The Joy of Aprons!

The inimitable nutcrunch has expressed uncomprehending disbelief at my wearing an apron to do the housework (see previous blog).

Lest the tolerance-challenged of this world (read bigots and fundamentalists) take this as proof that I am indeed a weirdo and do indeed warrant burning at the stake (don't laugh, an evangelical party worker actually recommended this procedure for lesbians - aka witches, at our last elections) I fear I must set the record straight (no pun intended).

Hey! And I'm not a lesbian either...not that there's anything wrong with that...some of my best friends - and heroines - are or were. Anyway lesbians don't wear aprons do they? Do they? Oh! It's all so confusing! If only people would wear little stars sewn on their clothes so we knew who were the good guys.

I'm not a witch either, tho' I am a pagan. I'm not sure if I'm just too lazy, disorganised and neurotic to be a witch or if I'm just too dreamy, eclectic and amorphous. Is there a difference? I suspect that witches, being practical magick, earthy, cooking pot-type people may just very well wear aprons - at least some of the time.

Mmm! Now I'm starting to feel a bit less confused. OK! So now I know that anyone wearing an apron is definitely not a lesbian but might be a witch...or a christian fundamentalist trying to occupy woman's rightful place in the kitchen. Oh! Oh! How will I tell? What if we burnt the wrong person at the stake? Would it matter?

Anyway I digress. I'm not sure why I wear an apron when I do the housework. Who cares? It probably does have something to do with a) growing up in the fifties b) being a naturally "feminine" person - whatever the hell that is and c) being a transsexual woman and so tending towards things which enhance her sense of "the feminine" (I challenge you to define that too!) in the face of others' bemused skepticism or outright hostility.

I told you I was no saint (well not until hair shirts come in pastels with a nipped in waist)!

Ennnywaaaay! here are what I think some good reasons why one might choose to wear an apron around the house (yep! believe it or not, unlike the life-long condition of transsexualism, wearing an apron is actually a "lifestyle choice" and I could, if I so chose, give "it" up!):

1) The pockets are great for carrying pegs or cordless phones when you're up at the clothesline.

2) The pockets are great for carrying the car keys when you've got both hands full carrying stuff up to the house or assisting someone with a disability downstairs.

3) In general, aprons are a good way of bolting on removable pockets when you habitually wear things like skirts, dresses or pants that don't have pockets.

4) Aprons protect the clumsy (yep! that's me!) from all manner of wetnesses inundating their persons - bleach water when cleaning the toilet, greasy washing up water, pots of soup and splashes of worcestershire sauce - to name just a few.

5) Aprons protect against the "poltergeist phenomenon". You know when you have a tendency to pick up a jar of pasta sauce only to watch it sail, unbidden, out of your presumably perfectly capable hand, land on the dresser, smash your favorite cup and saucer and then spurt broken glass and tomato back all over the good pants you just had drycleaned. Don't believe it? Come round to my place sometime...but wear an apron!

6) An apron allows one to do little spurts of housework before work or going out while wearing "good clothes" (you won't catch this little duck wearing "tracky dacks"* to the supermarket!)

7) Throwing on an apron when you get home late from work allows you to help your partner finish off getting dinner then sit down on the lounge and eat it in front of your favorite TV show (up till it just finished recently that was "Silent Witness" with the wonderful Amanda Burton - still looking for a replacement) without worrying about spilling chilli and olive oil on your good skirt.

8) Aprons are a great way to wipe your hands in an emergency.

9) Aprons are a handy way of wiping away your tears when collapsed on the floor during hormonal surges,

10) Buying an apron is a great way to help support those worthy charities that set up street stalls "manned" by remarkable old ladies with incedible sewing skills.

11) Aprons are a way of expressing one's individuality in an increasingly bland and politically correct world.

WARNING! Aprons are absolutely of no use in the management of small children whose ability to direct a semi-digested stream of bright orange baby food onto unprotected areas of clothing is developed to a high level of competency in utero (I'd go for the "tracky dacks" here!).

You think I'm the only person who hasn't forgotten about the joys and practicalities of aprons? try this quick Google image search!

Now whilst performing this search I came across this doozy! The sanitary apron!

While we're on the subject of aprons, christian fundamentalists and burnings at the stake might I thoroughly recommend the chilling novel, "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (this book was written in 1986 would you believe!)

Amazon.com listing

Margaret Atwood website

Handmaid's Tale study guide

*"tracky dacks" is an Australian colloqualism for "tracksuit pants" which I believe Americans might call "sweatpants". Australians consider it perfectly acceptable to wear "daggy old tracky dacks" just about anywhere they think they can get away with it. In contrast, I have heard that, at least until recently, English women dressed up in high heels and make-up to do their regular housework. I try to steer a middle course in life!

Silencing Dissent...the user pays way!

Dangerous days ahead. Hey! What am I saying - they're already here!

Scott Parkin, American peace activist and promoter of non-violent protest is surrounded and hustled from a Melbourne sidewalk by 4 ASIO secret agents and 2 officers of Australia's most beloved and compassionate government department, DIMIA - department of Immigration & Multicultural & Indigenous Affairs. You know the guys that run the razor wire detention camps in the desert and wrongfully deport our own Australian citizens.



You can read some more transcripts on Alex's blog

or here at Margo Kingston's Webdiary

or here at the ABC

Oh! How a right wing government hell-bent on ramming home its ideologically-driven agenda loves a war - even one it helped start. Yep! 'cause then whenever anyone anywhere says anything against them, why surely that's a threat to national security! And then we have to lock them up - or deport them.

And we don't even have to explain why we did it - 'cause that would be jeopardising national security too - oh! how convenient.

What's even better, such a government gets to bill the victim! Yep, Scott now owes the Australian government $11, 000 for expenses incurred in muzzling dissent and degrading our integrity.

You know the only thing is...ummm! Scott Parkin was alledged to be a threat to national security for coaching some activists in non-violent methods of protest but what about our own Prime Minister, the dearly beloved John (I love you George W) Howard. He jumps on the bandwagon to help invade Iraq to support his mate Bush and thereby inflames international tensions.

Now I definitely call that a threat to national security!

Laundry Tip

I have a little Samsung 4.5 kg washing machine. I love her!

When my marriage broke up and I was eking out a living in a spartan little flat and ploughing all my money into doctor's bills and an intensive electrolysis program I used to do all my washing by hand in a bucket in the shower recess!

Such is the "lifestyle choice" we transsexual people make...so whimsically and so perversely!

So you can understand how my wash days are now a joy - just like in those bright sparkling 1950's ads! (I do wear an apron but not a horizontally striped day-dress altho' I do keep checking out my local vintage clothing shop!). I have a girlfriend who used to be convinced that my brain had become addled by watching too many episodes of "Leave it to Beaver". "Doctor, I feel like I'm Mrs Cleaver trapped in a man's body!". The aprons, I suppose ,were derived from an earlier, insidious exposure to Alice in "The Honeymooners"!

Nah! Mrs Cleaver I ain't! Something seems to happen even to the most compulsive-obsessive, anal-retentive of us all when we hit 50 something. Yes, the ominous slide into that saddest of indictments of modern society...no, not permissive sex or gay rights, I'm talking about lowered standards of house-keeping!

Anyway, all that was just a long-winded and self indulgent lead-up to my Laundry Tip of the Day. "Ladies... and gentleman, yes I think we do have a gentleman in the audience, have you ever suffered from a clogged up fabric conditioner dispenser (collective groans emanate from amongst the throng of aprons and day dresses)?"

Well, try this: pour a jug of boiling water slowly through the dispenser. It seems to dissolve the conditioner residue and allows you to continue to enjoy warm, soft, fluffy towels. Mmmm!

Yes, I do worry about the environment! I compromise between pristine rivers and soft towels by only using half the daily recommended dosage. Hey! I'm no saint either! (Have you ever tried drying yourself on a saint's towel? Who needs a hair shirt?)

Bread!

The Way of Bread - musings and recollections

It's an early Spring morning, still cool, but with the promise of a balmy warmth later on. I have bread baking, a mongrel loaf of whatever's left: organic unbleached flour, oatbran and polenta with a skerrick of Indian besan flour and a pinch of sea salt thrown in. It'll be heavy but I'm hoping, golden and nutty and, toasted, an excellent accompaniment to spring vegie soup.

I've recently been dipping into the online writings of an Oregon woman, Risa Bear. She's articulate and prolific and, like me, 50 something and living with transexualism. I particularly find myself drawn to a series of her essays entitled "Viewing Jasper Mountain".

She writes about living in view of a fir-covered ridge or bluff and recounts the various aspects of landscape, external and internal, that she encounters and experiences. Her words picked me, middle-aged, corporate, urban woman, up and transported me back thirty years. Back to a mythical-seeming time when first I launched the little boat of my life, hippie-clad and romance-dreaming, out into the turbulent waters of the early seventies and my misspent youth.

Memories flooded in...of unleavened bread and brown rice; roach clips and magic mushrooms; of Judy Collins and Creedence Clearwater; of Sand County Almanac and the Last Whole Earth Catalog; of sleeping out under shooting stars on a north Queensland hillside; of long, gear-crashing semi rides along the Hume highway, nodding asleep to Johnny Cash.

Mmm! I hear the breadmaker start its clunky kneading cycle and I think back to other bread-making days...

Early spring days just like this, 1974, Tasmania. Slipping out of an opshop 40's salmon swamee nightdress and donning either king gee's and jumper or circle skirt and peasant blouse, depending on the temperature and what I had planned for the day and whether or not the compost needed turning.

Those days I ground my own wheat, purchased by the sack with a friend going halves. My friend was a big Birmingham lad who built himself, single-handedly, a log cabin on the hills overlooking the Huon. Well, I do remember helping him adze some logs but mostly I'd sit, wan and delicate, while he carved out his dream. While I feel a swooning affinity with the earth and sky, strong, capable earth-mother I ain't!

But yes, I did grind my own wheat, using one of those metal, meat-grinder style thingos that were so common back then. I had it clamped to the back steps of the converted stable-cum artist's den in which I lived. I must have made a sight - long Indian squaw plaits swinging wildly as I swung the handle round; our two chooks watching intently from the sidelines, swooping in, whenever they could, to snavel a grain or two.

Grew my own yeast, too. A tangy, bubbling gloop fermenting away on the sideboard. And added other goodies to my loaves - buckwheat and millet, barley and oats. I'd do a marathon bake-in every Saturday - to last me the week and to take to friends. The currency of the hippie! Home-baked bread and apple-crumbles! With the bread in the oven I'd start on home-made bourghul and apple-pies! Hey! Who says I was a bulimic, food-obsessed, macrobiotic hermit?

These days I do it differently! Breville electric breadmaker (just like my washing machine - chuck in the load and choose the cycle) and supermarket (albeit wholegrain) breadmixes. Still like my Tree of Life Indian skirts...but alas! no chooks! And no plaits - I seem to have lost the touch for those (right one of the middle one; left one over the middle one). Tanks Gott! you say!

I was always a bit of a psuedo-hippie; a psuedo bohemian - as Penny Arcade calls it - always making sure my little safety line was attached. To what? Not sure...destiny probably!

How else could I have gotten here?

Wisteria in the Springtime

White Wisteria, redolent with a heady perfume, blossoms over our side entranceway, heralding Springtime.

Muffins!

Banana & Fig Muffins

The muffin you can eat for breakfast!

And it's guilt-free!

Unless you're a food-fundamentalist in which case watch out for my raw, unleavened, fat-free, unsweetened, wheatless muffin recipe!

INGREDIENTS

2 cups wholemeal SR flour
1 dessertspoon mixed spice
1/2 cup raw, brown or demerara sugar

1/2 cup chopped turkish dried figs

1 free range egg
1/2 cup plain yoghurt
2 sml-med ripe mashed bananas
1/2 cup virgin olive oil

METHOD

Mix dry ingredients
Mix in figs
Separately beat together wet ingredients
Mix all together
Grease a 12 hole muffin tin
Bake at about 200F for 20-25 mins

NOTE: May increase sugar to 3/4 cup for a sweeter muffin

Nasturtiums

The sandy, tussocky rise that is our wild, unkempt, hippie backyard is a riot of nasturtiums - in all shades or reds, oranges and yellows; like a Van Gogh painting!

On a warm if windy, second-last day of winter I accepted the gift of their beauty and picked some to grace our dining room table.

Oh! blessed be are we!