Baby Animals are the Shiz

Another photo post for y’all.  It’s been hectic in my world and my brain is mostly mush.

Some goslings out for a walk in York. They look like hooligans.

I love how the foremost gosling has his/her tongue hanging out.  If they wore trousers, it would be ill fitting tracky-dacks (tracksuit pants / sweat pants) and I do not doubt they would have their hands down the front.  Why do young men do that?

A pair of lambs nestling in a hole, somewhere in the Lake District near Wndermere (vagueness is not me being coy; I honestly don't really know.)

A friend, with whom I was hanging out and squealing about lambs in the Lake District, commented that she thinks women who have reached child-bearing age become more susceptible to the cuteness of baby animals.  I don’t quite agree with her.  For myself, I am still ambivalent about whether I will have children (and I guess I might need to make that decision soon-ish).  I have moved poles away from the position I took when I was eight, and held onto through my 20s, that I would never have children.  However, I am much happier and more comfortable now to wallow in all things cute, when I was very reluctant to do so as a teenager.  I got branded ‘cute’ a lot and it’s only the last few years that I’m prepared not to get offended if you call me cute.  On occassion, I’ve even been known to be flattered by it.   The change has to do with getting comfortable in my skin and my person, rather than impulses dictacted by biology.  Although, I guess if it was biology being the boss, I would not necessarily know it.

A not very good photo of baby pygmy hippo and mama, Marwell Zoo. He was so cute, he made me cry. No, really.

Hippos are dangerous animals. A workmate keeps telling me this as if it will somehow lead me to adore them less.   Hippos crack me up.  I love that they are vegetarians and yet kill more people in Africa than lions.  Okay, well, I don’t love that they have killed people but just the incongruity of the fact of their preferred diet contrasted with the threat they pose to visitors in their terrtory.  They own the river.

Pygmy hippos, however, are endangered.  They only survive now, in zoos.  They wiggle their ears.  It is the most adorably absurd thing on a creature so ungainly.

The baby pygmy hippo would disappear under the water and then emerge ever so slowly, eyes first, then ears which he would vigorously wiggle (presumably to shake the water out of them?).  Sometimes he would duck back under the water when he saw all the people ogling him and sometimes he would emerge fully.  My partner reports that I shoved some kids out of the way to get closer to the edge of the viewing platform.  This is possible.

Oversharing

I accidentally told a few of my workmates about a curious habit I have. (Accidentally in that I was talking to keep things lively and found myself relating an anecdote and thinking, “Oh dear. How do I change the ending on this one? Oh well, at least make it funny.”) And now, I’m afraid one of them is going to tell my boss ….

My curious habit is to sit under my desk. After a bad phone call, or uncovering an issue that feels insurmountable, or because I feel bad for some reason (e.g. a few weeks ago, I got some not so great news from home), I crawl under my desk and sit there for a few minutes, knees to chin, breathing deeply. After that, I can face the world again.

This habit started because one day something happened – I don’t really remember what – and I put my head into my hands. It all felt too much. And I thought, “I wish I could just disappear under my desk.” It occurred to me, well, why the hell couldn’t I? So I got onto my knees and crawled under my desk. It was nice down there. Quite spacious, really. Rather comforting. Dark. Quiet – the only sound was the hum of my motherboard and that was a reassurring kind of purr. I felt much better. I crawled out again and continued to work.

Calling it a habit is probably overstating it somewhat. My days at work are not so bad that I crawl under my desk with frequency. It is a rare occurrence (i.e. it’s happened twice this year and maybe three or four times last year).

As a child, I definitely hid in small spaces when I was not feeling so good. My mother chided me whenever I was unhappy, so if I was unhappy I had to be unhappy somewhere she would not find me. Under the bed. Under the stairs. In a corner of an unlit room. Once, when I was about 6 years old, I crawled into a chest and fell asleep there. I was missing for so long my family went searching for me up and down the street, and out to the park. I think my brother found me.  Thankfully, I’d been missing for so long that my mother’s relief washed out her usual desire to berate me for most of the wayward things I did.

I mused aloud to my workmates about what would happen if one day someone walked into my office while I was under my desk. Would it be better to stay really quiet and hope they don’t see me, or crawl out and own up? It would be quite easy, I think, to expect they would not see me, because that involves walking into the middle of my office and looking under my desk for me. I suspect, however, that I am the ‘own up’ kind of person. As it is, at least 7 of my workmates now know that I am wont to crawl under my desk when things are not going so well. All of whom now say that if they come to my office and I’m not there, they are going to look under my desk for me. And most people at work think I’m odd anyway so they can just file my crawl-under-desk habit away with “Oanh’s Quirks” (includes cycling to work, eating salad sandwiches, knowing words like schadenfreude and not watching TV).

Truffles & Twitter

Truffles & Twitter are now indelibly linked in my mind.

I have been mulling over whether to join Twitter for awhile, even though, quite some time ago, I disparaged it as being like watching a car crash.  (Curiousity for the sake of curiousity, voyeurism, nothing gained.)  I am still ambivalent about Twitter.  There are good and interesting (according to me) Twitterers out there but I’m not sure I’m going to be one of them.

I wondered if Twitter would make me write more often.  Or if, like Facebook, it would just be another distraction, into which my time could disappear for hours and I emerge from the other side having done no more than read a whole lot of updates, taken a lot of quizzes, rummaged through a lot of photos – some of people whose lives I care about and some just from idle curiousity – and made snarky comments on my nieces’ and nephews’ lives.  Inevitably, when I had finished, I would be too exhausted to write anything of my own.

I do like that Facebook allows me to have light-hearted exchanges with friends and families.  I can’t send an email to my niece saying, “Like your life plans, kid.  Good luck.”  Emails need to be a bit more substantial than that.  I would have to demonstrate I recalled our last interaction and what was happening with her life.  I would have to compose a brief but interesting catalogue of what was happening with mine.  Instead, Facebook allows me to feel that I can just hang out, instead of having to craft a more meaningful, quality correspondence.  Hanging out is equally important quality time to relationships.

Currently, I sit in one corner of the living room drafting this post and my partner sits in another playing a computer game with lots of bells and whistles (I’m serious).  It’s a pleasant way to pass the time.  I cannot do this with a lot of people because I’m on the other side of the world and awake, while they are asleep.  But I can look at the photos of their holiday last week and comment with, “Hey, looks like you had a lovely time. X”.  Or take the same quiz.  Or just feel a part of their life by checking out their Facebook profile page, even though I do nothing to let them know I just spent an hour reading through past updates and wall posts.

I’ve stopped playing Scrabble via Facebook, partly because the hoo-ha about it meant that it disappeared from my profile and partly because weeks and weeks would go by and I would not play a move.  It just became another thing I had a vague sense of guilt about, so I let it slide.  I had a real-time, actual, tiles and paper-dictionary game of Scrabble recently and it was lovely.  I lost (my opponent was my partner.  Still have not won.  I’ll get you next time, [partner], next time. <insert somewhat unhinged cackle>)

I am now on Twitter.  The catalyst was Kirsty but no blame laid. You can check out my tweets, if you want.

The timing of joining up to Twitter coincided with me making chocolate truffles for the first time.  Unsurprisingly, I tweeted about truffles.  And now, I’ll post a recipe.  They are so ridiculously easy and great to experiment with, though I only made one type of chocolate truffle.  There will be more.

Chocolate Truffle with Coffee Liqueur

Truffle Recipe, from The Australian Women’s Weekly Cook: How to Cook Absolutely Everything.

What you Need

• Chocolate: blocks of cooking chocolate of any description, white, milk or dark work fine.  Quantity is approximately 200 – 250 gms.
• Cream: I used single cream and about 1/3 cup
• Flavouring: I used two tablespoons of coffee liqueur.  You can also use about that amount of any kind of flavouring that takes your fancy: citrus (rind and juice); ginger (glace or stem ginger in syrup); nuts … oh, the list is endless!  You can even use no flavouring.  Crazy.
• Cocoa powder – dusting your finished product with.  You could also use icing sugar (but why?) or chopped nuts.

• A big heat-proof bowl
• A refridgerator

What to Do

• Break the chocolate into chunks, or if you’re feeling energetic, grate the chocolate into a big bowl.
• Pour cream onto broken up / grated chocolate.
• Set bowl over a saucepan of water and melt cream and chocolate together until you have a smooth paste.
• Let cool a wee bit and then add your flavouring.
• Mix well.
• Put into the fridge and do something else for at least three hours or even, overnight.
• Take out from the fridge and let mixture come to room temperature  (ish.  This does not have to be very precise).
• Place cocoa powder into a bowl and plunge your hands into the powder, covering your palms fully with cocoa powder.  You need nice, cold hands.  You could run your hands under cold tap water and then dry – very well – before doing this.  Or you could, like me, go stand outside holding your hands up and letting the ambient temperature make your hands icy cold.  Not recommended for tropical and temperate climes.
• Using a teaspoon, scoop out some of the chocolate mixture and roll into little balls.
• Roll the balls in cocoa powder (or icing sugar or chopped nuts etc)
• Place on some greaseproof paper.
• Continue rolling mixture into little balls, and rolling balls in cocoa powder (or etc) until all the mixture is used up.
• Stick the cocoa dusted balls into the fridge until you are ready to eat them (but wait at least 15 minutes so they can harden a bit).
• Stare at your chocolate covered hands, but, unless you like the taste of bitter unsweetened cocoa powder, resist the urge to lick them.  Just run your hands under warm water to clean.
• I don’t know how long the truffles will keep.  Recipe book says two days; some online sources say a month.  People will eat them before they go off.  A small child started crying when his mother would not allow him to have another at the barbecue I attended and to which my contribution was the truffles.  Pride contended with guilt over small child’s reaction.  Pride won out.