Holidays: Friday Feathers

Two marvellous birds from the Zoo

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

 

And as an unrelated bonus:

A video I stumbled across indulging in my love for Peter, Paul and Mary: Puff, the Magic Dragon.

What I love about the performance isn’t so much the artists, but the audience who is singing along, or at least mouthing the words, from the toddler to the grandpa.

Tummy Thursday: Churros con Chocolate

One of the kids’ favourite places in the city of Mataró is the Xurrería, which absolutely does not offer tourists an authentical churros experience. It’s simply the real thing, as evidenced by the fact that is was closed for holidays during the second half of our stay, something no tourist oriented business would do at the height of the season. That’s something to say about the city in general: tourism is a factor, and a welcome factor, but it’s not a big enough factor for businesses, especially bars and restaurants to rely on it exclusively. This means they need to provide a service that makes regular customers come back. I understand that I’m the worlds biggest hypocrite here when I want to go for a holiday but not where there are too many tourists, but I can live with that. It means good food.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Here you see “porras”, a thicker variety of churros with my “cortado”, an espresso with a bit of milk. Traditionally you eat them with “chocolate” as in the next picture:

©Giliell, all rights reserved

These are the more commonly known churros with their typical shape. The chocolate is thick and dark and not overly sweet, so you can dip your churros in and enjoy the whole thing. It’s more like custard in that respect, only that it’s delicious.

Holidays: The Eye of the Dragon

Komodo dragons are wonderful beasts and I simply love their majesty. I know they’re plain weird, using both venom and biological warfare to hunt. You got to give it to an animal whose hunting strategy is : bite once and wait for a week until it drops dead.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

And as a bonus: self portrait in the eye of a dragon, a close up from the picture above. That’s how I want to go, trying to take a picture of a dragon and then being unexpectedly eaten.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Holiday: Cute overload

Sorry for basically disappearing on you. Apparently I caught a “summer flu”, a viral infection that is similar in symptoms though less severe than a real flu. If anything it has reinforced my determination to get every single flu shot every single year. It completely knocked me out, I’ve been in bed since Saturday and today is the first day I’m up for more than half an hour apart from doctor’s visit and school run.

Here’s some cuteness to make up for it:

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Cute? Right? That’s just to ease you into it because nothing says cute like a baby mongoose:

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

You’re Never Really Ready

I’ve known that my mother is dying for several months. She has end stage heart failure and has been deteriorating slowly since early spring. This week, though, she’s taken a sudden turn for the worse and now it’s only a matter of days until she’s gone. Mom lives in a nursing home and most of her caregivers are kind and good at their jobs, but they’re busy. Very busy. Many days they work short-staffed and the dozens of patients they care for need a lot of care. Nursing homes in Ontario admit only patients who need full-time care and most of the people on my mother’s ward need help with everything from getting dressed to toileting. Staff does the best they can, but it isn’t the standard of care that I would give to a palliative patient so I’m visiting several times a day to help her be comfortable. This is my comfort zone. It’s when my clinical brain clicks in and I can push the emotional shit to the edges and be a nurse. Being a nurse is easier than being a daughter about to lose her mom.

There’s a phenomenon in palliative care known as anticipatory grief. It sometimes happens when a loved when takes a long time to die. The bereaved starts to let go of the relationship while the person is still alive. It comes near the end when caregivers are tired and it dulls the emotions. It’s one method of coping and I’ve often heard caregivers say that they’re ready for their person to die. In some ways they are. They’ve started the process, but they’re tired and dull and anxious for the struggle to be over. The thing is, though, that even if it takes a person a long time to die the moment when death happens feels sudden and no-one is ever really ready for the vacuum that appears where care and concern and love lived only a moment ago.

I’m an only child and we have no other family here. My mother’s relatives are all far away in Germany and there’s only the two of us left here. We’ve had a complicated relationship, mom and I, and I’ve worked through a lot of issues over the course of my life. I’ve let go of a shit ton of anger and in these past months I’ve made sure to say all the things I wanted to and to listen to all the things she wanted to say. I’ve been surprised by how much love managed to survive underneath all those other complicated emotions and I’ve let that guide me in these past few months. I have no regrets, there’s nothing left unsaid and I’ve been telling myself that I’m ready. It’s my coping mechanism, too, it seems, but in these last few days I’ve been surprised by how tender I feel and the facade of being ready is fading fast. I’ve nursed so many dying patients and their families that I thought I had an edge, but not even a palliative care nurse is ever really ready.

My first Commission – Part 6 – Halfway Through Hell

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This weekend I only could work for about 4 hours on this project, but I have finally managed to finish one blade.

I am not happy with it. Like, at all. I could have done a better job, and I have done a better job in the past. I just could not get into the thing at all. I kept making mistakes, and whilst to make a mistake on belt grinder takes a split of a second, correcting it can take hours. After 400 grit I went to hand-sanding. It is more strain on the fingers than the belt grinder, but a lot less space for a mess-up. And therefore I was, paradoxically, suddenly a lot faster. I might switch to hand sanding on the other blade sooner.

After 1000 grit I went for buffing wheels. Buffing a blade like this is not optimal and if I did not mess up the grind on belt grinder so often as I did, I would not go for it and I would polish it up to 7000 grit sandpaper. However buffing has one advantage, besides being fast – it hides and smoothens slight imperfections on the bevels by ever so slightly rounding up the ridges. Which is also the reason why I normally would not go for buffing for a blade like this.

This is the blade that goes to the customer. Next weekend I will hopefully finish the second one and then I can start on the accessories.

But after I am done with currently started projects, I will definitively make a batch of these. It is a complicated shape, and thus an excellent exercise.