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earthkissed

Just me and my thoughts, most of them silly.

Name:
Location: brisbane, queensland, Australia

I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a friend. Sometimes I am good at these things, sometimes I am not.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Helicopter

Well on Thursday before our guests left we took a drive down The Great Ocean Road. It was quite a long trip to try and do in one day! However, the best part was we went on a helicopter in order to see the twelve apostles and some of the other rocks:) It's the first time I've ever been on a helicopter, and it was fantastic:) It is certainly a great way to see that part of the coast. Thanks a lot to Aunty D:)

On the way home we stopped at some rockpools again, and I was fairly determined that I was going to pick up a starfish, just for a moment, before I put it back in. However Matt felt that as they had eight legs they might be octopus. Now I tried to point out that octopus look quite different and that starfish can have quite a number of different numbers of legs, but as I am not a marine biologist, I didn't have a lot to back it up with. So I caved and I did not play with the starfish (it would really have sucked to be wrong). I have since found photos identifying the particular starfish on the web. It seems quite benign, and it generally has eight legs. I don't quite remember it's name now.

Last night I worked night shift, and I will be doing so for the rest of this week. That means I may not post, or I may post complete silliness. It's always hard to tell exactly which way it will swing.

Here is something I wrote while we were driving along the great ocean road:
Great Ocean Road
I stared out the window
And I saw the ocean
Rushing to the edge of the earth
And pulling at the sky
To keep it taut above us
Like a peg holding a tent fly

I stared out the window
And I saw sand
Compressed by the weight of time
And forming towers
Multicoloured, multilayered towers
That interrupted an ocean blue

I stared out the window
And saw the shiny, curved hubcap of a truck
Reflecting a perfect distortion of my car
Twisting, twirling, shiny, spinning
Tiny and complete
But I didn't see me in it

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Guests

Currently Matt and I have two guests staying with us. Matt's Aunty D and his cousing Dom. They all had a lot of fun without me the first part of the week when I was at work (doing things like MCG tours, not too sad about missing out on that). But now I have some days off and we are having a lot of fun. Monday night, Matt and Dom went to a chocolate making course (which certainly hasn't turned out to bad for us - we have been eating what they made), meanwhile Aunty D and I went to a really yummy chinese restaurant and had spicy salt and chilli prawns. Tuesday we wondered around the zoo a little bit, before heading out to a restaurant that I had read about in the paper and was desperate to go to. The Grand at Richmond has a "Bunny of the day" special, and why wouldn't you love a restaurant that had that? It is mostly italian style food. Wendy and I had prawns and quail respectively for entree, and it was delicious. The quail was tender and chargrilled and all things good. For main I had the crispy duck with juniper berry and orange sauce. I savoured every mouthful. Matt and Wendy had the bunny of the day - rabbit loin stuffed with veal and pork sausage (I think). Dom had some very yummy looking pasta dish. We had a really nice shiraz with dinner - Bailey's of GlenRowan, 1920's block shiraz 2003, I've got to go and buy some, really good for it's price. For dessert Dom had italian doughnuts stuffed with pistachio icecream and with something arather else. Matt had Jasmine sorbet, with caramelised blood oranges - it was a really unusual flavour, and quite yummy. Wendy and I shared lemon crepes with homemade vanilla icecream. It was perfect.

Today we drove around the Yarra Valley, wine and cheese tasting the day away. It was fantastic, and I spent too much money. We came home and made homemade pizzas (lamb, sweet potato, capsicum, mushroom, olive, garlic etc), we didn't have one of the wines we bought today, opting instead for The Laughing Magpie by D'Arenberg (I love D'Arenberg wines because the stories on the back of them and the names are so great, plus they taste superb). Anyway, I must go because tomorrow we're off to the great ocean road and we have an early start.

After dinner I have been outside poiing with the poi Tim bought me - they're glow in the dark rather then ones that you set alight.... All too sad, when I move back to queensland I will have to graduate to poi that you set on fire. What's the point if hitting yourself with them doesn't land you in the emergency department?

Ski trip photos - interesting

Here are some of the photos from our ski trip taken with the same camera and film that aren't quite as pretty but are a little more interesting...

There were some friendly donkeys... this is a shadow of one of them, it's ear is sticking up:)

I think this farmer was trying to scare away the rest of the foxes...


This was some kind of cattle thing it was all wooden and cool. Not sure what it was for.

I found one more dusk photo:)

Ski Trip Photos - dusk/sunset

When we went skiing we took our rolleiflex medium format camera and we had some slide film in it. Some of the photos were quite cool, so we got them printed and I have scanned them into the computer. They have lost something in the process (the colours were quite brilliant in the slide film, it is particularly good with the blues and purples compared to normal film IMHO), but I still like the photos. The first lot I'll put up will be all the dusk/sunset photos.



Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Purple Podded Peas




The joy of growing your own yummy sweet peas, you can choose slightly strange ones to grow if you want:)

Friday, September 22, 2006

Whispers to the Sky

Rain pounds the pavement
My brain feels riddled with holes
And everything is flooding out
Am I losing brain cells by the day?

I imagine the rain is someone's wisdom
Falling through the cracks in their head
Nurturing the earth with dreams
But it is the slow death of living for the one it comes from

I put my hand in the wet that's seeping from the sky
The air is humid and warm around the cool drops
That seem to burst as they hit my skin
I whisper to the sky, I feel your pain, I feel your pain.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Purple Fingers

I have purple fingers. We grew purple podded peas in our garden and today I picked a little crop. We have been shelling them and eating them raw, they are yummy and sweet. We have cooked a very yummy dinner, but apart from a few bites to taste that it was good we aren't eating it. It's going into the freezer for another night, as we are going to someone's house for pizza (a bit of a last minute plan). The peas have just been a little snack to tide us over.

Tonight's Dinner

Sweet-sour Duck with Mango
Ingredients:
350g of duck breasts (if you don't like duck, or it's too expensive the recipe works really well with pork as well, tonight we used chicken because we already had some but personally I think pork is a better substitute for duck)
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp dry sherry or chinese rice wine
1 tsp sesame oil (we use olive oil instead of all the various oils the recipe calls for)
1 tsp chinese five-spice powder
1 tsp brown sugar
2 tsp corn flour
3 tbsp chinese rice vinegar
1 tsp tomato ketchup (we used tomato paste as we don't have tomato sauce)
1 mango, not too ripe (due to the fact that mangoes are $8 here at the moment, we used tinned mangoes this time - they aren't really as flavoursome, better to cook this in mango season, but it is still quite yummy with tinned mangoes if you are feeling poor)
3 baby eggplants (baby as in 2-3 inches, so otherwise buy the smallest ones you can find, and you'll probably only need 1 of any other sized eggplant)
1 red onion
1 carrot
4 tbsp groundnut oil (once again we used olive oil)
1 garlic clove, sliced
2.5cm fresh root ginger cut into shreds
75g sugar snap peas (we had a bumper crop from our garden, so I put in about double that)

Instructions:
1. thinly slice duck breasts and place in bowl, mix together with 1 tbsp of the soy sauce, sherry, sesame oil and five spice powder. Marinate for 1-2 hours if able.
2. mix together sugar, cornflour, rice vinegar, tomato ketchup and remaining soy sauce in a bowl, put aside.
3. peel mango slice flesh from stone then cut into thick strips. Slice aubergines, onion and carrot into similar size pieces
4. heat wok until hot. add some olive oil, swirl it around. drain the duck (reserving remaining marinade for later) and cook until fat is crisp and golden. remove and keep warm. Add oil to wok and stir fry eggplants until golden (approx 3mins)
5. add oil if needed and add onion, garlic, ginger and carrot, stir fry for 2-3 mins then add sugarsnap peas and stir fry for 2 more minutes.
6. add mango, duck, remaining marinade and preprepared sauce to wok. cook, stirring until sauce thickens.
7. serve with rice.
****************

Today was a lazy day. I slept in late. I got up and ate breakfast. I went back to bed with a cup of tea and a book. I got up and we walked to the shops and got a coffee and did some grocery shopping, walked home again, then ate lunch. Went for a drive to a local little art display and looked at some pretty paintings, and got ourselves invited to the opening night. It's Friday, and I'm thinking I might go. Did some more shopping, came home and wasted the rest of the day before cooking dinner. I love days like these. The more unproductive the better!

This week work has been frustrating. I had to let someone sign out against medical advice, and I felt like crying. It was someone who needed surgery for a self inflicted injury. They seemed to already be developing signs of sepsis to me - mottled skin, temperature rising. And I felt quite worried for them. But they were competent to make the decision, disagreeing with what a doctor tells you, doesn't make you incompetent. They were quieter and more polite then other patients who have psych issues and more then anything I felt really sad and worried for them. Normally patients like that would leave me feeling frustrated and not much else... Don't know why it's gotten to me. Everybody's free. It's a good thing. I know it is. I'm sure it is. I wonder though, seatbelts and helmets are mandatory because they save lives. Are we free? Never mind. I shall leave my rambling behind and get ready to go out for pizza.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Disconnected

There are days when I feel like this, it's so hard to connect outside of me. I don't know why. The world moves and people speak and it's a blur that I'm not a part of. I can't focus on it at all, and I can't remember it either. This morning feels like it was months ago. Short term memory refuses to convert and everything I did is lost. Then in the car my music started playing, and it was the only thing that entered my bubble of separateness, it felt so appropriate....

"I try to talk to you
And can't get past the weather
The friend I thought I knew
Found somethin' somewhere better
So I'm hangin' on your line
Thought we could speak together
Don't know what it is with you
You seem gone forever" --- by Machine Gun Fellatio

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Tall Stories

Well the other day Matt and I went to Werribee Zoo and did the Tall Order tour (which was a birthday present to me). This meant we got to go and see where the giraffe's lived and they called them over and they fed them very close to us. They call them over by driving in front of them with a ute full of hay and making them chase it. Here are some photos of the trip to the zoo. Zoos can be sad because there are all these beautiful animals that are in cages, but then you think about animals such as the Przewalski horse, which was extinct in the wild but the zoos made a breeding program and have reintroduced them to the wild. So zoos can play a rather important part in conservation as well as education (the best way to conservation is education in my opinion). Anyway, enough rambling on in silliness, here are some photos:





Anyway, I love Cheetahs, and they were fed, so they did stuff, which was good. One of my favourite books is the true story of Pippa, a cheetah who was brought up by humans when she was little, and then reintroduced to the wild.

Today at work somebody had dislocated their middle finger at the proximal IP joint. The tip of their finger went white and numb before it started to go purple - I guess the blood supply was interrupted. The xray looked very cool (click here to see an xray on the web that's similar), but even more satisfying was after I had put a ring block in to anaesthetise the finger, I got to pop it back into place. It made a very satisfying clicking noise, and then he could bend his finger again, and after awhile, the tip of his finger went pink again. It was the favourite part of my day.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Cheap, healthy, yummy

Well I had a late breakfast, so I didn't bother with lunch, so we're having an early tea. Making a lentil and sweet potato soup. It's sort of a hybrid recipe that we made up last week. It is very cheap to make, it seems reasonably healthy and it tastes very yummy.

Lentil and Sweet Potato Soup
Ingredients:
1 tomato
1 onion
1 chilli (dried or fresh)
1 sweet potato
1 can of lentils (or if you're not impatient you could soak dried lentils)
1/4 teaspoon of dried turmeric
salt and pepper to taste
crushed cumin to taste (but a generous amount recommended
coriander to garnish (if you can be bothered going out to the garden to get it)
beef stock (we had homemade beef stock in our freezer so it's what we used, but you could use vege stock if you were inclined that way) - we added 3 cups of beef stock and 1 cup of water. If too much evaporates off, I just add in a bit more boiling water as I go.

Basically I just cook the onion till it's soft, add in the tomato and chilli, cook it a bit longer, then add pretty much everything else (starting with the stock) except the coriander. I tend to adjust the cumin as I go, adding more when it's obvious how much it needs. And I just simmer it until it seems done. It makes maybe 4 bowls of soup depending how big a serve you want.

The first time we had it we made our bastardised version of garlic naan bread with it (which means we made pizza dough, but flattened it out thin and fried it with garlic and oil on some pancake pans). Tonight we're being lazy and having bake at home bread rolls with it.

My music is on random and it just started playing "Dance 10, looks 3" from A Chorus Line and now I know I'm going to be walking around the house singing "tits and arse, bought myself a fancy pair" for days *sigh* It's okay around the house, but sometimes I find myself humming/singing some fairly random music when I'm at work, and it's a bit worrying!

I think my soup is finished, I'm going to have to go and eat:) yummy!

Now I pee by candlelight, and other tales of woe

Well, the title is true, the light in the toilet has broken. It's not just that the bulb is blown, the light fitting is not working. This would not be such a problem if the hallway lights were working... however the hallway light bulbs have blown, and Matt is unable to figure out how to get the glass off them to change the bulb... I'm sure if I were taller, I'd be able to do it:) So we have a candle on the window sill now... I'm not sure that kind of ambient lighting is really appropriate for the toilet, but it's all we have:)

I haven't written comments on anyone's blogs, or blogged for a little while. This is because some evil problem with my server stopped me accessing all my favourite sites, and I have been unable to use blogspot.

I have just got home from work and I am very tire, so I will have to save a more lengthy update, as well as commenting on everyone's blog till another day. I hope everyone is well

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Interesting case for medicos

A few days ago in emergency I saw a 12yo who presented with unequal pupils and headache. On closer history taking she had photophobia, headache and CHANGING unequal pupils. As in when I saw her, her left pupil was definately dilated compared to the right, but earlier her dad, her and her GP all said the right pupil was more dilated. This had been occurring for two days. No history of head injury, no history of a cold. Afebrile. Her pupils really were quite obvious, and it was kind of cool. Complete examination, including neurological, normal except diplopia on upward gaze.

As per my consultant we did a CT head and bloods. They were all normal. I put forth that perhaps it was a weird migraine. We contacted paeds registrar who said "migraine with neurological symptoms". I still at that point thought it was pretty interesting. She was admitted overnight just for observation.

However today I was covering paeds, and I asked one of the nurses how this particular patient was going. And the nurse told me the consultant had said the patient had hippus. Which is, according to the online dictionary "Spasmodic, rhythmical dilation and constriction of the pupil, independent of illumination, convergence, or psychic stimuli". How cool is that? I don't know too much more about it then that one sentence.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Happy Father's Day

Well here in Australia, it is now, for almost 40 minutes, Father's Day. I can't sleep because my internal clock is a little messed up from night shift, and I keep thinking about Father's Day. I think Father's Day is not just a day to give our dad's presents. It's a day to honour them, to remember all that they've given to us. So in a round about sort of example, I want to explain the most important thing my dad has done for me.

In the movies, you always see those scenes. Where it's night, and everyone thinks the child has gone to bed. Instead the child is sitting just around the corner, on the stairs, listening to everything that is going on downstairs. The child listens in sadness, in sullen resentment, as the child's dad comes home drunk and argues with the child's mother, maybe hits her around a bit etc. And the child grows up sad, conflicted, hating his father, and loving his father.

We had a staircase like that in one of the houses we lived (Chapel Hill), and I was the only child who had an upstairs bedroom. I used to sit on the staircase, around the corner, hidden from view when I was supposed to be in bed. I used to listen in sadness, in sullen resentment, to all the fun everybody was having without me. I used to cry tears of frustration, write angry poems, about how I was being left out of all their conversations, their secrets, their parties, their fun. And I grew up, happy and well adjusted, loving my father.

This is what my Father has given me. Memories of a happy home. A beautiful legacy where I don't look back and remember a disjointed, unhappy home, but where I look back and remember how I wished I'd been downstairs where all the fun was happening. My dad and I have had our moments. Like any normal family - we have argued, we disagree. He's not perfect, I'm not perfect. But he gave me the kind of home environment, that I can only hope to give my children one day (if I ever decide to have children).

I know that I am extremely blessed to have parents like I do. I know that a lot of people haven't had this same experience, and perhaps for them Father's Day is not a happy day, but a day of sadness for what could have been.... I hope those people are doing okay and that today isn't too hard on them.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Chocolate Crackles

I had a sudden urge for chocolate crackles this evening after dinner, so I quickly looked up the recipe on the web (the traditional one that comes on the side of the rice bubbles packet), and we dashed to the shops to buy the ingredients. I must have been a bit of a childhood sweets kind of mood, because when we were at the shops I got an urge for homemade sherbet (the dry fizzy kind, not the sorbet type). So we bought some jelly crystals (I had this vague memory that you needed bicarb, icing sugar and jelly crystals). Then we went to buy copha to make chocolate crackles with, however when I looked at the back of copha and reasised it was mostly made of coconut oil (arguably one of the worst fats for you) and that it was 95% saturated fat (100% actual fat), I couldn't bring myself to buy it, it was just too unhealthy. I know that chocolate crackles aren't actually healthy, but.... The result of this entire encounter is that I have just made chocolate crackles with couverture chocolate instead of cocoa and copha, it was not in an attemt to make snobby chocolate crackles, just vaguely healthier ones. It feels almost sacrilegious to change a recipe that I think is probably one of the first things children are taught to cook, and something we all remember eating when we were little. Anyway, they taste delicious.

The sad news is that I don't have all the ingredients for sherbet, you need citric acid as well. Will have to get that tomorrow. For now I will settle for cups of tea with chocolate crackles:)

Mirror To You

Do you hear me?
Really hear me?
Or is the noise of my voice
A distraction from your thoughts
As you carefully choose
What you will say next

Do I touch you?
Really touch you?
Or am I mirror to you?
A way to bounce your thoughts
To hear how they sound
On another's tongue