- Saturday February 4th 2012
- Weather:
Min: 17 Max: 25
Easel
I can't paint hands.
- Thursday February 2nd 2012
- Weather:
Min: 17 Max: 20
Simmer
Is there a fixed amount of time you can have an item of food before you become sentimental and have problems eating it? At some point does your brain switch from "I could use those calories to fuel my cells" to "my comfort with this environment would decrease if this bottle of iced coffee mix wasn't on the bench anymore."I thought about this concept while preparing dinner tonight. I was heating a lamb Rogan Josh that I cooked, portioned and froze sixteen days ago. My bulk meals don't usually last me this long. This particular portion was the last of the batch, and I had eighteen minutes of microwaving time to reflect on the curious sense of sadness I felt about eating it.
I'm not talking about getting emotional about things like that box of Weet Bix sitting in the back of your pantry, or other long life tins that you can hold onto for six months and then throw into a pasta without a second thought. I think for this affection effect to happen that the item in question needs to be unique in some way, and also be exposed within the environment.
One Christmas I was given a chocolate Santa Claus made by a luxury chocolate manufacturer. It was on Christmas day and I certainly wasn't lacking for sustenance at that point of the afternoon, so I positioned it on my desk among other knick-knacks to eat another time. The next September, when I was moving home, I realised I was still yet to eat it. It seemed that at some point I had unconsciously decided the cost of eating it was too damaging to the tiny contribution the chocolate statue had on the familiarity of my environment. Reflecting further I realised this same phenomena might have been the reason I never baked my Thomas the Tank Engine muffin mix which sat on my desk for about 18 months before I threw it away. I did eat that Santa, it did not taste fresh.
Upon further reflection, I also held onto a six-pack of fat stubbied Cooper's Sparkling for six years after they changed their design to a slimmer bottle. When I drank them in 2009 they also did not taste fresh.
I think environmental familiarity is a major factor in human being's comfort levels. I have seen enough office spazz outs over disappearing mugs to realise this. And also, Luke Walton. There's probably some influence from your food-poisoning-preventing sub-conscious that poses a barrier to eating food your brain recognises as old as well. Whatever timeframe is needed to fall in love with food, it's longer than sixteen days, because my dinner was delicious, and microwaving things for eighteen minutes on the lowest heat makes everything taste fresh.
- Wednesday January 18th 2012
- Weather:
Min: 18 Max: 29
Loops
When it comes to running I do miss North Adelaide. Well, not all of me misses it, mainly the lower half of my body which appreciated colliding with surfaces made of grass or soil, while still being flat and long enough to plan proper exercise.Sydney is a city full of concrete, but I was determined to find somewhere I could jog and I took to Google Maps for an aerial survey of my area in case I'd missed anything suitable. I spotted a small park in the suburb next to Hurstville. It looked a little hilly but the grass was green and there was a footpath that looped around that I thought I could do some laps of. I used Map Pedometer to measure out a rough estimate of the track: 366 metres. If I ran the loop six times it would be about 2.2km which I decided would be a lovely jog to start rediscovering my fitness with.
I walked to the park and was pleasantly surprised at how clean and neat it was, by Sydney standards, which means it only had the equivalent of about two recycling bins worth of junk spread over it.
I did some leg swings with the support of a nearby tree and then started my laps. The park was otherwise empty, except for a Fijian man who started running loops right after me. He ran in the opposite direction so we made eye contact briefly half a dozen times.
After my laps I stopped to rest and he happened to stop near me. He asked me how many laps I did, to which I said "six".
He asked me, "why six?"
I said, "I measured the track and six laps equals 2.2 kilometres which is how far I wanted to run."
He was shocked, and wanted to know how I'd managed to measure the track so accurately while running. I told him I'd used a satellite to measure it.
"You have your own satellite?!" he said, incredulous.
"No," I said. "Well, actually, I guess you could say I do... We do."
I hadn't really thought about it that way before. Living in the future is awesome.
- Tuesday January 17th 2012
- Weather: Min: 15 Max: 26
I don't really miss reviewing music
M83's Steve McQueen, an epic electronic giant and one of 2011's best tunes. It's a track I've listed to half a dozen times this week. It's just an enormous, uplifting composition that makes you feel invincible. It's like the soundtrack to walking out the doors following your last day of a 25 year career working at a factory, doing the same job day after day in the gloom. And then you leave knowing you never have to come back again, and there's this glorious, golden sunset. And your job in the factory was being forced to kill babies.
- Sunday January 15th 2012
- Weather: Min: 17 Max: 23
Art of the Brick Review
Yesterday I went to Sydney Town Hall.
I went to an art exhibition called "Art of the Brick".
It was an art exhibition by an artist that explored many themes. Artistic themes. The fact that things were made of Lego and that I occasionally take photos of things I made out of Lego was a coincidence.
Inside I looked at works of art.
See, look at this piece of art. It is a Lego kangaroo made entirely out of orange. The message behind this piece is obvious, but takes a lot of thinking about.
I am being a little cynical, there were some impressive and expansive pieces that would easily be categorised as "artistic" if they were constructed from some other material except for Lego.
Unfortunately the artist used illegal building techniques on several occasions. That's probably because 99% of everything was made of bricks and tiles. That's restrictive.
Tickets were $20. Was that worth it? I guess so. I assume all the proceeds go towards funding the guys gigantic Lego collection, and Lego isn't cheap. Just take a look at the gift shop that takes up the second half of the exhibit.
- Thursday January 12th 2012
- Weather: Min: 12 Max: 21
Sydney
This evening in Sydney I sat in a tiny capsule for ten minutes and travelled from Hong Kong to Greece.The question I ask myself is, did I travel between continents, or back in time?
- Friday January 6th 2012
- Weather: Min: 18 Max: 21
Casual Friday Breakfast II - Merging Fruits
I don't plan to make this a weekly event, but I did have the time and opportunity to produce a non-standard breakfast again this morning. We're still recovering from Christmas excess and I was determined to find a way to use up some of the left over fresh food before it went bad and World Vision ads made me feel guilty about my negligence.After weighing up my choices of fruit, breads, salads and meats I decided I wanted to try blending all the left over fruit from the last week into a giant smoothie. This included half a honey dew melon, some week old nectarines, some giant mangoes Craig gave me and some frozen raspberries. I decided the best way to combine all these was going to require my blender.
If you're wondering what all fruits look like when layered in a blender with some vanilla yogurt, they look like this:
Yes, I too was slightly afraid that this was going to taste like the warm upchuck of an exhausted snub-nosed monkey after it was chased with a broom from a Chinese market's fruit stall. However, twenty minutes of slicing and skinning fruits made me stubborn enough to drink it. The taste wasn't off-putting, although I immediately regretted not adding a tray of ice to offset the warmth that ripening mangoes provide.
Pros:
Vitamins.
Cons:
The mango overpowered almost everything else, and was the main culprit for the warmth.
Improvement in Productivity:
This smoothie didn't improve my productivity as the preparation time meant I almost started work late. My concentration was about average.
Casual Friday Rating:
One colleague who brought a pavlova for morning tea to share and you don't really like the taste of pavlova but you decide to have a slice of it anyway because apples aren't on special at Woolworths that week and you decide the calories to dollars ratio outweighs the low glycaemic index value to dollars ratio out of five.
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