Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in tikiwanderer's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, July 13th, 2008
2:18 pm	Restaurant review: RokSalt, Bright Late lunchtime, in Bright, on a weekend at the end of the school holidays. Several cafes open, but none quite looking right. And then we found RokSalt. A fish place, advertising fish and vegetarian. Something a bit more than a fish-and-chip shop, restaurant quality fish in huge serves at upmarket fish-and-chipperie prices. The usual newspaper reviews you get in a shop window were from businesses of a different name in Byron Bay and Phillip Island... but the man in the photos was the same smiling guy with the tattooed arms who'd just served us. Good food, worth looking out for. My tuna steak with wasabi mayonnaise was good, so was the salmon with herb pesto, Mum's box of tempura vegetables was huge and delicious, and Chris barely made it through the heat of his vegetable curry. None of us were sure why they advertised hand-cut chips as something special, but the chips *were* pretty darn good. Specials board had good stuff that was in season, all the fish was good and fresh. Unfortunately, I shudder to think of the food miles - Bright's not exactly by the ocean. But the quality of the food really makes this place worth a stop. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
8:00 am	We were hot air balloons I dreamt this morning that we were training to fly with balloons. There were maybe eight or twelve of us in a seminar room, and we held our arms above our heads like an "O". The instructors put something under our clasped hands that gave us lift, so that we floated off the ground just a couple of feet. And then we had to try and steer, working out how to turn ourselves, move forward and back, all at only a slow bouncing speed. If you unclasped your hands or tilted them too much you'd lose the invisible thing that was giving you lift. It was kind of warm, so you could feel it, but you couldn't see it. I managed to drop mine, and dropped to the ground, but managed to work out how to regenerate the warm-lift-thing and got going again. It was quite funny, watching all of us bouncing around and giggling. And this was about being a hot air balloon, so that we knew how to do it. The main part of the class was actually outside - once we'd got the hang of the hot air ballooning, we went out into the daylight and were given canopies of balloons to fly with, the same shape as those long sideways rectangular kites that you see people parasailing under. We took those, and with the same body motions we'd just been learning, kept ourselves under the canopies and took off over the ocean. I wrote this dream up in one sentence, and put it at dailydream. It's a fun community to watch. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
6:56 pm	Snowboarding I tried snowboarding today. My best impression is that it means sitting with your arse in cold snow a lot. Worst impression, substitute arse with face, repeatedly at speed -grin-. I like the idea of snowboarding. There's a sense to it, a feeling that I should be able to get my body in the rhythm of the slide, where a turn is a whole body gesture linked to a glance, a look. Unfortunately, there's a few steps before this. Such as standing up. Go ahead, try this at home. Sit on your arse with your legs bent up in front of you, as if your feet are clamped into position at about twice your shoulder width apart. Now, stand up in one motion, without moving your feet. You can use your hands, you can press down on your feet - but if you press on your feet, it must be evenly on both. You also need to be aware that if you were actually on a snowboard, the moment you press down on your feet you WILL be sliding down a hill, so if you don't want to be straight back on your arse again you need to have your centre of mass over the board in the same moment as you press down. Go ahead. This is the movement I will be practicing before I try to snowboard again. I wasn't able to do it, at all. At any time. Of course, before you get to try and go down a slope and do the standing up bit, you first have to get UP the slope. At least, where we were learning. The type of lift up the slope was a puller, or plumber, or something like that. A hanging pole on a bungy cord, that you stuck under your arm and hung on to. I didn't manage to ride that, either. The instructor warned us that if you didn't manage it in three goes you were probably better off walking up the slope. Sure enough, guess which class member fit that category. After the third face-plant-on-takeoff I was ready to give up. The instructor talked me into one more go, but it was really no go. So I unstrapped and walked up, slowly. Snowboards are heavy when you have to carry them. James kept me company. He'd managed to get going on the lift, but they stopped it when someone lost control of their board and the re-start sent him flying. My brother Chris took to snowboarding fairly well. Given that it's the first time in the snow for both of us, the fact that he was taking blue runs after just a few hours was pretty good. Admittedly, the first time was by accident - he was cutting cross country to the second of the easy green beginner runs, and took the wrong trail. And the second time was because when he made it back up to the top of the lift he realised he'd left his balaclava at the bottom, and had to go back for it. But hey. I'm still impressed. If you talk to him, he'll describe the beautiful flying-Chris-shaped imprints he left in a couple of snowdrifts on the way after hitting a bump at speed, backwards. As well as standing up, I plan to practice braking and turning. We were trying this on the flat as a class. Our first exercise was to just try sliding straight. Easy for most - easy for me too - but as I was second last and had a little more momentum, there were all these people standing in the way of where I was going so I had to face-plant to avoid crashing into them. At which point the instructor jumped along into the next skill: braking. As a teacher, I appreciate the logical link and the creation of desire for a skill. As a shy and poorly-skilled student, I kindof wish I hadn't been set up for a fall. Turning wasn't so bad. Unfortunately, Chris, James and I were all goofy-footed, and standing on the left side of the group - which means you have your back to the other students. This meant I hesitated a little before taking my turn, not wanting to turn into someone else who was turning the other way, and missed out on a couple of goes trying to practice because of that. As one of the students who actually really needs the practice, this was bad. When I drew the teacher's attention to the problem, he made sure I got a go, but it was a crowded space and having people crossing behind me while I was trying to learn to turn meant I just face planted every time. I tried standing as far right as possible, but that just means you have a steep slope you're trying to avoid instead of other people -grin-. So I will try snowboarding again at some point. First, I will learn to stand up. Then, I will take some time on the flat to work out how to brake. Then after that, I might be ready for a beginners lesson again. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
5:01 pm	Really? From the list of phrases I don't hear very often: "Oh, hello! I didn't recognise you with all that green on!" True story. Lady in the post office down below said it to me, today. It had me wondering what she *has* seen me in. Probably layers of black and the Scienceworks uniform (black, white and yellow), I'm guessing. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
9:08 pm	Recent food encounters - taming venom and toxins ( Nettle and pine nut dip ) ( Pumpkin gnocchi with green tomatoes ) [1] Cucurbitaceae - family of vegetables including squash, cucumber, pumpkin, zucchini, watermelon, loofah and other similar things that grow on vines along the ground with trumpet flowers. Solanaceae - family of vegetables notable for both their great flavour and dangerous toxins, including tomato, potato, pepino dulce, eggplant, capsicum, paprika, wutjera (desert raisin), tobacco, deadly nightshade/belladonna, American nightshade, kangaroo apple, mandrake and datura. Note that nettles are in yet another family (the Urticaceae) so have a different chemistry of toxicity. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
3:58 pm	Travelogue Victoria - Serendip Sanctuary Serendip Sanctuary isn't the sort of place you have to find by accident. It's surprisingly well signed - take the Lara turnoff just south of Avalon Airport, head on through and turn north towards the You Yangs. Serendip's just on your left. Easy to get to. Question is, why would you go there? A happy accident? It's a bird sanctuary. A little bit quiet, as nature parks go, but perhaps that's not unexpected given that most of their work has been in breeding endangered wetlands birds over the last twenty or thirty years. Some things just Can't Be Rushed. Despite the best efforts of the male bustards, puffing out their necks and honking loudly at the women -grin-. There are several walk trails, that lead you through a kangaroo-and-emu enclosure, alongside breeding pens, past bird hides, and let you look over the two lakes at whichever birds are in residence. One lake was dry. I could tell, because the only birds in it were emus. The other lake was full of water... and magpie geese. The Victorian magpie geese (naturally resident out in the Wimmera) were in danger of becoming extinct, though the species wasn't threatened up in Northern Australia. So they bred them here for some years. The breeding programme stopped because it was successful enough, but also because they worked out that the Victorian population was genetically distinct from the northern population, and their breeding programme was breeding the wrong ones. The magpie geese aren't caged, they roam as they will. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty on the little island in the lake. The other birds they still breed there are brolgas, and bustards. The bustard cages are designed with special-sized holes in the fences, so that the males are kept separated, and the females can wander through randomly to which ever male they find most attractive or dominant. The brolgas take more of a leap of imagination. Serendip was very successful at breeding brolgas at one time - but only with artificial insemination. They are beautiful birds, though. Again, both brolgas and bustards are endangered or extinct in Victoria, but not necessarily so over their entire range. We walked out around the lake on the second trail, and found the wader hide. It was obviously working, because we couldn't see any birds -grin-. We skipped the trail to the demonstration farm-dam-for-wildlife, but pottered a few minutes in the pond set aside for netting and ponding and looking for cool bugs (all equipment provided). Mostly it seems that Serendip caters to the environmental ed market. There were plenty of classroom spaces and schoolkid-oriented displays. I particularly liked the little room in the visitor centre set up to look like you were under the lake's surface, and the frog room. James seemed particularly delighted by the dragon lizard sleeping in the sun, which was eminently understandable. We both had to laugh at the Cape Barren geese chasing each other. So I guess there was plenty of reason to enjoy being there. Wasn't quite what I expected, but certainly pleasant enough. And a good chance to spend some time watching a few bird species I don't normally get to observe closely. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
6:41 pm	On spoilers, as per Angriest angriest asked recently "When did people start hating spoilers?" It's an interesting question, because a lot of people do. With a passion. And that includes me. Tonight I worked out my own answer. I started to hate spoilers when I started to spend more time with people who thought knowing things was the prime social currency. More specifically, people who thought proving that you knew things *first* was what gave you the most bonus points. I guess, to some extent everyone I know in the academic/intellectual class values knowledge as a source of social currency. I guess that's not actually a bad thing. It's the having to know things first that's a problem, but even that isn't entirely bad on its own - the desire to explore and discover is something I'm pretty familiar with. I think it's more the wanting to be the one who tells everyone else, as if the source of power is not the knowledge itself but being the person who gets to trickle it out. To prove that you know something the others don't. As a teacher, as someone who loves learning, as someone who works to create the desire in others to learn and explore and make your world bigger, this offends me deeply. It offends me even more when people waste that desire to know, to hold the power of knowledge, on something as trivial as a movie or TV plot. It's really not an important thing to know. So if it's trivial, do I hear you ask why spoilers offend me? The answer to that is also simple. I think knowing the "facts" of a fictional story is a trivial thing to know, because what's important to me in a story is not to know it, but to feel it. If you take away the surprises from me, all I have is the knowledge. You've taken from me the thing I wanted most, in your urge to show that you can be the one who gives me the thing I want least and need not at all. Before I started to socialise with large groups of people like this, I didn't care about spoilers. They came pretty rarely, because no-one cared enough to try and find things out before everyone else. The only stories we didn't share equally were those in books - and you can't give away what's good about a book in just two sentences. All you do is encourage someone to want to read it and find out the rest. I'd still rather read a book than watch TV or movies. No-one ever tries to take those away from me. And on an only tangentially related note, how come none of the people who try to tell me about the good bits of the next Dr Who season could manage to tell me it was actually starting screening this weekend? I found out by accident, about twenty minutes ago. What, didn't you want me to watch it for myself? Current Mood: grumpy (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 27th, 2008
10:05 am	Heard at Scienceworks In the Light show in the Lightning Room. Audience of mixed-age families, most with children under 10. And a few young-adult couples enjoying themselves too -smile-. I asked the audience: "What animals make their own light?" The usual answers came up. That deep sea angel fish. (It's actually an angler fish, but small children confuse the two names sometimes.) Jellyfish. Electric eels. Glowworms. That's a good catch for a small audience, it covers most of the possibilities. I'd normally stop there. But no-one had said the animal that is most often said first - fireflies. And there was one tiny waving hand right up the back. So I pointed and said "Yes?" And in the tiniest, cute voice of utter confidence a little boy of about four said "Giraffes". A quiet, that's-so-cute wave of chuckling swept through the audience. I couldn't help grin. His mum called out in that proud-but-trying-not-to-laugh voice "Giraffes are his favourite animal". It left me with a slight dilemma, as we have a basic rule that you're not allowed to tell a child who gives you an answer that it's wrong. Encourage them to think through their answer a little more carefully, or add to it maybe, and you can even add a clause along the lines of "Well, I haven't seen one of those before but that would be really cool" - but not say outright that they're wrong. It's because we want to encourage participation and also because science is about guessing both wrong answers and right answers, we don't want to turn kids off that and make them think that there really is just one right answer that they have to get first time. So I had to say something to follow on. But all I could think of was fluorescent glowing giraffes, roaming the savannah at night. Possibly in hot pink. -grin- (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
8:15 pm	Gnocchi and sauce I tried making gnocchi for the first time tonight. My usual kind of experiment - I read several recipes online, then wandered into the kitchen and threw a few ingredients at each other. I was actually looking for an excuse to use up some celeriac and some pumpkin, with another box of vegies ready to be used if I thought of a good method for them too. So we ended up with: celeriac/pumpkin/potato gnocchi (made with wheat flour but not with egg), served with a baked tomato sauce. Flavours came out reasonably well - gnocchi plain, sauce clear but not overpowering. All vegan, too, though that wasn't deliberate. The sauce was good, it's the first time I remember doing this kind of baked sauce. I diced tomato, put it into a cake pan with olive oil, chopped parsley and basil, and diced garlic, some salt and pepper, mixed it all through and baked it for a while. Then I took the result and blended it until it was a chunky-sauce-texture. It came out really well, the flavour of the openly baked tomato is quite different to tomato just thrown in a stirfry or similar (which I generally dislike). I would have enjoyed it without the baking, too - I like the fresh flavours a lot. (Tomato and pepper, mm mm MMM.) The gnocchi was interesting. I managed to get it reasonably OK, though I suspect the more often I make it the more straightforward and reliable it will be. It wasn't quite as simple as it sounded, but at the same time it was easier to make than I expected. Using pumpkin makes it quite wet, and afterwards I made a mental note of one writer's comment that using baked vegetables rather than steamed gave you a much better texture because they started drier in the mix. I may try that sometime if I have roast vegetables left over and need something to do with them. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
8:28 pm	Travelogue Victoria - Tarra-Bulga National Park Tarra-Bulga NP is out in Gippsland, south of Traralgon. It's a rainforest park, tall temperate forest of mountain ash with tall understorey of silver wattle, blackwood, sassafras, with fern trees rising almost as tall under those. Beautiful to wander in. ( Tall forest, lyrebirds calling, thousand-year-old trees and a suspension bridge over the fern gully... ) Tarra-Bulga is about two and a half to three hours drive from Melbourne, 220-odd km from the CBD. Beautiful place to visit. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
7:57 pm	Fresh Science at the Redback Pub, Monday 16th June It's on again for 2008! Fresh Science is back at the Redback Pub. This year it's not during Science Week, it's, like, a week from now, so get your RSVPs in to them promptly :-) Fresh Science takes sixteen-odd young researchers from around the country and puts them through a "boot camp" for talking to people. One of the highlights is the night at the pub - they have to explain their research to a happy crowd that's been on the wine and beer for half the night, in about thirty seconds. Possibly in verse, and sometimes as karaoke. It's always a fun night -grin-. When: Monday 16th June, 6:30 pm for a 7:30 pm start Where: Redback Brewery RSVP: They really need you to RSVP. Have a look on the website, www.freshscience.org for more information and the RSVP details. Hope to see some of you there! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 6th, 2008
10:26 pm	I have seen this future on a thousand screens Pink. Green, orange, purple, hard curves and soft shines. Spots of light in darkness. Streams of people moving in and out, pulsing like fluid vortices in an engine boiler, veering in clots and clumps as if pulled by a randomly changing magnetic field. Strange surfaces and angles. Mass transit moving like a steady breath of stops and starts. And all of this within a well that reaches several storeys below ground and several storeys above, to the sound of a hundred different musics, four hundred different voices. I think it's the sound that struck me most. A boppy beat made of ten discordant muzaks and the sounds of chatter, a late night energy yet visually still it's a mechanical plastic dream. I looked at the people around us, the restaurants and shops and entertainment outlets. When you spend a lot of time in suburbia you forget that this is real. As real a place as the wilderness. It's a world of constant stimulus of sound and noise, of movement and lights. The window displays, the advertisements that move and sing and dance on their own, that talk to people's mobile phones as they pass. The streams of connectedness, of attention, that link all the disparate elements of this giant microcosm. Drawings of the future used to look like this. Do you remember seeing visions of this when you were small? Movies, or novels, stories of a strange world? It's all here, all now. I have seen this future on a thousand screens, and it tastes just like they told me I thought it would. When I visited the USA sixteen years ago I was struck by the degree they'd allowed advertising to take over their lives, to permeate their world. It was like a maze for the eye - you couldn't look upon anything simply. It was all full of noise, full of voices of colour demanding your attention now, dammit, now, because you needed to look. When I moved to Melbourne three years ago it struck me much the same. Learning to drive here took effort, because every surface was covered with demands, with adverts, with the things you Needed to See. Some highways even had flatscreens that played advertisements in full motion, five metres high and ten metres wide. The official highway signage was in an arms race for your eyes, bringing its own moving and flashing data at ever increasing brightness, resorting to more and more absorbingly stunning images to draw your attention back from the ads to the roads. Tonight we were on foot, in a place designed only for people. Stimulus from all sides, warring with scent and sound and colour, hard and shiny surfaces to reflect and catch. Physical design to scream for attention, as the self-focused happy-people thronging the walks pretended to ignore it. Instead they pulled out their phones and photographed themselves texting the numbers on the wall, sending messages to unknown robots and in return receiving more free stuff for everyone's favourite consumer number one. In intangible form, a data stream of lights and colours that might as well be money if it isn't dreams. I slipped out of the stream, and into the ladies room. Inside, a beautiful lady with glossy perfect hair and an immaculate uniform handed out boxes of multicoloured plastic utilities to every woman entering, giving each a genuinely stylish smile. Between guests she tidied - smoothing nylon flowers by the mirrors, straightening a knocked photograph beside the fur-covered rest chair on soft purple carpet. Creating the glamour, the beautiful illusion. She adjusted bottles of perfume and body spray on the counters, spraying some into the air to extend the experience to all senses. And it was an experience she was selling, for free, in little boxes of coloured plastic and that bright white smile. It extended right into the cubicles where the advertising of her employers faced you down, forcing into your eyes as you sat unable to look away. Magnetic fairy floss for the missing mind, so you'd know what it was you wanted to taste. I saw this future on a thousand screens, and it tastes just like they told me I thought it would. But I never dreamed it so close. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
6:21 pm	Restaurant review: 100 Miles Cafe The 100 Miles Cafe is one of the local places on my list of green kitchens. I was intrigued with the idea. It's pretty simple - source everything you can, in their case, 99% of ingredients, from within 100 miles. They're located in Melbourne Central, up on the third floor. James and I ate there tonight before going to see a movie. The menu is pretty straight-forward. It looks much like a normal cafe menu, the prices are about what you'd expect for a nice eaterie in a top location ($15 for a woodfired pizza, $25-30 for their top steak). Lots of interesting ingredients put together in a typically Australian-cafe style. While the wine list states the location that every wine's from, the menu makes no mention of their key point at all. It just leaves you to think about what's going to taste good. The information about the food (and why 100 miles) is actually on a map outside the cafe, showing the region they source from and giving examples of what they get from where. Cheese from Strzlecki. Chocolate from the Yarra Valley. Garlic from Ceres, a town near Geelong. Their exceptions to the hundred-mile rule are only a few, and include coffee (Australian-grown in Byron Bay) and miso (made in NSW by one of very few "official" miso makers outside of Japan). Admittedly, I note that some things are probably made locally from imported ingredients, for instance the chocolate. But they've done the best they can in that regard. The food itself was gorgeous. We ordered scotch fillet ribbons in sesame and miso with a mizuna, walnut and pear salad - actually, we kind of fought over who was going to get to order that. James surrendered and chose the duck, mushroom and pesto pizza instead. They were both pretty good, and definitely worth fighting over. I ordered dessert - a chocolate fondant with accompaniment. I thought fondant was the sticky cake icing, but it turned out to be a small cake shell filled with hot melted chocolate fondue. It was simply amazing. It was accompanied by a small scoop of what I thought was meant to be caramel icecream but tasted a little odd. I'm not sure what it was flavoured with. Came across as a little too strong on the esters, unfortunately, like it had been soaking in melted plastic fumes, but a lot of added flavours taste like that to me. The scattering of crushed pistachio nuts over the lot was nice, even if it had been optimistically labelled a "praline" on the menu, but the waiter warned us about that so it was OK. And the melty chocolate thing was liquid forgiveness for anything. Oh yeah. The layout of the place is curious. It's got a really big wood frontage, and you have to go down a long corridor inside to find the main room. There's a balcony there, the room is spacious and airy, still decked out in lots of wood, with a big bar and counter space dividing the room. But there's not a clear flowthrough or maitre'd point - you just arrive at a big counter wall thing that blocks access to the bar and to the main seating areas. We arrived just at 5, and I think the evening front of house staff hadn't started work yet. So I stood on tiptoe to look over the counter thing and bemusedly asked the bartender if I could get a table for two though I hadn't booked. He got just as bemused at me and said "I'll have to ask the boss if that's OK" and disappeared. I looked around at the large number of empty tables, and the front of house book he'd left open in front of me with only five lines filled in, and figured he must be new to eateries. A waiter appeared from behind a big concrete pillar and asked me if I was OK, I told him the other guy had gone to find out if I could have a table, and he gave a funny look in the direction the bartender had vanished -grin-. There was no problem getting a table :-) I chatted with the waiter a bit - the cafe's quite new, they're still getting word of mouth out, business is starting to pick up now but they're still experimenting a bit and finding what works and what doesn't. So it's interesting times for them. I figure word of mouth will be generally good though - prices are moderate, food is seriously excellent, service is basically good even though staff are still a bit new too. The only other funny thing was finding the toilets. You step off that big long corridor into a tiny space behind a black folding wall. You see three black doors, one to the east, one to the west, and a double door to the north. They are all unmarked with no handles. It's a bit dark, and the corners are filled with shadows. I started looking for the grue. But instead I did manage to find a label on one door that helped me work out by elimination which of the doors was mine. James had a similar problem, and on his first attempt to exit the corridor he missed the small dark room completely and found the fire hose instead. Overall: worth a visit. Decor and design interesting, concept straightforward, cool without getting in the way of the food. In fact, I think it does enhance the food. One of their stated motives is that supporting local farmers means they'll grow varieties that have flavour rather than shelf life. From what we tasted, that works. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
8:31 am	Power bill jump I knew my power bills were going to go up when James moved in. On my own, I used maybe eight or twelve dollars worth of electricity every three months. I didn't have a fridge, TV or any large electrical appliances, I use a laptop rather than a desktop computer (drawing 20-40W instead of 200-300W) and with only one energy-conscious person in a dwelling you don't make a lot of overall impact. Spending an evening dancing to a little CD player in your loungeroom just doesn't chew up the power. James however is a man who loves toys. We drove across the Nullarbor with a car full of computer and electronic hardware, plus a suitcase each. The prize possession he had shipped over was his large-screen TV. And within a couple of weeks of moving in, we'd bought a fridge. So I knew that the overall background levels of electricity use would go up - the fridge would always be on in its intermittent way, there'd often be double the lighting in use (though that's a trivial change as most of my bulbs are low-energy), there'd be standby for his TV and consoles etc. He also likes to leave his computer on all the time and just switch the monitor off, so that's a fair addition to the background load as well. I wasn't expecting a $70 jump. The bill I've just paid was $125, up from the usual $50-$55. The previous bill had gone up a little, up to $90. Which was a little ouchy to my low-consumer-attitude, but acceptable given that there's now two of us and I don't expect James to live in the minimalist way that I prefer. But the further jump is... well. I think we need to do some thinking about this. I'll borrow a Powermate, I think, and test a few things. My electric piano, which I bought in March and admittedly remains on standby - I don't know how much that uses. I believe it's under 50W when I'm playing it though. James' TV setup. It's all on one powerboard so it can easily be turned off when not in use - but we're not turning it off, so that'd be interesting to see what it chews. The new fridge. It wasn't the most low energy fridge we could get, though that was one factor (I am really looking forward to the day when chest or drawer fridges become commercially available on the domestic market). It'd be interesting to see what it draws compared to the official rating, and what kind of background it's really creating. And most of all, I really want to test James' computer. It'll answer a question I've had for a while, which is: if I come in and check the Net for five minutes, which uses more energy - booting up and using my laptop, or switching on his monitor? I'm not going to ask him to turn his computer off - it's a connected life we lead, and his puter's often downloading processing important software even when he's not here, so it's not like the computer's on but not in use. But maybe between all these things we can find a way to cut the electricity bill back by $30 or so. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
12:22 pm	The greenest kitchen in the world, part 2 So, there's a new twist in the discussions about the cafe kitchen, and it's all philosophical. The question is, can you even run a cafe kitchen and call it "green"? There's a strong argument that actually, the only sustainable way to run this cafe would be to not run it at all. It's an interesting question, actually. Saying "you can't do it" is like a challenge to me -grin-, it's a bit like a cop out. But the idea behind it is simple: when people go to a cafe, they want instant service, free choice and fast results. To provide those requires a lot of resources and energy, and results in a lot of waste - especially as you can only speculate on what customers you'll get each day. Normally, the costs for all the extras are just factored into the business. But if what we want to do is remove those extras completely instead of just passing the cost onto the customer, it becomes a much bigger problem. And it becomes a problem that needs social solutions as well as technological, because you will have to change some of your customers' expectations. Looking around the world, there's a few possible ways to do it already in action, and there's a few more I can think of. One green restaurant in Northern Europe has a set menu, changing daily. I remember when I was quite small that some restaurants would advertise themselves as "a la carte" because that was a special thing. Now we take it for granted and assume that every restaurant will let us choose our own dishes, and the pre-decided banquet is the exception to the rule (most commonly seen now as a special feature of Chinese restaurants). But if we reversed that, and said "you can have a choice of set menus", it would cut down the waste factor. There'd be a lot less things you'd have to have on hand "just in case" someone wanted them. The menu changing daily also avoids boredom, which is an issue with our current neophilic generations controlling most of the disposable spending on eating out. Another possibility is to only accept bookings up to the day before, and none on the spot. The good side of this is that the kitchen staff know how many people will arrive and can plan shifts and resources appropriately. The downside is that it's probably not a super successful business model, as most decisions to eat out are made within half an hour of the meal in question :-). Where it *does* work as a successful business model is if your restaurant is so fantastic that it's the kind of place you have to book months in advance to get a table. A special occasion place. Unfortunately, a little hippie cafe in the back streets of East Brunswick isn't likely to command that kind of customer response. Especially not in Melbourne, where you could eat out every night of the year for three years and never go to the same place twice. We have a lot of eateries. A variation on both these possibilities is to not be a cafe at all, but a function centre. That's a business model that *does* have a known number of customers each night, and a pre-set menu. Best of both. It's a business model that's known to work, with its own rules and sets of customer expectations. And, as a green function centre, we could command quite a niche for ourselves, so we'd have the desirability factor there as well. At the moment, that's the way I think the group is pushing. Don't be a cafe, be a function centre. Solves all the problems. It makes sense, but I can't help but wonder what other possibilities we haven't thought of. As always, thoughts and comments very welcome. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
12:30 pm	The greenest kitchen in the world I've joined a group at CERES that is working on a curious problem: how to create the greenest kitchen in the world. CERES has one cafe, and one training kitchen. The new centre that's starting construction shortly will have a second cafe, and another commercial-grade community kitchen for training and local enterprises. We have a chance now to influence the design of these two new kitchens, and our aim is to make them the greenest in the world. It's quite a difficult problem, and also very easy. It's difficult because a cafe kitchen is a huge consumer of energy and water, and produces huge amounts of waste - not just food waste, but also in the form of heat, pollution, greenhouse gases, waste water. So there's a long way to go. But it's also an easy problem, because very few kitchens around the world have tried to be green, so it won't be hard to do better than they have -grin-. There are a few things we could try. One is to be all on green power, and have all our cooking electric. It's kind of a cop-out though because we're not actually changing any of our practices. It's an invisible change. And our current cafe is already on green power, so it wouldn't be new. Another option is to try something like the 100 Miles cafe in the city (which I still want to visit), and go for local and seasonal food on the menu. It means both chefs and diners accept certain restrictions on what they can order or create, but you're saving environmental costs due to transport and/or storage. A third one that's been floated is to make it a refrigerator-free cafe. We probably can't do that with the new kitchen, but we certainly can change our current cafe over to refrigerator-free. It just means shifting the menu almost entirely vegan-vegetarian. Whether we want to do that or not is another question. Water-wise, our current cafe's actually pretty good. All its waste water output is currently treated and re-used on site, for irrigation of the gardens. It's got mains water going in, but I'm in the process of changing that over to rainwater, I just need to get the correct filtering system sorted out and connected. So then it'll be mostly off mains water input, and completely off mains output. The new cafe will be on a different system as part of the new centre, but it'll have the same kind of thing. So we're not really making any changes there, we've already got a full commercial-sized demonstration system in operation. So, it's all complicated, but interesting. What makes it more complicated is that the new centre is planned to be completely carbon neutral, averaged out over the year - and will be producing its own power and hot water. So whatever we do to the kitchen has to work within the energy systems we're building into the total plan - if we decide we need X amount of energy at peak in the kitchens, the building has to be able to produce that, and that means making sure we've sized the system correctly. It's all very cool. Any thoughts from foodies and enviro-minded types about what would make a green kitchen are completely welcome. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 30th, 2008
9:00 pm	Earth, the movie I don't tend to bother with movie reviews. But I thought this one was worth it, if only because it shows how much working on Carbon Cops spoiled me for good environmental storytelling. Earth is a documentary by BBC Worldwide and Greenlight Media about life on earth, animals in the wild, their yearly cycles and how those are changing or being affected by climate change. Much of the photography is beautiful, though some of it is ordinary. They've caught on film some timelapse of seasonal changes that is stunning, and some absolutely gorgeous animal moments. The polar bear cubs trying to learn to walk on a steep slope of snow, and the baby mandarin ducks taking their first flight to the ground and bellyflopping from three metres up, are both pretty funny as well as gorgeously cute. Overall, though, visually and as a nature documentary it's only B-grade, not in Attenborough's league. Storytelling-wise, I wish they'd given the film to a good writer before they put Patrick Stewart's gorgeous voice across the text. It's not bad, but... there's a few basic mistakes. Like going on and on about whales eating krill, then putting up an on-screen text message saying the plankton are dying. If you're going to hammer one word, guys, keep the same word the whole way through. They also wobble a bit about what story they're actually telling - is it how important the seasons are? How lots of animals make these really long migrations and don't stop to eat or drink until the end of it? I thought it was going to be about the effects of climate change on the animals, but they don't really talk about that for most of the animals they show, only a few key ones. And even there it's only mentioned really briefly. Maybe they were trying to keep the message positive, but it somehow loses conviction in the process. Basically, they just don't stick to any one storyline, and it seems driven by whatever cool nature photography they had that they wanted to stick on screen. The director/s have attempted to link their photography to the month of the year, but they get all over the place about six months in, jumping back and forth, showing pictures of Northern Hemisphere dogsummer and emperor penguins enjoying Antarctic summer at the same time and just generally forgetting to tell us when they think they are so even that theme gets a bit lost. The editing is a little ordinary at times, and I think the film went about half an hour too long overall. Unless the aim was to have something you'd just play on silent in the reception area of a holistic wellbeing centre, which it would be perfect for, but in that case, why get Patrick Stewart to narrate it? I did like the film. But I couldn't help but sit there and think "Guys, you didn't try hard enough to make this *good* instead of just ordinary". (2 Comments |Comment on this)
8:24 pm	My own hot chocolate recipe I haven't put proportions in this, because I didn't measure them. Which means I got it right by sheer blind luck, given the ridiculously strong proportions of each spice I put in. Hot chocolate: made from ground milk Belgian chocolate from the Daylesford Mill, with hot water instead of milk (my usual, I like my hot chocolates short black, not cocoalatte). Into the cup also went: ground cinnamon, ground cardamom, ground ginger, ground wattleseed and fresh-cracked black pepper. Oh, it's good. Though I admit I only experimented with my cup, and made James' a plain latte. What I really want to do one day is get the actual cocoa beans, and grind/espresso them the way you do coffee. That would be so good. By preference, I'd probably also add the cracked pepper to it. But as James says, I have a unique palate in many ways. (Actually, what he *really* said was "Your tastebuds are INSAAAANNNE!", but that's OK, I can translate.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
8:56 pm	Hard choice... On the one hand: fresh sweet potato waiting to be steamed and mashed, fresh and fragrant dill, and a cream cheese FULL of hot and burny fresh-cracked black pepper that needs to be used up. Sounds like the ingredients for beautiful sweet potato balls to me. And I need lunch for tomorrow. On the other hand: sleep. I'm so freaking tired. And I signed myself up for a full day of tank backfilling tomorrow, starting at 7 am. On both hands: tomorrow I'll finish work and go straight to Cinema Nova for the CERES Global fundraiser, a screening of the documentary "Earth" about animals around the world and climate change (it's not too late to book in - ring CERES Reception to put your name down and pay at the door). So it'll be a late night tomorrow, with no time to cook. This means that I'll be both more tired tomorrow, and that if I want to cook I should do it tonight. Darn. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
4:54 pm	The tank building exercise In hindsight, scheduling a tank-building session on a day that every weather forecast in the last week had been predicting hail for was not a great idea. I knew it wasn't going to hail, and it didn't. However. If you woke up on Saturday morning and looked out your window, it was not exactly what you'd call "inspiring". I turned up anyway, because if anyone really was game enough to turn up in the steady, drenching, very cold rain then darnit, I should be there. Though I sincerely hoped for their own sakes that no-one did. I spent the first hour or so chatting with my co-manager Steve about how the project was going and what strategies we needed to be thinking about, then he was getting a bit cold and wet and went home. I stayed around til well into the time that the second session would have started. I knew that the rain would back off by lunchtime, so there was a chance that anyone who'd actually been keen might emerge from their cocoon, sniff the sky and think "I'll risk it" for the second half. But no. By 1 pm it was still raining (though only marginally, it had backed off as expected), it was still FREAKING COLD, and I was still the only one there. So I went home and curled up with James under lots of blankets. So no tank building. Apparently Scott did come (thank you!) but must have missed me by only a couple of minutes. I attempted to build a module on my own thinking that well, the more I did now, the less I'd have to do later, and if I was going to be here for a couple of hours anyway that could equal ten modules. But it was actually too cold for my hands to manage it, even with gloves - I got less than halfway through the first module before I had to stop because my fingers weren't working anymore. It didn't help that this was the day that the temperature kept going down all morning - the minimum temperature for the day was actually at about 11:30 or 12. So it really *was* cold. (10 Comments |Comment on this)