25 august 2019

Looking at my phone photos from five years ago is a bit confusing because obviously like anyone but particularly like hoarders (it's in the genes) I use my phone (as mentioned in previous post) as just a dump for every impression/ thing that happens/thing I do/ thing I see, but at the same time I can't be friggin' bothered to make a note about why this is important or what it means, I just assume that one day I will sit down and notate on it all, which to be fair.... well, what I'm doing now is the closest I will ever get to making any kind of extra commentary on this shit. 

So five years ago, I made a loaf of bread. Yes. The weird thing about this is that I had made a loaf of bread the day before, too. So I am not sure what this was about. This bread was born in the humblest of circumstances, the scungefest that was the kitchen in Albion. I mean my kitchen today is pretty awful but nowhere near as awful. 

I guess I walked Barry and Ferdie that day, although this is the only picture from that moment, so who really knows. 

It doesn't matter in the slightest but why did I go to the 12th Caulfield (St Johns) Memorial Scout Hall five years ago today? I definitely can't tell you. 

I vaguely recall seeing this book in a bookshop in Elsternwick I think. Maybe it was the first time I saw it IRL? Because I have a short chapter in it, so I would have been interested. Maybe I was just pleased to see it out in the wild. 

Fabulous op shops in Elsternwick, so that's probably where the above images are from. 

This was around the time that I was getting ready to go to Europe, and I visited my aunt Maggie a few times with my mother, apart from anything else, I was proposing that Maggie take on Chanticleer as her new cat. Not sure what this would mean for Pompey but maybe I would keep him, I don't know. Maggie was ill with cancer and as it transpired she died in September. 

Pompey (rear) and Chanticleer in the Albion hovel. If you don't know the story of have forgotten (sometime I forget) I rescued these two from the mean streets of Albion, they were street cats with no future or at least the future of being run over by cars. They were flea-bitten, wormy and undesexed. I am guessing that by this stage they were no longer the first two categories and maybe not the third either anymore. 

Nancy hated them (still does). Though fortunately for Nancy, she doesn't have to think about them too often. & vice-versa. 

Once again this is all trivia but the one thing that I am amazed by is how awful things were five years ago and how good they are now (for me, not for anyone else, just me). I put most of the credit for that with Laura, who is a daily tonic. No doubt by this stage she had already agreed to look after these three cats while I was overseas, and as it transpired - she ended up keeping the two boys, together. It's hard now to imagine ever separating them. 

hello singapore and sheer bliss

I am told by blogger that over 5000 Singaporeans looked at this blog in the last 7 days, something that I actually find extremely hard to believe, extremely. But hello Singapore. 

I have nothing to report. I have been working hard on various conference-journal article-book chapter projects. Well, I suppose I have that to report but that's all. 

I did get this in the mail today:

I have wanted it for some time, and it has been curiously elusive. I thought I had found one in Hungary (!!!) and then the guy said oh he'd sold it and forgotten (or something). Then I found one in New Zealand but the guy didn't sell to people like me with slightly less than perfect buyer ratings (I don't know how I got to have a slightly less than perfect rating considering I always pay upfront and the bullshit people on discogs had put me through... but... whatever). So I retired my account and started a new one, which had a perfect buyer rating by dint of having been used to buy nothing from no-one ever. What a system! That's how I came to get a copy of Sheer Bliss.

Well, it's not the greatest record ever made, but it does have a song called 'Silent Number' on it, so I'm pretty pleased to have it. Oh also bizarrely it has a real all-star-cast-you've-never-heard-of of players on it - including, most surprisingly to me, Jarryl Worth/Wirth who was in Babeez/News and this seems to have been about the last thing he ever played on, so strange. He's on two tracks. Then there's a lot of people who'd been instrumentalists in Air Supply. 

Also, I made some good looking bread, but not hungry, I don't know if it is actually good or just looks good. 

bread

Somewhere along the way I got to be a brilliant maker of bread. I almost said the best bread maker I know, but I suppose that's still my father, who has versatility although he claims that his best bread making days are behind him (also a work colleague posts pictures of a variety of loaves which look marvellous, but I have never tried any). Anyway, I make a standard loaf, white, wholemeal or rye (I usually make white, for no reason, except that it rises unproblematically and tastes good, so does rye in fact in some respects I prefer rye but sometimes I get a gnarled little rye gnome which tastes great but is also a little humiliating) and I almost never fail. Only ingredients are yeast (activated or whatever the word is in some tepid water with a bit of sugar), flour of course, olive oil, a small amount of unnecessary salt. 

I think my bread is great, which is the most important thing.

It's better than that disc of Homicide I was watching where of the last two episodes, the first was glitchy to the max, and the second just repeated the first 'chapter' of the episode - the pre-credit set up where a roadworker in Templestowe finds a dead body in a car - over, and over and over! Have to go to the next disc. Soon. 

bit cranky

This is what you fuckin' want on a day of onerous tasks isn't it. So obviously I had to get tested ASAP so I went to the RMH. Last time I was there, it was a fairly quick process but this time there was a long queue. You just have to bite the bullet. 

The test is really fucking unpleasant but it's over fast and I knew the chances I had been infected were super low (actually I don't even know if the test picks up if you're carrying Covid without actually having it - that's a thing, right?). I do know I could still have it even though vaccinated. 

These are all on the traffic light pole when you come out of the hospital. So, anyway I had to go straight home and isolate until I got the all-clear. It took about 9-10 hours to hear the unsurprising news. In the meantime I watched the documentary on the Go-Gos, which I have to say was OK but not earth shattering, they seem like interesting people I guess. I also made this amazing bread - I feel like I've hit the jackpot finally on how to make amazing bread! After all this time. It's a bit of rye flour (organic) and the el cheapo cake / pizza flour from Cheaper Buy Miles. It's just so great!

Still I feel like today was a bit of a waste, although I did take the opportunity to do some minor admin tasks - the little things that I often avoid because they seem like death by a thousand cuts. Right now it's quite late (midnight actually) and I'm listening to Jen Cloher, who's always good.