Flemish Belgian formerly living in the US, now back home. Eternally amazed at the world around her. Knitter, (sometimes) yarn spinner, returning long distance runner, ex academic historian of China and East Asia. Opinionated about chocolate and beer.
In 2023 I finished another year of running 1000 miles... Because the relocation across the Pond and the concomitant travel shook up my schedule, and because of "stuff" that I can't remember now, my planning wasn't great and by the time October rolled around, I needed 27+ miles per week to stand a chance. So... apparently I did that. All I now remember is that it was a lot of miles run-walk, a lot of early mornings once I got my shiny chest light in particular, through wind and rain, catching little bugs in my Fetchpoint game Somehow I escaped injuries by sticking to snail-speed, but I did notice after consecutive days with 5 mile runs, it was getting a bit much.
But darn it, I did it. And I achieved my goal of running on average those 1000 miles faster than I did in 2022 (by 27' per mile, to be exact).
I love all the detail you get from Fetch!
Obviously I decided to do it all again this year: another 1000 miles, if you please, my little legs? I'm adding in a bit more variation now I have a decent base: some intervals, tempo runs, and long slow runs without walk breaks. Or to be more accurate: replace "run" with "jog" because I'm still barely faster than a snail.
As of the start of May, I'm only a little bit behind on my target: instead of the weekly 19.2 miles, I need 19.9. Seems manageable for somebody who can churn out a few weeks at 27 miles, doesn't it? But that's not counting on a massive new change: I just started a full time job, and I've got a commute that requires bike+train three days a week. Planning is very tight if I want to reach 1000 miles with multiple shorter runs through the week. I still have 4 days without commute, to run on average about 5 miles each time. If you're speedier than me, you can fit that in before working from home, but for me it's a 3-miler on those days, and the rest I grab during the weekend. Or on one of the many bank holidays that grace my first month of work!
So we'll see if I can stay on target this year. At the moment I see very little opportunity to slack off, let alone fall ill or get injured. This will be another interesting year of "will she, or won't she?", but it won't be for lack of trying!
Early morning runs have their charm -meadows and trees in the mist in Mespelare.
Well, not really... But I have a job ahead of me taming this camera/lens OR I need to get a new one that's up to what I want to do with it. Out of 70 pics, this is the only one I kept because it's not a blurry mess.
Lightly edited Jay and his peanut. I absolutely love the blue stripes on their wings.
I know bird photography is hard, but even then the sensor isn't up to it with the shutter speed and aperture on this thing. Cameras have evolved since *checks* 2007/8 when this camera came out, and the buyer at the time did not have bird photography in mind in the first place.
Things I can try before chucking it all out and saving up for a new one:
use a tripod (need to find the right screw to attach camera to tripod)
clean the windows (they're not that dirty, honestly)
not take pics through the kitchen window (the birds won't dare to come close enough for the 150mm zoom I have)
trying out different settings
That last one would require me to go through the manual, and we all know how we feel about that, don't we? đ
Have you succeeded in taking pics of the birds visiting your garden, and can you share them? Drop a link in the comments! I'd love to check out your pictures!
The human caretaker has permanently relocated to Belgium, and has taken up the position of assistant caretaker at Collegium Vanachter in den hof (VIDH) in Flanders, with a side-gig as Orchid Whisperer (more about this in a separate post).
Some portraits from the star performers in summer 2023 at Collegium Vanachter in den hof.
We look forward to learning how European wildlife delights the humans near their dwellings in the Old World. We already received reports of sightings of Erik Brown (Squirrel), and of Freddy Fox barking deep into the night. Owl hoot-offs are a nightly occurrence. Over the summer the mosquito aerial combat team prevented most outdoor human activity and we are curious to hear how both parties will negotiate a truce next summer.
At the moment, the caretakers are spoiling the Feathered Division rotten with this fab new addition to the infrastructure, and bespoke mixes of fat, insects, and nuts and seeds. They are setting themselves up for a real challenging Big Garden Birdwatch (Flemish edition) to count all the feathered visitors in late January.
New infrastructure at Collegium VIDH is a hit with the Feathered faculty, staff and students!
PSA: For continuity we will continue using the category BackyardWildlifeCollege for all garden-related wildlife adventures even after this relocation.
So: here's the recipe, scroll further down for the blabla story that other blogs put before the repice. I personally prefer the reverse: tell me how to do it, then tell me why this dish matters to you. ć·±æäžæŹČćżæœæŒäșș as Confucius said. (Do not do to others as you wouldn't have done to yourself.1 )
Grab a 25 cm/10inch sandwich tin (I use one with a removable bottom), and a few mixing bowls, then gather the following ingredients, and follow the instructions below:
Ingredients:
175g (6oz) unsalted butter
250g (9oz) good quality milk chocolate. For my US-based friends: Trader Joe's Imported Belgian Chocolate is excellent, I personally vouch for it.
3 whole eggs
3 egg yolks
125g (4oz) light brown sugar
175g (6oz) ground almonds
100g (3 1/2oz) whole almonds crushed
150g (5oz) medjool dates (or poach ordinary dates in water and sugar for ± 3 mins), cut in small pieces
Instructions:
Grease the sandwich tin, and line the base with a circle of grease-proof paper
Preheat the oven to 170C (325F, gas mark 3)
Melt butter and chocolate together au bain-marie or in microwave
Beat the whole three eggs with egg yolks and sugar until the mixture is pale and thick.
Add the ground almonds, the crushed almonds and the dates to that mixture, combine well
Incorporate the butter and chocolate mixture
Pour everything into the sandwich tin and bake for about 50 mins. (I needed to add another 15mins, but our oven is geriatric and temperamental)
Leave to cool before turning out
Decorate with an icing sugar pattern right before serving, if you fancy
Tadaaaa!
Icing decoration optional, but tasty!
On Christmas day we had not prepared the quiche that was murmured about â that one had fallen by the wayside. Just as well, so there was a small pie-shaped hole still available for our guests to try out this gateau. (I know I called it a torte in that previous post but to err is human.) Everyone enjoyed it, after all the other delights we served â including a gorgeous Yule log. Just look at that picture!
Our reindeer decoration approves of the Yule Log.
Anyways: it's still as good as I remember, and it reminded me of a very thick brownie with added pizzazz: ever so slightly crunchy on top, moist and substantially chocolatey on the inside, and almond flavour everywhere. My cousin compared it to frangipane but with chocolate, and that's the almonds talking.
This thing was so delish we even saved the crumbs from my clumsy cutting effort for the next day. (Tip: use a sharp knife and a decisive cut.) The Belgian Army didn't show up, neither did the Navy, to help us out, so we hid the rest of the cake in the freezer, because there was serious temptation to eat all the leftovers in one go and that might not have ended well. We're now slowly munching our way through it one piece at a time. We're tempted by cake, not by new year's resolutions here!
This yummy piece of cake survived the freezer effortlessly.
I'm sure you know the situation: family members (3 people) have been invited for a holiday dinner, with the promise of "something simple, not like you folks do." Then you let it all go for a couple of days and next thing you know, you pick up murmurings of a quiche for opening nibble, and a brunoise has miraculously appeared in the kitchen ("That's the soup. I'm not sure yet there will be a starter but I might do something yet."), and there is some coordination to pick up the guinea fowl and then somebody (not me) is hunting through recipe books to find the right sauce to go with the veggies. At least, I comfort myself, we have the cakes covered: picking up a Yule log from the local baker's is a safe bet. He makes great cakes, we like 'em. Ganache-covered option for us, of course, we're Belgian.
That was until I bumped about four days ago into a dead link on the newspaper website, for an Almond Chocolate Cake and I said "Oh well, I do have a good recipe for that anyway." "Oh? You do?" piped up my housemate. Yeah, I do. Somewhere...
Next thing I know, I'm digging in the garage amid the piles of boxes with my stuff from the US, for my handwritten recipe notebook; we're strategising about the egg yolks that are left over from the brunoise; and somehow milk chocolate and dates have appeared in the pantry so resistance is futile: all ingredients are in the house. The almond-chocolate cake torte (as the recipe calls it) shall exist.
Just one small thing I had forgotten in the 13 or so years since I last made this thing: it's rather dense and even with its innocent measure of a 25cm sandwich tin it will feed the entire Belgian army (if we cut small slices, part of the navy too). How on earth five of us will manage to tackle this thing after an extended dinner and a Yule log is beyond me, but: I was requested to contribute this torte, and I have complied.
On Monday we'll get to try it out, and if it passes muster, I'll share the recipe. Hold on tight!
Yeah, summerâs long gone but I havenât finished my reviews yet! More coming, I guess, as I did manage to read a few more!
Some books start off as one thing and then become something else and itâs ok â as I wrote about in my previous update, that happened in Dan Hollowayâs Our Dreams Make Different Shapes, which morphed from coaching you in memory techniques to boost creativity into a manifesto for diversity in society and the workplace, but it all made sense.
For other books, that transformation from one thing to another doesnât quite work. Justin Jacobsâ Indiana Jones in History should really just have dropped that last section about the space race. Thatâs pretty much my only quibble with the book, and once you know thatâs coming, you can maybe decide to skip that section and move ahead to the final chapter which is justđđ»
I taught a course on material culture of China, and we touched on the ethics of archaeology. I tried to ensure that one thing students would get comfortable with by the end of the course was to ask the question âHow did this thing end up in this museum?â It's common sense enough and yet few people seem to ask! This book and the excellent accompanying little YouTube videos go a long way to answering those questions. Fair warning: you may want to watch the Spielberg Indie movies before diving into all of this, because the adventurer's story wonât be the same again.
Jacobs' writing is geared towards the curious non-specialist, and not weighted down with notes but still based on thorough research, I can confirm for the China chapters. Definitely worth reading!
LBJs are in the (UK) birders' world those little brown birds that all look unremarkable, brown, and yet can be the most amazing species you'll see only once in a lifetime. Or if it's a passer domesticus, you may yet be enchanted by its exotic patterning, as Inspector Morse was.
https://youtu.be/UvoVme4rfRs?feature=shared&t=897
You only need a minute to watch his powers of observation
LBJs are not flashy with WILD!! COLOURFUL!!! MARKINGS! but I still like them.
Turns out you have those LBJs (or LGJs, Little Grey Jobs) in socks too... And with a little bit of effort, you can turn them into something worth observing, IMHO.
I ended up knitting these socks for mum in something of the following way:
Mum: Hm, I have this beige sock yarn I don't know what to do with. It's too meh for me.
Me: Oh. Can I knit with it? I donât have any yarn with me.
Mum: Sure, you can use it.
*I start knitting a cable into the leg*
Mum: Ooooh that's nice! I like that. That looks a lot more fun now.
Me: Do you want me to knit them for you? It's your yarn after all.
Mum: Erm... đŹ
(Fortunately they fit her!)
This is the world's easiest cabled sock to knit: take your basic 72 stitch top down sock pattern. For the leg, once you're past the cuff, knit 4, purl 3, cable over 8 stitches (cable every 8 rows), purl 3, and knit all the rest. Keep the rest of your basic pattern as is. I kept the cable going for the foot.
For the *other* leg I counted out the pattern so it was knit 18, purl 3, cable over 8 stitches (cable every 8 rows again, and if you're really fancy: turn them the other way), purl 3, knit all the other stitches.
If you want a pattern, check out Socks on a Plane (Ravelry), it's a toe-up version.
Iâm currently through the first four books of my Ten Books of Summer challenge (my personal list is in the previous post), but itâs slow moving, because I seem to have picked some titles for my list that just canât be hurried. Thatâs because the content requires attention, not because theyâre boring! And because these are worth my attention, I choose to savour the ideas they develop; Iâm not in a hurry to get through them. Letâs kick off my mini-reviews!
The first of these âslow booksâ was Seth Godinâs This Is Marketing: You canât be seen until you learn to see. If you know me, the last thing that comes to mind is marketing, and I am not looking into a Sales and Marketing role. (âInfluencerâ is about as low as a theme can go on my Clifton Strengths list, FYI). But Seth is different, of course, and he clarifies that everyone is in the business of marketing something to someone, trying to convince someone somewhere of something: to hire you (oh hi, that would be me!), to check out your art, to attend a concert (whether with you, or to hear you perform), to spend some time with you, to listen to your cool idea to improve the team or save the world or just to get a raise, or even how to make better coffee. This is marketing that makes me able to live with myself: itâs not about selling your soul to the devil and then living on the proceeds, but about how to make your work align with your values. Itâs about how to create something that you can be proud of, so you can share and âwhere appropriateâ sell in a way that makes you proud to make the world a better and more beautiful place. âWhoâs it for?â is the central question the book keeps returning to, because what you make canât be for everybody if itâs actually a worthwhile thing. And thatâs what I need to learn. That some of the things I create are not for you, but for somebody else. And that itâs ok when I need to say that. Thereâs a whole lot more in this short book, and I urge you to give it a look and spend some time with these ideas, and the many others from Seth Godin, because he has a lot of interesting and thought-provoking ideas. Not all of his ideas may be for you, but some of them will be.
A second book I worked my way through quietly and slowly was Dan Hollowayâs Our Dreams Make Different Shapes. The subtitle sounds ominous: How your creativity can make the world a better place (ok, not that part) and why the world will try to stop you. Why would the world try to stop you from making it a better place? Hmmmm⊠You should really read the book! But let me say this: this is a master course in writing a book with excellent âshadow objectivesâ: I know Dan a bit from our shared time in Oxford, and have admired him for his endurance feats in the mental and physical world. As a creativity champion and âamong many other things!â an eloquent advocate for disability rights, Iâm ready to listen to what he has to say, because thanks to him I already learned a lot on how to make the world a better place for my fellow human beings (and I have a lot to learn yet). We start off with memory palaces, and how to deploy them for increasing our creativity, for creativity is putting things together in ways people havenât done before, and you should have a healthy stack of nuggets of info on hand for that. Itâs also about pushing boundaries in unexpected directions. Itâs very practical âhere are exercises you can do to make you a more creative person. Try it!â
But Dan has also carefully observed that weâre pushing against boundaries that even creative people cannot move leave behind entirely if they want their creativity to have an effect on the world. Those people who were âahead of their timeâ? They went too far out of the box, and the world just was unable to see their vision, for instance. Problem is, weâre now in a world where we need creativity more than ever to solve those âwicked problemsâ and our society is not encouraging the maximum number of creative people to take part in solving them. Or society is not listening to them.
Once you reach that section, the book quietly slips for all the right reasons into a well-reasoned and clear manifesto for diversity. A truly creative society needs the diverse perspectives ânon-normativeâ people bring (but what is normal but a small sliver of society, of those people that just happen to have power and money), and this slim volume deftly combines those tricks you crave to boost your creativity with a call to action that, if we choose to listen, will leave the world a better place for more creatures âincluding humans.
I did not intend for my first two books to be such nice complements to each other, but it turns out these are a nice set if youâre in need of inspiration and encouragement to act.
The next two mini reviews will follow shortly. Until then, connect with me on Bookwyrm or leave a comment and share what youâre reading this summer!
A friendly Mastonaut tagged me for a reading challenge "20 books of summer", from the 746books blog.
It's a friendly challenge, with no strict rules, other than just reading books during the summer: "Set a list in advance. Make it twenty. Or ten if that feels better. Swap out books if that feels good." I mean... the more I look at that list, the more I see a host for this challenge who is indeed "bend[ing] the rules to help anyone reach their goal."
That suits me, because my tangible books will be on the move and physically unavailable to me from late June until they show up sometime in August I guess. But I do have plenty of books on my iPad and some stashed away in Libby, the library app, on my tsundoku pile.
Also, I LOVE that this is a blog where the comments are how you participate in the challenge. I feel like I'm back in 2009. Blogosphere was good. We still have blogs and RSS - that's a rant for another day. Here is my list for the summer of 2023 reading:
That's a couple of books I already started, a few I heard the name of but don't really know what to expect at all, a few that have been on my "really should read this" list, one that slipped through the Africana Book Club so I'm reading it now myself. Some fiction, some non-fiction, some translation, some China, some history, some world literature. A nice variety. Now... I need to pin this list up so I don't lose sight of my goal!
âŠare for reading with your seal friend by your side. Or on your lap, as chance may have it. Of course with coffee in striking distance. âïž
Arale-chan makes for a great book seat. Currently reading Paul Therouxâ Figures in a Landscape.
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![screenshot of a Classical Studies Memes for Hellenistic Teens post on Twitter.
lmaonade: My favorite video game quest trope is [all caps text] "help us, they are stealing our ancient artifact, thank you for helping us, as a reward you may have our ancient artifact"
Reply by 6qubed: "The ancient artifact was less important than having agency in its distribution"
Reply by Suinicide: "Nothing is more important than keeping it out of the hands of the British museum"](https://polifinario.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ancient-artefact-distribution-1-1024x928.jpg)
