Travellin' Penguin

Another week is gone and I can’t quite get over how fast this year is going. Here we are in September!

Bookish News-

I was scrolling around on Tik Tok one rainy afternoon this week. I mainly follow Book review sites and a few travel tales of people walking or bicycling around the world. I have learned how to wean out the junk on this site and find some gems. One of the pages I follow is Ann Patchett’s book store in Nashville Tennessee. She posts a book introduction every Friday. I really enjoy her and her little dog. She introduced a very interesting memoir of a book called Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. 

Debut author Mildred Armstrong Kalish, a retired English professor, records her childhood recollections in clear, concise prose. Voted one of the 10 Best Books of 2007 by the New York Times Book Review, Kalish’s Little Heathens is a compelling memoir of her hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression. As foreclosure fragments her family, five-year-old Mildred and her three siblings find refuge with her grandparents – God-fearing farmers, enjoying a modest retirement. When the “little heathens” flush the seniors and their child-rearing skills out of retirement, the grandparents deploy tough but loving bedtime schedules, Bible and prayer routines, and plenty of character-building chores. Having no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.

I really enjoyed this book very much. It has the same tone about it as Grapes of Wrath or any other Steinbeck type voice. The children had such a disruptive life yet they worked and played and the closeness and antics of family members during such a harsh time really lifted the story. If you enjoy American depression history I would recommend this book. One of the best things about this book is there is not a lot of emotion. Each chapter focuses on a different way of life. One chapter is about the farm animals, one about their garden and harvesting food. One about life in the kitchen and one about their school or their clothes. It is very matter of fact but has good character development.

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The rest of the week went by in a bit of a blur. Not much happened on Monday. Tuesday I had to take Ollie to the vet for cyst removal from the top of his head. He’s had it awhile and as it kept changing size I decided to get it removed. He needed his ears checked as well as being springtime his allergies are flaring up.

Then I went for a haircut and colour which always lifts the mood. In the evening I had my seniors group meeting. They are such a funny group. No one can hear and half can’t see and we all talk at once while enjoying a lovely meal on the yacht club premises on the outskirts of Hobart, with views of the big bridge and the river.

Ollie came home before I went to the dinner and he had a big bandage on his head. 

During the week I had a delivery of a rock tumbler and I also won at auction a small box of petrified wood. I’m going to tumble it. I have always been interested in rocks and geology and I remember my “rocks and stones” class at university I took. Geology. We also took an ornithology class in our basics at university in Michigan. Our final exam was a room set up with tape recordings of quite a lot of bird calls and we had to identify the calls. I did really well on them then ended up living in Tasmania where all the birds are different!

I didn’t have any Fullers book launch events this past week but will have one coming up.

On Thursday I had to go to the hospital to the cardiac centre and get fitted up with an ambulatory blood pressure set up. You wear it for 24 hours and it takes your blood pressure every 30 minutes during the day and hourly during the night. It was quite funny doing a pilates class when the cuff would tighten on the old arm in the middle of training and the long cord wrapped around my neck. On Friday I went back to the centre to get it removed. I struggle with blood pressure. It really does have a mind of its own so hopefully we get it sorted and see what’s going on. But not to linger on the old boring health stuff. We aren’t meant to have body parts in our conversation as we age or people will become bored with us. (quote by Germaine Greer).

Pickles has the run of the house now and is trying hard to take everything over. We are so happy she has finally settled in with our exisiting cats and dogs. But when life gets too chaotic she retreats to her cubby house. She is such a friendly lovely cat. We just love her.

On that note I am looking forward to the coming week where we have book group to discuss The Season by Helen Garner. I also have a photo club meeting where we critique photos we have recently taken and it is a very social group.

On Wednesday three of my women photographer friends are meeting up with me in the city and we’re all doing street photography. That should be a lot of fun. Four female photographers on the streets of Hobart. Rain showers are predicted which always give off good light so looking forward to seeing what we capture. Stay tuned for a few photos.

I had time to edit a few of the Bruny Island photos I took with professional photographer LukeI O’Brien in June. I’ll share a few here. It is a beautiful island about 45 minutes south east of Hobart. I was there for three days.

Enjoy the photos.

Good morning shot.

Just after sunset.

Bruny Island lighthouse. It first lit up in 1836.

Bruny has many albino wallabies. We also saw an albino possum. It was pure white but too fast to photograph.

This was taken from the Pennicott boat tour in the Tasman sea. Australian fur seals and a Pacific gull.

What are you looking forward to this coming week?

FROM MY SHELF…

I finished listening to East of Eden by John Steinbeck yesterday. I really enjoyed the book a lot once I got into it and had the characters straight in my head. Rather than wait to read a lot and finally learn who everyone is, I went to Chat GPT and asked it to list the characters in East of Eden.  Within a minute I had a complete list of the characters and who they are within the book, by family.  Wow! Would this be helpful if I were to dive into any big Russian novel. It was incredibly helpful.

I have to say I am enjoying reading older American authors as that is the America I remember and loved and nothing like it is there today. So nostalgic. People were just so different. Responsible, courteous, seemingly doing the right thing by others. Steinbeck is so very good writing about characters and dialogue. I will reread more of his books as I’ve  not read him in 50 years.

Now- the book from my shelf is one my neighbour’s (who just passed away,) sister gave me. It is a very old 1933, hardcover cook book called the New Standard Cookery Illustrated edited by Elizabeth Craig. Oldham Press Limited W,C. London. 

I laughed at the following paragraph from the book:

“I am glad to be able to present to housewives not only a large number of modern recipes but a large number of old favourites,which I have often been asked for and which I have found very few books carry.

There is one thing husbands won’t be able to say anymore if their wives use this cookery book, and that is that they can’t get the dishes mother used to make.”

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Many of the recipes are wild game, lots of butter and lard, all the old foods we don’t fix anymore.

The other thing I noticed is how much trouble these women would have had to go through to fix something relatively easy. I am typing up a recipe for Southern Corn Bread as an example.

This is a recipe one sees quite a bit in southern cookbooks from the American south. I used to make it when we lived in Florida for 15 yrs before we moved to Australia.

I could easily find corn meal there. I have made corn bread here but have used polenta as I haven’t found corn meal. So here we go.

Utensils needed:

Sieve, saucepan, 3 basins, egg beater, deep loaf tin, measuring spoons and a wooden spoon. 

Ingredients:

2 cups corn meal

2 eggs

2 cups milk

2 TBSP butter

1/2 tsp salt. 

3 tsp baking powder.

Instructions:   Sift the corn meal, salt and baking powder into a basin.  Scald the milk & add the butter. When the butter is melted add the milk & butter with the beaten egg yolks, to the corn meal. Fold in the stiffly frothed whites of eggs and bake in a deep, buttered loaf tin for about 1/2 hour.

(Temperature not given so guess the women of the world knew which to use.)

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Now there are corn bread mixes, especially in the USA and there are several steps I believe can be omitted.

I hope you enjoy some of the photos here.

Is this the oldest cook book I own now? No I actually have my grandmother’s cookbook from 1926 with a few comments strewn throughout. I find it interesting to look through these old books and see how people ate years ago. Would I want to live back then and have to cook everyday the way the women before us did? No, I don’t think so. Mr P does most of the cooking in our house. That would not have happened in the past except out of necessity. I think food would have been more wholesome in many ways but preparation is so much easier now. Wouldn’t it be fun to go back in time with a microwave under one arm and an air fryer under the other.

What is the oldest cook book you own now? Or What cook book is your favourite?

PHOTOGRAPHY

No it’s not Christmas time yet but our photo club had a great day out yesterday on a Scavenger Hunt in Richmond, Tasmania.  Richmond is a small, historical town about 45 minutes from Hobart. We met at the local bakery at ten am for a group coffee. I passed out the pens (I bought a pile of them at the tip shop for a dollar) and the paper listing the 20 items we were to photograph.

Everyone had 90 minutes to photograph as many of the items as they could. The day was a bit overcast but a fairly warm 18 degrees C (is about 64 F). It felt almost tropical.

It was a good way to end the week.

Here is a selection of the photo items.

Blossoms or flowers

Six in a row

An old shed

Two birds together. In this case, two geese a laying

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READING

Now, some other people I have been spending time with are the Trask and Hamilton families. Cyrus Track is a stern patriarch and father of Adam and Charles. Adam is a gentle, idealistic son who becomes a central character. He is so naive in his life. It is often quite annoying.

The awful character I’ve been around is Cathy Ames also known as Kate. What a wicked woman she is. And to top it off she is married to Adam who just can’t see what she is like. 

By now, most of you probably know what book I’m spending time with this week. It is John Steinbeck’s book East of Eden. I listen to it at night while I junk journal or do a puzzle. The narration is good. (Narrator is Simon Manyonda).

Adam’s friends, the Hamiltons are lovely people. He is a warm hearted Irish immigrant farmer. But his wife Eliza is a strict religious person and I have enjoyed seeing how she deals with Kate.

East of Eden is a retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. It is a blockbuster of a book and surprisingly I have not read it. When I was in my twenties, living in Michigan and going to Central Michigan University in Mt Pleasant I read most of Steinbeck’s books. However for some reason I did not cover this one. 

I love Steinbeck but I must say, having read Grapes of Wrath three times in my life, I still think that is his masterpiece.

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MORE PHOTOGRAPHY

Now for another photography trick- last week I mentioned I had a street photography project book and I was supposed to go out and find a randomly picked assignment in this book. The theme was Zoom Out. It is quite easy to do with both phone and camera. You approach an area you like and take a wide angle photo of it. It can have lots of little things in the photo but overall you are covering it all. 

I went into the city last week and sat outdoors at a favourite restaurant. I needed time alone and some people watching time. I ordered a tomato, cheese and pineapple toasted sandwich and a chocolate milkshake. I love their milkshakes as they use the big old time stainless steel (aluminium?) containers and it easily gives me two or three glasses of milkshake. The kind we used to get as young people at the drug store counter in Michigan in the 50s and 60s. As a ten year old, my mother used to think I was too skinny and she’d give me my 35 cents to go and have a milkshake almost daily after school. I think she really just wanted us kids out of the house. We’re talking 1959 or 1960. I never complained and happily sat at the counter with my milkshake. It had malt in it which is even better.

MORE NEWS- SOMETHING EXTRA

I am going to introduce another feature to my posts.

It is going to be called- ‘From My Shelf’ where I feature a book from my shelf because of its interest, uniqueness, love, or just because I like it a lot. These are the books that are huge or tiny, the ones we don’t read cover to cover. The ones with great photos or they may be older. I’ll start that either as part of this weekly blog post or on it’s own. If anyone has a preference or idea, let me know in the comments. 

COMING UP

Forward planning for this coming week?  I must focus on exercise. I am promising to get to the pilates class, the barre’ class and the personal trainer this coming week.

I will also listen to more of East of Eden so I can finish it and move on to another book. Though I never race through books just to finish.

AT THE HOUSE

On the pet front all the guys are doing well. Cousin Eddie continues to eat and eat but as he is older he never puts on weight. He is the one we worry about but he eats and is happy and under veterinarian supervision.

Ollie and Peanut (Peanny) spend more time outdoors as the weather has been quite spring like.

Pickles is walking around the house more and more. She explores it a lot while we sleep but she came face to face with our little maternal Peanny this morning and did not bat an eye. Penny does not chase her as Ollie might.

I will check on my rock tumbler too as I found a few stones that might polish up and I won a box of petrified wood at auction and I’m going to see what that does in my Australian geographic tumbler. I’ll let you know as it is a slow process. 

UNTIL NEXT WEEK

I hope everyone has a good week and does something they love with one of their interests. I have many interests and I feel if you like doing something you need to make time to do it. 

Let me know what one of your interests is that you wish you could make more time for. All the best.

Bye for now…