A Prayer Request

We continue to have a wonderful time and have seen and experienced some amazing things.

The food is very interesting, and I have taken advantage of a few opportunities to see them cooking it now - twice in hotel kitchens and once, yesterday in a traditional farmhouse where they made everything using the old methods by hand. I can't say we really 'love' the food - it is both chilli hot and bland at the same time, but we do enjoy trying the different foods and have discovered a few favourites.

We have seen very few temples - they are not really our thing somehow, but we did go this morning to see a local temple that dates back to the 7th Century. Isn't that amazing to imagine! There is currently a prayer ritual going on there, and hundreds of pilgrims have been there praying for rain for the last few days. Alas, their prayers have been a little too successful it seems, as the monsoon started yesterday - several weeks early.

Although we are all safe and happy, I want to let you know, because the results of the torrential rain have been quite catastrophic and several people have already lost their lives in the raging rivers including two young children. (Just wait until you see our incredible photos!) Alas it seems that every time I venture overseas there is a natural disaster somewhere close by for my parents to worry about!! (Mind you, maybe Bhutan is too small to merit a mention on International News...)

Anyway, the road between the Capital, Thimpu, and the country's only airport in Paro is currently cut, which leaves us effectively stuck and unable to get out. I wonder whether you might be able to include us in your prayers. Please pray for us that the rain will ease somewhat over the next few days allowing us to leave the country as planned. Also please pray that there will not be road slides and that the airport will not close. All of these look somewhat likely at the moment.

Again I reiterate that, aside from further potential inconveniences, we are quite safe and continue to have a great time. We are in very good hands. It is at times like this that we remember Psalm 121:

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
Where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD
Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot slip
He who watches over you will not slumber;
Indeed he who watches over Israel
Will not slumber nor sleep.

The LORD watches over you.
The LORD is your shade at your right hand.
The sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all harm.
He will watch over your life.
He will watch over your coming and going
Both now and forever more.

(Written from memory - please forgive any mistakes!)

Jemimah is currently challenging her Daddy to a local game of “Parala” which uses cowrie shells, coins and dice. It looks fascinating - I might go and learn to play myself!

Bangkok Highlights

Mum:
The wonderful street food;
The blissful albeit punishing Thai massages at Wat Pho;
Exploring in the Asia Bookshop...what a surprise!!

Dad:
Reclining by the hotel pool and reading a trashy novel;
Exploring Chinatown;
Chatachak Weekend Market.

Jemimah:
The delicious tropical fruit - especially the pineapple;
Swimming with Daddy in the pool;
Daily foot massages - an affordable indulgence at $6.50 an hour!

Hong Kong Highlights

Mum:
Shopping - and buying - at Shanghai Tang;
The Sound and Light show of the central skyline from Salisbury Road;
Seeing Jemimah having so much fun meeting the Disney characters at breakfast each morning.

Dad:
The Buzz Lightyear ride;
Eating choc dipped strawberries with flecks of gold leaf at the Godiva shop;
The Breakfast buffet in the Enchanted Garden restaurant at the Disneyland Hotel;

Jemimah:
Space Mountain;
The Waterslide at the resort swimming pool
The Star Ferry across to Kowloon

While I'm gone...

...you might want to have a browse around the recently launched World Digital Library. It really is an amazing resource!

Take a look at this treasure, for example:

It's a copy of the fables of La Fontaine - in French from the mid 1800's.

There's even a 15th century copy of Aesop's Fables - with Romulus as compiler, believe it or not.


You can read these and all the other goodies online or download them as images or PDF files. I don't have time to fully explore the site, but I look forward to doing so on my return. Let me know what you think!

P.S. I heard about the site at Caustic Cover Critic here. Thanks JRSM for the link! (Caveat emptor: watch his language...)

...Bye....

Going....going...

We leave for Melbourne on Friday, and fly out on Sunday night. I'm really excited - visiting Bhutan has been a dream of mine for so long, and now it's becoming a reality!!

I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update my blog while we're away, but I plan to pop in occasionally just to let you know what's going on...our life should be pretty exciting for the next few weeks...

I've made a few bloggy changes to facilitate things from my end. I've added a Followers link so that I can keep in touch with those people who publicly admit that they read my blog. Thanks girls, it's an honour. If you want add your name to my Followers I'll be able to easily access you from my Blogger Dashboard while we're away. (Please!!) You can also follow me on twitter. There's an orange link for that on my left sidebar, or you can click below. Please make things easy for me!!!

I've also put up a poll for you to complete while I'm gone. I hope you don't mind. Let me know what you're looking for when you read my blog. You can add a comment if I haven't added enough categories. I just want to ensure I'm heading the right bloggy direction with my posts.

Finally, I'll be reading and answering comments. Please do leave me some.

I'll check in again before we leave.

...Gone

Mushroom spore prints

Rabbit trails.

That's what happened to my mind this morning...Two posts ago I started out to write about mushroom spore prints. I got distracted. Obviously. By the beautiful autumnal weather. By my home decoration. By that magnificent inspiring hymn.

Now I'm back on track. Honestly. Blame the packing...and the ironing...and the fact that I'm only halfway through my bookclub book and the meeting's tonight...Oh well.

We grow fantastic fungi in our garden in autumn - if it rains. It's hard to identify most of them, but there are gorgeous yellow waxy capped fellows, tiny white fairy umbrellas, common old puffballs, black fragile elongated toadstools, miniature white perfectly shaped ones and mushrooms, lots of mushrooms.

Most of these are edible field mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, and that's what we love to do with them - eat 'em.

Now I'm not advocating here that you go out and eat the mushrooms that are growing in your garden - especially if you live in Australia. The edibility of most Australian mushrooms is untested, and some, like the relatively similar looking death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides are deadly. You can get more info on this from this Gardennote from the Western Australian Department of Ag.

Last week after the rain, mushies popped up everywhere. We gathered them in baskets, and had a lot of fun cooking them up. There were some though, that the flies had got to before us, and they were looking decidedly maggoty. Old maggoty mushrooms are responsible for a significant number of the supposed mushroom poisonings reported each year, and while not deadly, we weren't going to take our chances with those ones. We put them aside to do something else with...spore prints.

Following the instructions linked above, we chopped off the stem of our specimen and sliced the top off the cap.

We placed it then on a white piece of paper and covered it with a bowl overnight. It was a simple as that. In the morning it looked like this:

This is it enlarged:

We gave the whole thing a spray with hairspray to 'fix' it, and then Jemimah mounted it in her nature notebook with a little bit of an explanation about the whole process.

Making spore prints was really cool. We're going to do it with some of the weird and wonderful fungi next time and see what we get from them. If they're as successful as these were, I'll post the photos!

It Is Well With My Soul

Autumn

The liquidamber dressed in her autumn finery.

Scattered with maple leaves
Where no one stepped
My garden path is better left unswept.

Kawahigashi,Hekigodo 1873 - 1937

The first frosts of the year creep up on us. We're just begining to think that summer's going to last forever, when woosh - here it is - autumn.

I love to set aside time for autumn walks of discovery, especially after the first rains. We love studying the colours of the turning leaves, the way one side of a tree turns red, while the other side fades into yellow. We love the way the claret ash outside my window now changes colour from the top down, the red merging into the green. We love the beginning of new growth, of the mushrooms and other fungi pushing through the ground.

We rotate our home's interiors based on the Japanese aesthetic concept called shun - seasonality. When a new season arrives - according to the weather, not the calendar - we change our seasonal displays and our decorations. We bring large branches of autumn leaves into our home and plan our decoration around their myriad of colours. We bring out the cushions of angora in shades of brown and beige, and store the red silk ones that have graced our sofas and chairs. We change the summer obis that decorate our tables and tansu cupboards for ones of maple leaves in restful shades. In this way we feel as sense of tranquility - of a natural quiet harmony with our Creator. He brings us peace.

Piles of golden autumnal obis await their seasonal resting places.

Autumn is a time of abundance in our garden too. It brings harvests of rocket and coriander. It signals the end of the basil season and we spend hours picking bunches of fragrant herbs to make into pesto to freeze for the cold months of winter. The green tomatoes become chutney.

We cook up delicious mushrooms with butter and garlic and smother them onto sourdough toast. It is funny how much better mushrooms taste when they're picked straight from your own land.

Autumn for us is a time of reflection and assessment.

Our God is good.

He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.
Daniel 2:21

The Betrayal

There's less than a month to go now until Douglas Bond's historical novel on the life of John Calvin is published. I'm really looking forward to this one.

You can read a chapter of the book here.

I got the link from Douglas Bond's website: www.bondbooks.net. You can read his blog too. It's here: www.douglasbondbooks.blogspot.com .

My Booktown Finds

So this past weekend was Back to Booktown. I blogged about it here. It was huge. Fantastic. Highly recommended.

Alas, we couldn't do it justice - it fell on the wrong weekend for that... we had opera tickets, family dinners, shopping and a million other things to do this past weekend. Alas. Maybe next year - definitely next year. We'll book a B&B and make a weekend of it. It's already in the diary:

Back to Booktown 2010 May 1-2 Clunes.

Of course, I did get some treasures, even if we were only there for a few hours. Take a look:

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable

You know that I didn't really need this book. (I've already blogged about the seven editions of Pilgrim's Progress on my shelves here.) I just wanted it - and now I have it. It was published in the early 1900s, and it has sixty illustrations. It's beautiful...

As I went through the wild waste of this world, I came to a place where there was a den, and I lay down in it to sleep. While I slept I had a dream, and lo! I saw a man whose clothes were in rags and he stood with his face from his own house, with a book in his hand, and a great load on his back. I saw him read from the leaves of a book, and as he read, he wept and shook with fear; and at length he broke out with a loud cry, and said, What shall I do to save my soul?

We'll be reading Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome in AO3. This pristine 1976 hardback copy will be perfect. Jemimah's daddy has fond memories of reading this book as a boy. It's a shame he didn't keep his copy, I would have liked to read from his childhood book. I've never read it.








The Family at Misrule is the second in the delightful Seven Little Australians series by Australian author Ethel Turner. The Woolcots are growing up, and Meg, the eldest, finds her time fully occupied in helping her step mother care for the large family. Pip, Nell, Bunty, Poppet, Peter and little Essie are all back in this second book about the delightfully naughty family.

They had the whole series of these books at Booktown. I contented myself with just this one - plus the email address of the bookseller: jillybookworm7@hotmail.com. Jilly specialises in Milly Molly Mandy, Edith Blyton, Ameliaranne, and Arthur Ransome. Needless to say, I've requested a catalogue by mail.

Little Grey Rabbit's Christmas by Alison Uttley is a new one for our Christmas Basket. Who couldn't help but be charmed by Margaret Tempest's charming illustrations in this gorgeous series about Grey Rabbit and his friends?

I'll blog effusively about this one separately...later.






What a find these were - four of the wonderful Enid Blyton Nature Readers.

I'm not always a fan of Enid Blyton. Her characters are often stereotyped and she tends to write in a twaddly dumbed down way. Nevertheless, she is one of the most successful children's authors of all time, with estimated lifetime sales in excess of 600 million books. Not bad for an author whose books were frequently banned for being racist, sexist and policemanist in the late 70's and early 80's. I remember then being removed from the shelves of my school library... I was peeved - I was half way through some series or the other.

Despite all the controversy - and my concern about the oversimplified language, I love her Nature Reader series. There were dozens of them - certainly more than thirty six, anyhow. I'm slowly acquiring the set. From the Note for the Teacher:

This series of Enid Blyton Nature Readers, although apparently a collection of entertaining and amusing tales, is in reality something very much more.

The sixty tales cover a vast range of Nature facts, and aim to give a clear and comprehensive review of the Science of Life in so far as it is understandable by young children. The varied facts of birth, nutrition or feeding, growth, reproduction and so on, are given in these simple tales in a way that makes them impossibly for the children to forget.

My four new books contain tales about conkers, traditional Christmas greens, thrushes, garden worms, Autumn leaves, ivy and rock pool animals. They're lovely stories. We might start reading these today.

The cover of The Chinese Children Next Door by Pearl Buck doesn't do justice to this final find, so I've included some of the illustrations from inside the book below. Who hasn't heard about this fantastic author? She is solely responsible for my ongoing fascination with the Far East. I remember reading her novels right through my teen years, but it was only recently that I discovered her books for children. This one's about ...the family who lived next door...

"You must know children," Mother said, "that all fathers and mothers like to have both boys and girls in their families if they can, but in China it is very important indeed.

"The Chinese family who lived next door to us when I was a little girl were very sad because they had no boys. They liked their little girls, and their girls were very nice. They all had black hair which their mother combed every day with a wooden comb, and she made it into pigtails, one to each girl, and tied the ends with bright red woolen yarn. And..."

The illustrations are by William Arthur Smith. I think they're delightful.

So, that's them. My treasures. I'll be back next year...

Meet my sheep

We popped into Paddy Pallin, the outdoor adventure store on Saturday to pick up some bits and pieces for our upcoming trip to Bhutan. Amongst our purchases was the jacket shown above by New Zealand company, Icebreaker.

Now it is normal nowadays to know exactly where your food comes from. I can purchase my meat and vegetables from my local state - and often from my own local region. I can narrow my eggs down to a particular local farm - and the farmer's photograph is emblazoned on the carton. Same with my chicken. Apparently this helps me to make informed and ecologically sound choices. Generally we don't know quite as much about our clothing, though. I can check the label, sure, to find out where the garment was manufactured, but I can only guess at the rest.

Not so my new jacket. On an inside label in my jacket is a unique baacode. If I enter this number on their website, http://www.icebreaker.com/, I can track my jacket's journey from the farms in the beautiful New Zealand countryside where the merino wool was grown, right through to the factory it was created in. There are videos where you can meet the farmers and their families. There are photos of New Zealand farms, homesteads and lots and lots of sheep.

If you'd like to take your family on a bit of a tour through New Zealand and listen to a few fun accents at the same time, here's my baacode: 045758361. You're welcome to see where my jacket has already been without me. Perhaps in a few more weeks I'll be able to tell you about its journey with me inside of it as well!!

Is this you?

"Mummy!!!"

No blogging today.

My little Jemimah is ill.

I'm playing nurse.

Hopefully she'll be better tomorrow. It's the weekend - doesn't she know that it's illegal to be sick on a weekend?

She's not one to sit and watch the tele...she's building a 'Monster in a box' from her wonderful Paper Toys kit... oh - and calling for the nurse...

...gotta go...