I <3 those wee blocks

I’ve begun replacing each of my knee pushups with a real one each day and am now up to 5 real and 95 knees.

The real ones are intense! But I am somewhat reassured by the fact that the knee ones were really hard too.

It is amazing to think I started this on 25 November and have managed to keep at it, save for the brief period I had stitches. In a mere 3.5(ish) months I’ll (hopefully) have achieved my goal!

I really enjoy the tiny incremental successes of this challenge – its like a metaphor for all sorts of life things.

mountain climbing

Today Bobs unexpectedly discussed a really interesting internal opportunity with me, the prospect of which made me more excited and engaged than I have been in a long long time (or ever!)

More on this when it is confirmed – and if he doesn’t change his mind. Though I daresay you’ll hear a good about that too!

Bits crossed!

big pit

Since the end of February Joe/Frank has been away two nights a week at his UPP course and is often working on one of the other evenings.

It is so odd and empty nesty without him around! And it is especially eerily quiet on the alternate weeks when Bessie isn’t here. I guess this will only get more pronounced as time passes – everyone is now very self-sufficient and I have more and more time on my hands. I don’t think I’ve really had so much time available before as an adult. Must work on plans to fill it.

Because of the new ins and outs of everyone, we’ve developed a complicated evening television routine, depending on who is available on a given night, currently:

Carol, Don, Joe/Frank = House of Cards, was Jessica Jones
Carol, Don, Joe/Frank, Bessie = Better call Saul, was Archer
Carol, Don = Whites, was Antiques Roadshow (such old people)
Don, Joe/Frank, Bessie = nothing current, was Orphan Black
Carol, Don, Bessie = generally anything on SBS2

And at some point we might get to those dozens of unwatched DVDs we continue to stockpile.

It rained overnight and this morning for the first time in what felt like months! I had to catch the train to SML today because Don had GP appointment¹ and was very excited to wear my wellies to brave the puddles.

I was less excited to walk to panzo-the-car in the afternoon in my wellies in the bright sunshine, but pleased the temperature remained relatively mild. I’ve tried very hard not to whinge too much about the weather this year, but March has been quite crazy hot and unpleasant.

While I am very glad for the forecast week of showers, it does rather conflict with our planned bike ride on the weekend. We may have to resort to some long overdue household maintenance tasks – which actually sounds horribly dull, so maybe we learn to ride in inclement weather instead. I think I am becoming more fond of this activity.

¹ in excellent news, his blood pressure is now high rather than dangerously high, hopefully the drugs and lifestyle changes will continue to pay dividends.

no stunting

I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff recently which suggests that getting 6 hours sleep per night over several days is the equivalent of not sleeping for 2 days straight. I feel like I hit that just-like-2-days-without-sleep wall today.

I honestly my brain is completely fried. Body is okay and I feel quite energetic, but urk! – it has been a struggle to think or even form (barely) coherent sentences. Don sent me an article today that noted most of Sydney is walking around like zombies and that the unusually warm weather is largely to blame. Stupid climate change.

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Of course all this sleep depravation is making me a cranky old lady, so I will leave you with some curmudgeonly observations / questions:

1. What is with people calling their ordinary blog posts essays?

2. What is with people calling an ordinary blog post containing multiple photos a photo essay?

3. What is with people giving a reading time for their blog posts?

I really need to do another cull of the blogs in my reader – and to get some better sleep.

chocolate buttermilk layer cake donna hay: the new classics

In this family, we all have, shall we say, champagne tastes. This meant that over the past couple of years we’d been spending a mint on family birthday dinners at very nice restaurants. We all agreed that this year we’d try to start a new birthday tradition – the birthday-ee gets a home-cooked meal of their choosing (as complicated and difficult as they like) and we’d bust out the fancy crystal, china and silverware. And then we’ll have one VERY bang-up meal for everyone.

First birthday of the year was Joe/Frank who chose slow cooked lamb with parmesan and anchovy potatoes and the pictured cake.

There’s supposed to be a fair amount of pan juices with the lamb, but on past occasions these have evaporated pretty quickly in a traditional baking dish, even after repeated topping up with water, so I decided to bust out the amazing kitchenaid enameled cast iron casserole / dutch oven. The results were amazing, the lamb so tender, the potatoes brilliant. It was a really wonderful meal.

It was my first time making a layer cake and I probably should have researched how to cook flat layers because the tops of the two cakes ended up quite domed. But it all worked out with careful balancing and strategically placed icing. The cake was huge, incredibly rich and decadent and there was loads left over. It tasted even better in the following days after a stint in the fridge.

A big success and great way to kick things off I think!

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I’d left the kitchenaid to soak overnight and when I was wiping it out found a quite large chip had come from the bottom and more was flaking away – noooooooooooooo!

The InformationSuperhighway suggested this might be because of the pan getting too hot too quickly. Oh, you mean like shoving the whole thing cold into a very, very hot oven? Honestly we’ve treated this thing with so much abuse over the years that it would never have occurred to me not to do this!

So the quest was on to find a replacement. This proved exceptionally difficult – the kitchaid was a giant 7.6 litres (8 quarts), no longer seemed to be available and everything else, like le crueset, staub &etc were well under 7 litres. We need something really big for the enormous batches of bolognaise and casseroles we make.

I was kind of keen on raw cast iron because I have had a tiny cast iron skillet for over 25 years and it is amazing. I had a bit of trouble finding something like that too and then finally stumbled on solidteknics – cast iron made in Australia with Australian materials. Crazy!

I remembered that Clarissifer had a giant stash of cast iron delivered to SML just before Xmas and so I asked the who and what – same brand I was considering (she was in on the kickstarter) and she loves it. Consider me sold.

And so it was that this giant box arrived:

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Containing a smaller giant box:

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Compares quite well in size to the very well used predecessor and has HEARTS in the handles:

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And has the casting date on the bottom!

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We’ve so far used it for gumbo and red beans and rice and it has been better than we could have hoped.

Because we anthropomorphise everything and we’re ridiculous, we’ve named him dwayne

So this happened this morning …

70.61km!

We were up and out just as the sun was coming up – mostly thanks to the kitties. Beautiful, but hot, day again – plenty of people out enjoying the morning. I had to divert to a service station around the half-way point to pump up my tyres – hopefully I’m not developing a slow leak. I’m getting a lot more confident with riding and happily tackled a roundabout with cars on it!

We arrived home at 68.9km and decided to do a wee loop around the neighbourhood to get us up to 70km. It was really quite hot and the loop had a giant hill at the end which I struggled with a little. But WOW, I am completely amazed I managed that distance after such a short time back on the bike!

After putting on a pot of coffee and having a shower my vision began to get very strange – everything looked like a fluid missoni pattern was in front of it, Don and Bessie’s heads looked a bit like picasso paintings. Don told me I was having an occular migrane, which was part of what he’d been experiencing when he ended up in emergency a couple of weeks ago. It lasted about 20 minutes and was such a trip! Then I started to feel an actual migrane coming on, which is not so trippy or fun at all, so scoffed drugs and had a quick nap. Feeling quite a lot better now.

I suspect I had a bit of heat exhaustion and was a dehydrated, I was drinking water, but maybe needed electrolytes. Also I’m now rather smaller than I was and haven’t got a lot of fat reserves to draw on. Must remember this for next time. Interesting that Don cycles with complete and utter ease, yet I could totally kick his arse in distance running – stamina and cardio fitness is a funny thing.

Other than the weird aftermath, it was pretty great! I think we could definitely tackle the Sydney to The Gong ride – but of course we need tons and tons of practice.

We’ve ridden the entire route before in stages, so we’re a little light on the new scenic shots.

Misty morning, sunrise. It was a lot more misty and spooky than my phone shows.

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A woman was feeding this absolutely huge flock of cockatoos, seagulls and pigeons. The squawking was incredible.

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So sparkly!

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Sydney AFL. Western Suburbs Magpies v UTS Bats. We were really excited to see a female field umpire officiating a dudes competition.

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I <3 apostrophe nazi.

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I think this is my favourite sign of all time. I can’t even begin to understand why it was in the location it was (shared walking, cycling, running path) or what it even means.

For the first time in several years we were pretty slack on the gardening front and the only real harvest was from the very late flowering chilli plant.

Okay, there was also the usual rosemary, bay leaves, thyme, basil and parsley. But I really wouldn’t call those harvesting because everything apart from the parsley and basil grows all year round.

I’m not sure what inspired this lack of enthusiasm, but I suspect it was the prospect of losing everything once again to the dreaded caterpillars.

I’m wildly successful at growing food to feed an army of bugs, but I’m full of envy of and admiration for anyone who can manage to successfully grow edible plants – edible by people and not by creatures. 

I’m kind of at peace with abandoning the big goal of growing lots of things to eat and am pretty happy with the idea of growing ingredients and planting the occasional random seed to see what happens.

mardi gras detritus

I’ve always been someone who is insanely curious and a completely voracious consumer of information: news and books and blogs and memes and, well, everything. I have a lot of my identity wrapped up in being current and knowledgeable, being able to discuss a wide range of topics and having an opinion on everything.

Back in January I embarked on a two week news fast because reading the news was making me alternately depressed and ragey. To my extreme surprise I liked the results so much that I’ve kept it up and have barely opened a news site since. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was previously spending hours a day reading the news.

And then there was twitter, really doing not a lot for me at all despite checking it many, many times per day, so I cut down use to once a day, then once every couple of days and now I’ve deleted the app from my phone and tablet.

As tends to be the way with these things, this information overload is really zeitgeisty. Last weekend I stumbled across the infomagical project on the great note to self podcast which pretty much nailed what I was feeling.

And that led me to the earlier bored and brilliant project, which made the case for the creativity and big ideas that come from boredom – and to stop using the phone / device as a crutch. Which is of course exactly what I was doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still the same voracious information monster, it is just now I’m trying to be more intentional about what I’m consuming.

Who knew that not knowing everything could be quite restful and calming?

After an extreme amount of dithering, I settled upon the easy as pie scarf as my complicated scarf – a not too hard combination of lace and cables, but I think sufficiently hard for me.

In the spirit of using of what I have, I’m knitting with the yarn from the abandoned boxy jumper.

So far going well, though I did have to rip back and re-start my first attempt. I can generally complete a pattern repeat during an episode of House of Cards

will hopefully improve with blocking

I must admit I was extremely tempted this morning by the vintage Shetland baby shawl patterns on kate davies blog. Thankfully there are no babies on the horizon, but I think such a thing would be a quite excellent throw for the kitties to claw to bits!

I think we’ll see how I go with the scarf first!