Yrae Chronicles

I briefly mentioned this earlier but I want to wax lyrical about my local supermarket. They have a quiet night, which is for two and a half hours on Monday night from 6:30, for people who get overstimulated by too much... stimulation. Yeah. So there's no music, the beeping of the cash registers is significantly quieter and they dim the lights.

There's live music on a piano at the back of the supermarket. There's a salumi bar, a cheese bar, a full-on patisserie, a seafood bar and a restaurant. You can take a seat and a plate at all of these spots. In a supermarket.

But of course, the reason for a supermarket is the stuff you actually buy in it. BAM Asian produce. They have durian and rambutan! Fresh galangal and kaffir lime--not just the leaves, but the fruit. Feijoa, kohlrabi, lychees and okra, and those are the things I've heard of. It's at this point when I'm telling people about Pasadena Foodland that they usually go "oh yeah, you can get them at the Central Markets," but the Central Markets are something special. This isn't an Asian supermarket or the Central Markets, this is a frigging supermarket.

What the shit is an abiu? Or a hairy melon? Sapodilla? So after four years of shopping there and going in with my shopping list based off a recipe I've got in my books at home, but walking past all this weird shit and wondering how to use it and what it tastes like, this year I decided to approach things a little differently. Go to the supermarket, pick a weird thing, look up a recipe using it on my phone and make the shopping list while I'm there.

So my experiments so far this year! I've made this hairy melon recipe, which was... the actual stuffing was odd? Somehow it was lacking, and the vermicelli was an odd addition. The hairy melon itself was kinda like a giant zucchini, right down to the hairyness of it. You know that sort of prickly feel zucs have? Yeah, like that. It was much firmer than a zuc, tho, so it held together really well and was still reasonably chunky after being in the oven for 45 minutes.

I made okra! From a recipe in one of my recipe books, which was part of what started me on this weird shit kick. So this was Turkish-inspired and had lamb mince sausages I made as well (mixture didn't hold together but it was super tasty, honestly I'd just use all the stuff that wasn't mince as a marinade on chops), an amaaaazing salsa, a salad with pomegranates because WOO summer, and the okra! 'How do you cook [weird thing]?' 'Looootta garlic.' Idk if it fell into that typical style but there were four garlic cloves involved in just the okra, also fried onion and that kind of general yumminess. I enjoyed it! Weird texture, slimy in the middle with some little seeds that go pop in your mouth, honestly not sure on the taste because of all the garlic. The whole meal was pretty awesome. Every now and then I just like doing a meal with a whole lot of stuff to it, just for me. I like cooking.

Made this, which used both kumquats and tamarind paste, and it was amazing and I recommend it highly if you can get your hands on kumquats and tamarind paste. I didn't put any sugar in it cos it's not a goddamn dessert and it's already got kumquats in it, it's sweet enough. Went so well with pork, omg perfect.

The latest one has been venison, which I actually got as part of the meat shop, because every meat shop I get one special meat, like duck or prawns or something else pricey. Cos it's only me here, and for just the odd one-off it's not a hell of a lot more expensive than the standard stuff. So yeah. Every venison recipe is full-on gourmet. I was just saddened that the celeriac in the supermarket was super piddly that day. Like in the past few weeks they've been HUGE beautiful monsters, easily the size of a melon, but these were barely the size of a decent onion. Anyway. The recipe was beauuuuutiful, amazing sauce with all the cherries. The meat itself is so much like kangaroo, very yummy, so I'll probably do this recipe again with roo. Love adding to my roo recipes list. I've got one bit of venison left so that'll be dinner tomorrow, then next~

Banana flowers! Specifically this recipe, only I'm low on meat--all I have left is half a pork belly, a tray of lamb chops and two bits of salmon--so I'll probably do this one with the salmon. Salmon always goes well with Thai flavours so I feel that'll be a good slide-in.

Also, Thai basil! I just planted some over the weekend. I don't have a cup and a half of it, but I also don't have a kilo of chicken (which will be played by salmon, as mentioned) so idk, half-recipe. Why doesn't Pasadena Foodland have Thai basil? They have finger limes, Buddha's hands and breadfruit but no Thai basil? I know this cos I've looked twice for other recipes, hence trying to grow the stuff. Last time I planted it, it got completely overwhelmed by the Vietnamese mint, so hopefully it'll be happier this time around. There it is, third photo is my herb garden. The big grassy one is lemongrass, to the left of that, the bushy one is the Vietnamese mint, and the little one in front and between the two of them is the Thai basil. Clearly that is not a cup and a half's worth. D'yknow what I'm going to hold off on that recipe until it grows big enough to get a cup and a half of Thai basil off of it.

Okay so. Hot weather~ weird foods~ that one. Yam beans and baby Asian salad leaves. I can do that one with the pork belly. DONE.

Also it's hot again but it's also February so that'll happen. Since Saturday it's been 35, 37, 37, 37 today, 36 tomorrow, 40, 39, then a cool change down to 32, 30 and 28.

It's also festival season, so the Fringe is on (woo!) and the formerly-Clipsal-now-just-Adelaide-500 V8s are on (boo). Well, road closures are on, racing doesn't start til tomorrow. Monday I left home 15 minutes early in anticipation of traffic and arrived at work 20 minutes late, because I underestimate the Monday every goddamn year. So okay, fine, Tuesday I left home 25 minutes early... and got to work 25 minutes early. What the shit even. So that made up for Monday??? At least??? Today I almost got it, only got in 5 minutes late, so I've had a net ratio of on-time this week. Yay.

FINALLY. No wait. I should put this bit in a private post cos it really relies on real names.

Frig, over a month again, damnit. I'm 33 now! Yay! Also we have a new PM. Again. In the past eight years we've had two elections but six Prime Ministers. Wtf.

August has been my month of getting shit done. I made a big list at the beginning of the month of all the stuff that's been piling up to get done, some big and some little, and I've just about crossed it all off. I've cleaned the oven, washed the kitchen walls (I have no exhaust fan, so the smoke and steam from cooking congeal and drip down the walls. It's great), cleaned and reorganised the fridge and cleaned and reorganised the pantry. Fixed a shelf in the studio that Rory broke by jumping on it too many times, so he's not allowed in the studio anymore.

I've organised for more quotes for turning my cupboard into a display cabinet, this time contacting glaziers, because the only quote I managed to get out of cabinet makers was over 5 grand. So. Emailed ten glaziers, five said it's outside their scope (of whom two said I should go to cabinet makers), three didn't get back to me and the other two came around on Tuesday morning to get measurements. I've got one quote back so far, which is a titchy smidge over 2k so that's aaaalmost within my 1.5-2k budget. I'm just waiting on the other quote then I reckon I'll make a move and get this thing installed. Woo!

I bought a duster and dusted, turned the posts on the cat tree upside down so he can scratch at the top of the posts again (he's all but destroyed what was previously the tops) and swapped over the hard disks in my laptops. Shwiggy, which had a shiny new solid state disk installed about 2 years ago, no longer charges so it's exclusively used for Foxtel now. And then there's N00b, bought at the beginning of the year, which had only a regular 1TB hard disk because it was $300 cheaper and I already had a shiny SSD. So finally I got around to swapping the disks over.

Dry cleaned my coat, wherein they lost one of the buttons that made me buy the thing in the first place and then tried to blame me for it. Thankfully I had a spare, but I'm totally going to leave them a Google review on this =| Not happy. On that note, did some clothing maintenance and sewed up holes, reattached other buttons, chucked out some beyond repair stuff.

Done weeding, swept the shed, swept the cobwebs out and sprayed it over with surface spray, cleaned and vacuumed the car interior (not exterior cos it'll get rained on within the week), done my taxes, done the last bits for getting my home loan refinanced and reopened a bank account that had closed itself due to inactivity.

I have an outline for the Tsayth NaNo which I'm pretty happy with, though I'll revisit that in a month to see if I'm still happy.

Finally, and I mean that in every sense of the word, I finished Kate Hawtin's website! She's currently in Greece so haven't been able to see it, but I'm pretty stoked. Still a bit of back end stuff, like obviously getting her domain/hosting and then converting it to a Wordpress site she'll be able to update herself, but this is the beginning of my portfolio of websites. It's been a looong time coming. I'd like another one, maybe two websites, then I can pretty confidently prove to prospective employers that yes, I can design a goddamn website you blind arseholes. Now I've got this one, though, I'm going to start applying again. Never know, that one could be enough to prove myself.

Two things yet to cross off the list, but I'll get them done this weekend, I hope. I'm so excited for the glasses cabinet! It actually feels doable now! I was so close to giving up and either leaving it as is or halfarsing it somehow, but now I feel like it's going to happen really soon. WOO!

God I'm so productive in January. I'm very good at getting organised at the beginning of the year, for some reason. December is largely a write-off, with parties and Christmas and friends and social occasions all over the place, and god I love it that way. But then come January 1, somehow I knuckle down and get all the shit done. All of it. In the past two weeks, I have:

• Applied for, received and activated a new AMEX credit card.


• Got new tyres for the car.


• Had the car serviced (it had a clunk whenever I did slow-speed manoeuvres or headed towards full lock with the steering wheel. I was scared of it being expensive; turns out all it needed was for the steering column to be cleaned and re-greased. WOO CHEAP AND EASY FIX. Also they said my car was mechanically faultless. I love my Yoshi <3)
  
• Changed mobile phone plan.


• Changed electricity plan.


• Got Dad to disconnect the goddamn house alarm. I don't know how to arm it, how to disarm it or how to change the code, but the real kicker is that its backup battery probably went flat 20 years ago. Whenever the power goes off and comes back on again, which happens with some frequency in SA, it would turn on. Usually at around 5am. It was very relaxing.


• Had an eye test, and subsequently bought glasses. It was pretty much as I'd already guessed--right eye is better than my left, and while glasses would improve things, it's not a lightbulb WOAH I CAN SEE NOW moment. My left eye on its own is one level below being able to drive, and the right is pretty damn good, so eh. Up to me, said the optometrist, so I decided to give it a shot. Just cos. If it turns out I never wear them, then I know not to bother.


• Gotten the ball rolling on refinancing the house.

SO MUCH ADULTING. Today I've gotta get all the bits and pieces for house refinancing together and send that off. Payslips, bank statements, 100 points of ID, that sort of thing. With any luck I can cut back what I'm paying on that every month and actually save some money, cos hell knows I'm not getting a pay rise anytime... ever... =/

I had hoped to also get some garden stuff done this month, namely get a shade cloth installed and hang up my terracotta pots that are going to form my screen in the unit 1 direction, but it's been way too goddamn hot. Starting Wednesday we've had 35, 40, 42 yesterday, 39 today, then 35 tomorrow and a cool change on Monday! 29! Then 30, 33, 37, 40 (Australia Day. That's going to be a fun barbecue...) and 42. The only gardening I'm willing to do in any of that is standing in the shade with a hose on the citrus for a few minutes.

I also picked up some free chairs this morning, which will be my permanent chairs now. I'll strip back the legs and whitewash them the same way as the table, and eventually get them reupholstered in whatever material I get a couch in. Exactly what I was after :D Slightly dodgy and therefore free, no compunctions about changing them up myself, but still good enough (well, four of them are, anyway) to keep using in the meantime.

Tomorrow I've got Mum and Dad coming over for dinner and cricket. I have planned salmon with papaya mojo and I had heaps of egg whites in the freezer after making mayonnaise last weekend, so for dessert I've got mini-pavlovas with mango mojito sauce. I've just done the mini-pavs, so keen to test one out and see how they go. Aww yeah.

The front garden is so close! It was warm all day, but hellishly windy because spring is a lie. Nevertheless, it is mid-October, and I've ended up with tan lines to last me through summer. Whoops. Look you can hardly blame me the weather's been deplorable. You forget that it's not still winter.

So while it was blowing a gale, I headed off to get my dirt. Rather than rent a trailer this time, which would have cost $40 and taken three trips and all day to get my three tonnes of dirt, I had it delivered, which also cost $40 and took zero trips. Perfect. It was possibly a bit much in the end? I'm not sure. It's pretty deep and there's something of a mound towards the middle, but it's not catastrophic. So anyway. It's all shovelled nice and even so I'm happy. That took about 45 minutes I guess?

Next was rolling out the weed mat left over from lining the pallets, which was nowhere near enough to cover the whole spot, but I did have enough for the strip where I was planting the succulents. Cut holes through the mat and awkwardly dug a hole in the dirt underneath, then stuffed each one in.

During which time Creepy Old Man came to stare at me. He shuffled right over next to me, so on my property and not common ground anymore. Just standing there. Asked what I was doing while I'm frigging on my knees with hands in the ground, like, what do you think I'm bloody doing? So I asked him to please leave, and he started calling me a bitch, complained about when I'd accused him of using my bin a month after I'd moved in (wtf I was totally over that) and told me to fuck off. From my own house. Yep. Swore a bit more with no particular direction apart that I'm a bitch, and no he WASN'T snooping, this is just what neighbours DO. Never mind that no neighbour I've ever lived next to has ever made a point of asking what I'm doing literally every time I'm outside. I reminded him that I've not done anything but ask him politely to leave and stop snooping, he swore a bit more, told me again to fuck off, and then he fucked off. Ugh.

Anyway! Finished all the succulent planting, yay! They look gorgeous, nice tightly packed row of beautiful soft colours. I love them. Finished at 4pm, which is when all the landscaping places close, so I didn't get to source my white pebbles, but oh well. Headed to Bunnings instead to get some more weed mat and I've pegged that all down now. It's mostly covered, just a bit of a gap near the tree stump.

Tomorrow morning, get the pebbles delivered, spread them out, plant the citrus and I'm DONE.

I am insured! Adulting takes way too long. It's taken over a year and a half to get onto the home/contents insurance (which is actually only contents, because the home is entirely included in the strata insurance) and then another, geeze, month of researching and comparing and finally nailing it down. I'm covered for bushfires, which is really all that properly matters. Also flood. Which. Yep. I'm on top of a hill in the driest state in the country, but sure, flood cover comes standard.

Meanwhile, ( tree gone! )

As Dad was hacking at it with the chainsaw, halfway through he suddenly went, 'Aaaah, Anna?' and turned the chainsaw off. Nestled in behind the branch he'd just felled was a nest with two pigeon chicks in it. I had no idea they were even there! They were both completely stiff, probably scared shitless, so I carefully picked up the nest and relocated them to a nice thick bush down by the driveway. The mother came back and sat on the roof staring at the not-tree in obvious distress, and the chicks still weren't making any noise, but eventually she did find where they were. She flew off and came back several times, always coming back first to the not-tree before finding the nest again. Silly pigeon. I'm sure she's forgotten all about it by now.

Yesterday Mum and I went succulent shopping, so I have a row of them sitting under the window now awaiting planting, along with my lemon tree, lime tree and tangello tree. SO EXCITED! Can't do anything until I can clear away the rest of the tree, though. But YAY!

Garden update! Finally! Like, a month after I finished the last plantings! ( GREEN )

So that's that! All it needs now, aside from time to grow into itself, is table and chairs. Moving right along, front garden! Which I realise I've never actually taken a photo of. Here it is as taken by the land agent before I bought it. The bit of building on the right is unit 1, but the rest is all mine. Living room through the blinds, and bedroom right behind the tree. I have all those pot plants with the long stalks, not the leafier one on the left, though I still have its pot. Also that random column thing was not left behind (what even is it?).

So this Saturday, Mum and Dad are coming around to help chop down the tree! And I was hoping to get rid of the scoria on Sunday but turns out it's Fathers' Day, whoops. So next weekend, then.

The plan here is white pebbles with stripes of red river pebbles, which I went and collected a literal bucket-load of over the weekend. Where the boring tree/bush is now I'll put a lemon and a lime tree, then plant the succulents in more lines, which are looking far more fabulous now than they did in that photo, along with more succulents. So it'll be very geometric and designer-y. It'll be weird planting things in flat ground XD I don't doubt that Creepy Old Man will steal my lemons, but such is life. With any luck he won't know what to do with limes =/

( More progress! We have plants! )

Today Mum and I went to buy more, so I've probably got as many ferns as I'll need, I think? Bunch of pretty leafed things, AND CYCLAMENS. EEE. They exist now as punnets with four small plants and I got SIX PUNNETS and it's awesome. I'll get more hopefully next weekend from Bunnings. And also plant them. Omfg they're beautiful. I'm going to have walls of cyclamens, WALLS of them.

( Aaaaaand new toys 8D )

I'll probably move fairly soon on buying a media unit, because that buffet it's sitting on right now really doesn't do the job. It's too long so the speakers don't quite fit, doesn't have shelves so the collection of bits plugging into the tv are either shoved awkwardly in front of it or underneath it, it's so old and cheap-looking compared to my amazingly slick and modern entertainment unit, and the whole thing's too high up. Sitting down on the couch, your eyes are about a third the way up the screen, and the lights reflect off it, too. So yeah. Buffet doesn't make the best of entertainment units, who knew?

You wish your living/dining furniture was as shit mismatched eclectic as mine.

Entirely unrelated so it gets a new post, ( garden happenings! )

Today I borrowed Mum's car while she and Dad are in Bali, to go down to work and load it up with pallets! I now have six of them to turn into vertical gardens, which will mostly cover the fence. Something like that seems to be the most useful way of doing it, with an overall look something like this but not nearly so high. I like the wave of different coloured leaves, though. Wonder if cyclamens could go in a vertical garden, they have pretty leaves as well as BRIGHT flowers. I also have dreams of doing this, but first things first.

Also of note, the baby beginnings of my baby's tears lawn. These are from two weekends ago when Mum and I went to Aunty Meredith's and pulled up over a square metre's worth of the stuff, so it ended up with that sort of coverage over the ( whole back yard )

My tiny fuzzy green army :D Today I took those two green crates around to a local plant nursery, where it grows aaaall over the place and they treat as a weed. Filled them to the top with enough to completely line the edge of the concrete to about 20-30cm from the edge. This stuff grows on rocks, so I'm anticipating it'll cover over the concrete, too. How long it'll take to grow I have no idea, whether I should expect a lush carpet by summer or what, but I'm guessing it'll do sod-all over winter. And it was all free! For some context, Bunnings sells them for $8.63. That little pot is about the size of each of the little patches I've scattered around from Aunty Meredith. By Bunnings' estimates I've got hundreds of dollars worth of the stuff, probably over a grand, without paying a cent. And the pallets were free, too, thanks boss-man :D After spending thousands for the tank and general cleanup, this is super-refreshing.

Tomorrow, buy supplies for the vertical gardens, see about getting started on at least some of the construction. I need to sand the pallets back, pry off the back planks so I can then line the inside with garden fabric/plastic/something (research that tonight) and nail it all back together. Six times. This is going to take a few weekends to get ready for dirt. Oh, and star droppers or something to keep them upright, because there's no way that fence is going to be strong enough to hold these things up. They're already heavy when there's no dirt in them.

There was one pallet I wish I could've gotten, probably about twice the size of the regular ones, and because the slats go across it, it'd mean it'd stand straight up a bit over two metres. How cool would that be? I could've put it right down the other end as a privacy screen down there. Alas, the thing weighed a goddamn tonne, and even if I had been able to lift it, it wouldn't have fitted in Mum's car. Still, it'll still be there at work, so if I'm enthusiastic about it in X months time, we could rent a trailer and pick it up that way.

asdghalks I'm so excited. THINGS ARE HAPPENING!

ARG when the standards keep taking you up to after 9pm and I have less than an hour for Stuff XP

I had an interview on Tuesday! Sort of. I'd applied for this one but they were actually looking for someone more 'campaign heavy' which is fine, I've done sod-all campaign stuff. Closest I've come is a few Wendy's posters. But she'd deliberately left out the more specific parts of the job ad because she was also just looking generally for more people to add to her talent pool, which I'd been shortlisted for! So went for coffee at lunch and it was p awesome. She was impressed by my stuff, and she was lovely and encouraging and positive and FINGERS CROSSED something awesome comes from it :D

Getting quotes for tanks and installation thereof, and probably set on who's going to do the clearing part of it. Final look at pavers on Saturday and then I'll select them. Annnnnd. Oh yeah, I'm now getting baby's tears for the green ground covering, because I can get it free from the nursery near Mum and Dad, whereas decent-looking artificial turf is $95 per square metre. Which is. No. Also whenever you search for using baby's tears as a lawn alternative, the results are full of 'baby's tears are invading my lawn how do I get rid of it?' which I think is a good sign for me not killing it.

The guy who quoted me yesterday morning for clearing also said it'd be really easy to stabilise the wonky framework being held down by two bolts, and then I could put something like star jasmine in to climb up it and it will be gorgeous and smell lovely through my studio window and also privacy.

And my new clothes line came. Once it's installed I'll be able to hang up washing under the veranda so I won't have to wait for the three weekends through winter when it's not raining to hang up the washing, yay.

I need more time for fun stuff, damnit. One LJ post and it's bed time.