December 27, 2001
08:32 AM dublin time
need another clue?
howabout this...
and this...
any more confused??? ooh, no, now i'm just teasing. those pictures above were snapped from another christmas pressie i got:
and the snapping was done with abcd's new toy:
the wonderfully low-res, light-weight, infinitely portable and fabulously good value pencam. yay for christmas.
[link]07:39 AM dublin time
i hope everyone had a good christmas. i managed to stay offline for a record breaking three days, but was back on this afternoon to play with the new toy aonghus and i got for ourselves - instead of buying big pressies for christmas day, we got little ones for each other and then went into the sales this morning to buy a proper present.
can you guess what we bought? [no, not lots of christmas decorations]
December 23, 2001
04:05 AM dublin time
i've just finished making these golden syrup window biscuits. an extraordinary feat if you ask me, and not just coz it was quite a tricky recipe.
apart from the ingredients, the recipe called for some kitchen equipment - an electric beater, a meat mallet/hammer [for crushing up the boiled sweets], a rolling pin and a weighing scales - none of which i currently possess.
i wasn't daunted however, i've been making biscuits for about thirteen years [i habit formed when my parents refused to buy us shop ones when we were younger]. a wooden spoon and well-used right bicep would be my electric beater, an empty bottle of wine could double as my hammer and rolling pin and a table spoon and practiced eye would serve as weighing scale.
it was all going wonderfully - the dough seemed the right consistency, the boiled sweets were crushed ready to melt into little biscuit shaped stained glass windows, the wine bottle had rolled smoothly. it was the oven that was to let me down.
it's an awful oven and it decided to burn the bottoms of the biscuits on lower tray leaving the tops still raw. so i lost about half my batch [damn oven].
it's difficult to cook using an unfamiliar oven - they all have their little vagaries - hotter at the top or the bottom, actual temperature lower or higher than the dial says - and until you know these inconsistencies it makes biscuit baking tricky.
still, i got a good two dozen biscuits out of it, looking maybe a little charred on their bottoms. pictures to follow.
[link]December 20, 2001
11:06 PM dublin time
re. quiz questions, let me put you out of your misery....
what's so special about months that start on a sunday?
they have a 'friday the thirteenth'
what domestic animal is not mentioned in the bible?
cat
the capitals of twelve countries begin with the same letter making it the most common first letter of a country's capital - what letter is it?
b
name all twelve
without ciarán i don't think i can, but i'll give it a go...
brussels
berlin
bern
belgrade
budapest
...em.... [thinking hard]
bangkok
....[more thinking]...
brasilia
....i give up.
in what institution is the lutine bell?
'lloyds of london' - apparently it's rung whenever there's a shipwreck or something.
what is a cyclo orbital hematoma more commonly known as?
a blackeye.
what does nubile mean?
of marriageable age.
[you didn't do too badly martin]
[link]10:57 PM dublin time
work email server is acting screwey - if you sent me anything in the last twenty four hours please re-send.
also, all emails should be addressed to cd@dwyersrestaurant.com - over christmas and always.
[link]02:52 AM dublin time
i just want to blog and blog and blog with this new layout. yay. it's so fun redesigning - i should do it more often - especially if it inspires me to write more. though perhaps i should try to keep with the quality over quantity rule of thumb.
anyway, tomorrow's my last day of work for the year. i'm looking forward to the sixteen days i'll have off - i've only had one day of holidays since starting here at the end of august - i think i deserve a break. hopefully over the christmas we'll manage to get out of melbourne for a couple of days and see a bit of the victorian countryside. i fear laziness and inertia though - unless aonghus organises something we might just end up staying put.
[link]02:31 AM dublin time
we came a miserable joint-sixth in the grand final of the quiz last night. the questions were tough, but shouldn't have been too bad, i think our hearts just weren't in it. we did answer a few crackers though:
what's so special about months that start on a sunday?
what domestic animal is not mentioned in the bible?
the capitals of twelve countries begin with the same letter making it the most common first letter of a country's capital - what letter is it? [and our unasked piece d'resistance] name all twelve. [we ciarán did!]
we also missed more than a few that we probably shouldn't have:
in what institution is the lutine bell?
what is a cyclo orbital hematoma more commonly known as?
what does nubile mean?
how would you have done?
[link]December 19, 2001
07:16 AM dublin time
i've just managed to squeeze in a minute to fix the comments [i'd forgotten to include the script - silly!] before we're off out to auntie jack's special christmas trivia quiz extravaganza.
zip zip bye.
[link]05:55 AM dublin time
yes, in honour of my two hundred and forty third day blogging i have redesigned for the first time.
in a mad rush.
so i haven't done the archives or anything else. and there's bound to be bits and pieces linking to wrong places. and it probably looks crazy in anything other than the navigator type and version and screen resolution i'm using. but it was fun. i should do it more often.
[link]December 18, 2001
07:14 AM dublin time
i've been in london maybe three times, for a total of about twenty days - a couple of short holidays and long weekends - definitely not long enough to have formed strong and lasting memories of the place. and yet, as i ascended from the train station on my way home today, a gust of hot wind forced forward by an approaching train swept past me, carrying the smell of metallic summer dust and escalators and i was momentarily transported to a sweaty sticky london underground.
smell is the most evocative of the senses. a mere whiff can carry you swiftly through time and space and back in the blink of an eye and the twitch of a nostril.
[link]December 17, 2001
05:06 AM dublin time
one of the best things about our current place of residence is that because it's sort of attached to a hotel, we get an endless supply of hot water.
this is not only handy for aonghus' acute shower addiction, but also for the de-creasing of my delicately posh and difficult to iron skirt. it's been hanging up for the past four months, but eight weeks squashed inside a tightly packed piece of left luggage in bangkok airport can leave some stubborn wrinkles. how was i going to get rid of them? the solution was simple:
1) hang skirt in bathroom
2) turn on shower to max heat and pressure
3) close bathroom door and leave room to fill with steam.
ten minutes later the bathroom walls are dripping condensation but skirt is miraculously crease free and cinderella shall go to the work christmas party. [damn. do i have to?]
[link]December 16, 2001
01:28 AM dublin time
i really have caught the mirror project bug. more here and here. that's it for the moment - i promise.
[link]December 14, 2001
12:02 AM dublin time
i have at last joined the ranks of the mirror project elite. yay for photographic narcissism.
[link]December 13, 2001
04:31 AM dublin time
it was the early summer of 1986, our last day of school before the holidays, the day we were to leave behind one year's teacher and meet the the next. most of my classmates were wracked with a nine-year-old's grief of having to leave what was considered a 'lovely' teacher - middle aged, a bit of a softie, giving lots of treats and little homework. she was also the one in charge of the 'secret library' under the stage in the school hall and we got to go there more than other classes.
i never cried when i left a teacher. i was a quiet, obedient, diligent student. i did my homework and got ten-out-of-ten in spelling tests. they liked me, i liked them - all pretty much equally. this particular one was fine too, and i'm sure i joined in the cheering when we heard we were to have her for another year.
it's only in retrospect that i realise how sinister it is that teachers have such control over these malleable little nine-year-old minds. not that she scarred me particularly, but credit for title of this blog belongs to her.
she used to give us these serious, if somewhat vague lectures that mostly centered around the phrase 'it's always the quiet ones girls' - meaning that it's the quiet ones that get 'into trouble' - which in turn meant only one thing in an irish catholic girls school. i don't think i actually realised what she meant for another couple of years, but in the meantime i tried to remember her advice [or warning?] - me being one of the quietest ones and knowing it clearly applied to me.
so maybe it was down to her advice, or maybe it was all my own doing, that i never did end up sixteen, single and pregnant. ironically, a friend of mine who has a two-year-old daughter and is unmarried was in that class with me. we weren't particular friends back then and the strongest memory i have of her is being put sitting at a desk on her own because she wouldn't stop talking to the girl beside her.
[link]December 12, 2001
04:29 AM dublin time
i've never eaten so well in my life as i have in the past six months - and that's saying quite a bit as my dad's a chef and i lived above our restaurant for about ten years.
of course now that aonghus is cooking for me, i'm enjoying dinners like never before on a nine-to-five schedule. partly because as my dad says 'a good meal is one you haven't cooked yourself' and partly because aonghus is cooking different things to those i usually do [and very nicely too].
but nearly every time we manage a meal out it has been consistently wonderful. highlights include the garlic loaded tapenade in the vegie bar on brunswick street, calamari salad with lemon and coriander in yelza on gertrude street and a deliciously moist pear and date pudding with butterscotch sauce in unwine on hardware lane - my dream three course meal and i'd even get some well needed exercise walking from one course to the next.
[link]December 10, 2001
11:10 PM dublin time
i've always been a concise person.
i remember our final english exam in school, while most people, writing as fast as their weary hands could manage, were still struggling to squeeze the required number of essay answers into the three hours, i had long since finished. [and not just because i didn't know anything].
my difficulty was always writing enough words. i prefer to cut to the chase and skip the superfluous details.
i think it's for this reason that the mayfly project appealed to me.
the idea?
sum up the last year of your life in twenty words. i didn't have too much trouble stretching my words to fill this one [though i could have happily done it in less].
result?
"me and the boy spending our fourth year consuming much food and drink whilst wandering in a mainly southeastward direction."
the shorter version?
"abcd go to oz"
December 09, 2001
10:28 PM dublin time
it was alright in the end, coz you know the way friday felt like a sunday [in a bad way]? well saturday felt like a sunday too, but in a good way. so it all kinda cancelled itself out and i had a lovely weekend.
and i got my fix of sky. even in the desired shade of blue with the exact kind of occasional clouds i was after! yay for inaccurate weather forecasts.
[link]December 07, 2001
05:29 AM dublin time
this weekend i want sky, and lots of it.
i've been craving sky since i got to australia - it's something i thought they'd have a lot more of here, but it's about the same as home. right now i feel the need for big gaping expanses of it, reaching over my head and stretching all the way down to the ground. i'd also prefer if it was blue, with some flimsy light cottony puffs of cloud. i don't think that's very likely, the forcast this weekend is for rain, we'll probably stay in and i wont get my fix of sky.
it's friday evening, why does it already feel like a sunday?
[link]December 05, 2001
04:04 AM dublin time
photos from my sunny birthday weekend down the coast can now be found here
12:53 AM dublin time
in the past three months of walking to work from the train station, i've been following the building progress of a soon-to-be-office. right now they have most of the main structure completed - no windows or doors, but walls and ceilings - and they've just started plumbing in the facilities - water pipes, electricity cables and airconditioning vents, so across the ceiling winds a network of giant tubular silver slinkies, each meeting the floor at regularly spaced intervals like enormous elephant trunks.
this morning as i walked past they reminded me of an act i'd seen during the spraoi [i'm always talking about the spraoi aren't i?] where a family of five silver slinkies performed on the street in waterford. it turns out the slinkies are from an
australian company called bedlam oz. well fancy that!
December 04, 2001
09:53 PM dublin time
yay! snails are ickle today on ickle.org
[link]December 03, 2001
11:20 PM dublin time
cue justification of more time wasted on self promotion...
incase you wondered what that blogsnob link on the right was: "everytime someone views your site, a small text ad shows up on your page. for every ad shown on your site, someone else's site displays your ad".
i'd say this is about to get huge. [found via row].
[link]10:32 PM dublin time
today i will be mostly answering email.
[link]05:48 AM dublin time
i put the answers at the bottom of the quiz questions page.
[link]01:09 AM dublin time
a giant spherical shiny silver christmas tree bauble, about three or four metres high and wide, has tumbled to earth in the centre of melbourne, as if from an enormous christmas tree. it has the most wonderfully reflective mirrored surface and i've already been down to take some photos. mirror project here i come.
[link]December 02, 2001
01:59 AM dublin time
there were plans for a blog meet today, but i don't think the location of the park was picked, and it's pissing down and i have to go to a bbq. maybe we can re-schedule the blogmeet. [unless everyone wants to crash our wet bbq in fiztroy?]
[link]