notthrowingstones.today

I try to make mincemeat in the middle of November. That gives it time to do its thing for a month or so before it’s needed.

This year…somehow didn’t happen, which is why I’m making it now, less than a week before Christmas.

Browsing the web for spice ratios, I came across a recipe for “traditional” mincemeat – with meat in, not just dried fruit.

I’d already soaked the currants and grated the apples and squeezed a million oranges and lemons (i.e. all the prep work) for my own recipe so I decided to split the mixture three ways – with meat, without meat, without brandy – and go from there, in this case directly to a shop willing to sell me Christmas biscuits and steak at 9pm. 😉

The recipe called for approximately ⅔ fruit to ⅓ beef or lamb. The preminced beef in the supermarket was mixed half-and-half with pork. I looked for steak instead. I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to proper cuts of meat so I bought 700g (total) of three different cuts of beef. Two posh Irish steaks from the deli and two reduced-price Brazilian steaks from the prepackaged fridge section. When I got them home and opened them, one of the Brazilian ones smelled really bad so I abandoned it. That brought the ratio down to 4/5 fruit to 1/5 meat, but I figure it’s still way more than usual and I’m not following any other part of the recipe so whatever.

I left the uncut steaks to marinate in the almost-mincemeat overnight.

This morning, when I came to chop them up, they fell apart. Especially the remaining Brazilian piece. The poshest one was the only one I had any chance of cutting into cubes.

A kitchen full of the smell of lemon peel and simmering mincemeat is a pretty good thing :).

Spot the meat mix:

I think it’s bizarre how different the mixtures are turning out.

Looking forward to testing how they taste in pies…

Flying really late at night after everyone else has gone home has some advantages..

Mostly that everything is empty and none of the shops try to sell you things.

My brother and I wandered out of the shop and back to the car. I stand and wait for him to open it.

My brother: *waiting for me to get in, looks round* Uh.. This one’s mine… *points*

Me: …

Turns out I’d been waiting to get into the driver’s door of the car next to his.

I am way too used to being a passenger in Germany…

It’s the last day of my holiday and I’m on a train back home. Just one (three counting the local trains at each end) with no changes between Düsseldorf and Berlin (which is a very good thing considering how much luggage I have* and how often the lifts are broken).

Besides being tired and achy and looking forward to getting home and having a bath, I am currently incredibly smug and incredibly angry in fairly equal parts.

***

I booked a ticket for myself and my bike in advance. For unknown and uninteresting reasons, the train carriages are in a different order today and the space I booked doesn’t exist at all. There is still a fairly large bike compartment though, so I set up camp here in the corner.

I have a seat, my bike and luggage was on the train and out of the way and there was enough space for multiple people with suitcases to get on at the same station and wait until they find a seat.

So far so good.

When the ticket lady checked my ticket a couple of hours into the journey she told me that I had to hang my bike on one of the allocated bike hooks. I told her it was less in the way as it was and she just repeated that I had to and added that there would be stress if I didn’t.

After a while she went away and I went back to what I was reading.

Cue the next ticket lady’s entrance.

Ticket lady 2: What did my colleague ask you to do?

Me: *shrugs*

TL2: She told you to hang your bike up on the hooks, didn’t she.

Me: Mm. It would be in the way if I did that.

TL2: We will need the space if other people with bikes get on the train.

Me: Mhmm.

TL2: Hang your bike on the bike hooks, now.

Me: Whatever. *hangs bike on hook*

We now have the following situation:

My bike is now on a hook. It is officially conforming to all the rules and regulations concerning bikes on trains.

However.

The hooks are arranged in such a manner that you can fit the maximum number of bikes into the minimum amount of space with access to each of them separately. The theory is good, in practice it only works if there are no people in the area at the same time.

Unfortunately the train before this one was cancelled so there are a lot of extra people on board. It’s not bursting at the seams but there are a lot of people who haven’t found seats in the main passenger areas and are sitting in the bike section.

My bike is now perpendicular to the windows. It is about two thirds of the width of the carriage and there is a fold-down seat directly behind it. That leaves approximately 30cm between the back wheel and the-smallish-kid-on-the-fold-down-seat’s knees. Everyone who wants to walk along the train has to squeeze through the gap. After already squeezing past the smallish-kid’s family, and before squeezing between a foolishly placed dividing wall/electricity box and a lady with a large suitcase.

I feel sorry for everyone getting on or off the train with a suitcase or a buggy, and for the smallish kid who has to stand up to let them through, BUT, I take great pleasure in watching the (large :)) ticket lady squeeze past. If anyone complains I will refer them back to her too.

***

Just to clarify, I don’t think rules (and their enforcement) are automatically unnecessary, but I am 100% against enforcing rules purely for the sake of it, to the detriment of other good things like comfort.

Not that I am personally affected one way or the other. My seat is protected by the electrical box. At least until all the bike hooks are taken. I’d have to move then. It’s unlikely though – no new bikes have arrived in the compartment since I moved mine and I doubt any will. It’s November. The chances of five more bikes needing space on this train is remote.

🙂

* I’ve been back to my friend’s house and picked up all the things she brought back from England for me.

My phone is striking.

Apps stop working mid-process, the map doesn’t know where I am, messages don’t send, emails don’t load, the camera won’t take pictures. It’s a pain.

Especially when I still have a weekend left on the road (/rails) and a million photo opportunities. The sun’s out, autumn is well and truly here and it’s golden and crunchy and beautiful. And I want to catch it, preserve it for grey days when I can’t remember what the sun feels like.

Memory full.

Please delete everything to continue.

Ok. Maybe not quite everything. But lots.

I don’t want to delete anything at all. I want to keep everything. Always. Almost always. Even the blurry photos are keys to memories of train rides, bike rides, cold hands, rushing to be somewhere else but desperate to get a picture of where I am as I go. The picture itself is often meaningless, but it reminds me to remember something else.

It’s true of my life as much as my phone. I don’t like getting rid of memories. Mostly. Sometimes I try and they refuse. Much like the photos on my colleague’s phone that kept reappearing no matter how often he deleted them.

On the other hand..my memory strikes too, sometimes. Remembering things seems hard, harder than it should be. Or maybe I’m running too many programmes at once. Hard to say.

For instance, I don’t remember when I last manually backed up my pictures. More accurately, I remember joining my phone to my computer and starting the import, I just don’t remember when it was relative to now and if it worked or not. Sometimes my computer strikes too. If it did work, I could delete the pictures I already have on the computer and make space on my phone. But I don’t remember.

Various clouds have my name on but I don’t trust them enough to just delete everything and hope for the best. My colleague asked me for help with his disappearing and reappearing photos. In the process of finding out what was going on, we discovered that his cloud is only accessible from his phone, since then, my already low view of virtual memory has sunk further.

Memory full.

Please delete everything to continue.

I won’t. I’m spending time during the boring bits of train journeys, going through the masses of old pictures and deleting the ones I probably wouldn’t miss if I really don’t already have them. It’s long-winded so it’s a good thing I’m travelling so far in the dark and/or in trains with windows so dirty I can’t see out.

I moved to Germany to be an AuPair a couple of months over 13 years ago.

I set out by myself with a suitcase and a backpack, flew a few hundred kilometres and got a bus and a train across Germany, in order to live with a family I hadn’t even heard of a week before.

Afterwards, people asked me if I’d been scared, or told me that I was brave or crazy or that they couldn’t have done that. I didn’t understand them, I was just doing what was necessary for the next step. You can’t learn a language better than if you fully immerse yourself in it after all.

I can’t claim I wasn’t at all nervous, but I had so much more to do than concentrate on it.

***

Today, I got a train from Murcia (and K) to Barcelona (via Alicante but that’s another story).

I am currently staying with people I don’t know in a city I’d never been to until last week (and even then only for a matter of minutes). I say ‘staying with’, but I actually mean I am staying in a room they’ve made free for me. Our paths hardly cross besides exchanging pleasantries and the keys.

As I lie in this tiny room, sprawled out across this bed that is mine for one night only, I realise that I haven’t ever been on holiday by myself. I’ve moved house multiple times, I was an AuPair for 3 families in 3 different places, I’ve been to conferences and seminars and schools and last year to a fish meeting. But I’ve never been anywhere by myself just because.

Purely for the fun of it.

Without a good raison d’etre.

Without a plan or a purpose or anyone I know coming along for the ride.

It feels frivolous – I’m spending money on myself without any kind of visible or tangible or describable payback. There are no course notes, no minutes. Nothing I can show to anyone else afterwards, nothing for a CV or an interview. Nothing I can point at and say, “Look. It was worth the money and effort and time off”.

I’m not spending time with anyone, not helping anyone, not listening to anyone, not filling anyone’s ears with my words. (Your eyes don’t count ;p)

There’s no one else who benefits from it, except maybe my hosts. Just me. Anything that happens, or doesn’t happen, pretty much only affects me.

It feels really weird, and unexpectedly more scary than it has any right to be.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet it also feels good.

And kind of addictive. Like a kick from a drug I haven’t let myself have for a long time, reawakening the urge to just do things without so many millions of thoughts.

I might have to do this more often.

But first I have to find something something to eat.

🙂

Barcelona here I come!

😛

There was an “antique” market held here today.

When I think of antiques I usually think of expensive furniture. In this case the antiques were a mixture of things without any obvious age limit or theme. It was more like a sale of anything old enough and/or bizarre enough not to be wanted by the original owner.

After wandering through the market and back we needed sustenance.

Luckily, Murcia is full of bakeries.

Unfortunately, not all pastries are as tasty as they look. These are filled with overly sweetened strings of an unidentifiable fruit.

Later this evening, I tried yet another good looking pastry and it was disappointingly dry and unremarkable.

In the last few days, on the walk to the sanctuary and on trips around the city, we tried various different sweet and savoury pasties. All of them had the potential to be delicious. Most of them failed. I probably use more herbs and spices and less sugar in my cooking than K does, but we both agreed that the savoury pasties are mostly bland and the sweet pastries often too sweet or too sticky or too dry or too oily.

Considering how attractive they are, it’s very frustrating not being satisfied with the taste/texture.

I signed up for Ra’s nanopoblano gig and promptly missed the first day. (ironically because I was deeply involved in a conversation about being late until the early hours of today).

Here’s to starting late and talking later 🙂

I’m taking my bike to France by train..

I thought I could spend the 15 hour journey writing and catching up with myself and re-working my website etcetcetc.

Instead I’m looking out of the window and taking numerous blurry pictures of the rivers and mountains I’m going past.

The writing will have to wait.

Train station, half past 6.

Smallish kid: “Mum! Mum! Mum! Can we stop and buy vegetables?!”

Kid’s brother: ” No!”

Smallish kid: “Mum! Can we buy vegetables, please!”

Kid’s mum: “No. We’re in a hurry to get to <Somewhere>. Wait, what?”

Smallish kid: “Can we buy vegetables?”

Kid’s mum: “What do you want to buy vegetables for?”

… And then they were out of earshot. They didn’t buy anything.

Sometimes all you need is a sunny day off to fill with a 2 hour massage and a peanut butter and chocolate brownie ice cream..

A cycle ride through the autumn colours and along the canal into the sunset doesn’t hurt either.

🙂

Written yesterday but for some reason not posted properly.