Category Archives: domesticity

carrot salad


We had this with some aloo palak for dinner. Nom!
This recipe’s from ‘Cooking With Kurma.’ This is basically grated carrot, lots of chopped coriander, lemon juice, a bit of salt and some spices cooked in a bit of oil: cumin seeds, urad dahl (I had none so used some toasted sesame seeds), curry leaves and asofetida.
It was very light and fresh and tasty with the spices adding that darker, dirtier flavour.

Happy Christmas!


up-pops!
I’ve been making popup cards. It got a bit fiddly and annoying, eventually, and I ran out of card long before I actually made cards for all the people I had on my list.
I’ve also uploaded (finally) some popups from the last time I did some popup work, which was about a million years ago. Last year… no, 2007 perhaps. Sheesh.
If you’re following me on twitter, you’ve seen all these before. But it’s nice to have them in my (poor, neglected) blog as well.

today…

I cleaned the house and browsed the Spotlight catalogue. Good thing I also watched Stepford Wives.
Now that I’ve read the catalogue I know they have 20% off made to measure blinds, and that they’ll come out and measure your windows for free.
If we didn’t need blinds for our sitting room so seriously I’d think I was mad.
Actually…

kitchen!




kitchen!

Originally uploaded by dogpossum

Finally, we have kitchen. Finished on about Monday the 9th November, we had a party on the Wednesday and cooked for 10 people. It was freeking horrible cooking in that tiny space. There is NO WORKSPACE. Click the pic to see all my notes.

I have big plans for this kitchen, but only a tiny budget, a budget which must first accommodate the scary bathroom with its 1970s approach to water proofing.

reward for poor painting skills: mad dumpling orsm


Yesterday we did the first coat of paint on the ceiling of the lounge room. We sucked. But we have had the floors done and they look GREAT. These dumplings are from New Shanghai Something or other, and they are great. I had red rice and chicken, though. And we both had choy. Click through to this pic to see more photos of our floor, and then to see the painting we did today.
We did the first coat on the walls in the lounge room today. It looks terrible; we will definitely need a second coat. But then we did the ceilings upstairs and did a MUCH better job. So we figure we’re on some sort of long, slow learning curve.
We are so tired.
On the ride home, we stopped in Summer Hill to get some food for dinner. A middle aged man with short cut hair (gauge 2 maybe), dark, fashionable glasses, some sort of red shirt, driving a small red convertible alpha romeo, rego starting with V nearly hit me. Because he was trying to do a u-turn down the main drag of Summer Hill at peak hour. When I stopped and pointed at my eyes (as in ‘look’), because his window was up, he opened his car door and yelled, “DON’T YOU LECTURE ME!” and then “GET OFF THE ROAD!” Ironically, I was just about to pull over and off the road. Then he did a really bad 3-point u-turn and drove off.
There were about a million people in the street and (once again) nobody said anything. He was clearly in the wrong and I was a bit shaken. He was the most dangerous of urban animals: a middle class, middle aged man in a car, embarrassed and then angry. They are the scariest creatures in the entire world. Also, they are fucking arseholes. But I was polite and just rode away. At first we thought he was trying to turn around to come after us. But he wasn’t. He was nuts.
Is it driving a car that makes people crazy? Or do they start that way? My feeling is that driving a car makes you crazy. Cyclists tend to be rocking their endorphines (unless they’re arseholes), but driving a car immediately makes you a) dumber, b) aggressive, c) angry. Motorists tend to think that they’re invulnerable when they’re in their car. That their car’s bubble makes them immune to everything.
When I’m on my bike, I’m intensely connected to and aware of what’s around me. So I’m very, very aware of cars and bikes and pedestrians. And I’m also a much safer driver since I started riding a bike.
If you drive a car, please, please PLEASE check your blind spot a million times before you open your door and before you pull out. And then check again. Because you could kill a person on a bike.

crazed renovating woman bores internet to tears


terracotta floor tiles
I am nuts for the idea of these tiles atm. They are made of terracotta and they’re hexagonal. Click the linky if you want to read more.
I have also started thinking about door handles.
I’ve never even considered these things before. And we have had to get some housey type things in a hurry. Choosing paint was rushed (but really, there’s no choice beyond ‘classic white’ for a small flat that has dark bits). I could perhaps have chosen a stain for the buttery yellow, knotty pine wood floors we’ve just had done in a clear satin water based finish.
I am still humming and hawing over painting the woodwork white. I’d like to get this shit done before we move in. But then, I should probably go slow on this stuff so I don’t screw things up.
We will also need to get a glazier in to fix a stupidly ‘mended’ window. And I need to get the dodgy painters in to do one room (the hall over the stairs – the ceiling is >5m and it’s over the _stairs_.)
After a while, we’ll redo the bathroom (which is really quite important) and then the kitchen (which is less important, but assumed greater importance when we discovered a leak this week).
And then I want to get the space under the stairs made into cupboards or large, pull out drawers. And I want to open out the ‘wall’ which edges the stair case into think palings or even just leaving it open (and dangerous!). And we will really need some built in bookshelves in the lounge room (we’ll cover an entire wall with them).
I like the thought of doing all this stuff. We are doing the painting ourselves, though we got a dood in to finish the floors (I’ll let you know what sort of job he did. He’s very nice, but you never can tell.) We’ll get a plumber to do the plumbing stuff, and a proper tiler to tile because those are jobs you don’t want to have to live with if you fuck up. But we’ve discovered we quite like doing this renovation stuff. The Squeeze is concerned he’ll like it too much and we’ll be renovating everything, forever.
So, in order of priority, I should be thinking about:
– the woodwork round the doors, etc
– getting all the locks changed, including the window locks. Years as a rental property mean that there are definitely dozens of copies of the keys floating about. So we need new ones.
– the bathroom. I have no idea on this one. We have a good iron bath and a decent toilet bowl, but we need to rip out the shitty shower unit ASAP and the vanity is screwed. It’s a tiny room, and very poorly laid out, so we’ll need to really think carefully about how we do it. I’d like to keep the bath as it’s in very good nick, and I had thought about putting the shower over the bath, but that’s not always a good idea, and not great for re-sale. We’ll need lots of new tiles and possibly need the ceiling sorted as it does open out into the attic space under the roof. Nice and bright but also DIRTY.
– the kitchen. It needs redoing entirely.
– the built in bookshelves and other assorted fitting and joining and random acts of carpentry. I need a good cabinet maker, I think.

long overdue roundup

I’d really like:
Gordon Webster’s CD ‘Happy When I’m With You’;
Duke Heitger‘s CDs ‘Prince of Wails’, ‘Krazy Kapers’, ‘Duke Heitger’s New Orleans Wanderers;
Probably some other ones as well.
I’d also like to get over this cold I’ve had since Wednesday. I’ve been lying in bed napping and watching telly for days and it’s getting really old.
The Squeeze has installed the new version of Movable Type. It’s pretty fancy. I should probably have switched to a better blogging application, but that’s a lot of work. Meanwhile, MT and I are struggling on together.
Twitter has stolen my life. Mostly because I can use it on The Squeeze’s old ipod touch when I’m lying in bed being pathetic.
We have bought a flat and are moving in in three weeks. I haven’t booked a mover, bought paint for the painting we’ll do in two weeks, finished packing, given notice to our land lord or… done a bunch of other jobs. I’m not freaking. I have booked the lawn mower guy to come do the lawns the week we move out.
SLX was fun, but boy did I get a heavy dose of the exchange flu for my efforts. We have another exchange coming up in the near future (SSF) and I hope I’m together for that. We’ll see. Then it’s MLX in November in Melbourne, and I really hope I’m well by then – it’s the biggest social dancing event of the year for me. And DJing. I’d like to get a bit on top of my DJing for that.
PS I’ve just come across this great set of live toobs of Heigter playing in a restaurant, over on Jazz lives.

i like

I like it that the garage across the road has

All work carried out by… Qualified Tradespersons

painted on its windows. As though, despite the fact that they’re an all-male workplace, they’ve everything in place, ready for their first female mechanic or panel beater. I can imagine them making sure they have one of those pink bins in the toilet and practicing their collaborative meaning making and affirming noises in conversation.
If only the internets could learn from their example.