Just a quickie from Taos
OMG it is SO beautiful here in northern New Mexico. The alders, the aspens and the cottonwoods are in golden yellow autumn colours. The light is amazing, the landscape and architecture breathtaking. Literally breathtaking as well: the altitude here in Taos is 7500 feet - about the same as the top of Mt Kosciusko, which is the highest point in Australia. So the air is thin, and any exertion leaves us lowland folk gasping a little.
But hey — no worries! And we've had r-a-i-n! And thunder and hail! A wonderfful day's drenching. We loved it.
:: Thanks for all your lovely compliments on the quilt. I do hope Larissa likes it. It'll arrive there tomorrow, so I'm hoping to hear.
Frogdancer: The design was our version of a Denise Schmidt quilt, which we adapted at random.
:: Gotta head off for dinner now — byee!
Monday, 13 October 2008
Friday, 10 October 2008
Look familiar?
How'd you like this black widow? She was in our garage this arvo — same untidy web as the redback, same beautiful body shape, same shiny black, and look ...
... the red flash is underneath, on her belly. It also seemed a little bigger than the redback.
I hope you're impressed with how close I got. David was watching proceedings and said, "I hope they don't jump!" At which point I got up in a hurry.
:: Here's a shot Will took of himself, with big fat smug smile, leaning on the stage at the Dandy Warhols' concert in San Francisco at the weekend.
We saw them here in San Diego a few nights before Will did, and they were bloody fantastic.
:: We're waiting for the US version of Kath and Kim, which starts tonight in just over half an hour. I've seen a trailer, which looked okay, but the review in this morning's LA Times was not too hot, while very complimentary about the Australian original.
:: I spied this rubbish on a table in the living room soon after Will got home from college yesterday ...
... and was about to yell to him to chuck it in the bin when I noticed the contents.
It's fun having a sculptor in the house!
:: We're off to Albuquerque and Santa Fe tomorrow. It'll be cool and dry, cold even, with autumn colour ... mmm! I'll be back in a little over a week — see ya!
Added slightly later: Forget to say — Bloglines isn't very reliable is it? It seems very haphazard about showing new posts, so I've probably missed quite a few. Kind of ruins the point really.
Also — I finally posted Larissa's quilt off to her this afternoon! All finished, quilted and bound, ends sewn in ... yay!
How'd you like this black widow? She was in our garage this arvo — same untidy web as the redback, same beautiful body shape, same shiny black, and look ...
... the red flash is underneath, on her belly. It also seemed a little bigger than the redback.
I hope you're impressed with how close I got. David was watching proceedings and said, "I hope they don't jump!" At which point I got up in a hurry.
:: Here's a shot Will took of himself, with big fat smug smile, leaning on the stage at the Dandy Warhols' concert in San Francisco at the weekend.
We saw them here in San Diego a few nights before Will did, and they were bloody fantastic.:: We're waiting for the US version of Kath and Kim, which starts tonight in just over half an hour. I've seen a trailer, which looked okay, but the review in this morning's LA Times was not too hot, while very complimentary about the Australian original.
:: I spied this rubbish on a table in the living room soon after Will got home from college yesterday ...
... and was about to yell to him to chuck it in the bin when I noticed the contents.
It's fun having a sculptor in the house!:: We're off to Albuquerque and Santa Fe tomorrow. It'll be cool and dry, cold even, with autumn colour ... mmm! I'll be back in a little over a week — see ya!
Added slightly later: Forget to say — Bloglines isn't very reliable is it? It seems very haphazard about showing new posts, so I've probably missed quite a few. Kind of ruins the point really.
Also — I finally posted Larissa's quilt off to her this afternoon! All finished, quilted and bound, ends sewn in ... yay!Thursday, 9 October 2008
Fingers crossed...
We're having a spell of Santa Ana weather this week, with temperatures pushed upwards by these big north-easterlies that blow in from the desert. I can't help thinking about the horrors of this time last year, and hoping no-one will have to go through any of that again.
We're having a spell of Santa Ana weather this week, with temperatures pushed upwards by these big north-easterlies that blow in from the desert. I can't help thinking about the horrors of this time last year, and hoping no-one will have to go through any of that again.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
Little black book
My trusty old recipe book, battered, tattered and spattered, is so full of cuttings and clippings, and so strained and fragile, that I really need a younger, sturdier edition.
But I can't bear to move on to a new one!
I started this one in 1976, when, working on the railways in the Pilbara and pregnant with Simon, I realised my life was going to take an inevitable turn for the domestic. So I'd better start cooking. Or at least, make an effort to look as though I could start cooking.
So I began cutting and pasting into recipes from magazines into this little notebook. I'd used some of its pages already, to copy out poems, the odd address ("Adrian, c/- the London Walkabout Hotel ... "), and a list of the serial numbers of my brother's American Express travellers' cheques (no plastic bank cards in those days).
Pretty soon, though, these scribblings gave way to an amazing collection of now tired and dated-looking 1970s recipes from Belle magazine for jams and preserves, sophisticated salad dressings and glossy-looking dishes that feature such exotic ingredients as canned pineapple slices.
There's nothing between 1976 and 1978 ...
... I imagine that once Simon was born there wasn't much time for prancing about the kitchen with cans of Golden Circle, and my domestic ambitions soon got shoved aside.
By the eighties, though, I was well into it.
One day in the mid-1990s, realising the collection was by now a family record, I went back and put dates and details on as many recipes as I could, those I could remember anyway. Since then, whenever I enter a recipe I date it and tell where it came from, and from whom.
I have the recipe for Pepper and Salt Nuts that I made for a party at Laura's house in 2002, my neighbour's Tetragona Marenga (nut squares), Karen's 'Father's Favourite', and a fabulous pasta and tuna dish with capers that I got from my friend Helen 'at the Nicholson Road bus stop, Monday 17-11-03'.
There are a few eccentricities among Ian P's tuna salad and Kate's pumpkin souffle, like instructions for making the aloe vera and beeswax soap that I used to whip up in enormous quantities in 1989, and even recipes for whatever was ailing the roses...
The San Diego section, the newest one, tellingly has several great recipes for chili con carne, including one that will feed twenty people, which I made for our first Superbowl Sunday, February '06.
There are also recipes gleaned from the many blogs I read, like the excellent and aptly-named Foolproof Fudge from Jennifer in Massachusetts and, from Madrid, Lobstersquad's fabulous stuffed capsicums. 
Last year, before Lily moved off campus into her own shared house at the start of her second year at college, she spent hours copying out my recipes into a book of her own.
It's part of the family.
My trusty old recipe book, battered, tattered and spattered, is so full of cuttings and clippings, and so strained and fragile, that I really need a younger, sturdier edition.But I can't bear to move on to a new one!
I started this one in 1976, when, working on the railways in the Pilbara and pregnant with Simon, I realised my life was going to take an inevitable turn for the domestic. So I'd better start cooking. Or at least, make an effort to look as though I could start cooking.
So I began cutting and pasting into recipes from magazines into this little notebook. I'd used some of its pages already, to copy out poems, the odd address ("Adrian, c/- the London Walkabout Hotel ... "), and a list of the serial numbers of my brother's American Express travellers' cheques (no plastic bank cards in those days).Pretty soon, though, these scribblings gave way to an amazing collection of now tired and dated-looking 1970s recipes from Belle magazine for jams and preserves, sophisticated salad dressings and glossy-looking dishes that feature such exotic ingredients as canned pineapple slices.
There's nothing between 1976 and 1978 ...
... I imagine that once Simon was born there wasn't much time for prancing about the kitchen with cans of Golden Circle, and my domestic ambitions soon got shoved aside.By the eighties, though, I was well into it.
One day in the mid-1990s, realising the collection was by now a family record, I went back and put dates and details on as many recipes as I could, those I could remember anyway. Since then, whenever I enter a recipe I date it and tell where it came from, and from whom.I have the recipe for Pepper and Salt Nuts that I made for a party at Laura's house in 2002, my neighbour's Tetragona Marenga (nut squares), Karen's 'Father's Favourite', and a fabulous pasta and tuna dish with capers that I got from my friend Helen 'at the Nicholson Road bus stop, Monday 17-11-03'.
There are a few eccentricities among Ian P's tuna salad and Kate's pumpkin souffle, like instructions for making the aloe vera and beeswax soap that I used to whip up in enormous quantities in 1989, and even recipes for whatever was ailing the roses...
The San Diego section, the newest one, tellingly has several great recipes for chili con carne, including one that will feed twenty people, which I made for our first Superbowl Sunday, February '06.
There are also recipes gleaned from the many blogs I read, like the excellent and aptly-named Foolproof Fudge from Jennifer in Massachusetts and, from Madrid, Lobstersquad's fabulous stuffed capsicums. 
Last year, before Lily moved off campus into her own shared house at the start of her second year at college, she spent hours copying out my recipes into a book of her own.
It's part of the family.
Monday, 6 October 2008
Cool and green
This is Fern Canyon, a narrow gorge carved by a creek that's still running. It's in Redwood National Park in northern California, about 50 miles south of the Oregon border.
It's a beautiful, cool walk through the canyon, and you start at this wild, windswept beach ...
... and follow the creek upstream, with the canyon getting narrower and lusher the further you walk. The water wasn't more than a few inches deep when we were there, but in winter the canyon is flooded. The water runs quite quickly over pebbles — it's a fabulous sound for us dry-land folk.
Trees try to get a foothold on the almost vertical sides, revel in the moisture, grow for a while and then fall in — hence the logs criss-crossing the canyon floor.
The canyon walls are covered in ferns, and even more water trickles down through them. Apparently some species growing here are over 300,000 years old. The untouched timelessness of the place appealed to the makers of Jurassic Park, who filmed some scenes here. It's easy to imagine disturbing some prehistoric beast as you round the next bend ...
:: We're off again at the end of the week. This time it's New Mexico, where the weather will be crisp and autumnal, with a bit of a nip in the air after dark. Can't wait!
This is Fern Canyon, a narrow gorge carved by a creek that's still running. It's in Redwood National Park in northern California, about 50 miles south of the Oregon border.It's a beautiful, cool walk through the canyon, and you start at this wild, windswept beach ...
... and follow the creek upstream, with the canyon getting narrower and lusher the further you walk. The water wasn't more than a few inches deep when we were there, but in winter the canyon is flooded. The water runs quite quickly over pebbles — it's a fabulous sound for us dry-land folk. 
Trees try to get a foothold on the almost vertical sides, revel in the moisture, grow for a while and then fall in — hence the logs criss-crossing the canyon floor.
The canyon walls are covered in ferns, and even more water trickles down through them. Apparently some species growing here are over 300,000 years old. The untouched timelessness of the place appealed to the makers of Jurassic Park, who filmed some scenes here. It's easy to imagine disturbing some prehistoric beast as you round the next bend ... :: We're off again at the end of the week. This time it's New Mexico, where the weather will be crisp and autumnal, with a bit of a nip in the air after dark. Can't wait!
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
How's your hue IQ?
How about Orange — one of my favourite design/idea/arty blogs — posted a link to this great colour test. Try it out! I scored 12, and had trouble with the blues and greens. Zero is the perfect score.
:: This is clearly the day for cannibalising other people's blogs and all their hard work! Here's a meme I found at over at Rhubarb Whine — lovely blog written by a very talented fellow experfite:
How about Orange — one of my favourite design/idea/arty blogs — posted a link to this great colour test. Try it out! I scored 12, and had trouble with the blues and greens. Zero is the perfect score.:: This is clearly the day for cannibalising other people's blogs and all their hard work! Here's a meme I found at over at Rhubarb Whine — lovely blog written by a very talented fellow experfite:
Porn Star name (first pet, first street where you lived):
Tiddles Bluebell
Rock star name (favourite pet, current car):
Yoshi Toyota (that well-known Jap-rap sensation)
Gangsta name (favourite ice cream flavour, favourite type of shoe):
Chunk'o'toffee Slingback
Native American name (hair colour, favourite animal, favourite hobby):
Dark Dog Painter
Soap Opera Name (middle name, city where you were born):
Ann Norwich (too bland to go far ...)
Star Wars name (first 3 letters of last name & first 2 of first name, last 3 letters of middle name):
Zamleann (my younger son is Zamwidan — much more convincing)
Stripper Name (favourite perfume, favourite candy):
Rumor Peppermint Pattie
TV Newsreader name (grandparents first name, any town that starts with the same letter):
Gladys Glasgow (serious cred!), or
Emilie Edmonton, or Elizabeth Edgbaston
Spy Name (favourite season, favourite flower):
Winter Freesia
Cartoon name (favourite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing now):
Cherry Shorts
Hippie name (what you ate for breakfast, favourite tree):
Cheerios Eucalypt.
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