• We gotta move these refrigerators…

    We gotta move these refrigerators…
    I’ve had Dire Straits stuck in my head all day. This morning was to be the final big push of the move, the day that we moved the last of the heavy appliances. I had a brainwave last night and called up a nearby secondhand whitegoods store. “Hi, I’ve moved into a new house and I’ve now got an extra washing machine. Do you want it? And as long as you’re here, can you help us move a fridge?” (That’s what you call putting your feminine wiles to work.) The guy agreed to come by this morning “between 9 and 10” to pick up the washing machine and help us move stuff. By 9am the Snook and I had emptied the fridge into a cooler, unhooked all the washer connections, and shifted all three appliances into place near their respective front doors. Then we waited. And we waited. And he didn’t turn up. At 10am I rang the shop again to find out where he was. The guy who answered didn’t know: “He hasn’t gotten in to work yet.” He asked if we could stay til 11:30. “Uh, we’ve both already taken time off to be here NOW. That really sucks.” So as I stood there, fuming, something snapped. “F*** IT. WE’RE MOVING THEM OURSELVES.” Thus, fueled with the kind of adrenaline that only comes of being screwed by a service professional, the Snook and I got to work. And folks, we moved both washing machines and that fridge (up six stairs!) with only a two-wheeled trolley and the sweat of our own brows. It was glorious. I’ll probably be sore tomorrow, but today I feel like a superwoman.

    Oh, and the washing machine guy finally turned up 45 minutes late. He took the old washer and gave us $100 credit at the shop. Better than nothing, I guess!


  • Bourdain rocks

    Anthony Bourdain bags out the current “stars” of the Food Network. HA! We watched a fair bit of FN when we were in Indiana last April, and Snookums still has nightmares about “that Italian chick with the huge teeth.” (Link courtesy of patrick.)


  • DDOS attack update

    For those who are interested, in the five days my site has been at my new web host, mod_security has successfully repelled 384,360 spam comment attacks on the site. That’s over 76,000 per day. And while I’ve done all I can to thwart them, I feel really powerless and frustrated by this. Whoever is doing this: YOU REALLY SUCK.


  • Moving Update

    It’s been one week now, and I’d say we’re past the 75% mark. It’s starting to look like a home! Amy came over on Friday for a much needed interior design consultation and also helped me move over quite a bit of stuff. (She’s handy with a wrench, that one.) We also had the plumber and the exterminator over that day too, which made for quite a party. (Dude, toilets aren’t cheap to fix!) Saturday the Snook and I took apart the IKEA entertainment wall and started sorting through the crap. We put some stuff into storage (VHS tapes, etc) but the rest is all going to Vinnie’s. We also started on the mammoth task of moving over the books and bookcases. Sunday I continued to move books while the Snook started bringing over office and computer stuff. What’s left: the last two bookcases, about half the kitchen stuff, and about half the office. Oh, and the fridge and the washing machine. I’ve got no idea how we’re going to handle those…


  • Idol Sighting

    The Snook and I walked to work together this morning. About five minutes after we split at Liverpool Street, I had a phone call from him.

    Me: What is it?
    Him: Idol sighting!
    Me: No way! Who?
    Him: All of ’em! I think they must be staying around here.
    Me: What were they doing?
    Him: I dunno, going to breakfast probably. I saw the Jazz Man; he was wearing a hat and sunglasses but he wears those on TV so I recognised him. And then I saw this little girl, and I was like, there’s another one! So I looked around and then I saw Bad Haircut going up the street.
    Me: Nice one.

    For what’s it worth, I want Natalie to win. Holden’s pulling out all the stops for a Matt Corby landslide though…


  • Alexander = Yoda

    Kristen posted a photo of Alexander in his complete Yoda costume. I love, love, LOVE how the three-toed socks turned out.


  • RIP Yarn Mag

    Not sure if all the Aussie knitters have heard the news yet, but YARN mag is no more. That sucks.


  • More Halloween love

    Our Mythbusters Halloween costume got some more attention this week. Mathowie posted it to del.icio.us and then mentioned it in the latest MetaFilter podcast. He referred to me as a “sexy Adam Savage”!


  • Allez cuisine!

    This week was our highly-anticipated dinner with Iron Chefs Sakai and Chen at the Observatory Hotel here in Sydney. I was kicking myself the whole time that I’d forgotten to print out the photo of me and Snook dressed as Sakai and Kaga. (And of course, I couldn’t print it out at work because the site was down. *grumble*) But that niggling annoyance aside, I was excited and rarin’ to go. We met up with Toast and Shan and headed in. We had a small table for four in the back corner of the Globe Bar with a big TV screen right beside us (for watching all the kitchen action). Shan and I took photos of every course, but I’m not going to bother posting them because Not Quite Nigella has written it all up way better than I ever could. Seriously, if you want to see and read about what we ate, go over there. I will say that my favorites were definitely Chen’s mud crab soup and his signature mapo tofu, but that my least favorite was the soup that went with the mapo tofu. Afterwards, we all rushed out into the lobby for a chance to get autographs and photos.

    Me, Snook, and the Iron Chefs

    Neither of them spoke English very well, so I chose my words carefully. “Chef Sakai, do you know ‘Halloween’?” I asked as I approached. “Halloween, yes!” he said cheerfully. “I WAS YOU!” I blurted out. “And him,” pointing at the Snook, “he was CHAIRMAN KAGA!” They laughed and laughed.

    Final tally of weird/unfamiliar stuff that I ate that I never would’ve eaten five years ago: salmon mousse, braised carp, caviar, jellyfish, calamari, sea urchin roe, foie gras, kinugasa mushrooms, mud crab (with roe), lobster tail, and shark fin (we guessed there was some in the soup I didn’t care for). And while all that sounds really exotic, the dishes weren’t really “out there.” It’s not like I had a pile of any of those things; they were mostly used in tiny amounts as interesting flavours or textures. I had the definite impression that the Chefs were toning down the weirdness factor for Western palates. (Case in point: Sadly, no fish ice cream.)

    Pre-dinner

    Here’s an extremely blurry shot of the Snook and I enjoying our champagne cocktails at the start of the evening.

    Snook guesses

    Halfway through the night, we played a game where everyone tried to guess where a mystery wine was from. The Snook made it the furthest out of the four of us. Here he is contemplating his next answer. (He didn’t win.)

    Dessert

    The desserts really were something out of this world. Here’s the Snook checking out the pannacotta on top of the upturned martini glass. We were all a little unsure how to approach this. It was nummy though.

    Me and Snook

    Everyone wants to know whether we got enough food for the money, and whether we were stuffed at the end of the night. Well, there was plenty of food. The portions were a good size (given that we had seven courses) and I’m not sure I could’ve eaten any more at the end of it. It just took so long! We were there a good five hours. Five hours of eating and drinking wine is actually pretty tiring. Here’s me and the Snook at the end of the night, just wanting to get our photo and go home to bed.

    Toast, Shan, and the Chefs

    Here are our other two tablemates, Toast and Shan. Thumbs up all around!


  • Comments are BACK

    The comments are back! Do you guys even KNOW how difficult this week has been for me? I said to the Snook in a moment of frustration on Wednesday: “It’s like I keep having all these THOUGHTS, and I don’t have any outlet to share them with the world! If Kristy has a thought and doesn’t blog it, does it ever really exist?” Hyperbole, sure, but I really missed my little site.



ABOUT

My name is Kris. I’ve been blogging since the 90’s. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I spent most of my career in the tech industry.

No AI used in writing this blog, ever. 100% human-generated.


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