Chicken Business

Our first batch of little chicks grew up..... into five roosters and one hen. We couldn't keep all the roosters so they were destined for the freezer. Their father, our main rooster, also needed dispatching, as he is now directly related to most of the hens in our brood. We also have received roosters for eating from a couple of local friends, so Nath has spent the last few evenings killing, plucking, and processing chicken meat. Tonight will be a big night - Nath and a friend have the last of them to get through, nine roosters and a drake (which will end up on the Christmas table). We'll have enough chicken meat to see us through a few months I would say.

Killing our roosters left us with a role to fill. We selected one of the roosters we had received from friends to fit the bill of our new head rooster. He is currently terrified of us, and wary of the chickens, but he has been working his way up the pecking order, one by one, so I am sure he will settle in at the boss spot soon. He's quite a pretty little thing, too, so different from the Plymouth/Australorp roosters we have been used to. Eventually I will get another big meat breed rooster, and maybe run two pens of chooks, but for now this new fellow will do. He is a Rhode Island Red/Isa Brown cross. Hopefully he throws more girls than the last boy did!

Right Now

Last exam tomorrow. I feel as if life is about to un-pause. It's marvellous. Sadly, my commitment to study has diminished slightly with every exam that passes, I am limping to the finish line whilst dreaming of the unimaginable freedom I will feel when uni is finished for the year! Not that I haven't enjoyed it, on the contrary, I have loved the content and the learning. But..... summer holidays!

Meanwhile, please allow me to indulge some of my holiday dreaming...

Wishing: ...we could have been with family in the UK for the dedication of a delicious newborn nephew.

Reading: ... An Anthology of Modern Verse, found in an opshop for $8, complete with old clippings and an inscription from 1925. Lovely.

Looking Forward To: ...Christmas! I love this time of the year, and I have so many gift and craft ideas to get onto after exams!

Creating: ...a memory wall in my bedroom. A place for artwork, photos, quotes, letters and inspiration.

Planning: ...handmade Christmas gifts, including some beautiful wall name plaques for the girls.

Cooking: ...Christmas pudding. All the fruits are soaking in a generous amount of sherry and brandy, ready for baking into pudding for Christmas Day.

Arranging: ...Christmas meat. We sent a pig, purchased from a friend, to slaughter last weekend, and are picking it up butchered and dressed next weekend. A full freezer, including a lovely rolled pork roast just in time for Christmas!

Enjoying: ...the longer days. Evening swims, walks and bike rides, drinks on the deck, no wonder it has been hard to concentrate on studying!

Hoping: ...my baby boy (who really isn't a baby anymore) enjoys his second birthday this Saturday!

See you on the other side of my last exam!

From Our Kitchen.

A basket of backyard goodness.

I am in the midst of exam preparation, my first exam is on Monday. I have three all up, and will be so relieved to have earned my holidays when they are over. Uni has gone well, I am sitting on a distinction or high distinction in all of my units, but exams may change that! Nath is on uni holidays now (no exams for his course) and he has maintained a high distinction average for his Masters degree, which has him on track to complete it by doing his thesis.

Amid all this study, though, life has a habit of continuing to tick along, regardless of how much we feel we have in the day to get things done. I have been feeling quite overwhelmed with the need to remain 'on top' of everything, and my days have felt not as slow as I would like them to be. My goal for next academic year is to achieve a bit more balance, and this will quite possibly involve actually saying 'no' to a few more things! I've missed having the time to do some of the things I love to do, like cooking and sewing. To be honest, it's probably not so much a lack of time as a lack of prioritising these things which nourish me (Mezz over at Mezz Makes Stuff wrote a post recently on the difference between indulging and nourishing ourselves - worth a read).

Anyway, the past couple of days, despite the mountains of washing, despite the uni notes to be made and the cleaning to be done, I have snuck in a few moments of kitchen time, and thought I'd share some pics with you.

Salad with greens from our backyard, eggs from our chooks and dressing made from homemade yoghurt and homemade chilli sauce.

Potatoes which, having been blanched in vinegar and sprinkled with salt, are ready for dehydrating to make salt and vinegar crisps.

Finished potato chips. Very tasty!

Homemade yoghurt being strained to make labneh which will be marinated in olive oil with a blend of spices.

Two jars of loquat and lemon jam. I was so excited to find loquats at the markets!

Preserved lemons, which will be ready for winter cooking.

For me, it is the times when we are eating and drinking largely from our own produce, spending evenings preserving, fermenting, making, that I feel most connected to the Earth, each other and our family values.

Bees.

I used to be scared of bees. If one flew near me, I would freeze and stop breathing until it had gone. Nowadays I see bees as friends, useful little insect friends with a very important job to do, and I love their presence in our garden. We have a lot of bees here, but the next step for us was installing our own hive, so that we could collect honey from it, another thing that we will no longer have to buy. As we use honey instead of sugar in our family, it seemed like a sensible thing to do.

We've been on the wait list for bees for a few months now, and yesterday, we got the call. So Nath and Brannen drove down the hill to collect our very own bees, a buzzing, humming closed hive of activity. The entrance to the hive was obviously blocked so they wouldn't escape during transit, but you could see their busy little legs and wings in the tiny holes in the hive 'gate', desperately trying to get out.

 Nath placed the hive in our chosen spot, under the grevillea bush in the otherwise unused pool area. It's a great spot - morning sun, afternoon shade, and locked so the kids can't get in. Once we demolish the pool, down the track we'll be able to get a couple more hives and the old pool area will become the bee area! Nath carefully opened the little gate to let the bees out to explore, and in a week or so he will open the hive to make sure the queen is healthy and laying, then we will leave them for a few months to do their thing. We have to get a couple more hive boxes ('supers') so that they can expand and have room to produce lots of honey - for them and us!

I may not be scared of bees anymore (well, not much, anyway!), but the actual beekeeping part is definitely Nath's job!

The beautiful grevillea.

 We are feeling pretty happy with how our garden and home plans are going, as we are well underway to producing a lot of what we eat here at home. It is such a fantastic feeling to be so connected to the food we eat.

My Ongoing To-Do List

There is always much to do around here. It can feel like as you tick one item off 'the list', three more jobs pop up. Whether it be housework, keeping lunchboxes filled, garden maintenance or keeping up with the work that animals create, it can be difficult to stay on top of things. I often tell Nath that I can only be awesome at three things at once, and I am definitely looking forward to having him around more!

Some of the things on my list currently are.....

Mucking out chicken pens, and putting the old straw etc onto our compost heap. This weekend we are also doing another cull of our young roosters and old chooks and moving all the other chickens into the one pen up the back. The driveway pen will be dismantled so we can build an enclosure for our goats.

Sewing up a flannelette doona cover for our bed using vintage single bed sheets that my mum gave me, cut into patches. I have finished making winter doona covers for the girls - simply by sewing single bed flat flannelette sheets together.

Finishing (I hope) the curtains for the kids' room. The curtains they have in there currently are a wee bit short and let too much cold air in through the gap. Poor Eden sleeps under the window where the draught is.

Filling up the freezer with bulk-cooked lunchbox goodies.

Weeding some more of the garden.

I'm coming to an acceptance, even a love, of winter clover. It can stay.

Bottling kombucha and making yoghurt.

My kombucha 'mother' is reproducing!

Enjoying the cooler weather! While it is nowhere near as cool as it is going to get, I have been getting into the swing of autumn with blankets in every room, apple with cinnamon sticks and cloves simmering away on the stove, chicken and puy lentil pies for dinner last night, and wearing my slippers around the house! I do think the cooler months are fast becoming my favourite time of the year.

Getting out for a bike ride. (Brannen and I - mostly me, he enjoyed the ride from the back of my bike - rode 12km of hills today to a friend's house and back. The fifteen extra kilos that Brannen provides presents a fairly hefty challenge in getting up and over those hills!)

And, sigh, tackling the ever-growing pile of washing.

What have you and yours been up to?

Happy Australia Day

Happy Australia Day, fellow Aussies. This is a day on our calendar that I particularly love. When I was younger, I would go to the Perth Skyshow (fireworks) with friends and an esky full of beer and celebrate with the thousands of others doing the same thing, down on the South Perth foreshore. There was always a game of cricket going, some people took paddle pools and it was always a very rowdy, happy day that I look back on with fondness.

I haven't done that for a very long time, and Australia Day is celebrated in a much more civilised and, ahem, mature kind of way these days. Often it will be a barbecue with friends, or, as our wedding anniversary is the day following, it may be a weekend away.

Big batch of baked beans for the week's breakfasts.

Today, though, I plan to put up a few bottles of passata using some tomatoes that I peeled ahead of time. I will put a new batch of yoghurt on, maybe two, and generally potter around the kitchen with the radio on. I am generally a local AM radio station kind of girl, but today I will turn on JJJ and find out what all the younger ones have been listening to all year! Nath will be putting a brew on (beer) for enjoying in a few weeks' time, and I'll do a bit of sewing, getting some stock together for a market stall in February.

Peeled tomatoes, ready for passata making.

At 4:30 this afternoon, the TV will go on for the Twenty20 match, and we'll barbecue some lamb and snaggers, make some salads and maybe even a pav for dinner.

Basil given to us by a friend, for drying and pesto making!

It's a beautiful warm day (36 degrees), the windows are open, the cicadas are singing and I couldn't feel more blessed to be right where I am.

Pesto and nut butters for sandwich spreads.

I hope you are enjoying your Australia Day, however you decide to celebrate it!

Food.

Way back in August, when I was immersed in holiday life, I posted about food. I talked about how my body reacts negatively to certain foods, and how hard it is to wade through what to eat, and why, and how. Food is a very personal topic, and everyone has their own set of values relating to it. You only need to take a glimpse into people's shopping trolleys to see the diversity in what people eat. Sometimes people's food choices are influenced by cost, sometimes by convenience, sometimes by taste. For some people it's more important to eat organically, while some choose to avoid additives. Some choose low fat foods, some choose foods that are unprocessed. Some people have food intolerances, and some are committed to eating ethically and humanely; others choose to eat local foods wherever possible. Usually, it's a balancing act between one or more of these factors.

It can be very difficult to prioritise your values around food, deciding, for example, whether it is more important to keep the weekly grocery cost low or to buy organically, which can cost more. These priorities will change often, depending on what is going on in your life. When I was pregnant, and horribly morning-sick, we bought more convenience foods than we were comfortable with, because I was unable to face cooking and the bulk of it was left to Nath (who is a wonderful cook, by the way, but rushed off his feet during those months!) I used to be a big believer in buying low fat foods, and now I only buy full fat foods, including cream, butter and good animal fats. The points-counting me of years gone by would be horrified.

Our loose priorities at the moment are as follows: unprocessed and additive free, low in sugar, local, ethical, organic, affordable, gluten-free (for me), protein-rich. We assess our shopping list based on these values, and it is far from a rigid set of rules. Some items may not be organic, but are local, for example.We do the best we can within our constraints.

Learning to listen to my body has also been very significant in determining what we buy and how we cook. I am becoming sugar free, after realising the negative health impacts of sugar. I say becoming, because this is proving to be a hard nut to crack!! Similarly, I have learned that it is gluten that makes me feel bloated, sore and lethargic, so I am staying away from gluten at the moment. I find it hard to resist my own cooking (I know, it sounds so conceited, but when you have put love into baking something, its very hard not to take that first, straight-from-the-oven bite!) but I have noticed that when I eat things that my body doesn't 'like', I hurt. I get cramps. I bloat, noticeably. My weight can rise by up to three kilos in a day. I get very, very tired, often just lying on the couch in the afternoon. I play less. I yell more. I have headaches and restless legs. I don't sleep well. My motivation disappears. I get cranky, and flat. I fart more (sorry!) and my skin looks awful. 

When I eat well (for my body), I have so much energy. I feel fantastic. I move easier, my stomach is flatter, I have motivation to get moving and do things. I don't get the 3pm slump, I sleep better at night and my mood is improved (just ask my kids).  I still falter (often, actually) but at least now I can examine how I am feeling and know that it is not normal, and it is because of what I put in my mouth.

My heroes are still my heroes. Sally Fallon, and her 'bible' Nourishing Traditions - what a resource this is. Jude Blereau, the wholefoods queen. Quirky Jo, a fellow Thermomix user who eats gluten free and largely sugar free - her blog is a go-to often for me.

There is always someone who will tell you, don't eat that, this way is better. Your food journey is yours and yours alone. Try things out. Make mistakes. Learn from them. Decide what your priorities are, and hold on to them. Nourish yourself. Food is more than a fuel, it is an expression. It is a gift from you to your body.

Preserving Seasonal Produce

One of the things I love most about summer is its seasonal produce. Fresh, sunny-day fruits, cool cucumbers and an overload of shiny red (and yellow, and black, and striped!) tomatoes... peach juice dribbling down your chin, onto your hands and leaving sticky, sweet-smelling trails down your arms.... berries included in all manner of meals and snacks, and discovering exactly what mix of berries you need to make light pink, dark pink and purple... scoring a criss-cross pattern into fat, juicy mango cheeks and sneakily scoffing them down before the children see and you have to share.....

Every summer, we spend a few weekend days preserving some of this fresh produce, to use later in the year when it is out of season. We freeze mangoes and bananas, blanch and freeze beans and peas, dry and braid our garlic crops, make liqueurs out of stone fruits, turn apricots, plums, figs and berries into jam, make sauces, paste and passata out of trays of tomatoes, and dry trays of fruits and tomatoes in the oven. We preserve in salt, oil, vinegar and sugar syrup.

One of my favourite ways of preserving is using my aunty's old Fowlers Vacola electric preserver. I was given this unit and boxes and boxes of Vacola jars, lids and clips, all wrapped in newspaper from the 1970s, and I haven't looked back. The internet is a great resource in starting out with bottling (or canning, as they call it in the US).

Last weekend, we were given a tray of kumato tomatoes, a lovely, shiny, little brown variety. We peeled them by scoring them then immersing them first in a pan of boiling water, then in a bowl of cold water. The peels then slide off easily. We then pack the sterilised Vacola jars full, add a bit of citric acid (about a quarter teaspoon to 500g of tomato) and fill with water. The seals, lids and clips are put on, and the jars are processed in the electric unit for 60 minutes.

A note on sterilising jars:
My method of sterilising is to wash the jars and lids thoroughly in hot soapy water, and dry well. I then place them into a cold oven and heat the oven to 160 degrees celsius, and leave jars in there for 10 minutes after temperature has been reached. Make sure the jars are not touching each other in the oven, and be sure to keep them hot until your preserved product is spooned in, as hot foods being put into cold jars will cause the jars to crack.
If using screw top lids, I boil these in a saucepan of water until needed, and use tongs to lift them out and place onto jar. Seal immediately, because as the food cools, it will cause the lids to 'pop' inwards, creating a full seal.
To remove labels from jars easily, I soak all jars in a tub of hot water with some eucalyptus oil, then use a soft scourer to scrape labels off. Make sure jars are then thoroughly cleaned, dried and sterilised as eucalyptus oil is toxic.

Six more jars of whole, peeled tomatoes for the pantry. No preservatives, no BPA.

We also laid out a rack of tomato halves and dried them slowly in a very low oven. When they were dry, we dipped them in apple cider vinegar and placed them in a jar, topping the jar up with olive oil and herbs. Home-dried tomatoes are so full of flavour, and it is so satisfying to eat foods that we have prepared ourselves, for a fraction of the price of the supermarket version.

Do you preserve seasonal foods?
Any favourite preserving recipes/tips/tricks?

Easy Peasy Healthy Chocolate Bliss Balls

Easy Peasy Recipe Swap (via Mezz Makes Stuff)

Healthy (yes, healthy!) Chocolate Bliss Balls.

Sugar-free, dairy free (not that I mind a bit of dairy) and grain free.

For all you Thermomix owners, I have adapted this from Quirky Cooking's Cacao and Walnut Bliss Balls, to make the recipe suit our family's style and what we generally have on hand in the pantry! For all non-TM owners, don't stress, you can do this in a food processor.

Also, I am quite a non-precise cook, so all my measurements may be in the very technical units of 'about', a 'splash' or a 'touch'. You'll work it out.

Process about 80g cacao powder (or nibs, or hey you could get really radical and just use cocoa powder!) together with quite a few (fresh, not dried) dates (say, about 300gm, maybe a bit more) until mixture is crumbly. Add a couple of handfuls of cashews, or pistachios, or any kind of nut really, a nice big dollop of coconut oil, some shredded coconut, a pinch of good quality sea salt, a smidge of vanilla bean paste (or extract, or essence), some sweetener if you choose (I use a splash of honey or rice malt syrup) and process until sticky (add or subtract wet or dry ingredients until it looks right). Roll into balls and stick in the fridge. Or just eat them.

Easy peasy. And darn impressive. And full of beautiful good fats and the super-ness of cacao. The kids WILL NOT know they are healthy, so when they ask for another one, you can scrunch your face up, and pretend to think REAL hard, and then when you say yes, you earn yourself extra cool mum cred.

A Considered Christmas (Part Two - Joy)

Yesterday, I said I loved Christmas. I especially love how we do Christmas. Over the years, we have developed a few little rituals and ways of doing things to make our Christmas celebrations fit us perfectly as a family. There are a thousand ways of 'doing Christmas well', keeping the Earth and its people in mind, and finding a way that fits your family is essential, otherwise you will be unlikely to enjoy it or repeat the experience. With that in mind, I am going to share how we are preparing for Christmas this year in our house.

Decorations

This is an old photo - don't worry, our tree isn't up yet!!

This year, we are selling the bulk of our pre-children shop-bought decorations in favour of homemade ones. Some will have been made by me, such as our advent calendar bunting, and some will be made by the children. A couple of friends and I have organised to do a Christmas craft 'swap', where we each plan one craft activity to do with all of our children, and most of these will be Christmas decorations.

Gifts

This is probably the biggest area that we differ from the 'norm'. The gifts we give each other generally can't be found in a department store catalogue, and most of them will cost nothing. There are a couple of exceptions - I bought each of the kids a wooden toy from a friend's home based business, and I am buying Nath a hunting knife from a man who makes them locally. Most of our gifts, however, will be homemade. If we do happen to venture out to the shops for gift-buying, it will be to op-shops.

For extended family on Nath's side we do a Kris Kringle. Each brother (and partner if they have one) 'buys' for another brother. I use the term 'buy' loosely, as while there are no restrictions, a lot of us tend to homemake our gifts for each other. Since there are five brothers and four of them are married, it reduces the gift buying dramatically. For everyone else, it is handmade. Grandparents love gifts made by the kids, and we tend to give the kids' great-grandparents a homemade jar of something, and a photo of the kids.

We have stockings, which I made, but they are by no means stuffed full and consist of smaller handmade gifts (such as the halos in the picture - which didn't last too long!!). Our kids generally only get one or two gifts from us, plus their stocking, then maybe one to share.

Our wrapping 'paper' this year will be made from Christmas-y material for the gifts going under our own tree, or recycled paper painted by the kids for everyone else (our butcher is old-school and still wraps everything in butchers paper - I love it.) I am making all our gift tags by hand (apart from the ones the kids will make with their friends) over the next couple of nights.

If this all seems like it will take a lot of time, remember, we don't watch TV, and I save a whole lot of time by not needing to do Christmas shopping!

Food

I only buy one thing outside of my normal grocery shop - and that is a grassfed, organic, free range pork rolled roast from The Naked Butcher. Other than that, we just shop as usual, spending the same amount as usual, and make everything from scratch as usual. This year we are camping with friends from December 23rd until after the New Year, so we will take our standard camping fare along with us. Food gifts are made with things we generally have on hand anyway, or things in abundance in our garden. We even make our advokaat (alcoholic egg nog) from scratch!

Spreading Some Christmas Love

My lovely sister in law, Mezz, posted a question on her blog yesterday, which prompted some very thought-provoking discussion with our kids. What can we do to spread a little extra love and care around at Christmas time? Here is my comment on her blog after our discussion:

Hi Mezz,
Thanks so much for this post. We used it to provoke some very special conversation with the girls. We posed your question, then told the story of the REAL 'Santa Claus' (our kids know the man in the red suit is a fake!!) and talked about how in our area there are loads of people whose Christmases may not be very happy ones.
We decided to focus on our local Women's Refuge (there are often children staying there too) and the girls decided to wrap up some of their toys they don't use anymore to give as presents, make some Christmas cakes and Christmas decorations, and take them all in.
Unfortunately, most Christmas 'welfare' campaigns focus on people outside of our own communities. Its really important to focus back in. Our kids are so darn privileged, I worry that they may be growing up without a real understanding of some of the issues their own local people deal with everyday.

The girls made me so proud during this discussion! The ideas were theirs (except, of course, that we suggested where our gifts may go to), and we are very much looking forward to making extra decorations and cakes to brighten up other families' lives!

So, in a nutshell, these are our Christmas plans. Like I said, this way of doing Christmas suits our family perfectly, but I would love to know how you and your family celebrate!

A Considered Christmas (Part One - The Problem)

I love Christmas.

I need to make that clear, because I am about to embark on a little tirade about the Silly Season and I don't want anyone to think that I am coming over all Bah Humbug.

But, seriously, we as a society have completely lost touch with what this festivity is all about. I'm staying away from the religious side of Christmas here on my blog, and want to talk instead about what most people refer to as "the spirit of Christmas".

Apparently, having some Christmas spirit means talking endlessly about what major, plastic and mass-produced toy is on sale and where. It means trawling the shops, standing at checkout lines for ages, battling the crowds of thousands of other people who have the same idea about "the Christmas Spirit". It means racking up some serious credit card debt, or at least experiencing some financial pressure due to spending on presents, food, decorations, drink, a gift for Aunty Mavis' estranged husband.... the list goes on.

Apparently, every child needs at least fifteen presents with their name on them under the tree, otherwise we may as well pack the dear child up and send them to the poorhouse now. Apparently we need to fill up two regular sized shopping trolleys with every kind of 'sometimes' food under the sun, because we wouldn't want to go hungry on Christmas Day, would we?

The average Australian (singular, not per family) is forecast to spend $1600 towards Christmas this year. That's nearly DOUBLE the average household's (not single person) weekly disposable (after tax) income. Credit card debt peaks in the first quarter after Christmas each year, sitting earlier this year at an average of $4700 per Australian card-holder.

Does this not seem a little ridiculous?

And that's just the money side of things. We can also look at our Christmas over-consumerism in terms of the world's people, our local communities and the environment as a whole.

From The Buy Nothing Day website:

What is so bad about shopping?
It’s not shopping in itself that’s so harmful, it’s what we buy. The rich western countries - only 20% of the world population are consuming over 80% of the earth’s natural resources, causing a disproportionate level of environmental damage and unfair distribution of wealth. As consumers, we should question the products we buy and the companies who produce them.
The idea is to make people stop and think about what and how much they buy effects the environment and developing countries. Increasingly large companies use labour in developing countries to produce goods because its cheap and there aren’t the systems to protect workers like there are in the west.

I'm sure I have posted this video before, but the lead up to Christmas is a fabulous time to watch it again and be reminded of the need for more mindful purchasing. If you haven't watched it yet, please do. It's a major reason we started to live the way we live, and I am passionate about its message.

We can't shop our way to a better world. Every purchase we make has an impact (even the eco, fairtrade, sustainable ones). Every dollar we spend is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.

Another aspect to consider (at any time of the year, not just Christmas!) is that in our own communities there are people who are doing it tough. As Christmas is a time of joy, celebration, family, friends and food, people who are marginalised, financially struggling, separated from family, lonely, suffering from mental health issues or in other ways not able to celebrate Christmas the way they may like to can find this time of the year particularly hard.  If you think there are no people like this in your community, you aren't looking hard enough. Does your community have a hospital? A mental health department? A women's refuge? A drug and alcohol agency? Centrelink? Employment agencies? My community has all of these, and I am in no way saying that everyone who accesses these services is not going to have a merry Christmas. I am merely saying that these services exist to support people who need support, so if your community has one or all of these services, you are likely to have people who are doing it tough living nearby.

This all sounds pretty bleak, I know. But I believe those who have more, have a responsibility to those who have less. My family is looking forward to a festive, funfilled, feasty Christmas. We just have plans to do it in a way that respects the Earth and its people, that spreads some true Christmas cheer around our community, and that teaches our children to want to make a difference.

Tomorrow, I'm sharing how our family will be doing Christmas this year (with not a shop in sight!) So stay tuned, for some real Christmas cheer :)

Muffins, Meringues, Mess and Magical Moments

 Sometimes, you have just got to let it all go.

Let the washing pile up.

Let the beds remain unmade.

Let the baby cart the recycling rubbish all through the house.

Let the kitchen mess build up.

 

Let faces remain unwiped.

 

Let the kids drag their stools up to the bench...

 

...and pick all the blueberries off the bush....

...and create.

Sometimes....

....things don't turn out how we expect them to.

And that's okay.

Sometimes, nothing says "I love you" more than....

...."Come and cook with me."