Happy Boxing Day!

Oh, great. Blogger has imposed it's "new look" on me. Now I have to figure out the whole setup again. I love it when these people decide to 'help' me.

Still. I suppose it's a free service. I get to suck it, basically.

Hey. Happy Boxing Day!

What - you didn't know it was Boxing Day? You thought it was Christmas? Ha! Poot to you! It's Boxing Day in the Flinthart household, and that's what counts.

No. This isn't a timezone thing. This is a "Nat's on call today" thing. We figured we could have Xmas yesterday, or tomorrow, to make up for Nat being called out. The Mau-Mau had the deciding vote. At first, she was horrified by the prospect of having Xmas on Genghis' birthday. The idea that he might get more presents than her was so awful that she was practically in tears... but when she was told the alternative was to wait another two days, she cracked almost at once.

It was a pretty good sort of Xmas. Low-key, as desired. Jake got a model rocket kit. Genghis got not one but two beautiful wooden, brass-bound chests, one with an inbuilt lock, one with a padlock. The inbuilt one contained a much-coveted set of polyhedral dice, for gaming. He immediately locked both chests and announced that his sister would never be allowed to look inside. Because that's what it's all about, right?

That's okay. The Mau-mau got a lockable diary, complete with Invisible Ink pen and UV light so she can read her own invisible notes.

We found Natalie a gun/toy into which she can load her iPhone. With the 'Alien Blaster' app downloaded, she can now wander around the place hunting invisible aliens and zapping hell out of them. It's fun to watch.

And me? Um... oh! I got a nifty Girl Genius badge and a Jackie Chan flick courtesy of my sister and her mob, and courtesy of the Mau-Mau I got the most marvellous set of action figures.

Okay. I lied about "marvellous". Here they are...

Natalie laughed like a drain. I did my best to keep a straight face.

Genghis found me a spice caddy. Jake got me a nice, clear pyrex teapot. I'm not sure what was going through the Mau-mau's mind... but she seemed to think the wrestling action figure playset was absolutely the best possible thing for me.

Never mind. I have a plan. It involves stop-motion animation... the Mau-mau will have cause to be proud of her gift.

The good thing about having Xmas on the eve is that the stores are open. I picked up a carton of Boag's St George, which will see me right for a while. Even down here in Tas, it's more or less hot. Yesterday maxed out at a fairly steamy 24C at 1500hrs - pretty much exactly when I was down in the raspberry patch, gathering goodies. Yeah... I know. That's not a patch on the Bad Old Days in Briz, but fuck that shit anyhow. 24C is plenty warm enough to make an icy beer very welcome after an hour or so of intensive berrypicking.

The bad thing about having Xmas on the eve is that the next day isn't Boxing Day. Nat's on call. I've got three restless kids, and another steamy, warm day to fill in without the aid of the Indians and the Australians doing battle at the MCG. Happily, various chunks of Lego sent by relatives (plus other intriguing presents) are still keeping 'em entertained. Long enough for me to type this, in any case.

So - have a good christmas, one and all. I hope it's not too hot for those of you in the south of the world, nor too cold for the north, and I hope that families and friends are around you, so you can end the year with peace and good will.

Oh, Humanity.

Every now and again, amidst all the universal assholery and madness, between the destruction and the despair and the unbelievable, aggressive stupidity, something else happens.

Sometimes it's something special: so meaningless, and yet so beautiful that the meaninglessness of it becomes glorious in its own way.

This is one of those things:

http://thefoxisblack.com/2011/04/07/bach%E2%80%99s-cantata-147-jesu-joy-of-man%E2%80%99s-desiring-played-on-a-giant-wooden-xylophone-in-a-forest/

I'd have made a direct link of it... but for some reason, Blogger no longer permits that. I guess they want me to use their "updated Blogger interface".

Oh well. Enjoy the site, people. There's hope for humankind as long as this sort of madness remains. Ah. Here. Direct link.

 I must say: this new interface isn't very attractive.

Early Birthday Present - A Personal Insanity

Today is young Genghis' birthday party. It's about a week early, but what do you do when your kid is born on Xmas eve?

He's getting a really cool party this year. He and nine of his friends (including his brother) are off to the new Laser Tag facility in Launceston, for a few hours of running, screaming, jumping, and laser-zapping. I expect massive carnage. I also expect a bunch of very, very tired boys.

Once we're done, we'll head back here for the triple-layer chocolate cake with peppermint marshmallow, and a bit of a backyard barbecue with the firepit and all. In the meantime - well, Genghis got permission to open one birthday present. You can see it in the pictures above.

Obviously, I've been working at it for a while. To my variously Medieval friends: yeah, I know the links are too large, and it's a bit funky around the shoulders. But you know what? That is one deliriously happy not-quite-nine-year-old boy there. And remember that the armourer who put that particular chain shirt together has no prior experience whatsoever.

Hooray for the Internet, eh? I poked around a bunch of websites, and found out how to make basic chainmail. After that, it was all just cutting and bending.

It's a bit scratchy, but the boy loves it. He hasn't taken it off. (Of course, that's going to be challenging. It's a close fit. He'll have to tip himself up and shimmy out of it. I may even remove another couple of links.)

Happy birthday, kid!

The Evils Of Leap Years

The Mau-Mau, like most six-year-old girls, is not hugely endowed with patience. Especially when it comes to things like, oh, Christmas. Or birthdays, for that matter.

The little pile of presents under the tree is tormenting her. It's as though it has its own gravity well, that works purely on the Mau-mau. She can't pass it by without being magically drawn to it, then frozen in the spot, staring longingly at the colourful paper and the enticing shapes.

Of course, the fact that it's Genghis' birthday just before Xmas pisses her off mightily. She and Genghis are frequently mortal enemies, and she strongly resents anything that happens to him or for him which she feels should properly be directed to her. By way of example: as we drove into Launceston today, to do an afternoon of gymnastics classes at the PCYC, a conversation developed vis-a-vis birthday cakes. And since I'm the chief caker-baker in this house, naturally I asked Genghis what kind of cake he might like....

Genghis:"Oh. Well. A multi-layered cake would be nice. With different flavoured icing between the layers."

Me: "Aha. Okay. Well - what kind of cake should it be?"

Mau-mau: "I had a cake with layers on my sixth birthday. It was so nice!"

Me: "Did you? I don't recall."

Genghis: "She did. You made it. It was really awesome. There was a big cake on the bottom, and a little one on that, and a littler one at the top, and it was all covered with white icing and sliced strawberries."

Mau-mau: "Yes! Oooh, I loved that. My sixth birthday was really good."

Me: "Okay. Multi-layer. But... you want chocolate cake?"

Genghis: "That would be good. With chocolate icing outside. Can I have fizzy lemon icing in between?" (This is a reference to a culinary invention of mine: yes, I created fizzy cake frosting.)

Me: "I don't think so. I don't think it would be good with the chocolate."

Genghis: "Oh. What about mint? And raspberries?"

Me (my face is curdling at this point.) "Umm. Look. A few mint leaves with a raspberry dessert is one thing. But peppermint icing and fresh raspberries... I'm not ready to do that."

Genghis: "Oh."

Me: "I tell you what, though. I could do layers of peppermint marshmallow in between the layers of cake, and chocolate icing over the whole cake. How does that sound?"

Genghis: "Peppermint marshmallow? Oooh! That sounds good!"

Mau-mau (infuriated): "Are you trying to make your birthday better than mine?"

I'm not kidding. Those were her exact words. So there was a brief Dad interlude in which I explained quite pointedly that I was going to try just as hard for Genghis as I did for her, and that he deserved the best birthday we could manage... and if she didn't like it, she could spend the day in question in the Time-Out area under the stairs.

She didn't think much of that option.

Anyway. Later in the evening, after dinner, the Xmas tree once more worked its evil magic upon her. She stood and stared, sighing. And finally, she announced that she just couldn't wait for Christmas. And how many days was it now?

Natalie growled, and said we weren't having Xmas on Xmas anyhow, since she's working that day. The Mau-mau was pretty upset by that, especially when she found we couldn't have it the day before because of... wait for it... Genghis' birthday!

Anyway. When the fuss died down from that, she decided she had to know how many days it was until her own birthday. At this point, Natalie rolled her eyes and pointed out that the Mau-mau had first asked that question the very day after her last birthday. So Genghis piped up, and said that obviously, when she first asked, the answer was 365 days.

Unthinkingly, I pointed out that 2012 is a leap year, and therefore the correct answer was 366.

Uh-oh. A truly remarkable frown appeared on the Mau-mau's face. What was this about an extra day? Had someone put another day between her and her birthday?

Natalie tried to dismiss the topic, but the Mau-mau wasn't having any of that. Footstomping ensued. Genghis tried his almost-nine-year-old best to explain leap years, but that was no good either. The Mau-mau shouted at the top of her voice: "I hate Sleep Years!"

The resulting wave of hilarity didn't help the situation. In fact, it cranked her up no end; she was infuriated that we'd caught the mistake, and insisted she'd really said 'leap year' but her mouth was full of pencil, or something. And then she really let loose...

Apparently, Leap Years exist solely as a conspiracy to offend her by keeping her farther away from her birthday. That one extra day in the calendar is a deliberate, calculated attempt to destroy her life and her sanity. That's right, folks: you heard it here first. The sole reason there are Leap Years is so that my daughter has to wait an extra day between birthdays every four years or so...

You can probably guess the amount of sympathy that her outrage generated. The whole episode ended with her stomping off to bed, and having a good old weep into her pillow.

I'll fix it tomorrow. I'll tell her she's slept through the extra day, now, and everything's back on track. I'm sure that will work perfectly.

...now, if only I could figure out how to restore my own failing sanity so easily.

End Of Year School Shenanigans

Yesterday the Mau-Mau had her 'Early Childhood End Of Year Assembly'. There was much dancing at the prep-to-year 2 level. Happily, I managed to avoid that.

There was a price, of course. In order to dodge the Early Childhood school assembly (and please, folks... I've had two kids already go through all that three times each. And this is the Mau-Mau's second such assembly. So I do believe I've earned the right to duck one.) I had to take Genghis into Launceston for his double bass lesson.

Not so bad, right? Oh... but it's Christmas season. So... can you just take this PDF calendar to a printery and get them to run up four or five copies? Oh! And don't forget, we need something for little cousin S. And big cousin Z. Ooh - and here's a prescription that needs to be filled. Oh, wait: we need anti-fungal stuff for the fishtank. Can't get that in Scottsdale, no. And the Mau-Mau still hasn't got the Barbie doll she was promised when she won "Best Decorated Bicycle" in the Scottsdale Xmas parade last week. Can you just swing past K-mart and get the one with rainbow wings? Oh, and we need some gold and silver pens for the kids to make Xmas cards.

Meanwhile... I also got some T-shirts that I'm screen-printing for various folks. And I got Genghis another present. This whole birthday-on-Xmas-eve thing sucks.

I also found a remarkably clever present for Natalie. And one for the Mau-Mau. And one for Jake. We're staying low-key this year, though... have requested various relatives keep it minimal, and we're trying to focus more on family, and doing stuff together, and baking and decorating and stuff. Because, you know: I Have Had Enough Of This Christmas Crap, and so has Natalie.

So, that was most of my day yesterday. Five hours, including driving time of roughly an hour and a half. Mmm. Christmassy. I was so tired by the end of it all that I even skipped the weekly movie session with Bruce and the others... couldn't bear the thought of driving back into Launceston yet again. Besides, I needed the work time. Still do.

Today was Assembly Day for the rest of the school. Jake was set to play a cello piece. He was pretty comfortable with that. But far more nervous-making was the fact that my young flute student the Dill (of the Double-Banger family) was up to perform too. He'd not done that before, and he was pretty keyed up.

It went well, though. Or mostly. I'm afraid I made an ass of myself during the National Anthem. I've never seen the second verse before, you understand. I thought it was part of the Constitution that we only ever sing the first verse, and then we sit down and crack tubes. But no: the school, in a fit of misplaced patriotism, used its mighty digital projector powers to display the second verse on the wall so we could all sing.

Well. Almost all. I don't much like national anthems. But I was trying. And then I got to these lines:

For those who’ve come across the seas

We’ve boundless plains to share;

By now, you know my opinion on our pitiful government (past and present) and the way it treats refugees... most especially, those refugees who dare to arrive by (gasp!) boat. I'm afraid that when I got to those lines, I couldn't actually keep singing. Instead, I burst into laughter, defeated by the lovely irony of it all. Natalie frowned and shushed me... but it was too late. The damage had been done. I think I wanna print those lines on a couple of T-shirts, and send one each to Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard...

Still, what with all the enthusiastic singing going on, only a few people noticed my breach of protocol. And the boys played well. Jake is starting to make the 'cello sound like a real instrument, and The Dill did a very fair rendition of 'The Skye Boat Song', so everything ended neatly.

I ducked out before the awards. Natalie was staying, so I didn't figure I'd miss out. And lo - Jake got another 'academic achievement' award, and Genghis got an 'aim high' award. This latter is interesting: it's offered to the student who gets enthusiastically involved in activity and particularly, in discourse and discussion. Knowing Genghis as I do, I think I can imagine his version of 'enthusiasm', and 'discourse and discussion', and I strongly suspect that in his case, the 'aim high' award was actually a declaration of surrender by his poor, long-suffering teacher. She's done well this year, I must say. I hope she gets an easier lot next year!

We're getting down to the skinny end of things now. Just a few more school days. Genghis is having his birthday party on Saturday... no real choice about that, since we're running out of time. I've found a really brilliant way to handle the party this year, though, so I'm actually looking forward to that one.

Meanwhile, I've been gardening, printing shirts, doing up Xmas cards, wrapping presents, cooking, baking, reading for the MA, writing for the MA, writing on the MS... and even attempting to bring some order to my study.

I think my big project for the summer will be a clean-out and refurbishing of the top shed. I need a place to store the martial arts gear that doesn't involve crowding out my study - but until I manage to put bird-wire all around the eaves of the dojo-shed, anything stored up there is likely to get swallow-shit all over it, which pisses me off immensely. I also need to replace some of the old fibre-glass light panels in the roof with modern "laser-lite" plastic corrugated panels, but that's a bastard of a job: I have to cling onto a steeply pitched corrugated iron roof, over a drop of something like six metres down to a very unforgiving, flat, rocky clay surface. I don't like that at all.

But it's going to have to happen. I can't keep jamming things in this little study. I need more room. If I could shift all the martial gear up there without fear of birdshit, that would be a great start. And I could also move the shirt-printing stuff, and the glass-art stuff. And the sword training stuff too, which would make sense, because it could be with the rest of the martial gear.

That would leave me with only the computer, printer, router, video/camera/recording gear, the reference books, the martial arts library, the shelves of SF and fantasy, the language texts and exercise books, the musical instruments and musical theory/texts, the laminating and binding equipment, the games, the software, plus my personal collection of movies and music, and the sewing machine with all the cloth and the bits and pieces that go with it. Boy! I'd have so much room in my 3m x 4m study that I'd hardly know what to do with myself!

Bolt Writes For Crikey: Wants Marriage Equality

True story!

Read it here.

Okay, sure. It's Andrew Bolt's sister, Stephanie - not the Grand Fuckwit himself. But can you think of a better way to annoy the shit out of him than by recognising, publicising and respecting the excellent and intelligent writing of his married lesbian sister?

I can't. So... what are you waiting for?

Summer Tastes Like...

Actually, right now summer tastes like raspberries. The work I did a few years back in putting in the canes is literally coming to fruition. I've given up on neat rows and carefully tied canes: there's a tall, spiny, shadowy bramble of raspberry canes, just right for kids to sidle into and get lost, and scratched, and sweaty - and absolutely loaded with beautiful, fresh, ripe, delicious raspberries.

It's not completely uncontrolled. There's a quarry in Launceston that will sell random slabs of flat rock from their operations. You can get a trailerload for about $30. I've taken a bunch of those rocks and just thrown them into the bramble, making winding, narrow pathways amongst the berry canes.

That'll do. We're sitting on fifty acres. Why the hell should I bother trying to constrain my raspberry bushes? I've got a fence around 'em for the wallabies, and a daggy old net that I'm going to have to replace in the next year or so which deters enough of the birds. We're currently getting about a kilo a day from the patch, and probably will do so for the next week or two. Shortly after that, I expect the first blackberries to kick in.

The kids are ecstatic. Natalie's happy. I'm happy. Raspberries are good. The canes keep coming up, expanding into new territory. Eventually, they'll break out of the fence - and I'll let them. If they can fend for themselves amongst the ravening wallabies and rabbits, then why shouldn't they?

In the meantime, I have raspberries. At supermarket prices, I have something like $40 or $50 per day of raspberries, and they're not mouldy, or over-ripe, or squished, or flavourless from cold storage. Faced with such a bounty, I have a Policy.

Naturally, we're eating a lot of simple, plain, ripe raspberries. Of course. But as a cook, since I have access to such a luxurious ingredient, I feel a real obligation to do the job right. So I'm playing around, and everybody's enjoying the outcome.

The photo at the top is my 'Raspberry Sandwich'. It's a very simple single-layer lemon cake baked in a broad, shallow dish. The cake gets cut into neat squares, and 'sandwiched' around whipped cream and oodles of lovely raspberries. The mint leaves on top are purely and simply because I can. I have an enormous mint bush in a half wine-barrel next to the main path to the door, and the green, fragrant leaves look groovy on top of all that luscious cake, cream and fruit.

That was Thursday. Friday I went to the cricket, and got back late. Yesterday I made an elegant, creamy raspberry mousse, which I served by heaping it with fresh raspberries, then drizzling melted dark chocolate over the lot. (And mint leaves. That really is a goddam big mint bush. Must figure out more things I can do with mint.) We had Malay Chicken Rice first - the whole show, with the bowl of soup full of vegetables, then the fragrant twice-cooked chicken served with rice cooked in the chicken stock.

Then we followed it up with the raspberry mousse, and at that point, five children were convinced I am a God... and my wife is convinced I'm an incarnation of Satan, promoting furious gluttony upon hapless middle-aged women.

Anyhow: I'm looking for more interesting raspberry recipes. Anybody got a favourite of their own?