Author: Wattle

Welcome to “Feburine”.

The eating theme for this month features fresh nectarines on our pancakes, along with chocolate ice cream. It does sound good, doesn’t it?

We are very lucky to have a nectarine tree growing at our house. The best time to pick the fruit is the last few weeks of this month. The fresh ones are delicious and we freeze some too. Thanks to cool store technology fresh nectarines are available at the supermarket for most of the summer, which covers the earlier weeks of the month of “Feburine”.

This is also the month we celebrate the great mystery bag, the sausage! Most meals will be sausages with steamed carrots, rotating the other vegetables. Sometimes fries will be substituted instead of boiled potatoes. We include a modest serve of our favourite commercial brand, hollandaise flavoured finishing sauce with the meal.

One of our favourite kitchen item sets will make three or four appearances. It consists of the heavy duty chopping board, the pizza tray and the circular specialist pizza cutting tool. We really celebrate the hot salami mystery bag! Look out for the recipe soon.

Last but not least, we are partial to some commercial brands of pre-prepared Quiche Lorraines. The egg pie bag of mystery. Have you ever read their list of ingredients? I am always totally lost by about item 28. None the less, they taste quite lovely and this month we accommodate some of them on our plate.

30 Januberry 2018

Many catalogues have images of words like “win”, “great”, and “value”. They have different font sizes and colours that can be cut out and collected, ready to be used on Collendar pages in the various seasons.

Images of phrases like “Great value” can be placed next to an image of a fruit on a Collendar page. I often do this for oranges. I might not want to eat an orange each day, but I try.

Win!

The additional task I choose in any month needs to be something which will not rapidly transform me into someone who is unrecognizable to me. A subtle transformation is taking place, but it is very slow, almost a subterfuge.

I ask of myself, could I, a hoarder, well alright, quite a distinctive hoarder, throw out one little (or big) thing each day for a month?

Yes I think I could. There would still be so much hoarded that the house will not look particularly different to me to me. The dust stirred up will settle down again. Various stacks of precious items will only be marginally less high.

Feburin is going to be busy, decisions about what to throw out can be very time consuming!

Some months I like to pick some additional task that I believe I am able to do. The amount of effort needs to be about right so that I do continue to do the task willingly, in the designated month.

A really good example is the task set in “Parch”. Soon after giving up cigarettes I set the goal to be “Each day I drink a glass of soda water”.

The amount of effort to do this is trivial, you would think, right? Wrong!

Any task needs to have a meaningful aspect to it, and so for a person who thrived on cigarettes and black coffees, the meaning starts to become a lot more apparent. Non-trivially, soda water is being substituted for some of the smokeless, black coffees. Not only that, a walk was struggled through each day, at the height of the weight gain, to go and purchase the bottles of soda water.

I would say that the amount of effort was about right and I did continue to do the task all through the month. In fact it was such a success I have kept this task set and actively look forward to it now.

Unlike some other months, no thought is required to allocate Januberry’s task. It picks itself. Watering the garden with a hand held hose, delivering a survival ration to the plants is a must do task in our scorching hot, almost rainless summers.

It is not so bad. I contemplate things, all sorts of things…