From Q, Mrs. Q, Remy and Champ – a Happy 2009!

But I’ll let Remy represent us this year. Her picture is from last July (it is considerably warmer now, in our Summer)

St. Andrew’s Day: Scotland

St Andrew

30th. of November: St Andrew’s day

St. Andrew’s Societies, Scottish heritage groups, celebrate this day all over the world. Evenings, pipers will march escorting a cook carrying a haggis on a silver platter, in their midst to present Scotland’s most famous dish to a President or Chief of the Banquet. The haggis will be split open with a dirk (a small dagger worn at the kilts waist – not the Sgian Dubh -’skee.an.do’ - worn in the top of the stocking -hose- though it may be used of course) then approved by the Chief and those at the main table. A whiskey toast to the haggis by all, including the pipers in the cooks escort. Glasses thrown over shoulders, smash on the floor and the presentation over, pipers about face and march out, once again with the bagpipes playing.

It is a grand ceremony and I regret that I must be away from these Banquets: St. Andrew’s and Burn’s Night.

One occasion was specially memorable. The haggis, a ’super sausage’ actually, a glistening smooth bag in the centre of a salver, was presented to the St. Andrew’s Society Chairman. As is customary the Chairman offered the guest of honour the privilege of opening it. This happened to be a pompous gentleman from … well, a Very Important Person whose main qualification was being Very Important, much more than being Person. Properly disdainful of these savages in skirts, but ah well … the duties of high office you know. He took the dirk from the Chairman, as the cook (a wee little man, somewhat intimidated) placed the tray just right, in front of him.

VIP raised the blade high over his shoulder and tried to kill the poor haggis with a mighty stab. He missed. The point glanced off and struck the dish. Everyone froze – except the haggis. It leaped off its platter skittered across the ballroom floor at great speed, bounced off the skirting board and disappeared under the diners tables and chairs, on the other side of the room. Someone tried to stop it with a foot and it shot out towards the main table right at VIP. Maybe he was flustered, perhaps he thought it was really dangerous but he still had the dirk in his hand and he stooped for another stab. Touché, another glancing blow sent haggis into the Drums and Pipes Band by the grandstand. Swirling kilts as they stooped and grasped but it slipped away again and settled slowly in the centre of the dance floor. It would have ended there but a young lad amongst the guests well into the spirit of the thing made a flying tackle – which sent it skipping off again of course.

It went on, but finally the haggis, tired and wan, was captured as it got trapped in a corner. It had lost the gleam of its glistening coat and was cold but still intact when it was carved open. It was still very good though.

It’s too late today to prepare a Haggis for dinner, but there’s Burn’s Supper coming up (near Robert Burn’s Birthday, January 25th.  Here’s a recipe (tried, with some success)

—*—

Haggis:

Sheep’s pluck : Paunch (or bag, large stomach) heart, liver lights (lung). Lean mutton, some bone marrow. Beef suet. Onions, oatmeal, salt, pepper, cayenne, lemon or vinegar.

Clean pluck thoroughly, drain the blood and parboil the whole. The water may be changed after a few minutes, continue boiling in fresh water. Half an hour should be enough, though the liver can be done a little longer so that it will grate easily. Keep the boiling broth.

Take the heart, half of the liver and part of the lights (trim out any hard or dark parts). Mince them all together, with a pound of good beef suet and four or more onions. Grate the other half of the liver. Have ready a dozen or so small onions, peeled and scalded, to mix with the mince.

The oatmeal (slow cooking, not ‘quick’ and ’stone ground’ is traditional) should be fine. It can be given a light toasting in an oven or in front of a hearth. Two cups should be enough. Spread the mince on a board and strew the meal over it, with the seasoning of pepper, salt and a little cayenne.

The clean haggis back, with the rough surface outward, should be without any thin parts to it 8or it will burst – some cooks use two just in case). Prepare the mince mixture and onions to the right consistency (it should stick together when you take a handful) and fill the paunch until a little over half full. Add a little lemon or vinegar, press out the air and sew up the bag. Prick in places and place in large boiling pot (prick again as it swells . Let it boil about three hours in the covered pot, adding broth or water as necessary.

sgian-dubh

Q

Armistice Day, in memory of veterans of all wars

Royal Air Force

Had he been alive, this past weekend my father, Frank Knight, would have been joining his fellow veterans at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, London in the annual parade. He left his squadron as Flight Lieutenant, when it was disbanded – I’ve always suspected that he would have preferred to continue in the RAF after the war (he mentioned once that he had the opportunity) but his wife was going to have their first child and they chose to return to her parents in Argentina – where I was born a month before his official discharge.

He stayed for a while in Buenos Aires after his retirement (he worked as a salesman for a brewery, then for a steel company) and was at one time Chairman of the RAF Association there, but returned eventually to live in London, back to those of his surviving friends of that time – for though it was a tragic and awful time for humanity and the world – today we stop a little while in memory of all that die in wars and particularly this one – I think that bonds made then can never be undone. So honouring the memory o all veterans, and to Flt. Lt. Frank Knight, our Dad … with love,

Peter, John and Jeannie

About his Squadron:

No.172 Squadron was formed at Chivenor on 4 April 1942 from No.1417 (Leigh Light) Flight which had formed on 8 March to operate Wellingtons equipped with airborne searchlights on anti-submarine patrols. The first operational night patrol was flown on 3 June during which two U-boats were located and attacked. In August, seven aircraft were detached to Wick for patrols over the North Sea and were the basis of No.179 Squadron when it formed on 14 September. Patrols over the Western Approaches and Bay of Biscay led to many sightings and in March 1943 the Squadron’s Wellingtons were fitted with ASV Mark III radar to guide the aircraft into a position where their searchlights could be exposed to reveal a U-boat. This method soon brought results, U-665 being sunk on 20 March and the overall the squadron averaged one sighting for every four sorties.*

Between October 1943 and April 1944 detachments were based at Gibraltar and later, in the Azores. In September 1944, No.172 moved to northern Ireland and flew patrols over the Atlantic until disbanded on 4 June 1945.

Q

* Win one, lose one. From my father’s flight log: On the 8th. of October 1943, the German submarine U-340 was damaged and later scuttled (all crew but one rescued safely) but on the 7th. of January 1944 a surfaced sub blew a hole in one wing of my dad’s plane. – the sub may have been U-380 or U-952. The guy that would be my father, the Wellington’s crew, managed to get home and land safely. For better or for worse that’s why it’s me, Q, here and not somebody else (or no one at all).

Q rides again! (Back soon)

As soon as the weather clears a little. What happened to August? And September?

• Two and a half years after we bought this land  and  building a house on  it (in exchange for our share of “Cruz Blanca”, the farmhouse in the mountains that was our home for the past twenty years, plus some more) – the title deed was finally released by the Provincial Registry. It became “legally ours” – so have been able to start untangling the remaining issues …

• We very nearly lost Remy, the other half  the K9 division of our immediate family (two German Shepherds Champ and  sister Remy, both seven).  We had never heard of Bloat , or “Gastric Dilation – Vulvulus” until the Saturday 23d August … and then learned more about it than I’d ever care to know. A rare opportunity to know you dog inside.  Two hours emergency surgery (the duty vets, a couple of lasses, one still in her evening clothes) . Remy is fine now, though will be forever at risk if we are not careful with her feeding. She figured on her own that she’s to take a nap after her meals. Smart.

• In the midst, rearranging my work to accommodate writing full time , as a business – far from real yet, but much more realistic.

“Danzig Daughters” the novel is – work in progress, still in rough draught.
A heartening bit of good luck, I got a third place in a flash fiction contest (at the UK site, Writelink.co.uk for a dark little piece (probably reflecting my mood at he time). First place was way ahead, it did provide some welcome cheer at the moment! Thank you, Writelink & Paola.

“Seventh Aubrey” returned (can be revised, sent again); “Mother Dear” needs working on some more. Then a week ago, I thought it time to get back into the fray with writing friends in the different forums (fora? ). Writers Village U. and the L. Ridge alumni at Storycrafters. At Writers Village University a new round of the six week introduction to basics for writers is starting up, and in November of course, another bout of “writing 50 000 words in a month”, the notorious and totally mad NaNoWriMo

BYKNIGHT.COM will just have to wait a little longer. I’ve got (finally) Dreamweaver, Photoshop and other Adobe stuff and no more genuine excuses for stalling.

So Q rides again. Windmills will remain un-tilted, damsels will have to take care of their own distress’, knaves will stay unpunished for a while.
Sunshine.
Q

Linear Garden – a good idea

Somebody in this region tried this some years back: design a garden, with trees, flowerbeds, shrubbery and all, alongside a highway – it’s not too hard to do, as long as there’s some way of providing a water supply and some people willing to undertake a bit of regular maintenance (here, along Provincial Route 5 in Cordoba, Argentina, had the fire brigade of a town nearby provide irrigation services but it went to weed when enthusiasm from the volunteer gardeners ran out).

This morning’s Science Daily picked up an initiative prompted by The American Horticultural Society  (as a ‘new idea’: fair enough as no one has published it formally as far as I know):  From small, manicured beds of flowers maintained by community volunteers to extensive landscaping projects along America’s byways, roadside gardens are taking root.

Whoever can take credit, it is a good idea and deserves support from any authorities, groups, anywhere in the world: a win win thing if there ever was one.  Best would be a cooperative of individual enthusiasts but it’s hard to imagine that many people that would take on a largely altruistic effort – this is a place where town councils, state and provincial authorities can meddle and provide fine outdoor work as ‘jobs for the boys and girls’ if they must.  Better by far than enclosing inexperienced youths in administrative offices so that they can mess up peoples lives with careless form filling and messed up data gathering (but that is another rant).

If you happen on this post – keep it in mind and if you can, approach anyone you can to get this show – literally – on the roads in your region. And if you can, spread the word through trackbacks and comments on your space on the ‘net.

Q

American Society for Horticultural Science (2008, July 26). New Roadside Beautification Concept Studied. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 26, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/07/080717110228.htm

Q’s Place is still under construction – and about Spam

I have to find a good theme: Some look great at first but the text starts drifting across columns, or picture don’t quite stay put – at least, where I thought I put them. Others … I tried one and couldn’t find my way back into this site management place: Q was locked out of Q’s Place!.

Pretty can? The Original:

Still working on this site. “Q’s Place” is a little low on an overcrowded priority list.  Mrs Q and I discuss what might go here. It’s definitely be the place to put personal things,  for friends and family as well as any that wander by and care for the kind of things we post.  writing of course, and home making as we haven’t been able to settle down yet; for oh so many reasons!

This morning though there were forty seven messages spam queue, blocked by the wonderful WordPress Akismet plugin.  Wonderful software,  that!. But the topmost was nasty – a few hundred lines of filth. So long that it wasn’t practical to search back for any genuine messages.

So if I haven’t acknowledged a genuine post: my apologies. Please post again. I know I should check in more often and look at comments held by Akismet before the list gets too long … of course it wouldn’t have done anything about the garrulous pornographer of that long, long comment.

Of course, one can just let the sewage through and then collect from Adsense? I doubt it, the good people at Google must be wise to that one, ages ago. Whatever,  it’s sad to see so many twerps and nitwits using up bandwidth like this. Nitwits and twerps is too mild for those sad sacks that make a living promoting the junk.

Until the next one, soon I hope. Pictures of where we used to live.

Where we are now – which is also where we hope to move out from.

And some grandchildren pictures, and great pictures of great grandchildren as well.

Meanwhile …

Please don’t open the can !

Q

Let the good times roll! Am I done with computer crashes?

Three weeks now, about 200 hours: The cost of bad computer setup, even a small home unit like this one. It’s a Hewlett Packard/Compaq Mini-Tower 2200 with twin Intel processors and 300 GB: (not very small at all). With Windows XP Pro Sp2 installed from factory in Mexico – so it’s in Spanish which can be a nuisance for other reasons – I ordered and paid for MS Office (also in Spanish) which turned out to be a pirated version: The vendors, in Cordoba City, went out of business. It tanked along a couple of years but began to get slow and unpredictable. The bad Office went out and I repalced it with a legitimate one, on Office 97 I had from a previous machine. During the 2007 NaNoWriMo writers marathon it began to get really unstable, specially the Office installation: for a writer, the most basic. From Writers Village University I was clued to the alternative open source office suite:

Open Office: It is a wonder we use Microsoft.  Getting used to it can take a while, the Ways of Word are very ingrained. Open Office has a huge number of extra features and I see no reason for not making it the default suite here, but I’m not yet confident enough to use it for submissions on-line, where the finished product will probably be opened with Microsoft Word. Whatever, discovering Open Office has been the first big step forward.

Yesterday and the day before I may have found the second:  Ubuntu:

Quite amazing! It is the most friendly version of Linux / Unix I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying. The download took six hours! (about 630 megabytes) and this server actually managed to keep the connection live during all that time. I’ve been able to make a clean, error free, CD and It loads just fine. So now, as soon as I get on far enough with my writing commitments, I’ll see about installing it as the main Operating System on this computer.

But first:

• Get back to MFA and WVU. There I’ve left good friends and fine writers without contributing anything to that most excellent and brave course. Grumps, Susan, Raven, Joni and company…
• Maybe I’ll get back to the “Tales of Chestamovarado” and try and present some of it there.
• Jean Lauzier – The Book Tour will be in June. I Will have finished the next project by then (tentative working title “Plot Thickeners” but I see that is taken by another tutoring book, so will have to think of something else: A writer’s guide and cook book combined.

Tomorrow is crucial in this matter of the “property scam” we have fallen into (actually blundering into other peoples blunders is more like it). It seems we have good legal grounds to stave off the Golf owners claim that we should pay a 100% increase in the condo tax as well as their claim on supposed back payments, which are usury (in excess of three grand if they get their way, which of course is out of the question). But whatever the costs, we must avoid lawsuits (which in Argentina are another perpetual scam as neither judges or lawyers have any interest in the actual law). We will of course, be moving again. The only part of my own design that survived, the wood stove heated ‘loft’ is extremely comfortable, easy and economical to heat, so we’d aim at staying until this winter is over, at least.

Q