Everybody is busy

Maggie with a test dress

Maggie has been doing lots of sewing this week, and made a test dress to try out a new pattern.  She's happy with how it went and so is doing the finished dress in a lovely poppy fabric.  She should have it ready to wear this weekend, when we will go to Bath to attend the wedding of Andrew and Julia's eldest daughter. 

I have been doing more gardening during the days that it has been cool enough to work... after finishing the back wall I have now gone on to remove nearly all of the ivy from the apple tree and the lilac and elderflower bushes, and found this cute bird's nest up high in the branches.

Yoshi has been suffering a bit from the heat, but he's still wanting to play frisbee.  I ran with him yesterday, early in the day, and he was not very fast at all.  I am going to stop running with him when the temperature is higher than 20 degrees, because it's just too frustrating to have to stop every 500 metres for him to catch up.

Earlier in the week before it got super hot, we did a wood run to take our half of the firewood that we had delivered to Bousval last summer.  We spent some of our time while house-sitting chainsawing it up and stacking it, and now that it has been sitting for over a year it's good and dry.  Some of the larger pieces needed splitting before we put them inside the garage for storage, so I did some therapeutic work with the splitting maul.  Happily my right shoulder handled it just fine.  I can't say how relieved I am that I can throw a ball or swing an axe again!

Fortunately we were able to get all of the wood into the garage before a huge hail, wind, and rainstorm hit...

Fortunately nothing was damaged by the hail; the old part of the pavilion fabric had a couple of small tears but the whole thing held together, and the "toque" section on the cupola that Maggie sewed to replace the old one didn't budge a bit.  Also I was happy that our roof didn't leak, even with such extreme rain and wind.

Duncan and I were encouraged by the initial bubbling of the Abbey-style dubbel (which is still in primary fermentation but will need bottling in another week) so we decided to brew another batch of beer, this time 15 litres' worth.  Maggie prefers strong blonde beers to the brown ones, so we bought a Duvel style blonde from a brewing store near Leuven.  This kit was different as it came with a couple of different types of sugar to add during the initial fermentation, as well as some hop pellets!

We did the mixing up on the Belgian national holiday on the 21st July, but as the weather was a bit warm we had to wait until the next morning before the wort was cool enough to sprinkle the yeast.  If the temperature of the wort is higher than 25 degrees celsius there is a danger that it will kill the yeast.

We are keeping all of the fermenting beer in the basement where the temperature has been pretty steady at 23 degrees.  Ideally it should be a little cooler but we hope it will be ok.

the legal definition of brewing

Maggie and I used to go to a local wine-making place back in the 1990s, where the wine was fermented and bottled in a factory, so you didn't have to store it at your home.  But the legal obligation was that you had to show up to throw the yeast into the "must" (the wine equivalent of the wort) and then you had to do the bottling at the end of the process.  So I made sure that Duncan and I shared this responsibility...

Just down the road from us is a field that sells flowers that you can cut yourself, and you pay into a little piggy bank, based on the honours system.  This time of year it's full of gladiolus, and that is a special flower for us.  It was a variety that my mother grew for the decorations at our wedding back in 1997, and Maggie's late aunt Ina gave us a lovely big watercolour painting of gladiolus as a present, as she was not in good enough health to travel to Skootamatta for the wedding at that time.

Yesterday was the 24th anniversary of the day that we met, so I took the boys, a vase filled with water, and some secateurs up the street and we chose a few stems to decorate the house.

I did some baking yesterday, but did so in a minimal way so as to avoid heating the house even more than it is already.  English muffins are hard to come by in Belgium, and they make excellent hamburger buns.  I picked up a bunch of mini black angus burgers at the delaize that were on sale for a ridiculously low price, and squished them a little with a plate to make them the right size to fit the "buns".  The "mini" burgers weighed around 60g each, or two ounces, uncooked.  Interestingly, the original MacDonald's hamburger patties (the ones that are now on the kid's menu) were 45g before cooking, so that would mean that these little burgers were perfectly fine.  We ended up serving them up with some aged gouda, squares of cured bacon, a thin slice of beetroot, onions, pickles and mustard.  Very nice on a summer's evening...

Here are a few shots of Malcolm at work on his mandolin today...

here he is cutting a small rabbet at the edge of the top to accept ebony binding

part of the binding rabbet, with the back and point binding already installed

the scroll; the top has not yet been rabetted

In the time that it has taken me to write this blog, Maggie has completed her dress!