourself. Think about the word War, observe your body’s reactions. Do you feel a tightening of fists, clenching of teeth, anxiety, an element of fear starting to tie up your stomach? Now try the word Peace. Your body relaxes, facial muscles soften, a feeling of warmth pervades you. Imagine lots of people experiencing those feelings, waves of energy rippling from them into the world, spreading their feelings and attracting back a like energy and you can understand why she insisted on the words pro-peace.

So I find that I don't want to write about the war, I would rather philosophise about peace, read what people have said about peace and keep the harsh W word away from my blog and family. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't support the troops - they are all people doing their best according to their beliefs and deserve our moral and practical support. I do think though, that when there is nothing practical we can do about it, all we can do is try to meditate, pray or just use positive visualisation to focus on peace. If we could all do that and send out that positive energy to spread over the world, maybe, just maybe it could start to make things better.

Here is a site with loads of interesting peace quotes, where I found a couple more that resonate with me:

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but on the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody, that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow, we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race, which no one can win, to a positive contest to harness humanity's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a peace race. If we have a will - and determination - to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

Maybe if every one in the US emailed this one to the White House, they would take notice!

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

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A Farewell to Nappies

It comes to us all, that bittersweet moment we’ve been looking forward to, when our last baby is finally out of nappies, not just in the day time but at night too. Hurray! you shout, no more horribly expensive, non-biodegradable, bulky packages cluttering up the shopping trolley. No more worrying about destroying the environment because you couldn’t quite bring yourselves to get into the washable nappy arena, no more smelly nappies to deal with. Just three children who mostly now look after their own toilet requirements. OK, a slightly above average amount of laundry still to do, as though youngest has moved out of nappies there is still the odd night time accident. This is the moment I looked ahead to on the distant horizon, not believing I would ever get there, back when all three of them were simultaneously in nappies, albeit the oldest only at night.

And now? Celebration, fireworks, a big roll of drums? Rather a slightly wistful backward glance as I realise that none of my babies are babies any longer, but are powering on down the road to independance at an alarming rate.

In case you are feeling at all envious of my sweet-smelling, nappy-free house, those of you still in the thick of nappidom, let me just add that our animals are compensating in a big way for our children’s completion of toilet training. Senile Dog, can’t remember why she went to the door, so trundles back through the house generously leaving balls of poo behind in imitation of a muck-spreader. Horror, whose legs are too weak to get out of the window at night has decided that the shower is the best place to relieve herself. Very thoughtful of her, as at least it is easy to scrub down, but now we have provided her with a litter tray I was hoping she would start to use that, so that as I stumble bleary eyed to the bathroom first thing in the morning to wake myself up gradually with a nice warm shower, I don’t have the rude awakening of waving of bottles of disinfectant liberally around the tiled surfaces to get rid of the cat poo.

Finally I just had to share this snippet that didn’t quite warrant a post of its own:

There are some far better product names out there. If only the marketing agencies had some four year-olds on the job:

Blu-tak (that here in SA is called Prestik and for those of you with different branding is the sticky stuff for fixing pictures and postcards to the walls that supposedly doesn’t pull the paint off when you remove it) should actually be known as Glue-Attack. I don’t know why they didn’t already think of it – youngest says Blu-tak is quite wrong and sounds silly.

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Horror’s Story

She was grandly named Horatia, after a determined character from a Georgette Heyer novel, with strongly marked eyebrows. This little black and white kitten quickly left grandness behind her and became known as Horry. Very soon though her antics landed her with the nickname Horror and that stuck.

We already had one kitten in the family, acquired, so we told ourselves, to rid the studio of the mice by which we were plagued. This tabby kitten, from a secure South London terraced house has his story told here. He strongly disapproved of a younger sibling being introduced to keep him company and from his one month older position of strength used to leap on top of her from a chair and flatten her à la Garfield. Horry had no notion of cowering into a corner though. She stood her ground, this scrawny little black scrap with big bat ears. We put her upstairs to give her time to settle in, which was our bedroom accessed via a ladder and trapdoor. The next thing we knew she came flying through the trapdoor, splat onto the concrete studio floor. Slightly winded but none the worse she let us know she was tough enough for this and had no intention of being sidelined.

Later we found out that the address we had gone to, in answer to an advert in Loot (London’s free ads newspaper) for a black kitten, was in one of North London’s roughest housing estates. She had evidently inherited a determined survivor streak from her parents. Cats anyway are naturally aristocratic, secure in their knowledge of having been worshipped in Ancinet Egypt, they transcend background.

She grew into her ears and her rightful place as queen of the studio. Roaming the tin rooves at night, she would call in at our skylight demanding entrance at three in the morning, hang out at the local pub, catch all our mice and play with them in the yard. Furious after a visit to the vets she would freeze us out, not allowing a purr if we stroked her, denying us her brrp brrp of greeting, until a few days later we would be forgiven.

She flew to South Africa when we moved here, emerging from her box after a 24 hour journey tail-up, purring, learned to keep the boistrous border collies in order with a sweep of her paw and has reclaimed her tin roof wandering in a rural setting with a look-out post high on a roof amoung bourganvillea blossoms

I’m telling her story now, because it seems like she is on her way out. We’ve been to the vets twice this week, her back legs have got very weak and they were going to X-ray today, but already her front legs are getting weaker, which means it is not an injury or arthritis but something more systemic. There are various untreatable viruses and diseases they could test for, but we have decided just to bring her home to be comfortable for however long she still has. She is still eating and purring, her eyes are still bright, she just can’t jump any more and walking is getting to be an effort. If she seems to be in any pain we’ll take her on a final journey to the vet, but for now we’ll just remember to stroke her lots and tell her how much we’ve enjoyued having her in the family.

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