Birthday Meal

It's that time of year again. A little over, actually.

Every year, for Natalie's birthday, I try to scratch-build a recipe. Something new, especially for her.

One of the benefits of being untrained in cooking is that I don't know what's been done before, you see. I can blithely go ahead, put some stuff together, and be pleased with it, neither knowing nor caring if it already exists in some celebrity chef's compendium of recipes somewhere. Therefore, the dish that follows is an original - as far as I'm concerned. Your Mileage May Vary.

Smoked Salmon Salad With Sour Cream, Grilled Vegetables, and Potato Rosti.

Obviously, this one comes in several parts. First, preparing the cream:

I wanted a little texture, so I didn't stick to plain sour cream. I added chopped fresh dill and baby capers and black pepper for flavour, and I used a little gelatine to 'set' the sour cream so I could layer it without having it run everywhere. Pretty easy -- 400ml sour cream, a dessertspoon of gelatine powder, and just enough boiling water to dissolve the gelatine. Whisk the gelatine until it's a bit cooler. Throw in a good handful of chopped fresh dill, a couple tablespoons of pickled baby capers, and whisk the whole lot together. Put it in the fridge to cool.

The salad:

This was nice and easy. 250gm or so smoked salmon, chopped into little pieces. Four nice, ripe tomatoes, cut into small cubes. A handful of fresh basil leaves, shredded. Sea salt to taste, squeeze of fresh lemon juice over the top, stir the lot together.

The rosti: Oh, come on. Potato rosti, man. Grate the better part of a kilo of fresh, washed potatoes. Squeeze out the moisture. Add a couple eggs, some salt and pepper, and 1/3rd cup of so of self-raising flour. Stir the lot together. Put enough oil in a well-seasoned pan to allow shallow frying. Fry big dollops of the potato mix. Use a metal eggflip to squish your dollops down to about 1cm thick. Turn them once. Fry over moderate heat until both sides are golden brown. (If you wanna get really arty, grease a couple egg-rings and throw them in. Use 'em to confine your rosti into an anal-retentive circle shape.)

The grilled veg: I used big slices of capsicum and garden-fresh zucchini. They got salted and peppered, and coated with olive oil. Then I put them under the grill until they got a bit of colour. Finally, I put them in a bowl and drizzled them with a little balsamic vinegar and a little white truffle oil. (Don't miss that last, if you can. Mmmm!)

Assembly: on each plate, I laid out the zucchini and capsicum slices in a star shape. A potato rosti went into the centre of each star. On top of each rosti I spread a thick layer of the sour cream. And atop that went a couple good dollops of the salmon salad. Finally, I laid some very thin Vidalia onion rings decoratively over the top.

Job done.

The dish went really, really well with a truly remarkable '03 Pipers Brook Chardonnay cleanskin. The sweetness of the vegetables and balsamic vinegar nicely complemented the smoky, salty salmon, and the tang of lemon, with the tomato and the basil providing lovely, complex aftertastes. The rosti were crunchy on the outside, and firm but soft through the middle, providing a lovely contrast of textures - and the amazing scent of truffles kind of floated through the whole meal.

Natalie actually had two whole plates worth - which is a bit of a miracle, since she's a careful eater. But it really was a wonderful dish.

I finished up with a baked custard (because the chickens have been laying heavily) and stewed blackberries. So now we're all lying around, burping gently...

Summery Musings

Once it was clear that cyclone Yasi hadn't actually eviscerated anybody I know, I dragged the kids out today. We've been blindsided by rain for a few days, and at least once by 30C heat. (Yeah, okay. I know. "That's not hot!" Bite me, you hippies. Down here, 30C is hot.)

We jumped into the Mighty Earth King and roared off in the direction of Lilydale. Cunningly, I told the sproutlets that we were going to walk to Lilydale falls. They weren't overly impressed, but I didn't care. I've lived here for ten years and never bothered to visit Lilydale falls. That seemed like something to remedy on a beautiful, clear summer day.

I did, however, have an even more cunning plan.

The pick-your-own blueberry farm we visit each summer has had an odd year. They've had a week or two without any picking at all, due to (according to their ad in the paper) 'unrippened fruit'. I didn't know whether they'd reopened yet or not, but I figured that I could check as we drove by (since it's on the way to Lilydale), and if it WAS open, I could change the agenda and we could pick blueberries.

It was open. We went picking, to the delight of the kids. An hour and a half and eleven kilos of big, perfect, ripe blueberries later, we decided we'd had enough (filled our buckets!) and headed home.

I'm not surprised they've had issues with ripening the fruit, though. Summer has been cool, and slow in arriving, with unexpected rain. I had good raspberries this year, but the blackberries have been disappointing: affected by fungus, often weak in flavour from heavy rain, and more than a little tart. I'll cut them back drastically in late autumn, dump plenty of blood-and-bone around them just on springtime, and hopefully next summer we'll be swimming in blackberries again.

I really was relieved that cyclone Yasi passed with so little harm to people. Sure, there's property damage, but so far I've only heard two people reported missing, and no major casualties or injuries. That's damned amazing for a storm of that size. I had a phone call from my stepmum this evening. She and my dad live up Mareeba way. She ducked into Mareeba to see out the storm with her sister, in a brick house. Dad stayed at the old wooden place, battening it down.

In Mareeba, the power went out, so my stepmum and her sister played cards by candlelight, and drank champagne. (They do it tough up there, yep.) Dad, however - in that old, wooden place well outside the town proper - eh. The power never went out. He just sat and watched the one-day cricket-match to its conclusion.

So much for their cyclonic experience.

Back on planet Oz, though, there's that buffoon Tony Abbott again. I hear he's made some sort of halfwitted retraction for that signed letter he sent out, requesting donations to fight against the flood levy. Yeah, fine: retract away, Tony. Like it makes a difference.

It does fascinate me, though: the difference between social conservative voters (as opposed to fiscal conservatives such as Paul Boylan, who has a disturbing habit of demonstrating both compassion and rationality) and liberal/progressive voters. I'm aware of the research linking conservatism with fear-dominated thinking, yes. I am also aware of the research which indicates that hardcore social conservatives really don't respond to logic or rational debate - that confronted with evidence which disproves their pet theories, they are actually MORE likely to believe those theories than they were before.

And it's scary. Because, of course, if you are a fundamentally rational person with a live-and-let-live approach; if you believe in tolerance as a principle, and in debate and discourse as a means to discovering a path to acceptable social policy -- you are by definition incapable of working with these people. Further: the only effective way to oppose them is either to be fortunate enough to outnumber them and to live in a country where tolerance, debate, and discourse are ensrhined constitutionally and in the national character... or to compromise your own principles by taking a hard line against these idiots.

Take this latest caper from that craphound Abbott. If you take a pace back, and consider what's going on: on one hand, you have a government which has with obvious reluctance raised the issue of a one-off levy to find the money to make infrastructure repairs in the wake of the most damaging natural disaster of a generation... or even more. And on the other hand, you have an Opposition leader who is asking for money from people so he can campaign AGAINST raising this levy.

There really is no way to put a nice face on it. It's the act of a man without conscience or empathy. Sure, he can oppose this levy on ideological grounds (although you have to wonder about that, in the wake of all the goddam levies the Howard government created: the gun buy-back, the Stevedore affair, the Ansett collapse, and the milk thing... I think there were others, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head.) but to produce that kind of thing even while the same state slammed by floods is being blasted by the biggest cyclone in Australian history shows a lack of empathy worthy of a genuine sociopath.

And yet if you read the debate playing out in various columns and blogs around the country, time and again you see the reactionary/conservatives defending Abbott, and desperately trying to put the boot into Gillard. Some very few are prepared to admit they are embarrassed by Abbott's behaviour. Most simply continue with the same ideology-driven ranting drivel; screaming about 'taxes' and the 'battlers' and the 'fiscal irresponsibility of Labor'.

No embarrassment. No acknowledgement. Nothing.

If a Kevin Rudd or a Julia Gillard or even a Paul Keating pulled a stunt like that, it would be the end of them. Not because the Labor party is particularly progressive, but because Labor does depend on votes from the progressive end of the spectrum... and progressive voters are prepared to stop supporting candidates who do not behave appropriately. (Because we're 'weak', you see.)

It really does raise a question, one which keeps arising when I watch US politics too: what would it take seriously to discredit a conservative 'hero' like Abbott?

In the US, Republican politicians have rampant gay sex in public toilets, snort cocaine, embezzle -- hell, I doubt I can list it all. And yet all they have to do is break down, announce that they're sorry and that they're making nice with God, and voila! It's all forgotten.

Here? I dunno. I'm really curious. I wonder what it would take for Abbott's zombie army to wake up and smell the horseshit. A dead hooker? A kilo or two of coke? A closet full of leather-wearing gay soccer stars? Co-star role in a pedophilic snuff movie? What?

There really ought to be some kind of experiment done. It would be fascinating to see just how much degeneracy, depravity, corruption and bastardry the average hardcore social conservative can handle before the cognitive dissonance makes them explode with rage. I realise that the ethics of such experimentation would be tricky... but on the other hand, if we just let the stupid fuckers govern for a while, I'm sure they can fix the ethical obstacles for us, eh? I mean, who really needs ethics in science if there's corporate money to be made?

Not Tony Abbott, one strongly suspects.

Birthdays And Cyclones

Man, Queensland's copping it. Cyclone Yasi -- that is the biggest murtherin' storm I've ever seen on Australian radar. Category five, headed for Innisfail. (Guess we're going to be paying a fortune for bananas again.)

Silliness aside... I'm nervous. My Dad lives up on the Atherton tablelands along with my stepmum. They reckon it'll still be Category Two when it blows through their place.

Dad's no fool. He's got the place taped up and battened down, and Rose has already trundled off to her sister's brick and concrete place. But a storm this size... fuck. And then there are my Cairns-based friends.

I'm kinda chewing my nails here. I went through a few cyclones as a kid. They were a bit scary during the blowy part, but afterwards the rain and flooding were pretty much just an irritation, for a kid. Power outages, roads cut - yeah, we'd eat tinned food for a few days, read by candlelight, take cold showers.

But nothing I went through was bigger than Category 3. And this thing... it's a friggin' monster.

Take care, those of you in that part of the world. Look after each other.

Meanwhile, down here in Tas it's Natalie's birthday.... yay!

There's the Mau-mau applying rainbow sprinkles to the epic two-story chocolate cake I baked. The Mau-mau is of the opinion that there's nothing which cannot be improved with a liberal spray of rainbow sprinkles.

That's the cake-beast from above. Two layers of rich chocolate cake with a layer of home-made raspberry/lemon jam between, and vanilla-cream icing. The writing on top is... kind of messy. I admit this. It isn't easy to write in pink vanilla-cream icing using an empty syringe as your piping bag, you see.

I wouldn't have it any other way, though. There's something about using an empty syringe to decorate a doctor's birthday cake which is just... proper.

She got two Wii games, a couple of books, a couple more books -- and flogging great 1.5 terabyte external backup drive, plus a promise from yours truly that I will back up her damned computer every week or two.

I mean - she did finally get rid of Vista, after all. It's the least I can do.

Flat Out Already

Uhhh, yeah. Where was I?

Okay. Trying to catch up on a few deadlines. Short stuff, mostly. Hard to get back into it when you've been writing longer work. And meanwhile, there's life.

Nat took off to collect Elder Son from the music camp on Friday night. Came back Saturday afternoon. Yeah, the boy had a good time. No surprise there. In fact, he couldn't stop talking about it.

My heart goes out to him at times like this. I remember all too well what it was like at his age. School was like - some kind of alien planet, populated by freakazoids from another dimension. I couldn't talk to most of 'em, because there was literally no common ground. And even the friends I had at school... I couldn't really unload on 'em. They weren't reading Moorcock and Robert Howard and Asimov and Heinlein and Tolkien. They were watching a lot of television, and occasionally playing sport.

So Jake -- when I took him to the WorldCon and he spent a few days surrounded by kids with similar interests (and adults who weren't immediately going to dismiss him because of his youth) it just lit up his fucking world. He talked about it for a month afterwards.

This music thing was similar. He was put in a little dorm with a half-dozen boys his age, all of whom have the kind of parents who have given their kids the chance to pursue music. It's rare to find kids who are given music and ONLY music, naturally. Unsurprisingly, he had a lot in common with them, and they ran riot.

I really feel for him. He's had that little window opened - a glimpse of a world where he can actually feel like he belongs, like he's got peers and equals and people with whom he can laugh and joke without the risk of spite and misunderstanding. And of course, he'll be back in school in a week or two.

I don't think I had that experience of 'fitting in' until I was at university. True, I had a good time in my last year or two with the Cairns Youth Orchestra, but when you're fourteen or fifteen and your 'peers' are seventeen and up... well, people change fast at that age. I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to have met the people I did at university, and equally fortunate to discover the community that surrounds speculative fiction in Australia, and elsewhere.

Makes me wonder whether it's fair to the little guy, sometimes. Giving him glimpses like this -- knowing all the while that the real world is completely different. It doesn't matter what he does when he's an adult. He will never be able to surround himself with a community like that. If he's lucky, he'll have a few good years around college, hanging out with smart, creative (and dirt poor; that's more important than you might think!) people. The rest of it he'll have to get in dribs and drabs - a week here, a conference there, a festival next month.

It's the same for all of us, of course. And I suppose there's no way around it. He'll get over it, the way we all do.

Meanwhile. On Sunday, we got hauled into the local fund-raising concert at Bridport. It was a variety show: lots of people singing, playing instruments. Very community-oriented, and very nice. We were second on the bill. The Mau-Mau played 'Three Kings of Orient' on the piano. Then Younger Son took on 'Ode To Joy' on his double bass. He lost his way about halfway through, but kept sawing away until he recovered, found his place, and finished. I think I'm prouder of him for that than I would have been if he'd made it through spotlessly: that ability to keep going, find your place and come back is one of the most important skills in musicianship.

Jake played a 'mysterious piece' on his cello. It's still mysterious to me. Then Natalie and I played a reel on flute and fiddle, and she played a solo reel, and I played a slow air, and finally, we got together with the kids to play a version of 'Frere Jacque'... I arranged it a little bit. Younger Son played the first bar, and repeated it for the whole piece. Jake played once through on the melody with Nat and I, but then repeated the final bar (while Younger Son kept on with the first bar) while Nat and I did the melody again, with the Mau-Mau singing. (On key, miraculously!)

Sure. It's just a chestnut. But it actually sounded pretty good. Unfortunately, the kindly lady to whom I handed the video camera had a bit of a non-technical moment, and we didn't get a record. Ah well.

And here I am. Natalie's birthday is tomorrow. It's hot outside. I've got deadlines... but I'm having trouble concentrating because Nat is in conflict with the Mau-Mau and the Younger Son just outside my door. Think I'll go shopping, maybe take a kid or two with me to give her a break.

Whups. The Mau-Mau just upped the ante. Gotta go.

School Holidays And Work

Only a few weeks left until school takes up again. And for the first time, all three of my kids will be at school five days a week.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I got carried away last year, knowing the Mau-Mau would be out for two days a week. I tried taking on a whole bunch of extra shit. I shouldn't have done that.

This year I've been more careful. I've signed up for a Masters degree, yes. And I'll see if I can't work up to my 2nd Dan grading. I also want to put some of those hours to use on the grounds and property. Should be able to achieve a fair bit there.

But mostly, I want to try to work. I want to actually establish a work habit measured in thousands of words per day. I know I can do this. Four to six thousand words in a day isn't new to me.

The thing is, to produce that sort of output I can't be sitting in my study with one ear half-cocked for the sound of screaming children. I can't be glancing at my watch every ten minutes, calculating what I've got to do about making lunch for several. And I cannot be responsible for coming up with plans and routines to motivate and interest children when their own imaginations fail.

Writing takes time.

I try to pick it up at the end of the day, but there's no way I can stay in bed later than eight in the morning. Usually seven-thirty. And the family isn't safely abed until nine-thirty, maybe ten at night. And I'm not a person who can sit down and immediately pick up the the energy and the complex thread of what I was writing yesterday - I need to ease in by reading, editing, etc.

That does make writing a damned difficult proposition for me. And so I'm looking forward to this year. Which is probably bad, because something is bound to happen to screw it up.

Hello? I Think There's Been Some Kind Of Mistake...

Look, I know a lot of people must say this, but I'm really sure there's been a mistake. I don't belong here, you see. No. Really.

I mean, sure, obviously I share enough genetic material to interbreed with the dominant species on this planet, but there are plenty of species that can interbreed. Why should this particular one be different? Like I said: there's been a mistake.

I want to go home.

I'm not sure where home is, or who else is there, but honestly, it's got to be better than this.

There has to be a planet some place where they do things differently. I figure the intelligent forms there are similar enough to humanity - but there are fundamental differences. Important ones. And somehow, I got left here. By accident.

So - if you're monitoring this... I'm done now, okay? I've had enough.

I'd like to leave now, please.

Strange Milestones

Yesterday, I took Elder Son -- who has become 'Jake Flinthart' in these notes because of the identity he gleefully assumed at WorldCon in Melbourne last year -- off to a five-day music camp near Ulverstone. It was a long drive: forty-odd-minutes to Launceston, and then more than an hour across the top of the state to the site of the camp.

We had a decent time of it. Stopped in Launceston, got him a wallet so he'd be able to carry some cash for the week. Picked up a bunch of blank business-sized cards, put his name and his email address on them, filled the wallet's pockets. The theory is that he'll be meeting people, and making friends with whom he wants to stay in contact. It's probably an accurate theory; Jake has inherited a certain gregarious streak.

After lunch in Ulverstone, I took him to the camp proper, and spent a few minutes getting him settled in. Natalie had encouraged me to stick around for a while if it looked like it would help him find his feet, but it didn't seem like a good idea. They've bunked him in with five or so other lads the same age, and it took me only a few minutes to work out that they're smart, friendly kids. (Not really surprising. They are, obviously, all strongly involved in music, with all the parental care and attention that implies.) Within a few minutes, they were all talking about Doctor Who - and I knew that staying around longer would hinder Jake's progress, not boost it.

So I turned around and drove home again, stopping briefly at one of the various cherry orchards to pick up a few kilos of ripe Lapins. (Yeah. I'm actually becoming familiar with different cherry varieties. Lapins are big, dark, juicy cherries, very sweet.) A long drive, and only my memories for company.

I absolutely hated the school camps I got thrown into as a kid, and I would never choose to inflict anything similar on my youngsters. Big, drafty dormitories up the back of Lake Tinaroo, on the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland. Bunks rejected as unfit for WWII. 'Food' that deserved every lame joke ever made about institutional cuisine...

Worst was the enforced contact with a range of schoolkids I usually avoided like the plague. There was a big, big gulf between me and most of the kids around. I'm sure that if I'd had sophisticated social and emotional skills, I could have dealt with it better. But when you're ten or twelve or so and smart rather than physical, you're just not equipped for the raw primate pack politics of the schoolyard.

It was bad enough five days a week at school, but at least I could go home in between, and I could look forward to weekends. But school camps could last up to two weeks. Nowhere to go to get away. Nobody to talk with. No way to carry enough books...

School camps sucked shit.

Jake's music camp, on the other hand, is full of kids who play stringed instruments. It's within walking distance of a beach. It's got a couple of huge, in-ground trampolines, ropes courses, giant swings, and a bunch of other stuff. He's in with a lot of boys his own age in a small cabin, not sharing a gigantic dormitory with a pack of mouth-breathers of all ages. We tried to phone him last night at the prearranged time, but he was busy, and it sounded like he was having fun.

Good.

But his brother missed him. Younger Son - who has been fierce in his occasional demands for a Room Of His Own - was reluctant to sleep with the older brother, off in his bed at the other end of the room. And the place was altogether quieter without him.

So there it is. He's off now, spending his first length of time away from family and home. I'm sure he'll have a great time and everything. But it is only the first, isn't it?

I like my kid. I'm going to miss him.