Work in Progress

My knitting is getting along nicely - it will soon be too bulky to bring in to work. I got a lot done over the last few days while I was working on my computer.
It collapsed again last night - couldn't boot from CD, rescue disk didn't find anything to rescue. So this morning I set it up all over again. My sister suggested I wipe the disk and then format it - that will be my MO next time it collapses - if it doesn't last out till my new one arrives - but while it's working I'll let sleeping dogs lie.
This jumper was started from the neck, and you can see where the sleeves will be knit down from the yoke. I like sleeves that are knit down - when the time comes to repair the cuffs, it's so much easier. In fact, I need to make a mental note to knit C's sleeves without cuffs, and then pick up and knit the cuffs down. His watch straps are very tough on wool! I have some wool left from the Guersnsey I knit a friend's son, so I'll look out a suitable pattern and start something for my newest nephew, who is nearly 6 months already. That will be more portable for bringing into work.

I promised a recipe...

so here are Chicken Kebabs with Satay Sauce.
My PC seems to have finally died, after working OK for several days. Hope the one I ordered on Friday arrives soon - I got an invoice on Saturday morning, so it's looking good.
This is one of C's favourite recipes. It serves a double purpose, because if I keep just 2 tablespoons of the satay sauce in reserve, then he gets one of his other favourite dinners - a Chinese curried beef and potato stir fry. Another one of his favourites is devilled grilled chicken, so you can see the recurring spicy theme. Along with those, there is the zesty noodle stir-fry I posted a while back, and the good safe standby of steak, fried onion and chips. With, on my side, a compulsory green vegetable.
Anyway, here are the Chicken Kebabs.
Chicken Kebabs with Satay Sauce.
To serve 4:
1 lb boneless chicken pieces (thigh, breast)
1 inch fresh ginger (1 tsp paste from a bottle)
¼ ounce minced onion
4 tsp light soy sauce
1 tblsp lemon or lime juice
1 tsp coriander, ½ tsp sugar, ¼ tsp cayenne (ground chilli) pepper
Make a marinade from all the ingredients apart from the chicken. Cut the chicken into 1 inch cubes and marinate for up to 24 hours. Thread onto skewers and grill for about 5 minutes a side, till cooked.
Sauce:
4 oz fresh peanuts, dry roasted and skins removed
2 cloves garlic
1 oz shallot or onion, finely chopped
2 tblsp sunflower oil
½ tsp each cayenne and salt
2 tsp muscovado sugar
4/5 tsp lime or lemon juice.
Freshly ground black pepper to taste.
Grind the nuts as finely as possible in a blender or coffee grinder.
Heat the oil in a pan, and gently fry the onion and garlic till lightly browned.
Add ¾ pt (450ml, 2 cups ) water, the cayenne, salt, sugar and ground nuts. Simmer over a low heat for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with pepper and lemon/lime juice.
A basic unedited photo from Farmleigh last week - I'll have to put GIMP onto the laptop for the next few days. I thought the sky looked almost painted.

Three more Bs

Last night we went for a walk down to the next railway station and back up the canal. Because we left in a hurry before it got too dark, and I'd been spending a long time picking a new PC to order, I didn't even have my pocket camera with me. And the light on the canal where the *marina* is was just lovely. Not only the evening light, but the reflections in the water from the tall light you can just see sticking up behind the buildings. Believe it or not, there is a motorway exit just beyond there! It was a major engineering feat getting the canal and the railway and the interchange - a friend studied it when he was doing engineering in college.
So - today wasn't exactly going to be the same light, not at ten in the morning, but when I went out to do the shopping I brought my camera, and was lucky enough to see the heron. I'll have to go back another day with tripod, probably, and longer lens, definitely. And I didn't have my macro either, so was pleased with how the bee one turned out.
I was going to share a recipe today, but as we have someone coming for dinner and C has left to pick her up, I think it will be tomorrow.

Break in transmission

We apologise for the break in transmission, normal service will resume shortly...

My PC woes continue. I was going to upgrade my motherboard anyway - but that meant a new PSU as well, and in order to run better graphics drivers, an OS upgrade too. And since data keeps disappearing from my hard drive, possibly that is flaky too. So in the end it was just as cost effective to order a new PC. I'll be sorry to say goodbye to this one - we built it ourselves, and parts of it are over ten years old. It still has my original dial-up fax modem in it, and my first floppy drive too. But C is hoping he can work on it and make it good enough for a spare for him...

The photo challenge on Splitcoast this week was the letter B.
I wasn't expecting to work today, only got a call at ten last night. And this morning I was taking photos of my lilies because I realised the ones I took yesterday were all set for a high-key exposure...so I only took my little pocket camera with me in the dash out the door. Even so, B's came bowling in.

Three shots of the Brazen Head, two including barrels.





A Bus advertising the Body Exhibition - bit of serendipity, that, given all the ads it could have been.

One green Bottle, sitting on the wall, one green bottle, sitting on the wall.

Blossoms and Buds - I've been nursing these through several years now. Last year I left them in a pot on the patio, thinking they would scent it nicely. I must have been optimistic to think we'd have the weather to sit out and enjoy them. They were battered by rain in a day...so this year I cut them and brought them in.


Birds having a Buffet Breakfast


Berries - the neighbours had been having a skip delivered early this morning, and the truck must have knocked these rowan berries off the tree and into the road.

Bank

Balconies


And that's not including the barbed wire, buddleia and broken bottle shots!

Farmleigh walk

We went for a walk in Farmleigh this morning. If the sun wasn't exactly shining, at least it wasn't raining. I wouldn't mind some tonight, mind you, or I'll be out watering the garden.
I'll leave some of the photos for another day, but here are a couple of some water striders on the pond in the walled garden. I was lying on my front over the stone rim, with a firm grip on the camera, because if I'd let go of it, the strap wouldn't have been short enough to hold it out of the water. I am fascinated at how you can see the dimples in the water surface where the strider is resting on it without breaking the surface tension. It was a bit problematic to focus while leaning over the water, but I was pleased with these photos. You can see the sun reflecting in the surface of one of them. It makes such a defined shadow that when we looked at the photo on the camera, we thought it was two insects mating.


We seemed to spend a long time walking round the walled garden, which is where the potentilla and rudbeckia were. C thought there was another way out, which there wasn't. At least the sunflowers I'd promised him were still in full bloom - mine aren't even budding yet.

And we got some lovely apple juice at the organic farmers market, which was more than welcome when we got home.
On an up note I've managed to restore all my emails except for a few days worth, and all my Firefox favourites, so my PC is just about back to normal. Hope to goodness I don't have to do all this again when I upgrade the motherboard soon. I shouldn't...

Recipe of the Week

Last night I decided to format my C drive and reinstall Windows, as a couple of programs were getting increasingly flaky. I've got to admit that I was more than a little disappointed when, after a format and total clean install, my Olympus software is STILL returning an error message and shutting down. A very helpful support guy made all sorts of suggestions over the course of a week, none of which sorted it out. So I had high hopes of my fresh install. Hey ho, at least I can view EXIF data in Irfanview, even if it's not quite so user-friendly.
Anyhow, it being a holiday weekend C got up late, so breakfast was almost at brunch time, and lunch wasn't till around 3. So we didn't bother with dinner - I made these muffins instead - after defrosting the freezer on Thursday I must admit even I was embarrassed to find how many cranberries were lurking there.

Cranberry Walnut and Orange muffins.
12 large muffins

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tblsp baking powder
1/2 tsp each baking soda and salt
10 tblsp / 5 ounces soft butter
1 cup less one tablespoon sugar ( 7 1/2 ounces)
Grated zest of 1 orange
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups (12 fluid ounces) plain yoghurt.
3/4 cup chopped walnuts
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped cranberries

Preheat oven to about 180C, 375F.
Grease the muffin tins (I prefer this to using paper liners, which they always seem to stick to).
Stir together the flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder.
Beat the butter, sugar and orange zest together till light and creamy.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Beat in half of the flour mix.
Beat in half a cup of yoghurt.
Add the remaining flour half at a time, alternating with a half cup of yoghurt each time.
Stir in the nuts and cranberries.
Spoon evenly into the muffin tins and bake for about 25 minutes, till golden brown. Leave in the tins for 5 minutes to cool before removing.

A photo from the archives - sitting in the Tuileries when we visited Paris last March.

A sunny day...

...so we went for a walk in the park in the evening. The reflections were down by one of the ponds. C took a little bit of persuading to go that way, as there was less direct sunlight. So when we came up from the hollow we struck across the open grassy areas and encountered the deer. The sweetpeas are my own...

Teasels and the Sparrow Family

I was out with my aunt today. The forecast was for rain, but we were able to sit out in the garden for a while before it was time to provide the tech support which is why I was really there. In fact it only started raining when I got to the train station. She has a beautiful old-fashioned rambling cottage-type garden (well, her house is a cottage. It used to be thatched, too, but the insurance on thatch is high, and at some stage she got slates on instead). Haven't had time to upload the pictures yet, but here are some teasels. And yes, they were tall - taller than me, at any rate.

Here too are more photos of the sparrows. Father and son, mother and daughter? Parent and child, at any rate!

At last...

C had a friend staying over the weekend, so on Sunday morning I was busy getting dinner organised. But within a couple of minutes of putting some seeds and nuts in the feeder, along came the usual sparrows, and also this Great Tit. He was even still there by the time I'd changed the lens on the camera. He seems to be much shyer than the sparrows, so I had to take the pictures through the glass door. If it's fine tomorrow, when I'm not working, I'll fill the feeder and then just sit quietly and see if he comes again. He's so scruffy that I can't help wondering if it's a juvenile.

The little robin fledgling came back too - he's just so adorable.


For anyone who likes reading, can I recommend "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows. And then can I recommend it again!I spotted on Judy Rozema's blog that she had been reading it with her book club. As I once worked in Guernsey, I went off to check it out, and when I was ordering something else from Amazon I bought it. Quite apart from all the memories it brought back of my time in Guernsey, it was such a delightful and charming book. As it is set just after the war it deals a bit with the German occupation of the island, which I knew quite a bit about. So some pages make you almost want to cry, but then on the next page you are laughing again at the wonderful characters. I wasn't sure if C would like it, as I think it's probably more of a woman's book. I was going to lend it to his mother first, as I know she will love it. But he picked it up when he'd finished his latest P.G. Wodehouse book and he's hooked.

Late last night...

Well, the sparrow (I think) wasn't too late last night. This little fledgling appeared on the wall just as I was trying to get dinner on the table. And I had a short lens on the camera, as C's birthday present had arrived and he was opening it. So a quick change to long lens, and a bit of distraction during dinner. Thing is, I thought at first it was the little baby bluetit I've seen...alas not.

The rose came from C's sister's house. The Australian contingent stayed there most of the time that they were in Dublin. They came for dinner on Saturday, and Maria brought two roses from the garden. It was lovely to have them - we have no roses in the garden here. But she said that just as she was picking them J&G got back from golf and caught her in the act. I've been meaning ever since to take a couple of photos before they wilted too much. I left it too late for the yellow one...