Cake! Everybody Loves Cake…

Strolling through the file system this morning, I discovered a photo I’ve never shared with you: the cake I made for the Restoration Day release party.

It was the first time I made an icing other than the plainest of plain (water + icing sugar and a tiny bit of butter). Memory is hazy at this distance, but it might have been buttercream icing. With, as you can see in the photo, the viscera of at least one lemon.

It was delicious. Less delicious was the other photo I happened across: a dead mouse floating in the cats’ water bowl. (Always feed your cat on time.)

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Exciting News!

My thanks to you all! Restoration Day has made it onto the final ballot for the 2019 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel!


And to my great surprise, I have also been nominated for Best New Talent – my thanks to whoever thought that up; you know you you are (even if I don’t).

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I’m A Gnu

I’m knitting socks at the moment, out of a single ball of yarn – knitting the ball at both ends, as one might say. To avoid the awkwardness of having one short sock and one long one, I have both socks underway simultaneously – first foot, second foot, second leg, first leg. Unequal sockage duly avoided.

What I have failed to avoid, however, are the strains of The S-Song of the S-Second S-Sock, floating through my mind. And since that song is set to the tune of The Gnu by Flanders & Swann, I have found myself proclaiming at intervals that I’m a gnu.

Black wildebeest, or white-tailed gnu, Connochaetes gnou at Krugersdorp Game Reserve, Gauteng, South Africa (31233781942)
Gnu waiting for horns to grow long enough to knit with.
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