Retirement of a favourite blogger...

Rhonda Hetzel, author and long-time blogger decided to stop blogging for good this week. Over the years, her blog Down to Earth has been a source of great inspiration, archive of wholesome reading, gateway to more wholesome internet content, and a model on how to lead a satisfied and productive domestic life. The announcement made me very sad and it led to thinking about my own blog.

Back when I started in 2010, this blog was a way to make me stop procrastinating about writing. Over the years, it became a journal of sorts as I blogged about our travels, daily life, and special events. I still love reading over the early posts, especially those starring my kids and furry friends. But then real life and COVID intervened. Yes, I was still writing, but I found blogging to be a chore. I kept thinking, "What's the point?" and opened the blog only when I had something I really wanted to say. But the more I waited for such opportunities to come, the longer I had to wait, till I was blogging next to nothing. 

But not any more! Hetzel's retirement and a dear friend's inquiry about why I am not blogging any more has made me rethink my 'waiting to be inspired' strategy. So here I go again...

Let me start with Karthi, our home. Over the years, her exterior had grown grungy and marred with cracks, fissures, and algae abstract art...

 

So we decided to get her painted again with new-fangled moisture-blocking undercoats and to freshen the damp proofing of the roof. The first step was pressure-washing the whole exterior, which took a whole day, around 3000-3500 litres of water, and presented us with a whopping electricity bill in February. It was good that we had decided to damp-proof Karthi's roof back in 2011, because it stood up wonderfully to the pressure washing. The contractor and the painter said that when they had done on the same on a house younger than Karthi, the plastering had broken up into cement chunks and sand and they had had to re-plaster the roof.

Within three weeks in January, Karthi was utterly transformed. The tired faux wood work of the porch gleamed again...

The front door took a well-deserved day off its hinges, got a sanding and a spray coat and was back at its post by the evening...

 

and the whole house got the look of a demure Malayali maiden decked out in a mundu and neryathu set with a tamarind-leaf green border. It makes me hum "Puliyilakkarayolum pudava chutti" whenever I return home from a jaunt and see Karthi peeking through the trees...

 

As you can see, the cats were actively involved in supervising the painting process, as in barging in on the painters at meal times and begging for food. The painters deemed Pirate and Akrami very well-mannered because they didn't grab and run like other feral cats, but made polite requests and waited patiently to be served! 

Now that Karthi is looking spiffy on the outside, the interior looks dingy!!! We have plans, yes, we have plans. But some cannot be put into practice for six months because the exterior moisture barrier will drive the remaining moisture in the walls to the interiors in the coming months, and will be safe for painting only by June. Already we are seeing bubbling and flaking off in several ground floor rooms, likely to grow worse in the coming months. 

That's it for today. The past one and a half months have been unusually hectic and discombobulating for a new year. More on that next week!

Why I don't subscribe to the martyr mom persona

I fell in love with English literature at the age of fifteen. Two years later, I fell in love with the guy who was to become my best friend and partner for life. I would have been extremely happy with these two loves. Looking around at the lives that I see now, I am extremely grateful that I still have these two  in my life. But time had kept aside a truly wonderful gift for me. At the age of twenty nine, I fell in love again. It was the moment that I became a mother.

Growing up, I was not a very maternal person. I didn't subscribe to all the mushiness associated with marriage and bearing children. I loved my siblings, of course, but I seldom had any affinity for children as such. I would tilt my head and look on curiously when female relatives of my generation played house and found great joy in pretending their ragamuffin dolls were their kids. I'd rather climb trees and dream away in their high branches or immerse myself in a book.

But all that changed when I became a mother. I was brought up to be a career woman, there was no other option available at the time. It was what I was expected to be even after getting married. But it flipped the exact moment that I became a mother. As my babies started expressing their unique personalities, I understood that I could not ever leave them and go to work. I couldn't bear to think of getting to know about all their antics secondhand. I couldn't miss their smiles or tears. I couldn't not be the person to take care of them when they were ill. That is how I came to be a stay-at-home mother (SAHM) despite all the flak that I had to take from my well-wishers.

Yesterday, I watched a video on YouTube: Feminism, Mom and the Game of Chess . The speaker in the video describes his mother in the stereotypical Indian mom way - the mother who cooks four different types of breakfast a day to suit all tastes, the lynch-pin of the house without whom the family has to subsist on Quaker Oats all the time and without whom the house became a pig sty. The woman who gives up playing chess because her husband doesn't allow her to participate in the nationals. Ultimately when the father orders the mother to give up her promotion and get back home, she immediately obeys. It is heartening to see that the son cares for his mother's dreams and wishes, but never once does he say that he offered to help her in her chores, nor did he or his brother learn to cook and clean the house so that his mother could pursue her career and get what recognition was due to her.

Although my decision to become a SAHM was partly unconscious, I was sure of one thing - I would not be a martyr mother. That was a decision I took long ago. I was determined not to become a door mat. So I make one kind of breakfast each day - according to the thing I've made, it might be thoroughly disliked by at least one person in my family. E.g., Kunjunni hates upma, DH dislikes wheat dosa, they both don't like pancakes and Ani hates all vegetables in general. If anyone doesn't like the particular dish of the day, they are free to fix themselves something that they do like. And of course, I make my own favorites sometimes even if nobody else likes them in particular.

When Karthi was being built, the thing I most wanted to get right was the kitchen. I wanted it to be an open-plan kitchen near the living room. DH hated the idea. But I was adamant about that one point. Because I knew that if the kitchen was relegated to an invisible corner of the house, I would be the only one working in it while the menfolk lolled around on sofas watching TV. This was one valuable piece of knowledge I had gained from living in seven different rentals during our marriage of which two had open-plan kitchens. DH and I compromised by having the option of closing off the view of the kitchen from the living room with curtains if required.

So our boys have grown up watching me cook and helping me as part of their daily lives. I have made sure that my kids know the rudiments of taking care of the home. With two boys, it is easier to do all the chores by myself instead of having to direct them constantly. We don't do chore charts and such, but I ask them to clean their rooms, fold their clothes and occasionally do their laundry. Kunjunni has a knack for doing things and a genuine liking for learning how to cook. When I went to the Attukal Ponkala last week, he astonished me by making iddlis by himself without step-by-step instructions from me. He also told me where he had erred slightly, but all of them had a jolly time at breakfast. 

One of the things I love observing while visiting people is the family dynamics, especially in relation to women. Some women are genuinely generous and derive the greatest pleasure from giving away the best of their food to others. Conversely there are also some women who make it a point to choose the burnt, underdone or otherwise imperfect parts of food for themselves and then look about for approval and appreciation from their audience. They make me gag with their piety and their naked approval-seeking attitude. In my family, we share and share alike. Occasionally, if I am feeling very generous, I might give up a portion of dessert. But that is it.

With all the recent interest in mind-body medicine, I have been going through Deepak Chopra's and Louise L. Hay's works on the subject. In the book You Can Heal Yourself, Hay outlines the emotional states that cause different diseases to manifest in different parts of the body. She attributes cancer to resentments, secret grief and hatreds. She attributes menstrual problems to rejection of one's femininity, guilt and fear. Breast problems are directly linked to motherhood issues. Taking everything into consideration, it seems to me that it is important for a woman to make self-loving choices or end up having dire health problems. And from what I have seen of some women succumbing to such diseases in old age, they will be further criticized for being inconsiderate because they never cared for their own health while toiling away for others.

I have really come to love the art of homemaking over the past few years even if I was brought up to look on it as drudgery. I also don't think that my home or garden needs to be immaculate showpieces to show how industrious a homemaker I am. I am not what one calls "house-proud" at all. A decent level of cleanliness, a lot of comfort and personal touches are the things I go for. And of course, I love cooking things that my family loves. I would never have taken up baking if my kids hadn't pushed me into it.

One thing I have come to notice in life is that if you keep constantly giving up the things you like for the convenience of others, they will just take it for granted. So if I feel like going away for a meditation retreat, I inform my family in advance, take moderate steps to ensure their well being in my absence and I go. I don't cook and freeze meals for their use all through my absence. If a literary festival comes to town, I see how I can accommodate it into my schedule without disrupting anything absolutely important, and I go. DH used to see me crocheting and criticize it as a time-wasting activity. But I still do it because I love it.  Being a homemaker is a 24/7 job the whole year through. It doesn't change even on vacations with family. So I deserve such small breaks. 

The martyr thing? Not for me, no sirree!

Monsoon blues and greens

The dirty breakfast dishes are still waiting in the sink. The laundry is calling out loud from the washing machine. My SHE cards tell me that I have a full day of chores ahead. But when I stepped out to close the gate after my family departed, for the first time in several months I felt the urge to take out the camera, to write, to share. So my dear dishes, laundry and chore home-blessing cards, please wait a bit while I get this done!!!

The first thing that called to me was the sun...

...shining on the rain-drenched Napier grass through which I had mowed a path last week. The camera is a poor instrument to catch the magnificence of the light on the bright green. I stood a full minute enjoying the light before I ran in to get the camera...

My coral jasmine has decided that it is Onam already, making floral carpets and lending her blossoms to sundry bushes near her while vying for space with my plumeria.

Oh how I love those blossoms... they bring back the best memories of my childhood...

The color-changing bougainvillea that I had trained over the wall to say "Hi" and nod its blossoms at all passersby was blown right back and snapped in two by the wind last Saturday. I am not sad, because I know how soon it will grow back. In fact, the wind has done me a great service by sparing me the job of trimming it 😊. Now if I can just bring myself to cut it in manageable parts and get it to the top end of our yard where it can rest in peace without the thorns damaging me...

The globe amaranth providing much needed color relief from the rampant greenery...

The sun struggling to penetrate the vegetation of our absentee neighbor's overgrown yard into our backyard...

The fragile little "springs" that my ivy gourd is putting out to catch hold of its new trellis. I moved its pot to a different spot since a falling papaya tree broke the net I had set up for it earlier. Those tiny springs inspire me with so much hope and happiness...

Just take in this list for a moment...

1. A childless aunt has multiple hospitalizations for acute diabetes issues.
2. Husband and one child contract a nasty virus that combines fever, cough, sneezing, vomiting and consequent dehydration which last more than a fortnight each.
3. Another kid contracts a urinary tract infection that has his bilirubin shooting up and gives him high fever.
4. A cousin's wife and two kids have a serious accident. The lady is bedridden with multiple fractures on her legs. The kids survive with a fracture each.
5. The cousin, a high-functioning alcoholic who had been restrained till then by his wife's loving supervision, decides that his wife's bedridden state is the ideal time to leap off the wagon, goes on an alcoholic binge and ends up in a coma. In the ICU for two weeks without knowing if he will survive. Now recovering, but still not mobile and has a food tube and breathing tube. Still in hospital after a whole month.
6. A nephew gets acute appendicitis and gets hospitalized just in time to avoid appendix rupture. Still has a painful recovery.
7. Dad needing and getting cataract surgery.

This is what we have been going through from the beginning of this year.  I have had to personally care for only four of these people, but the sheer stress has been drawing out all joy in life. So much so that happiness seems even more fleeting than usual! 

Movies, books, summer outings - those go-to remedies for the blues - were just momentary distractions in the doom and gloom.

Today, it's different. Today once again I feel that life is not a burden. Today I've decided that enough is enough. It's time to get on with writing, baking, sowing those new seeds, going beyond mere housekeeping routines to do something creative, something extra. 

The sun's rising brightly over Karthi once again!

Post laptopitis and a makeover project...

January 29th was an ordinary Monday in all other respects at Karthi. After the weekend merrymaking, I was as usual torn between selecting an extended rest on the couch or whirling around Karthi putting to it rights after the weekend mayhem. I had no inkling of the disaster that was to befall me. 

In the end, I chose to celebrate the fledgling week by alternating between bouts of cleaning and sitting still. In one leg of the sitting still part, I fired up my trusty laptop of 7 years, did some work on it and left it on the blink a while later to get my lunch. After lunch I came back to my hibernating computer, sat down and pressed the switch...

Nothing happened. The screen didn't erupt happily to life on my touch. No friendly lights gleamed. I quickly attached the power cord and tried all resuscitation methods that my laptop technician relayed to me over the phone. No good. That is when I started to realize that something very serious had happened...

To cut a long story short, my laptop is still not completely fine. It was resuscitated and returned to me after more than a month minus a battery for the backing up of files. It needs another extended stay in the hospital for a complete recovery and I'm waiting for the technician to arrange a surrogate laptop for me to use till my own is returned to robust health. 

But the first two months of the year have not passed by uneventfully. Today I will share with you a project that had been niggling at me for several months. It was concerning this bookshelf in our master bedroom:

I have no idea how old this bookshelf is. From 3rd grade to the 5th, it had been part of my room in Saudi. Later, it sat in my sister's room for a long time. When our parents came to Thiruvananthapuram, they left it here at Karthi. My father had got the old plywood panel covering changed, put in new glass sliding panels and had the interior painted. But the glass didn't slide smoothly, it was a headache to open and close them and they were tough to keep clean of smudges and dust. So over the years, I was unable to close them properly and the interior got progressively dirty.

Things being so, I just stashed in some things that weren't in frequent use and had to spend considerable time and effort in retrieving them. It was tough to keep it organized and clean. Besides, it was the first thing that met my eyes on waking up and the last when I went to sleep, so it was kind of an eyesore too. 

One day I just paused by it and checked one end of the glass channel that didn't quite meet at one corner. To my surprise, it came off from the wood, trailing threads of tacky glue. I ran to my tool box, found a chisel and in no time had pried off the channel on the left side!!! I sat down to think and found that an open bookshelf would be much more easier to maintain and organize than this sliding glass affair. 

So in the second week of the new year, I bought some white enamel paint (since my painting adventure last year, I consider myself a veteran house painter) and happily dismantled the glass channels and panel without any damage.

It was a challenge taking out the glass panels and the top and bottom channels. I didn't know how to take the glass out of the channels without removing them altogether. So after a bit of sliding and prying that saw me sweating as much in stress as in exertion, they came out without breaking and I immediately packed them up and put them away for safekeeping. 

Two coats of paint later, the bookshelf gleamed back at me... Of course, the edges are a bit ragged and the paint has got out of the lines a bit, but they don't bother me.

And here it is now... organized and easy to clean, no longer an eyesore and completely usable.

So that is another project under my belt. Each time I look at it, I smile in satisfaction! Which reminds me, I have not shown you my living room makeover yet. Will post it soon!!!

2017 is over, so soon?

I love being a homemaker. One of the reasons is that it offers a wide variety of activities that appeal to me. No two days are alike on this job. One day I might be a cleaning diva, the next day I could be a nurse, on the third day I can wow my family with baked goodies... the list is endless. 

The only problem with this is, unlike a day job where the milestones are marked with pay raises, promotions, certificates and congratulatory parties, homemaking is a mostly thankless and featureless career. When I look back, it all seems like an endless corridor of cooking, cleaning and other mundane tasks that I have traversed with my apron firmly tied on.

So this year I've decided to sit down and list the things that I have learned and accomplished in the past 12 months. I don't want to remember years just for the memorable trips we took or tragedies in the family and friends circles.

Here is my list:

Gardening: Grew my first ivy gourds or kovakkai in pots and devised a pandal using plastic netting between our well and shed. The yield wasn't spectacular, but the vine is still alive and that is a huge accomplishment for me! 

I also improvised a trellis for purple long beans and had a bountiful crop. We planted more fruit trees this year. So in addition to the jackfruit, tamarind and coconut trees we had when we bought the plot, we now have cashew, sapodilla, guava, papaya, bell fruit, passion fruit and mulberry. My plan for the next year is to nourish these properly. The pineapple that I had got to grow from the top of a store-brought fruit has finally decided to put forth a fruit after two years of merely taking up space in our backyard. Talk about bonuses!

I also managed a couple of elephant yams and finally succeeded in getting a kanthari (bird's eye chilli) to grow from seed. DH and I planted around 26 banana and plantain rhizomes in May and got help in maintaining them. They are flourishing. And here I was thinking that I barely did anything in the garden due to health issues in the latter part of the year!

This year is notable for my discovery of a miraculous addition to my gardening - cocopeat! We have clayey soil that becomes quite hard in summer months. I was looking for a way to loosen it up and happened on this product at an agro store. I've used it for all the new plantings this year and it has worked wonders. Later, my hunch was confirmed by an agricultural expert's YouTube video recommendation for loosening and aerating clayey soil!

Craft: Learned and made three crochet amigurumi. Made my first macrame pieces.

I am also learning polymer claying. My first pieces are very rudimentary and I am still learning the various techniques.

And of course there was that needlework project that is now framed and hanging right at our entrance so that the maker can boast to her heart's content...

I managed to BuJo through the year and have decided that I don't need any other planner ever again. But the recommended BuJo journals are very prohibitively pricey (Leuchtturm 1917 - Rs.3000 for a notebook!!!) and the dotted notebook I got from Amazon shed pages so badly that I was left pasting back the pages more than I was writing in it. Other replacements had pages that ghosted and even bled.

So I bought a package of cream-colored A4 premium bond paper from my favorite stationery shop and learned kettle-stitch binding from YouTube. My first attempt at trimming the pages after binding turned out like a rat chewed up its edges. Ani now uses that as a sketch book. I bound two more and got them trimmed and covered by a professional binder. Then I added elastic closures and colorful endpapers on my own... 

Here they are: my new BuJo and Craft BuJo for 2018. Hope to learn how to do the covers by myself next year. The paper quality is the best! I can even paint in them if I want to. I thumb my nose at you, expensive stationery manufacturers!!!

Cooking and baking: Baked Tres leches, Red velvet, Devil's food and Caramel cakes. Learned how to make Swiss meringue buttercream icing - think I will never go back to plain ol' buttercream unless I need an eggless cake and icing. I tried my hand at icing flowers too! Here was my best effort of the year made for the "baby" in our family who complains if I don't write his name in icing on the top of the cake! (Yep, that's my DH)

In addition to baking I tried my hand at Unniyappam (turned out soft and yummy in spite of my skipping the step of letting the batter rest awhile after mixing), Kumbilappam during the jackfruit season and a savory, tangy Bhakarwadi that was a huge hit. I tried pickling tender mangoes, but got the proportions of masala all wrong so that instead of being soft and mushy, they turned out hard as bullets and too salty after the requisite 6 months in a closed jar. Ah, some you lose!

Home: Painted a whole room and learned quite a few valuable lessons in the process. Then I read this (highly recommended) book...

... learned to repair a leaky toilet by myself (cost 20 rupees) and emboldened by the feat, went on to replace the lights on the gate post by myself (no manual required). This is in addition to the valve-changing, picture-hanging etc that I usually do. 

I also managed to give our living room a makeover this month, but more on that in another post!

Books: I managed to stick to my resolution of listing all the books I read this year and writing a short precis of each. So far, the number is 131 - therefore I have managed to bring down the average number of books that I read from 15 to around 10 a month. Definite improvement, I would say! I will share my favorites of the year in another post.

Please don't think I am boasting about the number of books that I manage to read because anyone who knows me can tell you that reading is almost as essential to me as breathing. And please don't imagine that all my reading is either high literature or philosophical reading - those are certainly there, but I love reading potboilers, well-researched romances, memoirs, travelogs, good whodunits, thrillers and humor. I am looking forward to reducing this number even more because this year the power of the left lens of my specs went from -10.00 to -10.25 dioptre, not a good thing at my age!

Writing has not been very good this year: I managed a measly 12 blog posts not including this one. Didn't do any creative writing this year. And I didn't miss it much either...hmm, that is food for thought...

Towards the end of the year, I managed to help out a friend by copy-editing his wife's doctoral thesis. It led to my now getting two paying clients for my copy-editing and rewriting services!

All in all, it has been a good year for domestic activities at Karthi! I am so grateful for the new things I've learned this year. But my greatest thanks goes to DH who works hard and manages our finances so well that I have the leisure to be a homemaker. I cannot thank him enough for that.   

Do you look back at each year? Do the years appear distinct or do they telescope into each other and become a jumbled mess?  How do you chronicle the year's events? Do comment in the form below...

Wish you all a very merry Xmas and a Happy New Year! Signing off for 2017!