CuppaTea

It's been a while since I posted about any baking exploits. So here is a brief summary of what I've done in the last few weeks.

Another busy year! Most significantly, as far as I am concerned: Pride and Prejudice was published! Yay! And then there were a few wars: Argentinian war for independence Mexican war for independence Napoleon seems to have been fighting the whole of Europe (winning some and losing some) The Russians won a lot of land under the treaty which ended the Russo-Persian war The United States of America seems to have been fighting the British in Canada? And in the United States itself? Simón Bolívar led an invasion of Venezuela, and was named El Libertador ("The Liberator")   A few other random facts: Pineapples were introduced to Hawaii Australia's first coins were minted, transforming Spanish Silver Dollars into two coins: the Holey Dollar (5 shillings) and the Colonial Dump (15 pence), replacing the rum economy Mathieu Orfila published Traité des poisons , formalising the field of toxicology William Lawson, Gregory Blaxland and William Wentworth sought and

There were two women who lived next door to each other. The first woman owned a large 5 bedroom house, which she lived in with her teenage son and her adult daughter who was studying engineering at university. The second woman lived in a small 3 bedroom  house with her husband and four children. The two women knew each other by sight, and spoke briefly once or twice a week when putting their bins out or bringing them back in. One day the first woman knocked on the second woman's front door.

With the birth of a royal baby, which I am pretty thrilled about, as well as meeting the babies of a few friends over the last few weeks, I have been reflecting on how I feel about babies. Specifically other people's babies (as I don't have any of my own).

So, now that the halfway point is past, what have I accomplished so far with all this time? A lot of time spent with family, which has been great. My nearly eighteen month old niece has developed the adorable habit of taking hold of a finger on my hand to pull me to the location she has selected for me to do something for her - food or door related, usually. (I am not the only person she does this with, by the way!) Meanwhile, my nearly three year old nephew has commandeered my television in my room for his own viewing purposes. He actually pulled a video out of the pile of dvds recently, The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride . Luckily for him, I have an older television, with inbuilt video and dvd players, so he could watch the 'tigers'. Also, I have spent a lot of time in the garage and in my room, sorting through some of my hoarded items. The skip out the front of our house has been filled and collected. And I realised how many folders I have bought over the years. I just k

It seems that this random date may hold greater significance than I expected. But some of you from the USA may be able to tell me that before I begin! The Sugar Act and the Currency Act were passed in the British parliament, affecting the colonies on the American continent. It seems that this began or heightened the concern over 'taxation without representation' . John Wilkes was thrown out of the British House of Commons for seditious libel according to Wikipedia , and for 'Essay on Women' according to HistoryOrb  - although these appear to be the same thing, with Wikipedia calling it 'Essay on Woman', and it appears to have humiliated and angered his opponents, especially John Montagu the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Less political events of the year: a level 5 tornado hit Woldegk in Germany on the 29th of June Immanuel Kant published Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto , "a story, t

Now that I've shared a few things about that first week , I thought I'd follow up with a few more reflections on that first year of teaching. I was quite disappointed and frustrated with how ill prepared I was after uni to step into a full time teaching position and face all that such a position entailed. You may imagine that I spent a lot of that year angry and in tears. For the most part, I managed to keep that outside of the classroom. Amongst all the papers from that year that were in Mum's garage, I found a card from two of my Year 7 girls. They clearly spent a lot of time making it themselves - cardboard, stickers, pencil erased beneath texta, pages with their individual letters to me, and some of the neatest handwriting I saw all that year. I will again remove the names, but here is what they wrote.

This cleaning out business is so hard! And one of the things which is making it hard is my own sentimentality. I don't like to throw things away if someone gave them to me (especially as a present), or if they have memories of times or places or people attached to them. Which is why I wish family and friends had given me tackier things. Because then it would be so much easier to throw them away!

I watched the first episode of a new baking series - not a cooking show, but a show just about baking. Which is a fascinating enough distinction to make for a television show, but it lines up almost entirely with my own attitude towards food. I love to bake , but I don't necessarily like to cook . And I want to try some of the things the contestants did on this show, The Great Australian Bake Off !

I have so rarely noticed a pageview statistic which has a whole number, but in the spirit of allowing completely random dates, I thought I'd see what happened in 1700. And it was a significant year! (Just look at the length of the Wikipedia article !) Everyone seems to have changed their calendar! Protestant Western Europe (except England) started using the Gregorian calendar, Russia started numbering the year from the birth of Christ instead of since creation (I would be curious to see how they determined the date of creation before that!), and the Swedes adopted their own calendar. International attempts to set a date for any meeting must have given people headaches! And that is not to mention the complicated information about whether or not people observed a leap year! The Cascadia earthquake occurred on the 26th of January, affecting 600 miles of the North American west coast, and creating an Orphan Tsunami which hit Japan. The 'Lesser Great Fire' destroyed a subs

Going through some of the things in my Mum's garage, I found a couple of pages of reflections on my first week teaching. Before I throw them out, I thought I'd type them up and consider sharing them with you. I'm not sure why I never finished detailing the days of the week, or even Monday - there was plenty of paper left beneath what I had written (the following went just over two pages), but I suspect that I curled up and had a good cry at that point. If you are like me, and prone to crying over things you read, fetch a tissue now. Before you read the following, I would like to let you know a few things. I have typed it up as it was written, including incorrect spelling or words. The only things I have omitted are names.

While I am back for a few weeks, Mum has asked me (and my sisters) to work through all our stored items in her garage, as she would like to turn it into a playroom. She has even ordered a skip! Some things will also go to charitable organisations to be resold to people who may appreciate still useable items. Over the years I (and my sisters) have filled the garage with all the things we didn't need, but didn't want to get rid of...

There is a novel by Eric Flint and David Weber called 1633 (a sequel to a book called 1632 ) about a town from West Virginia transported through a vortex to Germany during the Thirty Years' War. Sounds delightfully unrealistic! But in the real world of actual history, what did happen in 1633? At least, according to such reliable sources as Wikipedia and HistoryOrb ... It was the year of Galileo's trail before the Inquisition, and that he was forced by the Roman Catholic Church to recant his heliocentric view of the solar system. A professorship in Arabic studies was founded at Cambridge University. A Ming Dynasty fleet beat the Dutch East India Company at the island of Quemoy. In Ethiopia the Emperor Fasilides expelled the Jesuit missionaries. Shogun Tougawa Iemitsu outlawed Christianity in Japan and began a policy of extreme isolationism. Events which appear to have happened in the general vicinity of what is now known as Germany: Samuel de Champlain reclai

I have four wonderful weeks of holidays ahead of me! And I have so much planned for those weeks, and yet not many specific, scheduled plans yet. My plans involve getting stuck into a new craft, catching up with a lot of friends I haven't seen in a few months, and spending lots and lots of time with my family. I now have two nephews and one niece to play with, and I plan to spend a lot of time doing just that before I head off interstate again. I also have a stack of books I've been waiting to read!