Snack recommendation! The Coles at Broadway had these Korean seaweed snacks on sale, so I picked up a package. And they are GREAT! Savoury, salty, crunchy. I might try to get more.
Colour Maze
Another volunteer shift, this time at the Colour Maze. See all those dots of colour? Those are stickers. And I’m the one handing out sticker sheets to hundreds of hot and overstimulated children. 😂
Peach Marshmallow – CWA 1965 Cookbook
Continuing with our vintage cooking experiment, for the second week of January we chose what looked to be a very simple recipe: January 13 – Peach Marshmallow.
That looks pretty simple, right? Here’s the recipe:
Fill up a dozen peach halves (drained from a tin) with crushed pineapple. Top with marshmallow and grill under a slow heat until marshmallows melt a little. Serve with ice cream.
The first hurdle I ran into was actually getting canned peach halves. Most of the ones on offer in our supermarket were slices. Eventually I found one brand though…
Rather than making a dozen, I just made 4 for us after dinner. I crushed some of the pineapple and filled each of the peach halves with it, then topped it with a marshmallow.
This is where I registered a concern: I went with Pascall Marshmallows because I figured they were an Aussie brand and would therefore be closest to what the recipe was asking for. Unlike American marshmallows, these are sold in the candy aisle and are intended to be eaten like sweets. They were coated in cornstarch and had almost a crunchy exterior. I had no idea how they would melt.
I put them into the oven with the top element turned on, but rather low on the temperature (like 170C). As you can see they did start to toast and melt a bit. I think they were in there well under 10 minutes, and I pulled them for fear they’d burn.
Here they are, served with ice cream.
It was… okay. I mean, it’s just a peach, some pineapple, and a marshmallow. The canned peaches did get warm, but they were still pretty firm. The marshmallow was sticky and the outside was still rather crunchy, though the middle was gooey. This didn’t feel like that impressive of a dessert.
Enter the Snook.
He decided to have a go at modernising it and fancying it up. We started by doing some research on marshmallows, and after talking to some of my older friends, it looks like packaged marshmallows were not readily available here in 1965. Instead people would have been making their own using a recipe like this. “That just looks like a Swiss meringue!” he said, and got to work. He assembled his ingredients. (The plastic container has the rest of the pineapple in it.)
He started by separating the eggs. After some internal debate he decided to do two eggs, which he weighed and then adjusted the recipe accordingly. (He did have a bit left over though, so one egg might have been sufficient.) He didn’t bother with any cream of tartar, and he had vanilla essence rather than a bean.
The egg whites were mixed with sugar and gently cooked over a double-boiler until they reached the required temperature.
Meanwhile, he halved and pitted the fresh, ripe peaches, and he brushed them with macadamia oil. (He left the skin on.)
Then he grilled the peaches on a ridged grill pan.
Once the egg/sugar mixture was at the right temperature, he took it off the heat, added the vanilla, and began to whisk.
Eventually it became thick and glossy. (He thinks he might have over whipped it a bit as he was hoping for stiff peaks, but it still looked great to me!)
Time to assemble. He filled each grilled peach with crushed canned pineapple as before, and then added a big dollop of the Swiss meringue.
And then out came the blowtorch! 🔥 He gently toasted each one to a golden brown.
And here’s the completed (Fancy) Peach Marshmallow, again served with ice cream.
This version was SO MUCH BETTER. The ripe peach was soft with the perfect amount of bitterness from the char marks. The Swiss meringue was delicious and fluffy with that slight burnt sugar taste from toasted marshmallows. This is something you could serve to guests and rightly feel pretty proud of yourself!
Future enhancement: Rodd thinks there’s also scope to improve on the pineapple element, perhaps by adding a bit of rum or bourbon? Maybe caramelised and cooked down with some brown sugar and cinnamon? YES, PLEASE.
Evil.
“There is No Safe Word” – How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades
I read the whole thing, even though I hated it after the first section. It’s terrible. Those poor women. I don’t know how to separate this from my previous feelings about his art. I feel like so many things I enjoyed are now tainted and gross. We saw The Ocean at the End of the Lane in London in 2021, and I wept at how beautiful it was. It’s all corrupted now. Time to toss my last few remaining books of his.
And yeah, I do feel some hypocrisy at tossing my Gaiman and Rowling books but keeping a shelf of Dahl. He was an awful person too, who said and did some pretty terrible things. Somehow it feels different, like he’s historical evil rather than today evil. He’s not actively hurting people walking around the world today in the way the others are. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. 😕
State of the Household Report
When I asked Rodd to have a financial review last week, he asked laughing if I wanted him to prepare a full annual report like this guy. “OMG YES I LOVE IT 😍” I replied. We decided to compromise and he made me the cool Sankey diagram I used in the previous post. If you’d like to make one for yourself, he used the tool SankeyMATIC.
Retirement – 6 months on…
Just over 6 months ago I handed in my badge and embarked on a new adventure with the Snook: early retirement. I really wasn’t sure how it was going to go. Would I get bored without a 9-5 job? Would Rodd and I get sick of spending all our time together? Was our planned budget unrealistic, and we’d have to become penny-pinching misers?
I’m happy to report that the answer to all those questions was a resounding NO.
Finances
Our gross income has dropped considerably without my salary, and it’s down about 75% on what we earned in the first half of the year. That was pretty scary for me at first, and we had regular sessions to review our budget and so Rodd could show me that we were still on track. We earned the bulk of our income through dividends on our stock portfolio, as well as returns from a few other investments we have. (Wages consists solely of Rodd’s tour guide income, as I promised myself not to even consider getting a job for six months.) Here’s a Sankey diagram that Rodd created showing our sources of income and what we spent it on.
The spending breakdown* is accurate, thanks to our tracking in You Need a Budget, but there are a few things that aren’t in there yet that are billed annually in the first half of the year (like Home & Contents insurance, for example). It also doesn’t include anything related to our renovation, as most of those costs came in the first half of the year. There are also still some tax issues we are sorting out from our time in Munich with tax agencies in the US, Australia, and Germany (😭), but hopefully that should all be resolved in 2025 and our tax situation will get way simpler. I’d also like to double the charitable donations in 2025. But even with those adjustments, we’re still pretty confident that we’re living well within our planned budget.
Overall, if you take these 6 months of outgoings (taxes + spending), multiply it by 2 (so 12 months rather than 6), and divide it by our current portfolio (savings + investments), we had an effective drawdown rate of 1.8%. That’s well within the 4% rule target, which is great as we’re ideally aiming for it to last more than 30 years.
And numbers are fine, but how does it feel? I said to Rodd yesterday: I don’t feel like I’ve been depriving myself of anything. We moved back into the house; we had a European holiday (granted, the long flights were paid with FF miles!); we went to some great shows and concerts; and we were able to absorb unexpected costs like a new fridge. If anything, our latest budget review showed us that there’s room for us to spend more without feeling too guilty. We’ve been able to give some generous gifts to support others and I’m looking forward to doing more of that.
* This is the point when I acknowledge again the huge amount of privilege involved here. Between us we had 40+ years in the tech industry, 16 of those at FAANG companies. Our mortgage is fully offset, and we’ve paid off our college loans. Neither of us is dealing with chronic illnesses or disabilities. We don’t have kids. We live in a city where we don’t need to own a car, and in a country with a functioning public healthcare system. We aren’t in immediate danger of our house burning down. 😢 We know how lucky we are, and we aren’t going to take any of it for granted.
Personal projects
When I quit my job, there were several people who expressed confusion over what I’d do with my time. Beyond moving and setting up house, I had a lot keeping me busy. Some highlights:
- I designed, built, and organised my dream craft room and office.
- I finished off a number of knitting and mending projects, and I did a heap of sewing. I made myself two new shirts, as well as placemats and two sets of cushions for the house.
- I cut up my AWS dresses and shirts and turned them into 14 bucket hats, which I raffled off to support dementia-related charities. All in all, I raised over $2400 for dementia support and research.
- I gave talks on financial independence as well as AI and creativity, and I attended a couple tech conferences as well.
- I revamped this blog and have been making regular updates to both it and RoaldDahlFans.
- I got a library card and I’ve actually managed to read a few books! We’ve also attended several library talks and events. I’ve also gotten back into video gaming and even managed to finish a few games.
- I’ve been to more concerts, plays, movies, and festivals in the last 6 months than I have in the previous two years combined.
- I’ve caught up with a lot of old colleagues and friends, for coffee chats, boozy lunches, and dinners that I wouldn’t have had the energy to do while I was working full-time.
Missed opportunities: I’d hoped to have focused more on my health, namely building strength and riding my bike. Unfortunately I badly injured my hip during the move back at the end of August, and it’s taken me several months of rest as well as physio sessions to start to recover. It also meant I had to pull out of some scheduled volunteering.
Looking forward
Now that I’m finally on the mend and our renovation project is nearing completion, my big personal focus areas in 2025 will be on physical health and giving back. I’d like to start lifting weights and putting some kilometres on my bike, and maybe lose some weight if I can. (I keep trying to justify to myself putting Ozempic in the budget, but I’m not quite there yet. 😂) In addition to increasing our charitable donations, I’d also like to do more volunteering in the community. I’ve already started strong with volunteering for the Sydney Festival, and I’m looking to do more. I’m also open to mentoring chats (whether in-person in Sydney or via videoconference) if folks are interested and want to reach out.
Beyond that, Rodd has bought us a couple Discovery Passes for rail travel and we are planning to visit more of regional Australia. First up will be trips to Mittagong and Canberra!
I’ve had a few folks reach out with job opportunities and I’ve had some ideas for part-time jobs for myself, but there’s no pressure and I haven’t made any serious steps in that direction yet. This has been the most surprising thing for me: I really don’t miss work. I miss the people, of course, but not the stress or the travel or the busy-ness. I like being in charge of my day, and organising my schedule around our lives. I like spending time with Rodd, and with my friends and family. I’m not bored, and I’m not looking for a job to give my life meaning at this point.
Things are good. 🩷
Gyros
OF COURSE I was going to insist we eat dinner at the place called “The SouvLucky Country.” GENIUS! 🇬🇷🇦🇺❤️
Cirque Alfonse
We headed to Parramatta to see “Animal” as part of the Sydney Festival. It was incredible! Live music, dance, humour, and gasp-inducing stunts. So good!! 🎪 🚜 🐔
The Whale (again)
The forecast was for storms but thankfully it was another beautiful sunny day at Bondi Beach!
I had another volunteer shift at The Whale, helping hundreds of beachgoers have fun with this amazing installation of puppetry. Thanks to my fellow volunteer Christy for joining me, as well as the Waverley Council folks and the talented team from Spare Parts!
Bootlickers
I was on the global board of Women at Amazon for 3 years. I met hundreds of folks working tirelessly on inclusive programs across multiple affinity groups around the world, top of their day jobs for no extra pay. And now this? This is disgusting, a slap in the face to all those Amazonians, and Andy Jassy should be ashamed.