Last year my friend Van presented the installation “Play with me” at CCP. I thought the cubby house she found to build it in was pretty impressive, possibly the most impressive cubby I had ever seen, until I stumbled upon this incredible site. “Good taste should begin early. We follow the basic principles of good design and apply them in a scale down version.” Amazing little houses for mini Martha Stewarts… and Martha Stewart canine equivalents. Bowl me over: 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. “A discriminating family wouldn’t hire just anyone to design their home; our clients feel the same way about a playhouse for their children.” !!!
My life as a dork
On Saturday night Big-P and I went along to Special-K’s 30th birthday party for a few hours (between evening baby feeds) where we ate too much thai food, changed a car tire and then did a reasonable (not great, but reasonable) job of mingling with people who we have never met before. At one point in the evening I suggested to Big-P, Kent and Small that wouldn’t it be fun to start a book club. We could all takes turns in suggesting books and then read them and then get together and probably not discuss them in much detail. Actually I think I phrased it more like “Would you guys think I was a huge dork if I wanted to start a book club?”. Small immediately guffawed at me and told me that yes she would definitely think I was a big dork, and I couldn’t possibly start a book club and still be her friend. Kent was much more excited by the idea and immediately started recounting his theories on the latest book he is reading – (Tim Winton’s “Dirt Music”? I can’t remember now, that was one he mentioned anyway.) and I suddenly realised that having Kent in a book group would be too daunting… absolutely. Actually Big-P and Kent together in a book club would be a recipe for disaster. Historically (in various beach houses down Gippsland way) their esoteric discussions on literature have sent everyone else to bed early with dramatic eye-rolling. As someone who has had a mortifying, paralysing fit of stagefright in 1992 when attempting to give a paper in an English Literature tutorial on the Australian Writer Martin Boyd (infront of a lecturer who went on to write his biography, yikes) and had to be offered a bottle of water from a kindly fellow student so that I could get some words out of my completely dry mouth, my idea of a bookclub is not to go in for serious intellectual competition. I was hoping for a book club where the discussion went more along the lines of “oh yeah – I really liked that bit. It rocked. George Clooney could play that role if they made this into a movie”. Anyway… the idea fizzled as soon as I thought about it for more than a moment, but now I see that perhaps I wasn’t as big a dork as I thought I was! (via the wonderful 42short).
And finally!
Outside the window
Is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colours of these nine crayons
- Margaret Atwood
Cake oh cake
Well, the chocolate cake rose a little more, but it just wasn’t as incredible as the ones my mum makes. I bought new self-raising flour and mum came over and sat in the kitchen and watched my every move. I did it exactly the way she would have. Exactly! So what went wrong? My theories to this now include that my oven is not the same as my mum’s. Perhaps it needs to be cooler – or hotter… or it’s the fact that mum pours melted butter into her metal mix-master bowl which immediately cools it slightly whereas my bowl is plastic so the butter stays hotter. Or maybe the eggs are too small or the eggs are too fresh. Perhaps it’s that the milk is not creamy enough (although mum says she uses Trim which is a low fat milk much like my Lite-Start). Anyway. The cake was fine. Just not perfect. Instead I think I am going to make some of this popcorn. The recipe looks pretty easy and the reviews are rave!
In other news, someone drove into my car while I was parked outside a friend’s house this afternoon. Fortunately they left a very nice note (“I RAN INTO YOUR CAR sorry…”) with contact details so I won’t have to pay for it but to get the back bumper bar fixed means I will be without a car for a while. While this doesn’t worry me too much because I still hate driving, it means it’s going to be hard to get little Amelia J around, because this is the car that her baby seat has been fitted into. Logistics are always trickier when there is this little new person involved.
Accessorise me
After entertaining last night until the baby-friendly hour of 10pm, Big-P and I got up this morning and headed down to Brunswick Street for a late breakfast: eggs benedict and hot hot coffee. And then I bought a hat, and then a second hat and then a bag from Douglas & Hope which I have been coveting for the longest time. Early birthday presents all round!
And just quickly:
Reading: Gigi and the Cat by Colette
Watching: Hornblower – new series starts tonight!
Cooking: making and remaking mum’s chocolate cake. Why, oh why, will it not rise? Tomorrow she is going to watch me make it to discover my cake baking weakness. Could it be that the self raising flour is too old?
Drinking: The most delicious cordial – Happy Valley Apple Raspberry.. mmm…
Surfin’: Nobody’s Doll (from where I found that one of my favourite rainy day books I Capture the Castle is going to be released as a film this year), 10 million march in peace protests, Nathan’s Kelman to the Rescue and Tadahiro Uesugi Illustration.