angharad_gam

Well, technically he is renting it from school. It is very shiny. And extremely loud.

This is a rather sudden development. He never showed much interest in music as a child (unlike Ash who has been learning various instruments throughout primary school). Then last year he decided to teach himself guitar (via YouTube). And now he has signed up for instrumental music lessons at school. Learning the trumpet. Apparently he wanted to learn the saxophone, but when he tried out for the classes they said he would be better at trumpet. Which is odd because playing the trumpet requires a bit of a trick (you can't just blow into them), but it seems he has the knack.

So the hottest average temperature days Australia has ever had were the last three days. It feels like South Australia made a large contribution to this - it was 44°C here for those three days (cooler today thankfully!). On Thursday night it barely dipped below 35°C even at midnight. This was doubly shocking because we have had a very mild spring and summer - verging on the positively chilly at times.

What's it like when it's that hot? Well, go turn your oven on to about 200°C. Make sure you turn the fan on too. Let it get up to temperature. Now open the door. That's what it's like going outside when it's 44°C. You don't notice that you're sweating profusely unless you touch something plastic because your sweat evaporates instantly - as does all the moisture in your eyeballs. When you turn the cold tap on the water comes out hotter than the hot tap. The birds pant. One bird came and sat right in the strawberry plants just after we watered them - we thought it must have been trying to cool its feet down. And I nearly gave myself heat stroke on Friday trying to finish my Christmas shopping.

And now everything is on fire too. There is a fire in the hills here that started yesterday, has burnt 25,000 hectares, and is still going. One person h as died and a dozen or more houses have been lost. We can smell the smoke from that at times. My sister had to evacuate her house (just for a day fortunately) a couple of weeks ago thanks to a fire in Ipswich (on the western outskirts of Brisbane). The fires in NSW are completely out of control. Tonight they are bearing down on Lithgow, a town of 12,000 people.

It feels a bit weird to be making Christmas plans in the middle of all this. I am working right up until Christmas, and then taking nearly four weeks off, which I am looking forward to a great deal. We will have Christmas at home and then a quick trip to Queensland in the new year for my Dad's 70th birthday. I might write more about food plans later, if I am not too busy actually cooking or freaking out over bushfires.

Yet another space of months passes without posting, I haven't been super amazingly busy (well, I was for a few weeks around the end of June), just not terribly inspired to come in here and write. In July I went to a couple of fairs with

dirtygreatknife - a craft fair and a book fair. Much yarn and many books were acquired. Erin also went off to the UK for most of this month, where she had a great time meeting various extended family members and traipsing round all kinds of historic sites. August is usually the month of getting colds and 'urgh, isn't winter finished yet?'. I did indeed get an unpleasant virus that really knocked me out for a couple of weeks. September has so far been the month of things breaking. The pump on the rainwater tank, and the car have broken. The pump was replaced relatively painlessly (except for the part where we discovered it was installed in such a way that was against building code and doing far more than any pump that size is meant to, but that's another story). The car's transmission (the gears) was basically completely wrecked and that has not been painless to replace, not to mention the additional pain of being without a car for nearly two weeks. Fingers crossed we are done with that for a while.

In pleasanter news, the garden is bursting out in Spring at the moment. We are swimming in broccoli, and will shortly be swimming in peas, and last night we ate the first of the spontaneous potatoes. They were really yummy. Next month I am going to the Great Southern Gathering (an SCA event focused on the less martial arts) where I am teaching three classes - two on cooking and one on fibre arts. I am also looking forward to the ABC plant fair.

I have been cooking rice dishes around the world a bit lately. Here are some recipes - Hoppin' John is a traditional southern US dish, and Paella is, well, paella. I made a really amazing paella with prawns once, but Andy is not a big fan of seafood, so this is a purely meaty one.

Paella
2 chorizo sausages cut into 1/2 cm slices
500 gms chicken, diced
300 gms (about 1.5 cups) arborio rice
3 cups chicken stock
1 400 gm tin diced tomatoes
1 red onion, roughly diced
1 red capsicum, roughly diced
3/4 cup peas
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2-3 tsps paprika
pinch saffron
2-3 tblsps fresh parsley finely chopped

Put the stock and saffron in a small saucepan and heat until it reaches a low simmer. Heat 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil in the bottom of a large, lidded frying pan (you will need the lid later, not right now), and fry the chorizo slices until they are starting to get crispy. Add the onion, and when that is beginning to soften, add the garlic and then the capsicum. Cook for a couple of minutes, then add the chicken and cook until it is browned all over. Stir in the paprika, then the rice. Add the hot stock, bring to a boil and then turn down to a gentle simmer. Put the lid on the frying pan and allow to cook for ten minutes. Add the peas, stir well, replace the lid and continue to cook for another ten minutes or until the rice is completely soft. You may need to stir a bit during this last part to stop it sticking and to ensure the rice evenly absorbs the liquid. You may also need to add a bit of extra stock or hot water if it's getting a bit dry. Many recipes for paella (or risotto) state that the rice cooking part will take 15 minutes, but I have never met any arborio rice that will cook properly this quickly. Maybe I always get the tough batches.

Hoppin' John
1.25 cups black eyed beans
300 gms bacon sliced into strips
2 sticks celery, finely sliced
1 onion, finely diced
1 red capsicum, finely diced (or 1/2 red, 1/2 green)
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 litre vegetable stock
2 tsps paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 large or 2 small bay leaves
a few sprigs of fresh thyme
1 cup long grain rice

About 2-3 hours before cooking, place the beans in a bowl and cover with hot water. Add more if the beans swell above the water level.
Add 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil to a large frying pan with a lid, or a large heavy-based saucepan, and fry the bacon until it is starting to crisp. Add the onion, capsicum and celery and fry until the vegetables are beginning to soften. Add the garlic and cook for a few minutes more. Stir in the paprika and cayenne pepper, and then add the drained beans. Stir well to combine everything, then add the stock, the bay leaves and thyme. Bring to the boil, then cover and let simmer for 30 minutes. Stir in the rice, and simmer for another thirty minutes. Season with salt and pepper, remove the bay leaves and thyme stems, and eat.

Note: you can add more cayenne, if you like spicy. You don't need to soak the beans before hand, but the first part of cooking will need to be at least half an hour longer, maybe more and you will need more liquid. Traditionally Hoppin' John is served over rice, not with the rice mixed in, but I overestimated the liquid needed to cook the beans and my rice cooker was dirty, so i threw it in with the beans. If you cook the rice on the side you will probably only need 3 cups of stock.

So, I am laid up on the couch with a rotten cold, which is probably going to stop me from getting the 'flu vaccine at work this week. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but apparently we are having a flu epidemic here atm, and there are shortages of the vaccine. As you might guess from the title, it's been an eventful few weeks, and since I have nothing to do but sit around and feel sorry for myself, I thought I might pop in here and complain about it.

It hasn't all been bad, mind. We had a nice Easter lunch with Andy's family - I made a gluten free carrot cake which came out rather well. Baking is always a bit hit and miss without gluten, and this was actually the first time I've ever made carrot cake. And I took the week after Easter off work, and we had a very pleasant week with nice weather and a bit of pottering around in the garden. I dug 3-4 years worth of compacted compost out from underneath the compost bin and promptly planted some peas in it, and the plants I acquired for the courtyard when

dirtygreatknife and I went to the ABC Plant Fair are doing really well.

But the week before Easter Erin got up one morning and noticed that the ceiling in the lounge room was falling in. To understand this, you should first know that Adelaide is built on big chunks of reactive clay which expand quite substantially when wet, and shrink just as drastically when dry. It's a problem all over the place to some extent (at our last house 0.5cm wide fissures used to open in the back garden during summer and then close up again in winter and that was a relatively stable area). Houses getting big cracks in the walls or ceilings because the ground is moving under them is a pretty standard problem.

Our street has a bad case of the reactive clays (if you have ever driven down it you would notice how remarkably bumpy the road is). This manifests in all kinds of ways, including weird bulging spots in the driveway and courtyard pavers. The house itself is pretty solid, except for one narrow spot where the lounge and dining room meet. To add to the 'this small part of the house could easily be snapped off the rest' effect, there are a couple of vents for the heating and air-conditioner in the ceiling in this part. Not long after we moved in the ceiling started cracking from this corner to one of these vents. We got a guy in to fix it and he did a pretty good job. But for a while now there has been another crack creeping across to the other vent. We have been ignoring this for probably longer than we should have. Add to this the driest start to the year since the 1880's and the weight of the vent, plus the weight of the fancy cornice tore a dirty great hole in the ceiling.

We propped it up with a bit of wood, and the same guy who fixed our previous crack has come around to have a look at it. The ease of the fix will apparently depend on whether they can cut out the broken bit of ceiling without breaking the fancy cornice along the top of that wall (if they do then the whole length of cornice will also need to be replaced). Anyway, they will be starting late this week or early next week, so that will be fun.

I also ended up having an ultrasound just before Easter because I have been having some rather unpleasant pain in my right breast. The ultrasound showed nothing to be concerned about, which is always a relief, and apparently breasts just get that way sometimes. I can't help but wonder if this is some sequelae to the terrible case of mastitis I had after Liam was born (I had a 3cm x 3cm x 2.5cm abcess in that breast - that was some fun I can tell you). If there's scar tissue of some kind in there the sonographer didn't say anything about it. I had some pain on and off in that breast afterwards, but not really anything since Ashwyn was born.

Our local greengrocer also closed over Easter. We have been going there since we moved back to Adelaide (nearly 15 years ago - yikes!), so that was a bit of a blow. I do not like buying fruit and veg at the supermarket, so we are experimenting with getting our fruit and veg at the Central Markets. It's difficult to go to the Central Markets and just buy fruit however. There is a great temptation to splurge on fancy cheese and smallgoods and beautiful pastries. We got some amazing asparagus there last week, and this is what I did with it:

Pasta primavera (yes it is autumn here)
1 small onion, finely diced
2 bunches asparagus (16-20 spears)
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup of shelled, peeled broad beans
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup cream
1/3 cup parmesan cheese
1 generous tblsp fresh sage leaves, finely chopped
black pepper
olive oil

Set some pasta to cook. Wash and trim the asparagus (the best way to do this is just flex the stem gently - it will snap off at the point where it is too woody to eat). My theory on asparagus, btw, is that the skinnier it is the better.
Heat 1-2 tblsps of olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan. Add the onion and saute on high heat until it is beginning to soften. Add the asparagus and continue cooking until the asparagus has turned a much brighter green colour. Add the broad beans and then add the wine and let it boil down until there is less than a cm left in the bottom of the pan. Stir in the cream, then add the peas. Once this also begins to boil, turn down the heat and add the cheese and sage. Season generously with pepper (and salt if you're into that) or according to taste. Simmer gently for 10 mins or until your pasta is cooked. Toss the sauce through the pasta and serve with additional parmesan.

This is still pretty nice if you don't have any broad beans.

Things have been fairly quiet recently, in comparison to my last post (which I hadn't realised was quite so long ago). The talk went well in the end, and Fields of Steel was a great success. I managed to come through it not completely exhausted, which was not bad given I made 150 pies the day before the event actually started.

We had a flying visit from my parents in the last few days of the school holidays, with my aunts from England in tow, so I took a couple of days off to play tour guide. I also made it to the ABC plant fair with

dirtygreatknife .

Spring has well and truly sprung. The front garden was lovely for a short while, but is still in dire need of weeding. The vegie patch has been doing pretty splendidly this year, however, with peas and radishes in abundance and zucchinis, broccoli and tomatoes all doing well so far.

Erin has two days of school left now, and then she is finished with formal lessons for good (all being well). Her graduation is later in November. I think I am going to blub like a baby. It didn't bother me much when she started school, but it seems like five minutes ago she was a funny faced little bub with a crazy tuft of black hair, and now she is graduating high school!

I have another work trip interstate before then, and I will try and get to an event next month too, but aside from these things I am hoping for a fairly sedate run up to the end of the year. Then we are off to Queensland for Christmas.

Anyway, to make up for months of silence, here is a cheesecake recipe. I adapted it from a 16th century Spanish recipe because I needed to use up some cream cheese, and blueberries are super cheap at the moment. If you don't fancy blueberries you could do the same thing with cherries or strawberries.

400 gms blueberries
3-4 tblsps sugar
500 gms cream cheese (I have an aversion to Kraft cream cheese, but if that's all you can get...)
200 gms sour cream
3 large eggs
1/4 cup caster sugar
200 gms arrowroot or digestive biscuits (gluten free work just as well as normal ones)
90 gms butter

Preheat the oven to 150°C. Place the blueberries and first lot of sugar in a small saucepan with a small amount of water (1-2 tblsps). Bring to a boil over medium heat then turn down to low and simmer for 10-15 mins or until the blueberries are soft and juicy. Set aside and let cool.
Place the biscuits in a clean plastic bag and crush thoroughly with a rolling pin. This is an excellent opportunity to relieve tension and stress, but be careful not to burst the bag. Melt the butter (30 secs in the microwave, then stirring away any remaining lumps will usually do the trick), and mix in the biscuit crumbs, combining well.
Line a 23 cm springform cake tin with baking paper. Press the biscuit mixture firmly into the bottom of the tin, forming a layer approx 0.5cm thick. Place the tin in the fridge while you do the next bit.
Place the cream cheese in a large bowl and stir a bit until soft. Leaving it out to come to room temperature can help a lot if it is quite stiff. Add the sour cream and stir/beat together (which it is might depend on how thick your sour cream is) until smooth and lump free. Beat in the caster sugar, then the eggs, one at a time.
Pour this mixture over the biscuit layer in your tin. Scoop out about half the blueberries and approximately two tablespoons of their juice. Drop these into the cheese mixture in the tin in strategically placed blobs and swirl them around carefully with a knife or skewer. Place the tin in the oven and bake for sixty minutes or until the cheesecake is more or less set. Turn off the oven and let the cheesecake cool for half an hour inside. Then remove from the oven and pour the remaining blueberries and their sticky juices over the top of the cheesecake. Set aside to cool further, and ideally chill in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving.

If you want to make the 16th century version leave out the blueberries and sugar (all of it), and make smaller cheesecakes (these quantities are probably enough fot two) with a pastry not a biscuit base. Once the cheesecakes are baked pour 3-4 tablespoons of honey over the top of each, carefully so as much of it seeps in as possible.

But I have been up to my eyeballs for what feels like months. Firstly work was really insanely busy for the few weeks leading up to the end of the financial year. Then Andy took off on a two week overseas holiday with his dad and brother. They went to Hawaii and Japan (the latter during the hottest week they've ever had there, and then they only just got out as a cyclone was blowing in). I took the first week of this off to be a single parent (it being the last week of the school holidays), and hosted a couple of friends from Canberra who were visiting. Then my parents came to stay so the kids could go back to school and me to work. The not driving thing was a distinct nuisance, but we managed (including taking three buses to the Aquatic Centre because Ashwyn was desperate to go swimming at least once in the holidays).

Next up was a rotten cold, which knocked me out for about a week. I dragged myself back to work after that only to discover that my boss had taken some bereavement leave, and I was going to have to do his job for two weeks. That ended on Friday. Today I am at the airport on my way to Melbourne for the Australian Statistical Conference. I am giving a talk. I am woefully underprepared. I come back rather late on Thursday night. Next week I am mostly taking off to do shopping and cooking for Fields of Steel (also feeling woefully underprepared atm), which is the following weekend.

And the last few days have been the first really nice days of Spring, which has been a shame because I have been too busy to go out and enjoy them. Mind you, the hayfever is also now rearing its ugly head, so maybe that's not such a terrible thing. It's going to be cold and grey all week in Melbourne, apparently, and I am not terribly disappointed by that. The garden is doing ok, though, although the front garden is suffering from my inability to line up days with decent weather when I am not sick or stupidly busy in order to do some weeding.

Last night I dreamed I was living in a post-apocalyptic world. The apocalypse was not specified, nor was the state of the world. But I was living in straitened circumstances, in some kind of compound, with a group of other people. The only other person I knew or remember distinctly is a work colleague, who drew the ire of everyone in the compound by having sex very noisily in one of the none-too-private rooms. Because I totally want to think about my colleagues having sex, thank you very much brain! Anyway, I did something rather careless on a trip outside the compound and somehow became cursed with the ability to attract worms. Yes, worms. Every time I sat still or laid down for any length of time all these worms would come crawling up the walls and the furniture trying to get to me. The others couldn't be having with this, so I was going to be kicked out of the compound. Most of the dream was taken up with me preparing to go off and live by myself in a tent. Just as I was about to leave it started raining really hard, and the others decided it would be too awful for me to have to go out in rain, so I could stay for a bit longer. At which point I woke up...

...and one disgustingly snotty cold. Ashwyn has finally decided that blowing his nose is a thing he can do.

Note that I don't say 'blowing his nose into a tissue'. This is not a matter of etiquette or hygiene. For his entire life, up until today, Ashwyn has vehemently denied that blowing one's nose (ie the expulsion of air and other matter from the nasal passages via a short, violent exhalation) is a thing that humans are capable of, and he has flatly refused any attempts to teach him how to do such a thing. Previous colds have been dealt with by all manner of sniffing and snortling and other unpleasantries. But today, he has been blowing his nose.

Perhaps next week he will spontaneously learn how to tie his shoes.

And that name is neuroma.

It's an inflammation of the nerve that runs between the little bones (well mine are little bones) in the ball of your foot. It's usually caused by pressure on the foot, and the treatment us at least partly to remove that pressure. No more pointy-toed shoes for me. Also, for this week at least, I have a piece of foam taped to the bottom of my foot. This is to help spread out the bones and reduce pressure on the nerve.

How did we get here? I got really bored of my foot seeming like it was starting to get better only to get worse again. So I went to see a podiatrist. Apparently, aside from the neuroma, I also have really bad rolling of the foot when I walk, which may be contributing to this and the ongoing issues I have with my ankle. I have long suspected I had an issue of this sort because of the really uneven way I wear through shoes, and the fact that I can't keep both my feet and my knees straight in certain yoga poses (eg dandasana). Or it might just be that I have very small, extremely high-arched feet, which can cause both problems. Regardless, there is a strong likelihood of orthotics in my future. Orthotics and new shoes. The podiatrist recommended Doc Martens!

In other news, work has been keeping me pretty busy. I have pretty much planned out the menu for the rapier weekend I am cooking for in September. It will include a 15th century Italian feast, for which I might post the menu later.
We had a short visit from Mum and Dad in the school holidays.
We have had some rain, and finally some autumnal weather, and grass is now sprouting everywhere in the garden, but the freesias (which start growing leaves in autumn, but won't flower until spring) are coming up too. Hopefully the foot thing will be sorted out soon as it is definitely getting into garden work season.
Andy is planning a holiday to Hawaii and Japan with his dad and his brother in July, and is now thoroughly alarmed by all the volcanic activity going on in Hawaii, even though they aren't actually going to that island. Andy's brother is a geologist, and is highly delighted.
Andy is still coming to grips with the business of being gluten free. Erin is the most reluctant vegetarian I have ever encountered. She actually said "It's not fair that I can't eat ham and pineapple pizza" last week.

A few weeks ago Erin decided she was going to become a vegetarian. A peculiar choice for a person whose staple food is toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, but there you go.

And yesterday Andy was diagnosed with coeliac disease. This seems a little peculiar to us, as his only symptom was iron deficiency, and he probably wouldn't have noticed that except he kept being told he couldn't give blood. Since chronic iron deficiency is pretty unusual in men I prodded him into going to the doctor, they did a heap of tests, and lo and behold: coeliac disease. I suppose he might have other nutrient deficiencies that we haven't noticed because he has never been tested for them, but I was under the impression that coeliac patients had lots of gastro-intestinal symptoms, and he's had nothing like that. Anyway, Andy is currently in mourning for pies and beer.

It's going to be interesting reworking our household diet to deal with these developments. The rest of us might actually get a lot healthier...

This morning the three clocks in my kitchen read 8:04, 8:17 and 8:25 in the same moment. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey....

...and it was moderately amusing, and since I am currently sitting in an airport departure lounge, trying not to spend all my travel allowance on books I thought I would have a go.

The idea is that you type the starting phrase into your phone's message software and then see what the predictive text throws up. You can keep going withe predictive text as long as you like I guess. I've done short and slightly longer versions of each...

Phrase 1: "I am the god of"
Short result: I am the god of the morning
Long result: I am the god of the morning by the sound of torrential rain

Phrase 2: "I woke up worried"
Short result: I woke up worried about the warden
Long result: I woke up worried about the warden the power of the morning

Which suggests that a) I text about mornings a lot b) I have been playing too much Dragon Age (the warden is the player character in one of those games) and c) I may be slightly concerned about my new role as god of the morning.

Actually, I just now noticed that I tend to select the right most of the two initial suggestions my predictive text makes. If I choose the other one, I woke up worried about the vomiting, which makes a lot more sense. Still the god of the morning though...

Borrowing this from

dirtygreatknife because a) I liked it and b) I am sick and bored and trying not to spend the whole day on the XBox for the sake of my wrists. So.

5 things you will find in my bag

Purse
Phone
Notebook and pen (these are the three things I will be carrying with me more or less all the time in any bag. I may also have...)
A large array of pharmaceuticals (to fend off sudden allergies or attacks of "Ah, nuts! I forgot to take my medication")
A book

5 things you will find in my bedroom

A large print of "The Lady of Shallot" by J. Waterhouse
The desk where I work from home (bad practice to mix work and sleep areas I am given to understand, but it's a large room, and the only space I can shut myself away from the kids and their shouty friends)
A carved Chinese style chest that was an 18th birthday present from my parents
A rather plainer wooden chest used by my grandad when he was in the RAF.
A box of random stuff we have not yet unpacked from when we moved in 2014

5 things that make me feel happy

Being in my garden in Spring when the sun is shining (that's a hint to the weather)
When my kids are getting along with each other
Getting good news from the doctor
That moment that sometimes comes in savasana after a really satisfying practice when many strains are eased and the heart is very open
My beloved spouse

5 things I am currently into

It feels kind of like cheating, but there are some things I am pretty much always into: tea, textiles, poetry, yoga, gardening, books, dancing, feeding people. For the stuff that fluctuates a little more:
Bioware games
Fanfic about Bioware games
Crochet
Working from home

5 things on my to do list

Write a talk I am giving at the Women in Maths conference at UniSA in about three weeks
Organise a class I have just agreed to give on mediaeval cooking on Oct 2nd
Organise something for our 20th wedding anniversary next month
Weed the front garden
Finish the 'dog on the loom' that is currently giving me weaver's block

Is why, in RPGs, you can usually only wear two magic rings at the same time. I wear eight rings as a matter of course, and could wear more, except I have never found any small enough to fit my pinky fingers (leaving aside plastic kiddie rings). And that's without getting into the mediaeval practice of wearing rings on the first finger joint as well as on the knuckle. Why would an adventurer not want to maximise their advantage by piling on as many magic rings as possible? A couple of reasons spring to mind:

Wearing rings that do not fit you very well (as would likely be the case if you had a random collection looted from various dubious sources) could make it more difficult to use a weapon properly. Speaking from experience, if a ring is too loose it pinches quite a bit if you try to get a firm grip on something, especially something hard. Still, this shouldn't stop mages or maybe even archers.
Magical interference. You might think the ring of attack and the ring of defense, and the ring of charisma, and the ring of perspicacity will work exactly as advertised, but when you put them on together what actually happens is that you turn an unpleasant shade of green and become highly attractive to termites.

Of course, the real reason is that it's just a pain to keep track of...

I swear I had a resolution to post more this year, but there's a reason I tend not to make new year's resolutions...

So what happened?
Well, I may have briefly mentioned I was acting director for a while at the end of last year. I came back from holidays to a bunch of frantic phone calls saying that the guy I was filling in for was still away and could I keep doing it for another 2 weeks. And then after that two weeks, another two weeks...this went on for the next two months, basically. I didn't mind in the sense that I am angling for a position at that level, and every bit of experience helps (also they were paying me more, and not expecting me to do my job too, unlike the last time I did this), but it was a trifle frustrating to mentally tidy up the loose ends and prepare to go back to my job, only to have to change direction again when it turned out that no, the guy was not coming back just yet. Several times.

And then I had to catch up with my job, which hadn't really been filled while I was away. And then somehow it was Easter, and my parents were visiting, and then my phone died and had to be replaced, and then I made the mistake of starting to play Dragon Age: Inquisition. That game sucked me in in a way that not much has for a while, and then, being a Dragon Age game, chewed me up and spat me out. I remember Andy playing the first one when it came out (in about 2009 I think) and hearing him moan about it, and thinking 'this is not for me' even though character and story driven RPGs are totally my thing. But Andy started playing the prologue around the time I was starting to get bored all over again with Skyrim, and I thought 'that looks interesting' and that was the end of my life for the next month.

(For the uninitiated the Dragon Age games are full of ambiguous moral choices where there are often no right answers, well-drawn characters who you fall in love with and then have to make dire decisions for, and very little in the way of happy endings)

Somewhere in the middle of this, the LJ terms of service change came through and I decided I didn't really want to post there anymore, but I dithered (and was kind of busy) about moving over here for a while. I also mostly stopped even looking at LJ so I have gotten a bit out of touch. Anyway, now I have finally made the plunge. I have moved over all my old posts, so I may well get around to deleting my LJ account eventually, but I'll leave it up for now with a redirection notice. I can't say how often I'll post, because I used to mostly post LJ stuff on my phone, and there's no app for this, as far as I can tell. I should try and be a bit disciplined about doing it at the computer when I am working from home (which is a lot at the moment), but see note above about resolutions.

As for things at the moment: we currently have a Malaysian exchange student staying with us, which is a bit of a shock for a house full of introverts, and probably a shock for her too. Thankfully she seems to be more bemused than horrified by the boys antics. The garden is entering its winter phase - some kind of Thing has taken up residence in it - a Thing that comes out at night and digs through the compost and eats seedlings. I have been feeling remarkably well, for no reason I can particularly tell - all my biochemical indicators are as tepid as usual - so I am enjoying it while it lasts. I have not been doing as much crafty stuff as usual lately due to Dragon Age, but I am hoping to pick up a bit more now I have finished the game (although I should note that as I came up to the end I was thinking 'there's no way I could play this through again', and then within one day of finishing the main story I had rolled up a new character and started another play through - but there's less urgency (and angst!) with this one as I know what happens now).

So then, farewell LJ, hello Dreamwidth.

(I was going to post a pic, but it looks like I can only do that from a URL - might have to tinker a bit...)

It's been an eventful week(ish). I was going to write sooner about my birthday, but I wanted to wait until a couple of things resolved themselves first, and now they have, and how!

First things first: the toothache. The day after my last post I began to get a toothache. I occasionally get aches in this tooth, and they usually go away in a day or two, but this one got worse. I have not been to the dentist for about 15 years, as I had some unpleasant experiences when I was younger and do not like dentists much as a result. On the whole my teeth are pretty good (the ones I have left - long story), or so I thought, apart from the occasional niggle from this one tooth. Well, I began to think the obvious - this tooth had been slowly rotting away over time, and due to my refusal to front up in the dentist chair I was now going to need major work (can you all say 'root canal'?). By Thursday, the day before my birthday, I was convinced that I was going to need a root canal on my birthday. The pain in the tooth was radiating up into the cheekbone. It was all doom and gloom.

Fortunately, by that evening it seemed to be turning a bit of a corner, so when I woke up on the birthday itself I decided I could muddle through feeling a bit uncomfortable but not too bad. I did make a dental appointment though - for yesterday (the following Wednesday).

The birthday actually was really lovely. I had a sleep in, and then a bath, and then Andy took me up to Gawler, where my main birthday present was waiting. We had lunch at the new 'French' restaurant in Gawler ('Provencale - it's a little bit French'). The food there is actually quite pleasant, but it is at best Frenchish, and the French names for menu items are misspelled! Then we came back home so Andy could get the kids from school, and I could play Skyrim for a bit. At this point Andy revealed to me that at 6pm a limo was coming and it was going to take me, him, Erin and his parents to Windy Point for dinner at the Starlight Room. Nice.

Then at 5pm came the real surprise - my parents walked in the door. I had an inkling Andy had invited them, but I assumed they weren't coming because they had gone to England on account of Gran. I knew they were flying back on the 26th, but I thought logistically it was pretty much out of the question. But they had gotten straight off a flight from the UK onto a flight to Adelaide, and arrived in the nick of time. So we all got tizzied up and went out and had a very very lovely dinner.

My parents stayed for the rest of the weekend, and went home on Monday.

As for me, I muddled through until Wednesday, gargling lots of mouthwash (I hate mouthwash) as that seemed to be helping. Then I went to the dentist, steeling myself for the bad news, and wondering how I was going to fit all this dental surgery in around my travel.

Well, I walked out of the dentist as high as a kite, and it was nothing to do with Novocaine. There is nothing wrong with my teeth. In fact, all my teeth are solid as rocks and cavity free. However, the tooth in question has its roots going up into the sinus. The dentist asked me if I had a cold recently. 'No,' says I, 'but oh, the hayfever!'.

So all this time I have been wondering about the niggles in that tooth, it was not slowly creeping tooth decay, but changes in pressure in my sinuses. In effect I have a weather tooth.

That done I floated off to the doctor's to get the results of my latest set of blood tests and some X-rays. A couple of months ago when I stopped getting about in my ankle strap all the time, not to mention socks and winter shoes, I noticed a painless, bony lump on the side of my foot. I pointed it out to the doctor and she suggested an X-ray. It turned out that this was also nothing - or rather, it seems to be a normal part of the bones in my foot not any kind of growth or spur. Which is odd, because it wasn't there before. I suspect the ankle injury may have something to do with it.

So, all in all, it seems I am functioning normally (for me) but I am just weird. But then you all knew that already ;-)

So, a bit of catching up to do.

The first half of the year was totally mad, but seemed to crawl past, and now I am sitting here with only three weeks left in the working year and I feel somewhat as if I have whiplash. Clearly I need more stuff in my life to slow it down.

Or possibly not.

Certainly Spring seems to have lasted all of about five minutes, and the garden is reflecting that. The heartsease and poppies are gone now, alas, but in their place we have gladioli and cornflowers:

I don’t have a photo, but we have a moderately successful experiment with herbs and tomatoes in a plot out the back. The new (not so new anymore) house has a largish courtyard which is completely covered by a pergola, part of which is clear perspex. There is a garden bed under this part with the clear roof (which was a later addition to the house, I gather), and when we moved in it was empty. I tried planting some herbs in there but they mostly died over the winter. All but the parsley. I theorised that over winter the sun wasn’t strong enough to get through the roof, so when Spring came I planted some more things out there – more herbs and some tomatoes. I wasn’t at all confident anything would take, because not only was there the issue of the sun, but also that patch doesn’t get any rain. This means it only gets water when we water it, and since there wasn’t much growing there, we weren’t watering it much. The soil was in pretty poor condition. However, with a couple of sacks of potting mix, some fertiliser and water, we now have tomatoes. They aren’t as spectacularly flourishing as the ones we grew in the ‘tent’ last year, but given I wasn’t expecting much I am quite pleased.

Last time I posted about something that wasn’t Gran I mentioned the inkle loom that irreparablegave me. I’ve been tinkering with it a bit. Here was my first go:

This is quite a narrow braid, not much more than a cm wide.

I was a bit puzzled by the threading of this loom, as it is a slightly different set up from other inkle looms. I googled the name Penelope and found only one other useful reference online to Penelope inkle looms – from someone else in Adelaide. Apparently these looms were once used in schools here for kiddies to do crafts on, so they must be quite Adelaide specific. Anyway, in case anyone else is looking for info on these looms, here is the warping set up:

I thought this was kind of nifty, so I decided to have another go, this time making a wider braid:

A closer view:

The next few weeks, then.

On Friday I will be having a significant birthday ending in a 0. I think Andy has plans, but since I quite like surprises I haven’t been probing too much as to what they are. However, I am planning on taking the day off and thoroughly enjoying it.

Thursday and Friday of the following week I shall be in Canberra.

And then on the 14th of December we shall be piling all our kids onto a plane (and oh boy is that going to be fun) and heading to Queensland for more or less the rest of the year (we’ll be back just before the New Year).

And that’ll be it for 2014. What a year.

I have been predicting for a while now that when the six months o' crazy was up I would fall in a heap, and here I am, heaplike. It's been an eventful few weeks to round out the six months o' crazy.

Firstly, the week before ASC I had a sore breast. I thought this was some kind of hormonal thing, except it was fairly localised and getting worse. Turned out I had mastitis. I didn't know you could get that if you weren't breast feeding, but apparently you can. Although, to be fair, the doctor said it could equally as well have been cellulitis - it was just a matter of which tissue the infection was located in. Either way, I went off to Sydney feeling a bit sorry for myself and loaded up with antibiotics.

The conference venue was an old locomotive workshop, which was kind of neat, except the conference rooms were rather spread out and there were a lot of stairs. Kind of a triumph of trendiness over accessibility. I made the mistake the first day of thinking I would be okay with the stairs and spent the rest of the week hobbling around with a sore ankle, and taking the lift. The ankle is still bothering me. I took it to the doctor last week and he said 'yeah, sorry but there are no shortcuts'. Basically, tendons are poorly vascularised, mine is probably messed up with a lot of scar tissue from previous sprains, and it will be done when it's done. A little work is good for it, but take it easy, so no heels, no stairs and no dancing for a while :-(.

Mum and dad came over to visit last weekend. This was the first time they have actually seen our new house. It was great because we had them, and one of Liam's friends (okay, well technically he is Liam's only proper friend) over for a sleep over, and it was totally okay. In our old house such a situation would have meant people being slung from the ceiling for lack of space. I took a long weekend, and it felt like a very well deserved one, and it was a bit of a drag going back to work (it doesn't help when the kids are on holiday).

I managed two and a sort of one days at work last week (on one of them I forgot my laptop, so I ended up going home and working at home, insofar as that is possible when it is school holidays and the house is full of kids). But for the last few days I have been stuck in bed with an unpleasant laryngitis type lurgy. Last night I basically couldn't talk at all. Which was very frustrating when Andy turned the TV over to Clash of the Titans and I felt the need to rant about Sam Worthington's hair (or lack thereof).

Given all of this, we completely failed to make it to AVCON this weekend, and I'm trying to summon up the energy to go to a feast next weekend (is there much point if I can't dance?).

Not having a lot of luck getting into ESO lately. The server has been down for maintenance the last two nights and tonight it's downloading a patch. The server regularly goes down for maintenance on Monday or Tuesday and Thursday nights. It is scheduled for 8am North American time, which is probably a fairly sensible time for bringing a game down, except here it's prime playing time. And so I turn to the old faithful LJ...

Only one and a half more weeks of trying to do two jobs at once. It has actually settled down a bit in the last week. We have mostly gotten all the performance review and staffing change stuff that needed to be sorted out for the new financial year in place. This week I have managed to dedicate a couple of afternoons to actually doing real work. Note that I say mostly, though. There's still a couple of situations that have the potential to cause some pain in the near future.

After that I am going to Sydney for a week for the joint ASC/IMS conference. It's going to be a busy time (the sessions go from 8:30am to 6pm most days), and somehow my papers always seem to get scheduled in the early morning sessions at these things.

And then I will fall in a heap. Or, you know, maybe just relax and enjoy having only three meetings scheduled in a week instead of the three a day I seem to have been averaging lately.

I also finally went off and got my blood tests done, and the news is mostly good. Iron stores are still fairly low, but my haemoglobin is more than fine, and my circulating iron is quite high (in other words I'm not managing to put any iron away for a rainy day, but I am more or less keeping up with my body's rather high demands). My thyroid hormones are back to a level I feel more comfortable with, but my thyroid stimulating hormone levels are getting higher, and my anti-thyroid antibodies are also high. So, the Hashimoto's appears to have reactivated, but the extra medication I've been taking is kind of keeping me on top of it. So, on the whole, feeling fairly cheerful.

I didn't realise how long it had been since I posted. To be fair I was in Canberra for nearly a week with bad hotel internet, and then, not long after I got back, we were shaped for a few days. Also I have been spending a lot of time playing ESO lately and that requires me to use Andy's gaming laptop. There's no way this slow old thing could cope with ESO, but I don't want to set up any of my accounts or anything on another computer, so I haven't been checking email much and mostly doing other internet things on my phone. Supposedly we will soon (which probably means in about two years) be getting BYOD capability at work, and then I will get a lovely and exciting new laptop that can do all the things. That is my ultimous dream anyway.

The doing my boss's job and mine at the same time thing seems to being swinging strongly towards mostly doing my boss's job and not doing much of mine. However, I rather badly need to start working on some slides for a talk I am supposed to be giving at a conference in July, so I hope the pendulum will swing back the other way a bit next week. I have managed to wheedle my way out of the travel I was thinking I might have to do the week before the conference, which is helpful, but I think I have actually just postponed it until later in July. August is going to be the month of falling in a heap.

Today we had a rather nice lunch at the Blue Gums Hotel in Fairview Park. Tomorrow is gardening. Tuesday is catching up on all of my Monday meetings as well as my usual Tuesday ones.

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angharad_gam

September 2021

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