i don't listen to yo yo ma

Went to see @mystefaction in the Messiah on Sunday evening with @narrante (uh, too lazy to look up proper formatting). It was pretty great. We were waaaaaaaaaaaaay up in the front of the balcony at the side, such that when we stood for the Hallelujah Chorus I got vertigo and had to hang on to the railing. I wonder if the balcony sides are made of unfinished concrete so that they look more solid?

The tenor's bio in the program seemed far too accomplished for a gentleman who's photo was of a 30 something year old, to the extent that Lana and I looked him up on wikipedia, and he was born 48 years ago! so obviously an old photo, we thought - until he walked out on the stage, at which point we decided he must be the Doctor, as noone else could look so much younger than they are. 

Later we decided to start a commune somewhere in the western suburbs (and sell gingerbread in a library, i think?); it was that kind of night.

Monday was our excursion to a waterpark/final party with students. It was pretty great; my team won the watermelon eating competition and I do like winning. Jen managed to cut the inside of her mouth - on WATERMELON - and kept eating as she is also a watermelon-eating machine. It's important to know your strengths. Am a little sunburnt, though, as I manage to forget to sunscreen my cleavage. oh well.

Tuesday - when i started writing this entry! - I had an induction to the school I will be taking leave from. It actually seems pretty great, and would be super exciting to work there next year. I would not mind at all if I couldn't get into uni, and had to go to work there! The librarian is good at the stuff that i hate doing, and i'm good at the stuff she's never had the time to learn. PLUS, and this makes me really intrigued: she reckons that they've managed to make it cool to pay attention in class and also generally be a good student. WHAT, BZUH, HOW, etc but wow.

The final-ever presentation night was last night, and god, am so exhausted now all i'm good for is drinking tea and whinging about there being no new Castle, so, am going to get back to that right now. tmw is the christmas party and there will be speeches and crying and tbh i don't really want to go. which i guess just proves how tired i am. 

After hanging out in a friending meme for a few pages, I feel like I should post something either fannish or substantial here, if not both. But the back of my brain is spending most of its time stressing about work closing down in a week and a half, and still not knowing what I'm doing next year. I will know by 15 January; perhaps then I will start posting about other things than food.

But now: Emergency Dessert. I don't like plain vanilla icecream so when I decided yesterday that dinner needed a dessert I was momentarily sad that it was all we had. But then I saw raspberries, and dark chocolate, and fanced it up a bit!

Pull some frozen raspberries - about two handfuls - out of the freezer as soon as you realise you want dessert. Consider microwaving them (on low!) to defrost them faster. Break some dark chocolate (this is how it's emergency dessert: milk chocolate would already have been eaten, but in this house dark chocolate is an ingredient, rather than food) into a bowl and microwave it to melt. Drop a handful of flaked almonds into a frying pan and seriously consider butter, and sugar, and making almond toffee, but realise that is far beyond the bounds of emergency dessert, and you don't want to scrub the frying pan tonight anyway. Toast the almonds. Get the icecream out of the freezer. Once the chocolate is melted and liquid, stir in a drop of almond essence, a tiny pinch of salt, a sprinkle of cinnamon, and a slosh of cream - just enough that the chocolate won't solidify again straight away.

Dish up four small bowls of ice cream, pour over the chocolate sauce, the hopefully-defrosted raspberries, sprinkle with the toasted almonds, and have your family be confused that you managed dessert before the coffee was ready.

saddest first week of term 4 ever, i feel - although (still!) super glad that we're closing down this year and not trying to hold out one extra year. I'm on the committee to organise the last day (for students) party; my suggestion was a frozen margarita machine but that got turned down.

Apparently this is how it will work (from my point of view):
books go to schools in our coalition or I can send them to charity (assuming the charity can pick up/pay freight).
no one is allowed to come and look over the collection - i (arbitrarily!) pick what books go to what schools
by the end of this term, i need to have every book off the shelf in a pile - one pile for each of the schools - and then, next year, the coalition school librarians get to come pick up their pile (and if they don't need anything I've put there, they can put it on the charity pile)
i don't have to withdraw anything or pass on catalogue records or do any kind of stocktaking (yessssss)
if a teacher knows where they're going, and knows that something is a valuable resource, they can ask me to put it on the pile for the school they'll be moving to (assuming they're moving to a coalition school i guess)
and all the vhs is going in the skip (a lot has already been dumped, i'm quite gleeful about dumping the rest of it!).

man i feel so much better knowing what it is i'm supposed to get done!

i also managed not to laugh at the principal when she told me to put books in "one corner for each of the five schools - and one for charity" our library is a square, we don't have that many corners. feels a little weird that "every shelf and every cupboard should be empty" by the last day of term - but the floor should apparently be covered in books?

I wore a pretty skirt and a tshirt and a cardigan and knee high boots yesterday - a fairly standard winter outfit for me, although admittedly not a cardigan i'd worn very often this winter - and apparently looked so good in it that three separate people confusedly asked me "are you interviewing?? i thought you wanted to go to uni next year??" so today i'm wearing jeans and a witty internet-saying tshirt. no job interviews for me!

So anyway, the other thing I've been doing lately is cooking my way through Viva Vegan. It's a great book, generally well written and full of interesting sounding recipes, and ingredients I don't often cook with. The first thing I cooked out of it this year was the potato & chickpea enchiladas, which got the response "how is this vegan? it's really tasty!" which is amusingly wrongheaded but flattering nonetheless.

In the last two weeks I've also made the seitan chorizo - look, before i say what i thought, i should qualify that a) I'm not actually vegan and b) pretty much my favourite way of eating animals is as spiced preserved pork products - salami, chorizo, bratwurst from the vic market - all those types of sausages are why i end up being "vegetarian-ish" and not actually vegetarian. so, look, the seitan chorizo is good, sure, but it's not a lot like chorizo. It's the same texture all the way through (chorizo usually has lumps of meat and fat in it) and it's awfully bread-like. Which is unsurprising for something made from flour and spices. The recipe made six sausages, which i put in the freezer - still have one left!

The first meal we ate the chorizo in was caldo verde - a potato soup with leafy green vegies stirred in, and chorizo on the top. I quite liked the soup, but next time might make it with more chilli in or something - it was the tiniest bit bland. I also chopped one chorizo into some chilli sin carne one evening, but it was wasted in there.

The other day I made drunken beans with seitan chorizo - i used two cans of pinto beans so that I could make it after work and not soak and boil the beans for 10 hours or whatever. I also changed the recipe by using a whole can of tomatoes (instead of one cup) and left out the tequila (cause i wasn't going to buy a bottle for the sake of one tablespoon). Really good. Really really tasty. definitely making this again.

I served the drunken beans with yellow rice & garlic - should have broken up the annatto paste more, it was a little lumpy - and simple cabbage salad. I don't even like cabbage much, but i thought i'd give it a try: shredded green cabbage, grated carrot, dressed with cilantro-citrus vinagrette. and it was so good! so tasty. now i kind of want cabbage in the vegie box next week so that i can make this again! The recipes were written to serve six; we got two serves of leftovers and still both of us ate so much it was almost painful.

Last week I made the chimmichurri baked tofu, brazilian orange rice, and silverbeet with raisins and capers. The rice and the silverbeet were good - the silverbeet particularly is on my "make it again!" list - but the chimmichurri baked tofu seemed like a lot of effort for not a particularly great result. I'd like to try the other baked tofu recipes, still, but I wasn't particularly impressed by this one.

Actually all the baked tofu recipes seem to be a little awkward: one bakes the tofu for about twenty minutes, and then coats them with the marinade/sauce and bakes it for another 20-30 minutes. It seems to me that that's only good enough to have the flavour around the edges of the tofu and not really all the way through! But the ppk forums are pretty enthusiastic about the orange mojo baked tofu so I'll give that a go soon.

I've also made the quick red posole twice now - once for just two people and once for four. the cans of hominy i can buy in melbourne are twice the size of the ones called for in the recipe, so when i served it for four i just used the whole can. Actually I should have upped the beans when making it for four too - to be honest i can't remember if there were leftovers when i made it as written for just me and danni! but the quick red posole is totally on our make again and again and again list, and I've even got a couple extra cans of hominy in the pantry so that i don't have to keep going back to johnston st (which makes it considerably less quick). new fact this year: hominy is actually really tasty! it's just corn, but processed in such a way as to make the kernals both fluffy and chewy, and it is delicious in a tomatoey-beany soup with avocado and chilli and corn chips on top.

on the weekend i'm going to make tamales, i hope: red chile seitan and veggie mole. The thing about a lot of these recipes is the other recipes you have to make first: for example, the enchiladas way back in march required green tomatillo salsa (which is pretty simple - things in a blender, then cooked up a little) and pine nut crema (which is even more simple - things in a blender, then left until the next day), but it means you have to keep flicking back and forth between different chapters to put together your shopping list and plans, and that you often have to prepare part of the meal the day before you eat the rest of it. I find it a little off putting, and it's why I've mostly stuck to the simpler recipes so far. but not now! tonight i shall make steamed red seitan, red chile sauce and mole sauce, and then tomorrow make fillings, and then make the tamales themselves. And then our freezer shall be full of delicious foods! conceivably i will even get danni to take pictures and then do a real food blog for it.

would you like to come to watch doctor who with us on mondays? we have been rewatching from the beginning of new who, in order to edumacate C, who finally got sick of not knowing what we were talking about. also i will cook you dinner, if you text me by 5pm on any particular monday (not valid june 11!). i admit that, being fairly familiar with season 1, i am actually sitting in the corner working on continuum while the tv is on, but it is entertaining nonetheless.

one of the reasons i like the otw is when i email them, they reply to "emilly" and not, as many of the replies i've gotten from various hotels lately "emily". (hotel person x has NO EXCUSE cause my given name is IN MY EMAIL ADDRESS. why should i arrange to give you thousands of dollars when you don't read?)

Because of reasons, I'm working on the continuum 8 conbook. I didn't plan to, this year; i've done it twice already, and i had other things to do! and yet. in the past when i have done this, i have really liked the bit where i lay things out, and mess around in InDesign, and go over it again backwards to find typos. This year I haven't got there yet but do you know what is FAR easier? Asking for people to pay for advertising! I hated doing that in 2009 & 10. This year I'm just flinging out the emails. They say no? whatever, they lose. They say yes? yay! I don't know if it's because I have "Chair, Continuum 8" in my signature, or if it's cause it's so not the most important thing i have to get done this week, or cause I'm a grownup now? I don't know, but i'm super happy with it!

I have also delegated much of the writing i - well, i never wanted to do it, i've begun to develop a thing about writing lately - but the writing i thought i'd like to have in the book. things that are easier when your girlfriend is a writer and interested in the same subjects you need writing on: my life.

i have opinions on things unrelated to conventions! i just haven't written them out yet. maybe one day.

I am moving house and am not fond enough of the following books to move them too. but I could give them to you!

( crime, boarding school stories, sf, and random stuff )

OKAY SO:
1/ I have inexplicably* fallen out of love with Hawaii 5-0, within the (relatively long, this time) pre-titles bit, in the exact scene that usually I would have adored. (Danno can't breathe! oh noes!) I didn't even bother watching the end of the episode. Instead I have been repeatedly rewatching the episodes of Leverage with Mark Sheppard in, cause Dr Who reminded me how much I love Mark Sheppard being rude and slightly evil.
*yes, inexplicably. i loved it even though it was awful, so why should it's awfulness make me not love it?

2/ I finished that shawl I was working on during Swancon & Comedy festival*, and in an effort to use the yarn I already own, am trying, but failing, to knit self-striping socks. SOCKS, WHY SO AWKWARD? I measured my leg, and am knitting to gauge, and yet these socks are too big even for Clare.
*conceiveably i will even wash and block and photograph it, and upload said photograph, but I wouldn't hold my breath. About the photography, anyway. I might be able to block it next week.

3/ In between getting frustrated at my knitting, to a soundtrack of Leverage Associates being frustrated by evil good guys, I am also being frustrated by hotel venues. How hard could it be to just open a hotel with function space for 200 people and, you know, run the con inside my own hotel? IT COULD WORK.

4/ Twinings Lemon Scented Black Tea comes from Woolworths, not Coles. Next time we run out, we will not panic about Coles' out of stockness, because we will remember that only Woolies seem to stock it. Of course, that will be a long time in the future, because we managed to buy three packages, and one lasts long enough for us to forget where it came from...

5/ I got my very first speeding fine. Trufax: it's from the apparently-dodgy according-to-the-herald-sun but not according-to-vicroads camera on Eastlink below the Wellington Rd bridge - but if I was indeed at Wellington Road at that time on a Friday morning I probably was speeding. Cause I would also be late for work.

6/ Occasionally Clare complains about my lj being "pick on emilly's housemate story!" but then she does things like go out when she's ill and buy a life size cardboard cutout of RPattz and put it in my bed.
6b/ RPattz is quite tall.
6c/ It was surprisingly hard to convince Clare she could take the day off. If I can hear you coughing from my room, you have a nasty cough. That means you can call in sick. If I can hear you coughing from my room AND you have pus in your throat, you need to go to the doctor, you crazy person, that's pretty much what doctors are for.

7/ I got carded! at the supermarket liquor store on a Wednesday at 5pm. Best part: the whole day, people were telling me I looked tired. Surely tired means i'd look older, not younger?

Suspension of disbelief, broken: look, I realise Steve McGarrett is more of a badass then I am, but the week after you break two bones in your wrist? It still hurts. Too much to carry most of the weight of a nine year old boy. Especially when there are easier ways to carry P. Diddy's emo kid.

How long does it take me to pack for a week in Perth: fucking way too long, really. Also, lol my wardrobe: I will pack the black skirt and the red skirt; the black dress and the red dress; the black shoes and the red shoes; what shirts should I bring? Perhaps a black one and a red one?

A refrain familiar to many of you: where the fuck is the upfield train?

PEOPLE OF THE INTERNETS!

shortly it will be my birthday! and also the first roller derby match of the year! a splendid coincidence.

part the first: a picnic! There shall be cake! possibly pie! & ridiculously sweet soft drinks and lunch-type foods. I'm thinking Central Park, cause that way, if it rains we can just come back to my house. also, directions are easy: it's right at the end of the number 5 tram route.

part the second: at about half past six, some of us will drive all the way to Keysborough, because that is where the derby is. It's the South Seas Roller Derby, in their second season. you should come! it'll be awesome! tickets are on sale here. i will even clean out my car so that human beings can fit in the back. btw you go for the charmers -- they are the purple team. and also the best.

if you consider you will be very hungry, you should rsvp in the comments or something. i mean, i usually overcater, but what if this is the one time i miscalculate? i'm prepared for you to be vegan, or gluten intolerant, but you could bring a plate anyway. also, if you don't have my number, you should tell me so, but I suspect everyone who's reading this far already does.


*if you are the interest in the roller derby, you should notice that tickets for the next three vrdl matches all go on sale 5 march.

Things that are not entirely surprising: Clare's first issue of Pro Bull Rider arrived today and I suspect - going by the advertisements - that neither Clare nor I are really in the target audience. However, we will be able to use the poster of Bones, the bull who retires this month, to cover up the boring March picture in the Top Gear calendar in our bathroom.

Things that are surprising & excellent: a conversation
Clare: hey i read a book about you today! well not you, but
me: a librarian who likes science fiction?
clare: yeah, but, kind of. not really. it's on the couch there
me: oh hey! I was just about to buy Among Others!

so now i don't have to pay hardcover import price, which is what was stopping me so far.

things that are exciting:
I have an epic spreadsheet of continuum 8. it's pretty much all I am thinking about at any given moment. I probably shouldn't work on it at work though! fair warning: i am going to be repeatedly excited about continuum 8 in this journal over the next sixteen months. oh look i have a continuum icon now!