Julie's Boggle

This has all happened very quickly (after more than a month of collective foot-dragging) but we now have ourselves a holiday all organised for April – to the Red Sea! Wheee-hee!

We had discussed going to the Red Sea this year – it seemed like a good idea now that we had more experience. So we’d already planned to cut back on our regular club dives to save up for a pricy Red Sea trip. And then I had the additional requirement to use up 6 days of leave before the end of April (when it expires) so that started to make April look like a good time to go…

We wrote a few emails and then discovered that many of the trips planned by the companies we were interested in were filling up rapidly. No time to waste then!

So this morning, I put through the order – and we now have a 6-night liveaboard (MV Cyclone) booked for the end of April.

Looking at the rest of the detail – that might have been the easy bit. We’ve still got to figure out how to get home from Gatwick Airport at 2am on a Sunday morning…

Some of you might have noticed that we accidentally let our domain subscription lapse at the end of February. The people who administer the registrations were very quick to put up a re-direct, so people visiting our webpages were shown to a page of their advertising instead! (And for up to 72 hours after we renewed our registration as well.) Oops! All better now though.

I love my bread-maker – it’s been almost two years since I got it as a ‘surprise’ birthday present and it still sees lots of use.

Although what it does is very straight-forward: mix ingredients and bake, it gives the opportunity for (a) being creative with new recipes and (b) adding the home-made touch, while still requiring minimal input in terms of time and effort. What more could you ask for from a kitchen appliance?

While the preparation for bread-making takes hardly any time, there is a certain element of planning involved in order to get the best use out of one’s bread-maker. For instance, half an hour before lunch, when the munchies are just coming on, is not the best time to begin a loaf on the standard program which takes just over 3 hours to run! (Especially when this will mean that the man of the house will be clamouring for food long before the dough has even got into its second rise cycle!)

There is a simple solution to this which, this morning, meant that as soon as we finished breakfast, I got started on our lunch-time loaf.

Today we’re making “Porter bread”. (Except that Morrison’s didn’t have porter on their shelves, so we took the closest alternative of a tasty stout with a quirky name – Theakston’s Old Peculier). Not exactly the sort of ingredient that you’d be thinking of sampling with the last of your morning cup of coffee.

I have two bread-maker recipe books. This one doesn’t have any of the glossy pictures, but it’s a real treasure in that it has a grand selection of recipes.

On today’s recipe, next to the 350ml porter, it said: “Pour this out and let it stand for 5 minutes”. No problem. Stout poured out and put to one side.

Then I went into auto-pilot mode. Ho-hum, bread-making is such a doddle – all these recipes that go with 500g of flour take 350ml of water. So in goes 350ml water, then the other non-flour ingredients: salt, tablespoon of honey, some oil. Right. Got everything, ready for the flour… hey, there’s the stout on the counter – I haven’t added that yet. Oh – hang on! – there ISN’T a line for water in this recipe, it only has the 350ml of stout!

Sigh. Out with the water etc., rinse, wash, rinse and in with the stout, and off we go again. But see how quick it is – even with that setback, I’m still done in 15 minutes.

Now — off to do other things while the bread-maker whizzes together some bread for us!

London 5-Day Forecast
We had SNOW this morning. Not serious snow that falls and hangs around – but still, little pieces of frozen water falling from the sky – indicating just how cold the air must be to support that!

And there I was thinking that with the now gradually lengthening days, we’d definitely seen the last of the serious cold — and this lot’s not going away just yet either. Sigh. (Thank goodness for central heating!)

We had a fun excursion last night – visiting a new area, socialising with a large number of other (mostly new-to-us) South Africans, and trying a new restaurant.

The occasion was Gavin’s birthday supper – Gavin being a friend of Tom’s from ThoroughTec days, who moved out to London last year in the wake of a mass family exodus from SA. Gavin had invited all of his extended London-based family along to his birthday bash, and with us and a few other friends that took the numbers to 14. There was one American, and one unknown (because we didn’t get to talk to him) – and all the rest were SA ex-pats.

The restaurant, Abiba Cuisine, had an extensive menu – with large sections indicating a distinctly Lebanese theme. Tom and I both chose the fatayer (spinach parcels) for starters. These were 4 substantial little pasty-type creations (with a bread-like pastry) with tasty spinach and pinenut filling that went down well with the very drinkable French chardonnay we’d opted for.

Tom couldn’t resist the fillet steak for mains (even though this meant stepping outside of the 3-courses-for-£15 bounds) while I had the less tender but quite flavoursome sweet duck breast. And we both finished off with a heavenly crème caramel – as good as home-made (and that’s definitely saying something!)

As usual, when it comes to the European community of the Greater Durban Metro, everybody discovers that they somehow have links to the others. Our crowd was no exception. One of Gavin’s friends remembered Tom lecturing him at UND, and I recognised a classmate from DGC (last seen in Standard 3) who turned out to be Gavin’s cousin!

Our walk back to Notting Hill station took us back down the diverse and interesting high street (very few chain stores, and a number of places with Arabic signage indicating middle-eastern leanings) and then through some swanky suburbs and lastly into the retail districts of Notting Hill with all of its imaginative and offbeat shops.

Only a day or two after putting up my photos for sharing on morgueFile , I got an email from someone asking if they could use one of them (left). The lady in question works for the United Nations Environment Program, and they want to use my pic as one of their scenery photos in a publication they’re working on called “Africa’s Lakes: Atlas of Environmental Change”. I realise that this rates as a very minor item of exposure, but I like the feeling of having made a contribution, even a tiny one.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. – Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001)

Another weekend almost over – sigh… No matter how hard you try to spin them out, they do tend to flash by.

I’ve had a lot of undisturbed time online on this one, as Tom has been re-inspired to delve into his quantum physics textbooks after we watched the movie Proof on Friday night, and that’s kept him quite absorbed.

A few weeks back, while I was hunting around for good graphics for my blog, I discovered a whole bunch of sites that would only let you use their pictures if you credited them on your site. (Not a bad thing in itself, but such a pest.) Then I found morgueFile (odd name, I agree) which is a huge online community of amateur photographers who make their photos available online with no such tiresome restrictions. Most of them just want to know when and where you actually use their stuff if it’s going to be used commercially. What a cool idea!

Anyway, having browsed extensively amongst their massive collection of photos, I joined up myself and posted some of my collection that I felt had some minor degree of the ‘inspirational’ about them. From what I’ve read on their news groups, the photos on the site tend to get picked up by people looking for stock photos for small ventures like online articles, brochures etc. My photos are nowhere close to the quality (just thinking of picture resolution, not artistic quality for now) of some of the other ones up there, but hey, it would be neat to have one of them used somewhere.

Aside from that, I did spend quite a bit of time posting up to the blog a few old emails from the archives under the Letters home category. This ended up taking quite a long time because, (a) I tend to read and reminisce over each one, (b) the back-dating option for a post never works first time, and (c) I try to find images that go with them to flesh them out a bit – just because I can. I’m also too much of a perfectionist when it comes to layout so even though the wording is already there, getting the pictures in just the right place, and right size, can take about 5 iterations (minimum). Yeah well – some things just need to be right!

In a day which was fraught and frustrating in so many ways, these were the highlights that made it all worthwhile:

• The weather. Ah, what an amazing morning. I just love the early morning city walk part of my commute on days like these. The required ingredients are a washed-clean, cloud-free sky; and the early morning sun just cresting the buildings – giving everything that warm golden glow. Combine that with crisp air laced with the aromas of coffee and toast from all the coffee shops along my route, and you have the perfect walk to work.
• Lunch. One of the tastiest burgers I’ve had in a very long time from our friends at the The Fine Line, a restaurant near work.
• Great music. Despite the fact that it implies the work I am doing is mindless (or I wouldn’t be able to concentrate), some of the best moments at work are when I can plug into my favourite mix of 3 albums (Best of Crowded House, U2: Best of 1980-1990, and REM’s Automatic for the People) and just let the music carry me along as I do the repetitive tasks requiring about 15% active thought. On a day that got hardly any actual work done, the last hour when I could get stuck in and enjoy the soundtrack at the same time really helped.

Being away from work for a few days is like freewheeling downhill on a bicycle. Wonderful while it lasts, but a massive penalty to pay when you have to turn around and go home.

Today was a bit like that. Just a deluge of things to do, meetings to attend, people to speak to… All clamouring for my attention. And an incipient cold didn’t help at all.

Late afternoon, when things quietened down a little, I was quite chuffed to take delivery of my new 300GB hard-drive for my development PC. More Space – hurrah! And then accordingly disheartened when it turned out that *Dell* have jinxed all the machines they produce to reject new hard-drives out of hand. The IT support guy had to carry my poor PC away – to take part in some ritual sacrifice, or whatever it is they do to make the wretched thing work.

Another frustrating 25 minutes on the Tube with this morning’s Metro (having left my book at home today), and then home at last. And several hours later I’m feeling sleepy and well-fed after a good meal at The Kensington — a nearby pub where it’s 2 meals for the price of 1 on Monday nights. So at least it ends well. And now -yawn- time for a warm bed and a book… Night all.

Still more tinkering about with my image editing software, and here they are:

[Click on the image to see a bigger version.]

In hindsight, I’m sorry that I didn’t take more close-up pics that illustrated how scratched the old left-hand panes were. (It’s kind of visible by how the light is reflecting off the glass in the top left one, but that’s a dodgy photo from the archives.)

In the end I ran out of time to get my “before” photos, with it being mostly-dark in the mornings, dark before I got home, and raining on the weekends – so basically these are all posterity has to work with.