... i love nigella...'s cooking!

upon being told of a cookbook worth investigating, i went into my local angus & robertson bookshop to investigate. they didn't have the title i was looking for but they did have the new nigella lawson cookbook, nigella express.

i flicked through it a little and about five recipes in i found this one for mustard pork chops.



hopefully it'll taste as good when i make it as it looks like it does when nigella makes it!

... i love my back

it's been a while since i blogged. it's part procrastination, part i-have-no-internet-at-home(-and-seem-unlikely-to-in-the-near-future), part my life feels very blah at the moment... but i love my back.

this weekend just gone i was away from melbourne, in sydney for a trade show. the fair was ok and i was pretty tired from having to be out of bed at 4.30am to get my 7.45 flight from tullamarine. there was a harbour cruise dinner in the evening that i was ready to leave about two hours prior to docking, simply due to fatigue.

the biggest problem was that i had another back spasm on sunday morning while getting dressed. i've been waking up as "pretzel man" every day since and while i'm recovering faster and feeling less sore as the days wear on, it's still frustrating. i wasn't able to be as quick on my feet and people i wanted to visit i wasn't able to - very, very frustrating.

back in melbourne, i had yesterday off so i could at least have one day of lying down, which was what i did. then around 3pm we had a blackout as part of the big windstorm that came out of the low pressure cell from the south. power wasn't restored to my part of town until about 5am today. blah.

all things considered, this is about as interesting as it's been. as for the title of my post?

as i was crossing the road near the slip inn on my way back from breakfast at cockle bay wharf, i noticed some people crossing against the light. i turned to watch them go and noticed a woman standing very close, closer than people would normally stand if you're the only two people at the lights. she seemed equally surprised. "i suppose i should introduce myself!" she laughed. i commented that this was the kind of conversation i enjoy in melbourne (randomly with strangers) and she mentioned that she might have already crossed. i remarked that i was a bit slower than normal due to my back spasm and she replied that she was a healer (i assume a reiki therapist or some such) and she offered to give me a go.

five minutes later i'm standing besides the slip inn, bag on the ground and eyes closed while she did... whatever... to my back. afterwards, she said, "i'm feeling a lot of dark energy there... what i really need you to do is to love your back. do you love your back?"

i really love my back!

... still alive

i'm sitting here at sticky, marvelling at how tidy the desktop on the computer screen is, trying to think about what's been going on in the last few weeks.

it's been pretty busy. after almost a dozen weeks of looking, i'm now in my new place. it's pretty small, but i guess that makes it "neat and cosy" or some equally real-estately euphemism for "small enough to swing a young cat, maybe". i quite like it. it reminds me a lot of my old place in kogarah (something i think i mentioned before) but after some discussion with mum on the phone a few nights ago i realised it also reminds me of my grandparents' last place in unanderra. the direction of entry into the flat is different from theirs, and i have no backyard, no outside toilet/laundry... similar then, but not the same.

the neighbours that i've met so far have been very welcoming and friendly. a couple of them have taken to semi-regularly going on walks of an evening in an effort to boost fitness levels, something to which i've been given an open invitation i've yet to take up. and so on...

i'm currently without a fridge, something i'm hoping to remedy this weekend but how successfully remains to be seen. i moved out of my family's home in may 1994 and this is the first time in all that time that i've been drinking powdered milk! (it's actually not as bad as i might have anticipated...) i have some uht milk in popper-portions but i don't like to open them unless i'm going to drink the whole portion in a sitting. good for breakfast cereal, not so great for a cup of tea at the end of the day...

i have rent due in about a fortnight and i'm trying very hard not to send any more money than i need to on things, not because i want to have money to pay the rent (obviously i want that!) but because i'm still saving towards going to the u.s. in august for the portland zine symposium. i have a stash saved towards it but moving house meant that i had to dip rather heavily into it. I'm not too concerned - my tax refund and the return of my bond over the coming months will greatly assist my savings in this regard again - but i am a touch worried. anyone who knows me will tell you that i'm not very good at saving and i secretly suspect in my heart of hearts that portland may end up getting carried over to next year. i really don't want it to, though, and if i can get there this year, i will.

that's about it for the time being. i've been having a lot of trouble trying to get internet connection at home and i think at the end of the day i may have to go with some kind of wireless broadband option. until then i'll be relying on free wi-fi at cafes and public spaces, along with my lunch times at work...

oh well... i get the feeling that God saved this new place for me as an opportunity to prune my life of extraneous crap. i guess news will follow as it comes to hand!

... not long now

i pick up the keys this afternoon. i'm still quite excited, even though i know the actual moving part is going to be a touch difficult, given the way the balcony is laid out and how far along from the stairs my flat is. i'll pick the keys up, come back into town to go to the zine event for the festival of the photocopier (follow the links from sticky), then go back there and measure the place up for the fridge.

i'm hoping to move some stuff in over the weekend, bibs and bobs that i can get there on my own steam, and i have removalists taking the bulk of my stuff later. my housemate is moving out mid-week, so i'll be without a fridge for a bit but that's no biggie - i'll get some uht milk in the small-format six-pack and use that on my cereal.

anyway, i have to get back to work. i'm here early to make up for leaving early this afternoon.

... new digs

well, i have new digs. i signed the lease today and i pick up the keys on friday. it's pretty exciting, actually, and i think it's the first place i've actually the signed the lease on for about five or six years. a while. it's a nice place, reminds me a lot of my place in kogarah, although this is only a one-bedroom and not a two-bedroom place.

there's a bus stop just outside and across the road from the block of units i'm going to be in, which is a mixed blessing: one route takes me up to the next station but far less frequently than the other route goes into the city. the flip side to this is the nearest station has trains which only take about 15 minutes into the city, while the bus directly to the city takes almost an hour. bus-train beats out bus-only in peak hour (i tested it this morning). i'll be interested to see how the weekend traffic affects the times.

it's taken quite a bit of time to find. i've been looking more or less for two months now, since my housemate decided to move east, nearer to church. i've looked at one- and two-bedroom places at ofis (open for inspections), which seem to be the main method of property managers scooping up applicants, and about a dozen various share places. i didn't remember this being this hard, back in 2001. when i found my place in kogarah, i think the whole process only took a few days... although, once i saw the place, that's about how long it took for this new place.

i had seen the unit advertised as being ofi about three or four weeks ago but through prior arrangements and mischance i didn't actually get to see it. so last saturday i had planned to look at three places - one in richmond, two in st kilda east - but i felt too tired to hit the richmond one up and decided to go to elsternwick instead and see if i could snag the keys to see a unit on glenhuntly rd in elwood, just on the other side of the nepean highway.

well, after having a long and involved conversation with the receptionist about her injured finger ("it was just a little cut but two weeks later i woke up at 1 a.m. and all there was in the universe was the pain at the end of my finger and "nursesonline" said, 'you have four hours to get to the emergency room' and now it's bandaged out to buggery..."), i discovered that the unit would be unavailable to view for another week while they did some painting and carpeting work. with some time to kill, i ducked across the road to another real estate agent, where i discovered to my astonishment that the unit i'd missed the ofi at was still available to view! i paid my fifty bucks and hopped a cab to go check it out.

first floor. wooden floor boards throughout. wooden slat venetians in the east-facing lounge room. pokey little kitchen (my words - in real estate speak it would be classified as "neat"). two sets of four powerpoints in the lounge room and two pairs in the bedroom. built-in wardrobe in the bedroom. gas hot water. good hot water pressure! communal laundry downstairs with big-arse laundromat washer and dryer for a dollar a load. car space (oh, the irony). great neighbours.

so great, in fact, that when i was leaving the block i ended up having a bit of a yak with them and they (hilda ("i moved in in 1982") and sharon ("i think about getting fit while i'm lying down with a block of fruit & nut") were on their way out for the day) gave me a lift back into elsternwick! how great is that?! so i applied for the place, ditched my plans for the rest of the looking-at-units, and wandered into town.

they phoned monday to say they were offering it to me. hadn't spoken to any of my three referees... i guess my application spoke for itself in ways that the last dozen applicants' hadn't. so i signed the lease today (tuesday, even though i know it's now wednesday) and i pick up the keys friday. so i'll be out of lovely carnegie by the end of the month.

i'm rather looking forward to the whole thing.

my housemate's blog included this little tidbit, upon settling on the new digs further east:
and where was God in all this? as it turns out... here the whole time... there were plenty of whiny prayers from me, i admit, but i've slowly come to pray more and more "i shall trust you whatever the outcome, and trust that all of this will make me more like Jesus."

as for myself, i didn't pray very much about my own search. i was fully confident that i would find a place, somewhere God was happy for me to be or (perhaps slightly more accurately) where he wants me to be from now on (for whatever reason that may be). i've been feeling pretty distant from God lately, not because of the search for somewhere to live but because i haven't been giving our relationship the attention it needs. i continue much encouraged by the passage:

Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound! Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. The saying is trustworthy, for:

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he also will deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—

for he cannot deny himself.
[ 2 Timothy 2:8-13, ESV ]

in those times when i find myself drifting, more or less actively, away from God, knowing that he is unchanging in his love and faithfulness is the most tremendous comfort to me. that is what keeps bringing me back to him. when i fall down, it's always shame and selfishness that keep me from getting up again but it's the unchanging word of God and the power of the cross that break through that.

... happy accident

i found this while i was trying to get an earworm out of my head. i went looking for a piece of music from the u.k. talent show "the x-factor" (and "kill bill") called "battle without honor or humanity". i looked on youtube for a film clip that accompanied it, found an interesting one cobbled together from bits of the star wars movies...

and then found this:

... qfs

i'm very sad to say how utterly unsurprised i was to hear/read about the out of control party at narre warren over the weekend. i can't help but hear the voice of v in the background as i think about it...

how did this happen? who's to blame? well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

how do parents instill in their children a sense of responsibility toward others when everything in the world around them tells them only to think of themselves?

i've heard people say that there comes a time when you have to think of yourself, which leaves me to wonder if it ever really need be true... after all, if you can have two people looking out for one another, making sure they're safe, why can we not have 22 million people in this country looking out for one another? why can we not actively seek to make sure as we step into the future that the person beside us is not left behind?

we talk about being "the lucky country" as if we are somehow different from other nations but the more i see our newscasts and read our papers, the more i see advertising and billboards, the more i hear people on trains and see them on streets, the less difference i see between australia and the rest of the western world. this is the effluent affluence that developing nations are aspiring towards? so they too can afford to crave the things we have? type-2 diabetes, spiralling divorce rates, people unable to build things or repair things but wonderfully trained to create web pages complaining about why the water pressure is poor or why new houses are so expensive...?

our very success is the albatross around our neck: our prosperity makes us targets which need to be defended by men and women with guns; our growing population weighs our economy down with credit card debt being paid to overseas interests while we import food because we cannot support our own appetites; there is no apology without the expectation of damages; there is no forgiveness...

when i started writing this i wanted to come up with a rant about irresponsible young people who could probably do with a good thumping when it comes to being punished for damaging people's homes and our community's police cars. i want to see the people i perceive as being the cause of this be punished.

what i want is wrong. what i should want is not recompense but redemption, not judgement but justification - not payment for past mistakes but a changed direction to a better future.

i read that some party organiser said that this young man's party organising skills would be worth $10,000. so heart warming that such public if deniably tacit approval of defying one's parents can be so rewarding; such a pity that that only comes halfway to paying the bill for cleaning up such a wonderfully well-organised party last weekend! one person thinks he's hot; another described him as having raided doctor zhivago's wardrobe.

it comes as no surprise to me that the community outrage that some might have expected to see about this incident hasn't much teeth. for the appropriate level of community outrage i suspect there needs to be a certain level of community responsibility felt within the community itself by its members towards each other, community responsibility that would have meant this would never have happened in the first place. five hundred people would have been fifty, who would have accepted that the police were there because the community as a whole empowered them to say, "you have gone thus far - too far".

so we have an acceptable level of debt, when any debt was something to be worked off rather than lived on; acceptable levels of unemployment, homelessness, divorce, scandal, corruption... what a lucky country we are! what? are we a lucky country? compared to others, perhaps. compared with what we could be, no.

we are some of us living on the verandah of a mansion, scorning the people on the stairs, ignoring those at the bottom of the driveway, and all of us together refusing to turn around and bring everyone inside the house.

... i love blogs like this

i came across this blog as i was logging in to upload my last entry. very cool.

... bicycle! bicycle!!! (1)

i want to ride my bicycle!

i did, yesterday, and so i took myself off to chadstone, shopping centre of the one-bike-rack kind. i ended up locking my bike to a light post outside, being warned off so-called "dumb" signs, those posts that are simply slotted into holes in the ground without being cemented in at all.

chadstone is busy! in a very terry-pratchett-it's-all-quantum kind of way, it exerts a strong socio-economic gravitic force on the area around it... distorting traffic movement, parking areas, public transport, property and rental prices, green grocery prices - the works. scary to see that kind of thing up close. i expect any large shopping centre would have that kind of impact but chadstone seems to be a bit more pervasive than most i've seen.

i did some exploring on my way home and by the time i'd put my bike away my thighs were screaming that they were about to cramp up at any moment! i had as hot a shower as i could cope with, scrubbed hard at the sweat that had caked my body (ewww, i know, but it also kind of felt good to have exerted myself that much), and took a great deal of pleasure in washing my hair.

... well i liked it

... no resolutions

well, none but this - i want to go walking for half an hour every day.

it's been a while since i blogged but nothing terribly exciting has really happened. not that i only blog the exciting stuff... it'd be the world's shortest blog, given my preference for avoiding (chinese curse-style) interesting stuff.

new year's eve last night was the first one i've had for about 13 years where i wasn't away on a camp of some kind. what did i do? i watched fireworks on telly, caught up with some filing on my computer, and watched a film on sbs. not a whole heck of a lot. i had sausages and baked beans on toast for dinner. i'm told the temperature yesterday maxed out at about 42 degrees here in melbourne - after so many steamy summers in sydney, it totally didn't feel that hot without the humidity i was used to over the Christmas period. anyone who saw me last (or was it the year before) new year's, when sydney had all those bushfires and it was one of the hottest new year's days we'd had and it was so dry, will agree that it's definitely the humidity that knocks me about, not the heat so much...

my mum and sister were over here on Christmas Day for lunch. that could be filed under exciting, i suppose, but from my point of view it was more scary than exciting. i made a slow-cooked lamb shoulder with mint and pomegranate, peas and parmesan, zucchini slices sauteed in olive oil, chilli and garlic, and potatoes with whole spices, with a variation on eton mess, serving meringue, whipped cream, cut strawberries and pomegranate seeds and juice piled up in a big heap for dessert.

i've never slow-cooked anything before, let alone 2kg' worth of lamb, so i was very glad to wake up and find the house had not burned down overnight. in fact, the cooking had filled the house with a yummy sweet, meaty aroma.

no surprises here either - i used nigella lawson's recipes for the lamb, the potatoes and the pomegranate meringue mountain (her name, not mine; i like the succinctness of "eton mess") and jamie oliver's recipes for the peas and zucchinis... truth be told, the green dishes didn't require much in terms of recipes but when you're uncertain of how even to cook frozen peas a simple recipe goes a long way. at least i could already boil water - i know more people than i'm happy to who claim to burn even that!

... ten years later

it's hard to believe that it's already ten years yesterday since my father died. i loved him dearly, even though i don't think, even at the end, that we were terribly close.

God showed me very tangibly the enormous love he has, however, on the day of the funeral, when he brought so many of my friends together to be with me and support me that day. i thank God for each and every one whenever i think of my father.

... no

i didn't forget

... cool

i got home from celebrating my birthday with friends from sticky - we went to taco bill's on russell st - and i found these waiting for me, cooked by my very thoughtful housemate!



how nice is that?

big shoutout of thanks to all my friends and family, without whom i can confidently say that i wouldn't be here today. God bless all of you in every way!

... quite by accident

i found this link to a blog about "a day in the life of a female marine". i find the u.s. marine corps to be quite interesting, not least because of my affinity for matthew reilly novels but also because they seem to be invested with such... a gravity and mythology that the military in australia (notwithstanding the s.a.s) doesn't really seem to have.

i can't say i really thought much of the movie g.i. jane but it also gave (one would assume, not knowing any better) something of an insight into the navy s.e.a.l.s... i've happened on this blog before and not read much of it but maybe i might take a bit of a longer look at it.

... thoughts on blogging

it's easy to go m.i.a. when you're blogging - life happens, things distract you, and the actual act of blogging (agonising over oxford commas aside) really does take up time. normally it's like time you spend with a friend - you don't always notice the time passing until for a little while you don't hang out with them and you realise trying to make time again to see them can be difficult. (i'm not sure that makes sense but it's early and i'm still eating my coco pops...)

i was thinking about this after reading a friend's blog, who confessed that life had intruded on blogging. to blog only quality or to blog sub-par thoughts? that was the question.

i don't know what i blog. sometimes i'm filling in space but sometimes (most of the time) it's stuff i can't keep inside me. i need to tell someone and in the absence of people being around to tell (or not wanting to burden my housemate with all my random thoughts), i blog.

why do you blog? why do you read blogs?

... is it ok...?

one of my favourite cds from years past (about a dozen or so) was by artist max sharam, called a million year girl. it had a few hits and was nominated for a bucketload of arias. i just liked the songs and the more i listened to it the more the songs got into my head. no surprises there, of course - if you spend time filling your head with something or other, some part of that something is bound to lodge in there.

thing is, the music didn't lodge like a sesame seed or a piece of spinach or that coppery-cellulosey bit in the popcorn that gets between your teeth and gums that you spend hours worrying out with toothpicks and tongue. it kind of dissolved into my brain, rising unbidden like an athena when i least expect it. there are a few albums and songs that do that for me... not heaps, not really, but there are a few.

i remember seeing advertising for max sharam's one-woman show in sydney last year or the year before and doing a bit of googlesearch found some reviews and articles about them. she played the melbourne international comedy festival, many gigs around australia, a ten-year-reunion gig for the album in '04, and the gig i saw her perform at at wollongong uni in 1995 (i think). (i caught a very late train home to my place in penshurst and was terrified i was going to be beaten up by a bunch of drunk guys who got on the train at thirroul and got off at sutherland...

a million year girl is a nostalgic touchstone for me. i don't listen to the album very often now but when i do, i feel pulled bodily into the past, into the feelings and emotions attached to the years i was living when i was listening to the album. merril bainbridge's album the garden, fiona apple's tidal, the doug anthony all-stars' icon and henry rollins' the boxed life all form a part of that internal soundtrack from then, glued together by canasta, Bible study, youth group, poetry and loneliness.

i suppose it's not a good thing to go back to the thing that causes you pain - but we're all human beings here, i guess, and hurting ourselves seems to be part of the package, whether we like it or not - but i believe that's a big part of what makes nostalgia bittersweet: that it's not just bitter...

and what im trying to say isn't really new...
it's just the things that happen to me
when im reminded of you
like when i hear your name
or see a place that you've been
or see a picture of your grin
or pass a house that you've been in
one time or another
it sets off something in me
i just can't explain

i don't often go looking for it - usually something will set it off and there i'll be, standing in 2007 but reliving ten years earlier, or twenty (if it's the pet shop boys), or twenty-five (if it's the smell of wattle)...

... freedom! forever!

remember, remember the fifth of november
the gunpowder treason and plot
i know of no reason why the gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot

it's been many, many years since cracker night, or bonfire night, the end of so many stacks of old fence pailings and tree branches in the middle of winter, the last vestiges of empire day... many years since i had a hole burned in the back of my dressing gown as a child by some other child's sparkler... i knew of guy fawkes through old agatha christie novels, through the rhyme, but nothing of the man himself, not really. v for vendetta - awesome graphic novel that it is, great film as far as it went - sparks some ideas but doesn't really say that much about guy fawkes himself.

tomorrow is the melbourne cup public holiday here in sunny melbourne; i believe i'll use some of the day to do a little internet research on guy fawkes and see if i can't glean a few more special seeds from his story that might yield a harvest in my own.

v says in the movie, "people shouldn't be afraid of their governments - governments should be afraid of their people". i understand the intended meaning, i think, but i think that so much of the failings of governments around the world come down to that: governments fear those they govern... no - scratch that - governments fear those they rule. all around the world so many of those in government are the greedy and the afraid... and how long does it take for the idealistic to compromise their beliefs until one day they fall into one category or the other?

it is an interesting idea to consider coming up to the next federal election. the last fit-like spasms of the parties trying to win over the electorate before the end of the month is painful to watch. perhaps we should draft people to serve as members of parliament - like jury duty - instead of electing them.

... the sublime helen mirren

i missed the start of the interview, so i was lacking a mite in context, but i was most fortunate to see andrew denton's enough rope tonight. fortunate indeed!

i honestly believe that there is no other actress like her in (anglophone) cinema today. from the time i first saw her in excalibur - when i was about 9 or 10, i think - i thought her to be one of the most beautiful women i had ever seen. despite the fact that my own opinions of female beauty are rather more broad than the usual, the conclusion i reached some twenty-three years ago remains true today.

in more ways than i can say, helen mirren is for me the standard and marker of beauty.

... beautiful girls do fart

if someone had asked me, i don't think i ever would have said, "i'll miss sydney taxis when i move to melbourne". if i had said that i wouldn't miss sydney taxis, i would have been wrong.

i've seen sydney taxis cross four lanes of traffic and make an illegal u-turn to pick up a fare... and here in melbourne, the city i find new reasons every day to love, i've seen twenty cabs pass by in as many minutes, except for the one which pulled up, melways propped up on the steering wheel, chirping in a near-unintelligible indian accent, "did you phone for a taxi?"

i've resigned myself to not being able to get an omelette that i like here in melbourne the same way a man might resign himself to his girlfriend being immovable on leaving a toilet seat up (i.e don't do it)...

... but i never thought i'd miss sydney cabbies.