Cinnamon scrolls

My long holiday is almost over, only 6 days til I return to work and I am feeling slightly miserable. Not because of the whole going back to work thing, but because I have a head cold brewing. I decided to try to cheer myself up by making cinnamon scrolls. Like baking bread there is a lot of resting in the process and I am just waiting for the final rest to finish so I can put them in the oven. I’ve never made them before and I am a little worried that my dough was too sticky, but I am sure they will be fine even if they aren’t the world’s neatest. They should be done just in time for morning tea.

That just leaves me with the question of what I am going to do with myself for the next six days. Some of those days are already accounted for. My brother is getting married tomorrow and I am photographing the wedding. Plus if it goes til midnight, I won’t be home til 1 a.m. and I shall need a lot of napping the day after to recover. For today, I think I am going to pin a quilt and read one of my books. After 3 months off work I am finding it is the simplest things that bring the greatest pleasure. A trashy novel, the cooking channel and my knitting and I am a happy woman. Throw in a pastry and its even better.

Christmas and Gardening

Only 2 days to go and its Christmas. I’m kind of organised. Presents are all wrapped and I am getting my groceries delivered today because I really didn’t want to be going to the supermarket this close to Christmas. That just leaves a load of cooking and prep for tomorrow and I can relax and enjoy the day.

I am feeling quite productive at the moment. I finished a quilt this week, and have been getting lots of reading in. In part, this productivity could be due to me finally giving in and starting to take something for my hay fever and allergies. Even though I still feel a little bit congested, my head is clearer. It’s amazing how much of a difference that makes.

While the weather is not doing any favours for my allergies, it is doing wonders for my garden. I planted some eggplant, capsicum and tomatoes about six weeks ago and, except for the tomatoes, they are doing great. I have had one harvest of eggplant already and when I looked yesterday, there were about five more growing. The mini capsicums are also growing well. I just need to figure out when is the best time to harvest them. While I had loads of tomatoes, they all rotted. I think they got fruit fly. It was either fruit fly or ants. There were ants on there when I cleaned them off the plants, but the ants could just have gone in to finish off the job. Either way, no tomatoes for me. I am going to have to find a way to protect them before the next lot grows.

 

That’s all from me, for now. Enjoy your holidays, wherever you are and what ever you are celebrating.

Misinformation, confrontation and the internet

I’m not a confrontational kind of person. Having to tell someone they are wrong about something usually leads to a kind of sick feeling in my stomach and anxiety that plagues me for days. My usually approach when people are misinformed is just to let them be wrong, I figure their misinformed state is not my problem. Plus, most people don’t actually want their minds changed anyway. Our confirmation biases are such that I could throw mountains of evidence to the contrary at them and they wouldn’t believe me, preferring to rely on the one source that tells them what they want to hear.

Yet more and more often I am finding myself in situations where I feel compelled to challenge the information being provided and it usually involves people posting misinformation online. I’m trying to figure out why. I don’t know if it is because the posting of misinformation is more frequent, whether what is being posted is more blatantly false, or whether the misinformation is more harmful. There is a lot of stuff out there at the moment that seems almost designed to stir up hate and by generating hate to increase the power and influence of certain groups of people who are promising action.

I am struggling with this one a little bit, because a part of me wants to say that I have no moral obligation regarding other people’s ignorance. I want to be able to say that everyone has an obligation to be aware of their own biases and to check the accuracy of information before they forward it on or rely on the information to form opinions. But…in saying that am I just indulging my own preference for non-confrontation? Is it something that I actually do myself? I know I try to, but like a lot of people I don’t always have time.

There are certainly some situations where I would be morally obliged to inform people of their misinformed state. For example, if a person was under the impression that they were about to drink a tasty drink but I knew it was poison I would generally think I am obliged to tell them its poison. Is the obligation to tell them any less just because the harms from the misinformation are less imminent or felt by society as a whole?

If I do have an obligation to correct the misinformed, how much time, effort and energy am I required to spend on it? Given the amount of misinformation out there at the moment, it would be a full-time job. More than a full time job and tricky because I am probably wrong just as often as everyone else. I think that is part of the problem, people are coming across vast amounts of information everyday and they need some way of deciding what to believe. Usually people just go with their guts, or with a source they trust. The problem is our guts are often wrong and the people we think are trustworthy are playing us for fools.

So, after that rather lengthy ramble I am no closer to a solution. It’s not really one of those things that one person can actually fix on their own. It needs a critical mass of people to change their behaviour. All I can do as an individual is set the truth as the standard I aim for and hope that enough people come along for the ride.

 

 

 

Lizards and Machine Quilting

In a fit of exuberance I agreed to photograph someone’s wedding. No big deal really, I have done it before and while it is not a fun job I’d rather do that than attend a wedding as a guest. Not that I have any particular animosity to people getting married, it’s just I’m not a party person at the best of times and usually the food is bad and there are hours sitting around trying to pretend you wouldn’t rather be at home reading a book.

I woke up yesterday though and realised the wedding was only a month away and it has been far too long since I spent any real time with my camera. I decided an outing to the local park was in order, because in the absence of models I figured the local wildlife would make a reasonable substitute. I managed to scrounge up a few decent shots including one of this rather large water dragon sunning himself (or herself) on a rock.

Didn’t stay out too long though because of the heat. I ended up coming home and doing what felt like an awful lot of machine quilting. I don’t know why that last little bit of the quilting always seems to drag on and on, but it does. I did manage to finish the quilting though and this morning machine sewed the binding on.

I have a sewing group meeting on Sunday so I can hand sew the binding down then, but for now I am off to start something new as soon as I figure out what I want to do.