Month: May 2012

Nesting instinct

The arrival of Winter heralded a frenzy of making things. 

Autumn isn’t a great feature of the San Franciscan calendar and this year it didn’t happen at all; we woke up one morning and the temperature was twenty degrees lower than the previous day, which told us that the cold half of the year had begun.  Evolutionary psychology is a controversial area, so you might prefer a more biological explanation of the nesting instinct, or maybe it’s just that something has to be done to counteract the effect of our flippin’ freezing house, but the arrival of Winter heralded a frenzy of making things.  A cauldron of plum jam, four loaves of bread, a batch of scones, a fruit loaf (for the easiest fruit loaf recipe try this; half a kilo of dried fruit soaked overnight in cold tea, next morning throw in two cups of self-raising flour and an egg and bung it in the oven.  No fat, no sugar, your virtuousness knows no bounds, or at least until you spread it thickly with butter and jam.) 

We dug out the sewing machine from its lonely corner of the office and I ran up matching big-brother/little-brother blue fleecy pyjamas for the kids:-

boys in pyjamas  boys in pyjamas

I might not have made them identical but Joni insisted.  I am also part-way through knitting me a jumper although I’m not sure which Winter it might be finished for, and Joni has a request in for one when I’m done.  Oh and Joni and I created a junk-model aeroplane one cold wet evening.  The next job is to put up a few curtains around the place; soft furnishings aren’t a great feature of Argentina and this house appears never even to have had curtain rails, but I managed to pick up a heap of curtains in a sale the other week so it’s time to make them earn their keep.  Although if it gets any colder my nesting instinct may just give up and give way to hibernation.