MockTales and Blogging (by sarah)

My left hand isnot behaving at the moment but we have resurrected Mocktales - this was our fortnightly writing night we just did in the house and invited people to join us so especially with NanoWrimo being no more we decided it was time to bring it back properly. So far we have mainly been blogging. We've been doing MockTales just for us again for a while and have including admin for writing and poetry stuff so if I have a load of slam performance requests I will reply to them or funding for storytelling etc... but mainly I want to write.

Before covid we were having to cap the nights so everyone got a chance to just sit and write but I don't think that is going to be such an issue these days. We have done some weekend ones mixed up with CreativiTeas but nothing like the numbers we used to have.

Anyway this week I did not blog what I did was try and retrieve stuff I had written on a stupid choice of plateform - not the plateforms fault it was never designed for writers and the writings had kind of been accidental. I do have a copy of these writings but it will mean typing it all out again 🙁 Boo! But doable. The result of my search was all my images are still there but the projects with the writings in are not - sigh.

On the plus side there may be a text reading short cut but it is in a silly font that might not be so readable to the reading devices so we shall see.

This has lead me to ponder weather I want to record this story - I am not sure how to do that as my microphone was broken yrs ago now by over enthusastic kids and grandmothers. It is probably fixable but will it still be compatable with my tech? It was bought from Maplin which no longer exists or at least is no longer round the corner!

I need to investigate microphones.

OF course I invited people round and then had a horrendous migraine so spent most ofthe day asleep whacked out on pain killers and not really functioning whilst awake so only after people left did I realise that the bunny supplies where all in soak in the bath and I hadn't emptied the bathroom bin and these things shouldn't really matter but I do fret about these things but the house will never be perfect for visitors so they get a dining room of half taken down halloween decks and a kitchen where weights are being primed to paint them metallic purple to match my living room gym as I battle with the high risk of osteoperosis and so on. And I boiled milk all over the oven just before hand too!

Anyway - I hope you are all enjoying our attempt to put the blogs all back in order! And hope a few more of our writing friends rejoin our little writing parties! Also you might need to tell us you want to know about them as the social media channels we had been using are getting more unrelable and they weren't brilliant to begin with!

Alaric has written a blog post that will go live tomorrow and is now back on working on the novel/series we concieved on our first date - a mash of the two novels we were writing at the time.

We are hoping to really get going again with our writing - for Alaric they would love to write another technical book but the chapters for collections and the book he wrote are now so long ago everything has changed including who the publishing companies are!

But all of that is the grand stuff - for now we are just spending Tuesday nights writing andhaving nice drinks and snacks.

The drinks this time were:

Toffee Apple Matcha Latte made with oat milk and served with a homemade siced apple toffee apple - the toffee needed more sugar

Spiced Pumpkin Pie Sticky Chai - hot with no milk and made about twice as strong as the instructions

Pumpkin Spice Malted Hot Chocolate with pumpkin marshmallows

Didn't mean for them to all be hot brews but it was tipping it down outside!

Pumpkin and Paneer Stew (by alaric)

Equipment

1. Knife for chopping veg
2. Chopping board
3. Large hob safe cassarole dish or pan or a crock pot. With adaption it can easily be cooked in an over or slow cooker as well.
4. Oven gloves or mitts or heat proof cloth (Sarah here - ok so I also bought us knew halloween/autumn oven gloves but this one is because Jean's university house mates accidently set fire to the pumpkin ones we've had the last five years or so... so this purchase does not count for halloween decor budget ok!)

Ingredients

• One small pumpkin (sold as a "cooking pumpkin")
• Two courgettes
• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• 3 vegetable stock cubes
• 3 teaspoons of smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon of garlic salt (or separate salt and garlic, we just happened to have some nice garlic salt to hand)
• 1 tin of red kidney beans
• 1 tin of chickpeas

(Sarah here - whilst Al did all the cooking I made sure we stayed hydrated with ths lovely Spice Pumpkin Pie Sticky Chai from Bird and Blend made in the pumpkin tea pot that we got several years ago - no it doesn't matter that I am the only one who drinks tea - shhhh!)

The Why

The weather is turning autumnul, and Sarah has been nagging me to buy this pumpkin-shaped cast iron casserole dish that she's heard is in Lidl...

(Sarah here - it is £25!!! for a 3.7L oven and hob enameled metal cassarole dish compared to the Le Creuset one which is like £300 and smaller and though it is not going to be the life time cookware of the Le Creuset it has a 3 yr guarentee and Sainsbury's etc... all have cute pumpkin cassorole dishes but they are ceramic or stone ware and I have not had good luck with seasonal cookware that is ceramic - we have been lucky if it survives two years and cracks much quicker than normal cookware - we may just do a lot of this type of cooking compared to other households. Having said that Sainsbury's one is apparently £15 but I am out of halloween budget sadly! And I had already gotten us a mushroom serving bowl from ASDA for £10 back in August so doesn't count right? It was a different season! Besides I kept waiting till pans and dishes were worn out to get a nice set but Alaric keeps buying replacements so I think getting the pots and pans we like when they are affordable is the way forward rather than getting standins and never getting the nice stuff. On a more serious note I feel that the heavier the pan the more ergonomic the handle needs to be and whilst not perfect the Lidle pan has a better handle for me to grip with my sometimes defunct hands though I do prefer the style of the Creuset ones! Now back to the Alaric:)

So today I bought one, and made a pumpkin stew in it.

The recipe

(Sarah here - ok sorry we promised we would always do no nonsense recipes without the the long life stories before you get to the recipe but... but... I had to defend my honour!)

• One small pumpkin (sold as a "cooking pumpkin")
• Two courgettes

Chop 'em up into cubes of at most 2cm on a side and put them in your cooking pot, with a couple of table spoons of olive oil. Put the top on the pot and put it on a hob at high heat. Stir every few minutes while you work on the next bit:

• 400g of paneer

Chop it into 2cm cubes, and in another pan, fry it with a little oil, turning frequently until it starts to get browned on the sides. Then add 1tsp of ground black pepper, stir, and turn the heat down to minimum.

The veg in the stew pot should be looking browned in places now, and generally soft and mushy, so we can proceed to the next stage.

• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• 3 vegetable stock cubes
• 3 teaspoons of smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon of garlic salt (or separate salt and garlic, we just happened to have some nice garlic salt to hand)
• 1 tin of red kidney beans
• 1 tin of chickpeas

Add all these things to the vegetables, stir to mix it all up, and put the lid back on.

Wait ten minutes.

Add the paneer to the stew, stir, and put the lid back on the stew.

Wait five more minutes (I used this time to heat a gluten free tiger loaf in the oven, at gas mark 4)

Serve!

Oh, and the pumpkin seeds I scraped out of the pumpkin, once manually seperated from the slimy strings and rinsed, were spread on foil on a baking tray and baked at gas mark 4 for about half an hour, making them golden and crispy; they're a snack on their own:

A sensible version of this recipe will appear on Salaric Cooking for you all here.

I miss public transport! (by alaric)

When I lived in London, I used to commute on the London Underground and the busses. And in my bag, I always had my current reading book. And I'd sit and read for my journey, half an hour to an hour a day.

When I started working from home, I lost that; but I had to travel into London a few times a week to rotate offsite backups and things like that, so I still got a good hour and a half of reading time a week.

When I moved to Gloucestershire, I still had to go into London once a week, which provided a solid hour and a half of reading time each way plus some time on the Tube, which was excellent!

But that came to an end. When I leave the house, it's rare that I don't drive; and I detest having to manually steer a vehicle around, consuming all that energy and taking up space on the road! Whenever I can I take my bike or use public transport - but times when I'm not transporting passengers or cargo or am in a hurry are so rare. It was a rare treat when I went into town to visit the optician and I worked out it would be just as fast to go on my bike (slower moving than the car - but able to go through the centre of town rather than around, and can be chained up right by the optician rather than having to be parked further out and walking in!

As a society, we're in a vicious cycle: because most people have cars, businesses face little penalty for setting up a few large premises on cheap land outside of city centres, rather than lots of smaller ones nearer to where people live. And because businesses do that, people are pressured to have cars in order to be able to access services.

Even aside from the environmental costs of all those individual cars driving all over the place - and the direct financial costs of a significant fraction of the average person's income being spent on a vehicle, and maintaining it, and fuelling it - we have the all-too-common problem with a lot of things the ignorant call "progress": it leaves behind the people who can't take part. The young, the poor, and the sufficiently elderly can't drive cars, and so are locked out of accessing important services. And because they're the main customers for what local public transport (eg, busses) there is, that public transport is underfunded and poor.

This vicious cycle is somewhat avoided in large city centres, where road layouts laid down before the invention of the car are too hard to change now, and so public transport is the only practical option for most journeys. And it can be undone everywhere else, too, with the right incentives - the fifteen minute city concept, for instance. I'm sad people are opposing it, spreading misinformation to turn others against them - I'm not sure if that just comes from ignorant misunderstanding couple with a knee-jerk fear of change, or deliberate manipulation in order to prop up the fossil fuel industry.

I want a world where I can get to most places I need on my bike, and places further away by bus, tram, and train. Sure, there will be delivery vans, and emergency vehicles, and work vans for tradespeople who need to turn up on-site with a load of equipment; but the roads should be dominated by bikes and mobility scooters and busses (that the mobility scooters can drive onto!). I don't understand why governments want to spend so much on roads (have you ever looked at a motorway junction and thought about what it cost to build?) for people to spend so much to buy and maintain cars to drive on them, and spend so much time driving, and finding and paying for parking in parking lots that take up so much space. Public transport is cheaper and more accessible!

I want this solarpunk transport utopia not just because it's more efficient - less waste is better for the environment, and frees up resources we can use for fun things - but because it's also safer, and frees up our time to read and think and talk while on busses, trams and trains.

(Since writing the above, I had a particularly bad day visiting our eldest at University - delayed by missing a turn because I had ingrained muscle-memory telling me to drive to somewhere else, then delayed by a road closure, then delayed even more by being rear-ended when the car in front stopped suddenly to try and not miss a turning; I stopped in time by the car behind didn't... I'm now even more sick of driving than I was!)

Fire Balls, Space Junk and Ring Lightning (by sarah)

Wednesday on our way home from the kids drama and singing lessons we saw a weird orange light in the sky that seemed to flare but by the time we had processed it and mentioned it to each other it was just another dimming light that could have been a floating lantern or a satellite or plan wing tip - having just come back from a conference on the paranormal and tricks my mind churned with the possibilities. At first I thought it might be a satellite dancing across the sky or a launch I had lost track off - after all something was due to happen with Space Link wasn't it?

I struggle these days to keep up with launches and fly bys and some are more noticeable that others - also due to the visual distortions caused by a mix of graves disease, damage from head injury ie a blind spot my mind tries to correct for and sometimes wrong colour due to blood sugar levels mucking up my lenses - I am always suspicious of what I see. But I wasn't the only one and we talked about Day of the Triffids and I thought on how it didn't seem right for the fly bys or launches I have seen. Nor if I am honest did it look like any meteor shower I had seen including one with a confirmed landing.

Now as a family weird stuff does happen to us - the probabilities of our life are so extreme they have to be real life because you could not get away with this shiiiite in fiction and sky phenomena is one of the things we seem to be proune too. We have seen clouds with fluorescent edges, cold fire flickering in strange colours(st elmos fire), a green flash from the sunrise, sundogs guarding the sun, moon bows, transits of planets in tear drop shapes across the sun, eclipses, green skies, sand storms in spout form, strange lightning, shooting stars.

I on my own have seen, felt and heard a thunder bolt crash in a flash to the ground - the sound of it was deafening as we sat in our car by the traffic lights - a ring of lightning that arrived in Grey Towers at the end of Hornchurch town centre when I was very small - it was amazing and painful and very too close - I am not sure what the out come would have been if we hadn't been sitting in the car with its rubber insulated feet.

Alaric on the other hand has witnessed not 1 but 2 fatal air craft accidents, on of which they then spent their time administering first aid to the crowd (to be fair they have attended a lot of air shows and been a first aider/emergency response of some sort at many events).

We've seen strange fogs, and rare cloud formations, inverted rainbows, but not the aurora - I thought the translucent clouds we saw were this but they did not shift and move and are another meteorological phenomena called Iridescence or Irisidation. Some I thought could not be real like the dawn flash - but they are along with scientific explanations.

I wonder if it is just because we are outside a lot or because we look to the sky or because the improbable is still probable if there are billions of people living their lives on an increasingly chaotic system of a planet.

So I promised the kids I'd see if there was anything on meteor watch about the strange lights in the sky - and promptly forgot as not only did it remind me of Day of the Triffids but it reminded me of Smallsville - a Superman spin off taking us through the adventures of a town decimated by a meteorite strike - and I ended up knitting and watching that instead. It didn't even seem that strange if I am honest - oh another UFO - I wondered if a satellite had fallen, burning before it could crash into the surface of our world but no biggy really.

The next morning however I woke up regretting that I had failed to capture it on my phone - I had tried but it was over and we were weaving around small roads and I just took too long - now I wanted to know what it was... as a personal set completion - space junk was preferable - from a studying and travelling the cosmos point of view a meteorite would be preferable on many many levels including just not making our own sky a no go travel zone because we've created so much space pollution ie debris.

So what do we know about this fire ball? It was seen most in Scotland and Northern Ireland but others including here in the SW of England saw it, some of which are our friends who commented on my Facebook post - also if you say you saw one mysterious sky object people will tell you all their UFO stories - I like this it is interesting - if you want to share go ahead and leave a comment <3

When I initially checked it was thought to most likely be debris from something and that was being checked out - but later in the day it seemed to have become the meteor scenario - so a rock from space that exploded in our atmosphere from uneven heating caused by the friction of falling through our atmosphere and the different materials, cracks and possible things like ice evaporating to super heated steam very quickly (this process can cause serious explosions as can many gas or liquid reservoirs within things like asteroids - also there are classification systems for all of this which I am semi ignoring to use words more widely know).

WE didn't even really see a fire ball - just a flare at most and there seems to be two times floating around for the even which might be an issue with daylight saving or maybe there are two events which wouldn't be particularly surprising as natural or human origin space debris tends to scatter on its way down especially if there are explosions! Or of course people are people and they make mistakes!

I really thought it was going to be one of the star link satellites if I am honest but according to the UK Meteor Network and other such groups and bodies of experts it looks like it was a meteor and that it is likely to have landed in the sea. There is more sea than land on Earth so that isn't really surprising and I recall several lectures on the finding and not finding of meteorites and the reasons behind this - the Earth is still "accreting" were are hoovering up space dust and being bombarded with rocks and narrowly missing the big chunks of other planets that are no longer planets or never quiet formed into planets in the first place.

Of course I am obsessed with space rocks so could bore you for hours with them - I am currently trying to set things up so that I can collect micro meteorites as such projects like Project Star Dust have managed - I even rope in groups of scouts - mainly we stare at bits of sand blown in from the deserts, or rocks thrown off the road but occasionally something unusual turns up.

(I found that this post had not gone live for some reason so it was back blogged to the date of writing)

Trickle charging spare batteries in the van (by alaric)

So, my van is a former "welfare van"; originally the sort of thing that would pull up next to some roadworks, offering a space for the crew to shelter from the rain and have their lunch. The back has four seats (with belts, so people can travel in them, making it a seven-seater overall), a table and a bunch of storage compartments. But it also has a 200Ah deep-cycle battery pack and a bunch of auxiliary electrical accessories. Read more »