What I know not how to do

I never liked sci-fi. We have a whole bookshelf full of it (Mike’s) but I never could get through any of the books in there. I think the problem is mainly that sci-fi tends to be really badly written. I have a degree in writing: I don’t like reading badly written stuff!

In fairness, fantasy also tends to be really badly written but I try harder to like it. (Still, it usually fails.)

But, there is one sci-fi series that I think is excellent. Really well written and a gripping story. That series is Hyperion (and Endymion) by Dan Simmons.

Maybe really what it is is that I think the first sentence is fantastic.

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

This article can’t be true, can it? I just laughed out loud.

Sunday night Mike’s band was meant to play a gig at the Brisbane Jazz Club, which is a really nice little venue right on the river at Kangaroo Point. I love the jazz club. It’s a great place to chill out and listen to some music and look at the river.

The jazz club went under during the flood. The stages were washed away, the bar/kitchen was badly damaged, the entire lounge area was destroyed. They went through the 1974 flood, and so they planned in advance, removing the piano and all instruments, records, anything of value to somewhere safe, but still there is some $100,000 of damage.

But they didn’t let that stop them. I was sure the gigs would be called off, which would be sad, as Mike never played at the jazz club before, but they weren’t! In true Queensland style they got themselves together, found a new venue, found new bands for Friday and Saturday night when the bands meant to play pulled out, and everything went off really well.

The place was packed, and even though it had no facilities for making food, two little old jazz club ladies sat in a back room and painstakingly created these beautiful fruit & cheese platters that almost everyone bought. The regulars, a bunch of old men, were there as usual in their dapper shirts and

It was good. Really good. And while I sat there listening, watching all the people smiling and laughing and eating those little cheese platters and having a good time, despite the fact that the actual jazz club was sagging and disintegrating only a few kilometers away, I was just so moved by that tough and cheerful spirit which shone from the faces of all around. People there had lost things. But they weren’t going to let it get in the way of the music, of the good time. It was just one moment, a brief snapshot of time, but I was so happy to be there and taking part of it all.

So I have discovered (Mike discovered it actually, and I pooh-poohed it until I tried it myself and realised he was right) that there is no need to use commercial deodorant.

Sorry, TMI, but in the last year it’s struck me that I seem to end up stinking a bit even when I do use deodorant, and pretty badly if I forget. What gives? Hormonal changes after baby or something?

Anyway, Mike started using plain old baking soda for deodorant a couple weeks ago. He bothered me until I agreed to try it too, with quite a lot of skepticism. I have found, to my great astonishment it actually works. (!!!)

Fixed the pool gate today. Spent ages trying to get a $13 pool gate spring from the hardware store to work properly — gave up and returned it. Found a plain old bungy cord does the trick: much better, in fact. Of course, it isn’t council-approved, but it actually works, so who’s to complain?

Was browsing around online looking for things to help me on my New Year’s resolution to go wireless… and found something that shocked me. Would you spend $349 on a trash bin? $79 on a kitchen soap dispenser? $129 on a shower caddy? $135 on a laundry basket? Oh dear.

I am feeling fat. I don’t like it. At the same time, I’m so sick of worrying about things like that that I think I just may not bother, this time.

Because there was no bread to be had yesterday, I bought wholemeal flour and determined I would make my own.

it should be noted that I’ve never been able to make bread before: even when I had a bread machine, it always turned out hard as a rock on the outside, heavy and doughy in the middle, and tasting strongly of yeast. Ick!

So it was with trepidation that I began. I found this recipe online and made it at 2/3 proportions. And I used entirely whole wheat flour rather than mostly bread flour and only a bit of whole wheat flour.

And it turned out WELL. Though the bread wasn’t the shape I wanted, turning out wide and flat instead of a nice loaf shape, and though it felt heavy when I picked it up (probably at least in part from using all wholemeal flour instead of some white flour), it wasn’t heavy at all. The butter I brushed the crust with kept it from turning into a rock, and the inside of the bread was surprisingly light. And it tastes nice as well! I have found a win! Now I’d just like to know how to make the shape higher.

I’ve had so many cooking successes lately it might just go to my head. Maybe I should try something really hard, like souffle, or croissants…?

The devastation here is just horrific. I have never seen anything like it. Brisbane is just being destroyed, with the main peak coming at 4AM tomorrow… 7 hours from now.

But we are blessed, here in our little house, because despite being somewhat isolated here — all roads to anywhere are cut by water — we haven’t seen a drop of water anywhere near our street. And we still have power and internet, although we lost internet for a while this afternoon. Moreover, today was hot and sunny — the first sunny day in eons — a really beautiful day. It is bizarre to be here in the peaceful quiet of our home, while just a few kilometers away everything is being destroyed.

We have Mike’s work mate and his girlfriend staying with us — they were evacuated from their riverside flat this morning. We drove there this morning to help them move stuff and close up the place.

I have never seen anything like it. From their building’s central patio which overlooks the river, you could see no end of flotsam going by. Entire floating docks (I think they are called pontoons) from who knows were roaring by with sizable boats still tied to them. The boats were swinging crazily on their moorings and slamming into things. Giant water tanks bobbled by, and I hear there were entire caravans, though I didn’t see one myself. Not to mention all the other flotasm of trees and big logs etc. But most of it was people’s boats. It was really sad to see. And then the housing for the swimming pool in their complex just burst apart. it was all glass-walled, a swimming pool right next to the river in a nice glass walled little house. The swimming pool was invisible under the water but as we stood there the glass panes just exploded out from the force of the water.

It was surreal. The beautiful blue sky, the beautifully landscaped apartment complex, and then, just a few feet below, the raging brown waters of the mad river. The boats, so pretty with their clean white sides and blue tarps, but crazy, unmanned, swinging this way and that, smashing into whatever was in their path. A huge section of a restaurant just up and floated away… a platform with pretty little white umbrellas, chairs, tables, for outdoor dining. A restaurant I run by every time we go running along the river… a restaurant I always meant to go eat at sometime. Gone. Horrific.

We drove by the street that our original house was, where we lived for the first year we were in Australia. It was completely under water. Our old house, all the houses next to it, had only their rooftops peeking out.

Some sewage plants have failed and raw sewage is now pouring into the river. Drinking water sources are still untainted, however.

And there was a bull shark swimming down the main street of a nearby flooded town. A bull shark right in the centre of town! Who would think!

One of the stories that, oddly, made me the saddest was this one here. Much as the Moggill Ferry has annoyed me in the past due to its slowness when really a bridge would work *much* better, it is horrible to think of them purposely destroying it. I know what is necessary in times of disaster, is necessary, but it still brought and ache to my heart. All three of those things mentioned in the article are irreplaceable Brisbane icons.

Here are a couple pictures of the highway 5 minutes from home… this is just after where I get on the highway to go to work every day… maybe I wont’ be going to work for a few days!

I am wearied of water.

It has been raining now for weeks on end. Is it months yet? Perhaps. The monsoon shows no sign of ceasing. Summer never came to Queensland this year. The mangoes never ripened.

The floods harassing Queensland continue. Even while the center of QLD is still underwater and/or recovering from being underwater, the Southeast is now being hit hard.

Back in 1974 there was a terrible flood that turned all of Brisbane into a giant lake. After that, the massive Wivenhoe Dam was built to prevent such a terrible disaster from happening again. And now it is being tested to the limit.

Ironically, a couple years back we were only Level 6 Drought Restrictions because the dam (which supplies Brisbane’s water) was only about 15% capacity. Now it is at almost 200% and rising. Up from 106% just a few days ago. It blows at about 225% and thus water is currently being let through the floodgates — water that will end up in Brisbane city.

Yesterday there was a horrific inland tsunami/flash flood in Toowoomba, a city about 1.5 hours to the west. It was the worst of this season of floods thus far. The damage is staggering and there were quite a few deaths and many more still missing. And all that water is heading for Brisbane, unfortunately coinciding with a King tide.

Granted, we’ve had fair warning. We know which suburbs are going to flood and there should be nothing flash about it. The river has been rising steadily all day and now a bunch of the city and inner city suburbs are partly under water. But even so the flood has not yet arrived. It will be arriving in force tomorrow, and getting worse Thursday, so they say. Right now people in danger areas are in the process of getting out.

Where we live is not a danger area: while this suburb does tend to flood (and is in fact under water now), it floods in a different part than where we live. I expect that the water won’t come anywhere near our house. And that’s a relief. A blessing. But my heart aches for all the people who are losing houses, businesses, pets, livestock, crops. And for the families of dead children. Fully half of those killed have been little children.

We’re anticipating losing power/internet/mobile phone, but that’s no big deal. Mike’s work has “released all employees from duty until further notice” and the daycare centres have shut down. So I guess we will sit here for the next few days, scanning the internet if we have it, eating cold beans if we don’t, listening to the radio and the ever-changing news.

It’s just a waiting game now.

So as mentioned, I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions. Things like “eat better, exercise more, drink more water, go to bed at a reasonable hour” all go without saying, so let’s not even go there. And the really important ones are too important to be put here for public consumption.

But there are a few superficial things I am determined to do…

1. Go wireless. This means making the annoying wireless print server work under Linux. Arrrrgh!
2. Get rid of all bugs living in house (3 months of solid rain isn’t improving this and nor is not having #1, above) No pity. No pity!
3. Learn to make good coffee. I’ve conquered the frosting: now I’m on to coffee! I’ve already figured out some really important stuff like:
   • Make sure your french press works (read: doesn’t have gaps in the mesh that let the grinds through in a kind of horrible imitation Turkish coffee)
   • Buy good quality coffee
   • Do not use coffee grinds that are a year or more old
4. Fix swimming pool so it isn’t in a constant state of virulent green and un-gate-closedness
5. Fix bathroom so it doesnt’ make you cringe every time you walk in
6. Get better mortgage. We’re finally past the 4 year break point (FOUR YEARS in this house isn’t that nuts???)

Incidentally, the man whose house we stayed at while stranded in Gin Gin gave me a sucker off his banana tree. I just planted it in the yard yesterday. I have a banana tree! Visions of luscious bunches of bananas are dancing in my head like the proverbial sugarplums. I can just imagine tripping outside on a lovely summer morning and picking a banana for breakfast!

It will probably die, because everything I plant on purpose dies. But I have put enough chicken poo on it to feed an army of banana trees and the downpours won’t cease so it should have plenty of water so…

I have a weird guilty feeling that growing banana trees in Brisbane is illegal.

Well i never did finish our Christmas tale because I was slow in uploading photos.

Anyway, I have uploaded them now and for anyone who is interested… here are some photos of the flood that is devestating Queensland right now.

We were in Gladstone, which was a little haven of virtual untouched-ness, but ringed around for hundreds of kilometers by some of the worst flooding QLD has ever seen. It flooded, of course, in Gladstone, but there doesn’t seem to have been much damage compared to, for instance, Bundaberg (40 minutes to the east) and Rockhampton (a little over an hour north) which have both been totally decimated.

We spent a very peaceful night in Gin Gin on that beautiful little farm. Such hospitality is truly rare. The next morning we went out to scope out the roads and found that the water levels had fallen quite dramatically. Nevertheless, the roads were still covered enough so that we didn’t make an attempt to go through. Honestly, if it had just been us somewhere, we would have given it a go, but in the midst of a massive national disaster, you don’t want to take any chance that will hold up the emergency crews from really important and necessary work.

So we went back to the farm and prepared for another day of sitting in Gin Gin. But after a couple hours, we suddenly heard traffic. The woman whose place it was went to check it out, and it turned out the cops had opened a detour and were letting people through.

We were packed and out of there in 5 minutes flat. There was a massive line of traffic so it took a while, but we made it through. The detour was a little single dirt track through the bush and the cane fields. There was still water over the road in places but shallow. I’m glad we took it as soon after they opened it as we did, because even by the time we got there the road was turning muddy and rutted. I’m sure after a couple hours it would have become impossible to avoid getting bogged.

But we squeaked through, and hightailed it home. It was SO GOOD to be home, to be in our own bed, to be able to do laundry. We arrived home on Thursday night, after leaving initially Tuesday morning! Still, it could have been worse. Much, much worse.

It’s always interesting when a new year starts. I usually view it with a feeling of hope, new beginnings. While I’m not much of a resolution maker type of person, I still think of all the things that I want to do, want to change, want to make better. I usually feel really optimistic at the beginning of a new year.

This year is mostly like that. After the emotional roller coaster of 2010, I am ready to be proactive in 2011, make things better, get things done.

2010 was an incredibly difficult year with some incredibly low lows and some very unbalanced highs. There were some very boring moments and some great adventures. I felt like I was on drugs for about half of it, honestly — it was such a roller coaster of different states of mind. I discovered some things about myself that really troubled and discouraged me. I had big periods of feeling cynical and/or angry. I got hurt, let down. I bit my tongue, a lot. I played with fire. I was restless, so restless. And through it, I was pretty much alone since I couldn’t (or wouldn’t, perhaps) find anyone to talk to about it all. I barely wrote about it.

It was a battle. 2010 was absolutely a battle.

And now I come out of it a bit scarred, a bit more cynical, but with eyes maybe a bit more open to the realities. Glad it all happened? Yes… and no. I’m glad the year is behind me. I’m disheartened by my current physical state, which (for me, anyway) is not great. Still, my little girl is one year old now; my marriage is still intact and I think going in the right direction, and these things are blessings. On the other hand, my heart still aches from some interactions. I’m still dismayed at some choices I made. But maybe these things are blessings too.

There is a lot I am determined to (at least begin to) achieve with this new year. From the spiritual, to the lifestyle-related, to the pedestrian. There are also a few big and scary decisions I need to make. When I think of them, of trying to choose what is best, what is right, my confidence flees and I feel overwhelmed and unsure and I want to go put my head under a rock.

Still, generally speaking, I feel hopeful and ready to begin.

Agh, I wrote the below on Wednesday on my blog but it didn't get cross-posted to LJ! Ah well, here it is.


Well, it has been an interesting Christmas.

I'm writing on an annoyingly tiny E-PC (SO annoying to type on!) using the Virgin Mobile dongle that Kifa so kindly loaned me... hoping I'm not using too much of his bandwidth!

We left last Friday to drive up to Gladstone, 7 hours north of Brisbane, to spend Christmas with L & C andC's family, as we did 2 years ago. Stayed in a house of some friends of the family that were away over the holidays... Christmas was really nice, just as it was 2 years ago.

But it rained. It's been raining now for weeks; months even. And Christmas week it was just bucketing down. As we drove up we noticed that the roads had already been damaged -- really bad potholes everywhere.

So we spent some days in Gladstone watching it rain, watching the rivers rise. There was some pretty impressive flooding in the Gladstone waterways, but nothing really crazy.

But then, yesterday, Tuesday, we started to make our way home. Drove 3 hours south to a little town called Childers and hit some major traffic. It turned out they'd closed the Bruce highway south of Childers due to flooding, and the only other route south (QLD doesn't have good highways: the main N-S highway, the Bruce Highway is in fact only 1 lane each direction!) was also cut. They estimated it would be 48-72 hours until it reopened; moreover, it was still raining, rivers all over were still rising, and they only anticipated that generally things would get worse.

After some consideration we decided to drive back up to Gladstone, camp out for a day or so and try again. Even as we drove back North, listening to the radio, we could hear them making road closures that we were driving on. We just squeaked through.

This morning was dry, relatively speaking, and it hadn't rained in the night. We looked up the roads on the internet and they claimed to be open again, so we made our merry way back down south, after an emergency stop at the vet for Fitz, whos entire side had gotten swollen and infected overnight from a spider bite or some such.

This time we didn't even make it to Childers. We made it to Gin Gin, about an hour north of Childers, and there we stopped. The Bruce Highway, they claimed, was cut just south of Gin Gin.

We were annoyed. We didn't believe them. We had DRIVEN the road to Childers twice just the day before and it wasn't flooded or even nearly. Sneakily, we drove around the roadblock the back way and continued our merry way down the Bruce Highway... until we hit the flood. And what a flood! A big chunk of highway was some 4 feet underwater.

Spent the rest of the day driving all over the region attempted to get through somewhere, anywhere. Every road we tried was under at least a couple feet of moving water. It was just crazy. It wasn't raining any more, but the rivers were still rising, rising.

Drove out to a tiny one-horse town called Mt. Perry in an attempt to make it through the backwoods south, but that was the worst of all. Barrelling down this skinny little road, we rounded a curve and nearly hit a massive lake sittingright over the road. A family was standing in the middle of the road in the "lake" cheerfully fishing. Pulling in some mighty big fish, too.

Got back and Gin Gin weas just a zoo. Someone has mobilized some emergency services and there are now some 3000 stranded people camped out on borrowed air mattresses and gym mats in the RSL club, the showgrounds, the churches, the youth clubs. Gin Gin is fast selling out of food and suchlike but the Salvos came down from Gladstone with an army of bread and sausages and mobile kitchens.

But, ironically enough, the people whose house we stayed in in Gladstone, have parents who live in Gin Gin, so Mike and Calliope and I are blessed with a proper bed in a house on a beautiful piece of acreage. The people are just lovely. It's such a blessing, after such a grumpy day.

They estimate the highway will be opened Friday morning at the earliest so it looks like we will be vacationing in Gin Gin until further notice! This is the worst flood in a very, very, very long time.

It seems to me that Calliope is starting to look like a little girl, instead of a baby.

Took a few pictures of her the other day, eating a bubbaccino. In Australia, in coffee shops you can get something called a “bubbaccino” (like a cappuccino) which is basically a small cup of foamed milk with a marshmallow in the middle. So we made one at home (sans marshmallow), and let Calliope feed it to herself with a spoon.

This first picture here has captured a strange, un-babylike expression on her face. When I look at it, I can see the girl within the baby, it seems to me. (Even though she still has only 4 teeth. Perhaps she’s doomed to a lifetime of porridge and bananas?)

So what color do you reckon these eyes are going to be? She’s more than a year now, so her eyes should have changed to their final color according to all the books etc. And yet… it seems like the hazel center is slowly taking over. But shouldn’t it have finished by now? I kind of wish her eyes would stay exactly as they are now… they are so cool looking.

Have not been feeling well of late. Feel woozy all the time. Often when I’m going about my business I feel so weak and woozy I have to sit and put my head down. It’s weird and annoying. Sometimes even I’ll be sitting doing work and suddenly I find myself collapsing forward. It’s not dizziness exactly, more like a sudden shift of location. I can’t explain it. But weak. I feel so weak. And short of breath. Like I’m breathing but just not getting any air. Perhaps still iron deficiency? Went for blood tests this morning.

I wish my body would just go back to normal. It’s been a year since Calliope was born. Am I broken forever?

I’ve really had enough of cakes. I think taking a LONG break from cake/frosting making will be GOOD.

But… in closing… let me impose one last cake picture… Friday we had a party for Calliope; ironic, since there were no children except for one boy who is about 8, who came with Calliope’s adopted grandparents. For that party I made a cow-cake. it was meant to look like this, but in fact ended up looking like this…

It was a pretty good party: a bit awkward at times as it was a very random group of people invited, most of whom didn’t know each other, but it ended up with us all out on the patio being pyromaniacs with coffee creamer and methylated spirits. Always a good icebreaker. After everyone left, Mike and I spent another half hour entertaining ourselves by fire-breathing bacardi 151 into the hedge. We practicing the proper spitting technique first with water, and I had to wonder what the old lady next door thought as we spewed water merrily into the bush right outside her window.

This week we put up a Christmas tree, the first one we’ve had since leaving America 5 years ago. It is, naturally, a fake Christmas tree. But whereas in the States (at least in the East) fake Christmas trees are a sad and bedraggled affair, generally speaking, here, since there are necessarily no real Christmas trees, fake trees are large and lush and grand. We got our at K-Mart but it still looks pretty great, in my opinion. And I never felt good about killing a tree just to put it up in my living room for a couple weeks in any case.

The only problem? It doesn’t smell like a Christmas tree. Now when I walk into the living room and see it towering there (it is so tall it is only a couple inches shy of hitting the ceiling) I automatically inhale deeply to get that Christmassy smell — and then realize that a fake tree is not going to smell like Christmas! Maybe there is a Christmas tree scent somewhere that I can buy and spray on it for authenticity?

So today is Calliope’s birthday. She is 1 year old! Although this year has really been something of an eternity, at the same time I can’t believe she’s 1 year old. Crazy crazy crazy. My good friend L. just had her baby yesterday. I went today to see her in the hospital… the baby, which weighs pretty much exactly what Calliope weighed at birth, and which is 4 cm longer than she was, looks so SMALL. It’s just insane to imagine, that last year this time Calliope was just like L.’s baby, and that next year this time L.’s tiny little baby will have morphed into a little Calliope-sized munchkin racing around and screeching.

But that isn’t what this post is about. After all the frosting experiments and failures and finally success, what happens? Today I am making Calliope her birthday cake: I’ve made the cake (which came out perfectly thanks to Magi-Cake strips) and the frosting which is just right. But then… I decided to color the frosting. I thought I frost the cake in yellow and then either make a big happy face on it or if more ambitious, make some chocolate frosting and make a lion’s face/mane. So I got out my food colors and went to work.

DO NOT USE ALL-NATURAL FOOD COLORS. I bought them because I thought it would be good to avoid the chemical food colors…?? but they DON’T work. First I tried to make a yellow with a hint of brown. I followed the instructions exactly and got… GRAY. Gray frosting! Unhappily, I added some cocoa to try to make a yellowish-brown. After much effort and a total change in consistency of the frosting, I have come up with a coffee color. NOT what I wanted at all. The picture (below) looks better than the cake…

Depressed, I thought I’d just edge it in a nice green, make a couple pink roses, and write happy birthday on it. So I took some frosting that I’d set aside before the brown disaster and added the green color. And added. And added. I added fully half the bottle to something less than a cup of frosting, and it was still not anything close to proper green. The consistency again changed, and worst of all? When I tasted it, it tasted like SPINACH. The all-natural coloring they get is from spinach. I achieved, ladies and gentlemen, spinach-flavored frosting!!!!

I was at a loss. Nasty pale brown cake, pale green spinach flavored frosting. I don’t think it gets much worse than that. So with the small amount of frosting I had left, I used checmical colors to get proper green frosting. But then… another disaster. My frosting bag/tube broke while I was making vines and leaves. The tip/tip holder thing just shot off the end and big blobs of frosting flew out. I was forced to make the remainder of the leaves (and the roses too, which was a feat indeed) by jamming frosting into the tip as if I were filling an ice-cream cone and then pushing it out with my finger while twirling the rose nail. I did the writing using a icing tube I made out of a piece of wax paper, and boy was it shaky…

Anyway, here are a few pictures!

I think I’ve got it!

3 cups confectioner’s sugar
100g butter (that’s about 1 stick for you Americans)
50g shortening (I used softened Copha)
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk (or maybe a little more)

Cream butter & shortening until light. Add half the sugar and beat in thoroughly. Add milk, vanilla, and rest of sugar and beat in sugar.

It is pretty light, still a tiny bit gritty (as American cake frosting tends to be), and gets a slight crust when left out. Tastes good too. That is what I was trying to achieve! I haven’t figured out how to flavor it though. I tried adding 2 tbsp cocoa powder and another tbsp of milk and that kind of worked, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. Mike thought it tasted good though he reckons the ones with more butter taste better. however, since Copha tastes like nothing, I could probably do it with all butter and no Copha/shortening. I wonder if it would make it heavier.

Tried my hand at making frosting roses today. Hahahah! What a joke.

A few weeks ago we got our house informally appraised. I was encouraged by the fact that it has gone up pretty significantly in value but it’s put my mind on the things which we should be fixing up & maintaining. That was in fact part of the motivation behind the sudden surge of gardening a couple weeks back.

Anyway, he told us that we shoudl renovate our bathroom. Well, this is no news to me: I’ve long been suffering pains from the nastiest bathroom in town complete with scary shower, midget bathtub, hideous clunker of a vanity, 1970′s black & white “chicken scratch tiles” (alternating with dusky rose triangles), etc. etc. I tried to fix it up a bit when we got the house by painting over the chicken scratch and dusky rose tiles with white tile paint and painting the walls light blue instead of a drab brown/beige, but it’s still pretty horrible.

Here is a picture:

I’ve been trying to work out how to renovate this small (2m by 2.6m) bathroom but it’s tough because I am a terrible interior designer. I tried a whole bunch of online 3D modeling tools with little success: finally went back into that old standard, Second Life. Since I’ve already got so much experience using the building tools! Spent this evening building a Second Life bathroom as close to scale as possible.

Here is what I’ve come up with so far… the first option at least. It’s tough to know what to do with regards to wall tiles & floor tiles and paint colors blah blah. And lighting! Gah! How do you pick the right kind of light? I am so not gifted in the area of interior design…

I would like my own personal sauna. Wouldn’t that be awesome??

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about frosting #4 and #5. Fail on both accounts.

#4 was a meringue buttercream (egg whites no yolks) from crumblycookie.net and #5 was Rose Levy’s Neoclassic buttercream (egg yolks no whites). I did them both tonight so there wouldn’t be any egg part wasting.

#4 tasted pretty good just as meringue. I should have just baked it as a meringue and let that be that. As frosting it was pretty tasty, but too liquid. The texture was nice, silky smooth and light, but not what I was after. And it didn’t come out as white as she said, either. Of course, I couldn’t beat it for as long as it called for (ridiculously long if you ask me) because I was afraid I’d blow my hand mixer. Also.. it was way too lemony. Maybe this is good if you want a lemon frosting, but for non-lemon frosting it was just overkill. Still, it’s worth keeping the recipe around for frosting a pound cake or something. It tasted nice. You could almost have eaten it like pudding.

#5 failed in every way. This might have been somewhat because I didn’t have soft butter and got impatient and tried to microwave soften some with varying results… and also because I had to substitute Golden Syrup for corn syrup, because there is no corn syrup in Oz. I don’t think that substitution works. It was a terrible color, brownish yellow, and was also too liquid, and gritty at the same time (the sugar didn’t melt into the Golden Syrup properly), and it tasted strongly of raw sugar/molasses. Due to the Golden Syrup, which I’d never tasted before tonight. Oh well!

So the winner is definitely #3, the Williams-Sonoma buttercream, although I think I will make it again using a small proportion of Copha to see if I can lighten it up just a smidge without making it greasy or nothing-tasting.

I’m a late in writing this but traveling took up all of yesterday.

Day Four, the weather was fully as bad as Day Two. it didn’t start off so… Spent a bit of time in the hotel in the morning getting everything together and checking out, then set off on a walk downtown. I’d read about this eating house, Cumulus, Inc, that supposedly served good breakfast and I wanted to try it out. More on that later.

Got sidetracked by the Old Melbourne Gaol which I walked by on our way downtown. First went to the City Watch House for the interactive “be arrested” experience, then walked through the Gaol itself, reading all the things.

I didn’t finish it because I actually found it quite morbid and depressing. Very interesting, but oppressive as well. Also, there was no space for prams and I was carrying Calliope, who had fallen asleep and therefore weighed as much as a football player.

Headed downtown, found Cumulus, Inc, and had the worst lunch experience I’d had in I don’t know how long. I’d found the place from some online review site that had described it in such a way that I thought it would be a kind of cafeteria or diner. And they said children were welcome. How wrong could you be! It was nothing like a cafeteria or diner and children (anybody small enough to require a pram, that is) were most certainly not welcomed.

First, they made a big deal about me getting a table. I don’t see why — there were tons of open tables and it remained so the entire time. Because all the tables were mashed together and there wasn’t much room for a pram, they told me I should wait until some women at the end table who were “just finishing up” finished up. It was stupid, because there was a little 2-person table that they left me at in the “interim” and by moving it slightly I fit the pram in perfectly well, but no. I had to wait. Never mind that I was starving and all the tables near where I was in “interim” were EMPTY. When it became abundantly clear the ladies had no intention of finishing up, they took me to another table where there was marginally more space.

I sat at my new table for a while and they finally brought me a menu. The waiter explained that most of the items were very small, so for a single person eating, ordering 2-4 items was advisable.

I could barely find 2 things I remotely wanted to eat. The menu was populated with a bizarre list of hoity sounding and very expensive items — oysters, caviar, tongue, raw meat or weird body parts, and plenty of things that I had no idea what they were. Lomo? Freekah? Mojama? Blecccccccch.

So, never being a big eater anyway (I graze, not binge), I ordered the minimum 2 items — the rocket salad and some grilled haloumi. I was cross-eyed with hunger at this point and Calliope was, just because we were in a stupidly posh restaurant where we were persona non grata, throwing a fit. Complete with screaming, thrashing, and frantic grabbing of cutlery and other things from the table. Unfortunately, I had lost my disciplinary chopstick in the move from table #1 to table #2.

I gave her a banana, which she demolished in 2 seconds flat, and a baby granola bar type thing, which she sucked on and dribbled all over herself, and her sippy cup of water, which she threw on the floor. Then my coffee arrived and with it — oh happiness! — two slices of bread and some butter, which I devoured promptly (Calliope helped). The coffee was very good and the bread was *excellent*.

Then the food came and it was BIG. A huge salad and a plate with a big hunk of grilled haloumi and 4 more pieces of bread drizzled with olive oil. Gak! Thank goodness the little monster was still hungry because I could not possibly eat all of it. And he had said 2-4! Both items were likewise delicious but the rocket seemed specially designed to have maximum impossibility to eat. It was of the long, stiff-stemmed type that refused to submit to the fork no matter what, and it was all only made worse by my having to keep one hand free to smack Calliope down as she alternately beat on my leg with the Gaol pamphlet and determinedly tried to hoist herself (and the pram, to which she was attached) onto the table. Hunks of mushed up bread dribbled from her mouth down her shirt, onto the pram and onto the floor as she yammered. Where were my emergency napkins?

The napkin provided with lunch was cloth, and not only that, was so stiffly starched that it was actually impossible to wipe your mouth with it. I always wonder if those napkins are just for show. And what to do with the decimated banana peel? I’d left it on a spare plate on the table but every time the waiter/waitress came by they smiled politely and looked right through it instead of taking it away. Okay, so it wasn’t THEIR banana, but still. Babies don’t eat steak tartare.

When I finally finished and stood up to go I nearly killed myself slipping on one of the mushy bread things that had fallen from Calliope’s mouth. The wait staff didn’t bother opening the door as I left (though there were a bunch of them there) and I nearly dropped the pram as I tripped down the steps. Honestly. I hate these kind of things. The more nervous and out of place you feel, the more boorish you manage to behave. It was definitely the most uncomfortable meal I can remember having in ages.

It was pouring again so we headed over to the Aquarium. It was pretty good as aquariums go, but Calliope was still too young for it and found it dull. By the time we got out of there, it was mid-afternoon and I still had an hour to kill before heading back to the hotel for the shuttle. So I wasted some time in MNG trying on shirts apparently designed for tiny people with no shoulders, and then amused myself by going into a discount scent shop and sniffing all the men’s colognes while the security guard fixed a fierce eye on Calliope and her dirty, grabby little paws.

Getting to the airport was generally uneventful (though I nearly missed the shuttle because wrestling a screaming Calliope into the pram took longer than anticipated) and so was check-in, but then the plane was delayed. Ugh. It finally took off an hour after schedule and Calliope threw a major tantrum for about 10 minutes just before take-off. Ugh, ugh. What possessed me to think traveling with a 1 year old was a good idea? I think there might actually not be a worse age for travel. As a small infant, they just sleep. As a 2 year old, though they are willful and have tantrums, they can kind of talk and you can kind of have conversations and explain things to them. At least, so I hear. A 1 year old has all the willfulness, mobility, and tantruming abilities of a 2 year old (at least, mine does) but none of the communication abilities. It makes for a bad combination.

Anyway, got back to Clyde ok and went home. Calliope was delighted to be home and spent a bunch of time running about the living room and chortling with glee. Even after I put her to bed, she stayed up until well past midnight, jumping up and down and squawking. And she gets up often before 6AM!

Anyway. It was a good trip, and I’d like to go back. With Mike, and maybe not with Calliope

Today got off to a good start, because Calliope didn’t wake up at 4AM but actually slept til 7.30.

Then it got bad, because Calliope threw a 45 minute tantrum when I tried to strap her into the pram so we could go out and get breakfast. I must have spanked her 6 times before she became subdued or sick of tantruming. Gaah!

Felt rather morose during breakfast, which I got down the street at a kind of diner/bar called Muleta’s. But they made fantasic scrambled eggs. I know the secrets of making excellent scrambled eggs, and apparently they did too. REALLY good.

Things looked up after that as I walked West to the Melbourne Docklands. The weather was still overcast, but not raining, and the sky had a kind of lightness that hinted sunniness was not far away. The air was fresh and as we approached the Docklands it smelled of the sea.

When we got there though, there was a lot of construction to hike around and I felt annoyed again. But then we got to this long wide open kind of Esplanade along the river and the sky was getting blue and my annoyance melted away. I love water. I love the sea, since that’s what I’m used to, growing up on it as I did, but I also love rivers, which by definition are going somewhere. I love the swaying of water, and the smell. There was almost no one walking the Esplanade despite it being 10.00. Melbourne is a city that gets up late.

Walked toward the Shopping Center part of the Docklands past an extremely scary statue of Dame Edna. She/he looked exactly like Elton John, in my opinion, but more garish.

Then… went shopping. I know, I know. But I AM a girl, and I do shop… sometimes. Calliope was very good during it all. I gave her lunch halfway through (I wasn’t hungry), and then it began to rain. Not rain. Pour. An improbably TORRENTIAL downpour.

And here is the funny part. Remember I was hunting for those wooden letters… and only found them online… and thought there was a shop in Melbourne that I could go to… but then wrote them and there wasn’t? Well, I ducked into a toy shop to get out of the rain (I had no umbrella or jacket) and it turned out to be a shop that mirrored the Swiss toy shops quite precisely, except smaller. And they sold ALL the wooden letters! They had every single one! I was completely floored. Call that serendipitous… escaping a rainstorm and falling into something that for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist. It was a fantastic toy store too. Everything made of wood, almost everything animal-themed, tons of Noah’s Arks, charming little chair and table sets, wooden imitation food (though no plush roast chickens), the whole lot.

After the shopping we walked on down all the way to the river and crossed over on a very interesting pedestrian bridge that resembled an intestine. Then we wandered along the river and crossed back over. Calliope was asleep by this point so I stopped at a nice little cafe/wine bar for a break and a sandwich. The chai latte I got there was *excellent*. It was really nice to sit there on the sidewalk, sipping my chai and reading Jane Eyre and watching the people walk by (it was about 6PM by now) while Calliope snoozed.

Way too many people here smoke, though. The lady behind me was eating a sandwich and smoking simultaneously. How does that work???

I tried again to find the cafe that eluded me yesterday and found it, but it was closed, or didn’t exist anymore, or something. As to be expected, I suppose!

Anyway, now I’m back in the room — just got back from the sauna. How I will miss the sauna!! Calliope is snoozing away and I have one last hour’s worth of BBC Pride and Prejudice… good timing, really, as we’re heading back to Brisbane tomorrow. I’ll be glad to be going back… it’s been a nice time away (if a bit tiring from all the walking and managing Calliope nonstop) but it’s always good to get home.

Tomorrow… it’s meant to rain again. So I suppose that means the Aquarium. Calliope should like it…

Now back to Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett!