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October 31st, 2007 10:19
Hooray, I’m home! I actually came home yesterday but was too tired to write anything and my poor middle was too swollen to sit up anyway. Today my poor middle is still too swollen to eat or breathe properly, but it is marginally better than yesterday.
I am sooooooo tired. Went to bed at 9:30 last night, woke up at 5:30 this morning and have just been sleeping on and off since then. I guess my body needs to rebuild everything—the doctor showed me pictures while I was in hospital and my poor insides are completely raw what with being all chopped up with the special anti-endo scissors.
V. came to visit me in hospital Monday night: I was very happy to see her and she stayed till they kicked her out. Now in retrospect I realize that I was completely doped up on morphine at the time (I felt normal, at the time though) so I hope I didn’t say anything too weird or act too bizarre…
Oh my goodness so woozy. Finish later.
October 28th, 2007 15:55
I have just drunk poison. Aka Picoprep.
So I have been fasting all day and drinking this disgusting powdery white fluid which is supposed to make my poor body purge everything that is in it. It tastes astoundingly bad: drinking the stuff is like drinking acid, but I haven’t noticed any other real effect yet although I have to say my stomach doesn’t feel too great. Of course, I’m also starving, because in addition to fasting today I wasn’t allowed to eat most things yesterday either.
I’m nervous about the surgery tomorrow: all the dreadful disclaimers and unlikely but potential disasters come to mind. I’m mourning the upcoming death of my appendix. And I’m also afraid that even after the whole thing is over, they’ll discover that my diaphragm is actually significantly diseased and so the pain won’t be ameliorated. But, one just wastes one’s time worrying…
I’ve been working madly away today, trying to get a bunch of food cooked, laundry done, etc. etc. so that Zaubi doesn’t waste away while I’m gone  ) I’ve bought myself a store of canned soup and crackers and juice and stockpiled some books so that I can look after myself after I get home again and expend only minimal energy doing it.
Ugh. Another hour until I have to drink my next glass of poison.
I just wish it were all over already. I hate waiting.
October 26th, 2007 23:33
Ahhh… Saturday. It’s a gorgeous day. I just made a super breakfast—I feel like a condemned man: no more good breakfasts for a while. Messed up the cappuccino foam though. It is clearly a fine art.
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The other day we went to a grand opening of a Selmer Pro shop here. Patrick Selmer (great grandson of Henri Selmer) was there to give a brief talk and I liked him. He seemed very sincere.
Anyway, they had there the most ridiculously expensive sax I’ve ever seen – a reference 54 “Kookaburra”. It was a gorgeous sax with a gorgeous sound (I tested it) but $14K?!?!?! Honestly. I guess you can get em for $5-6K in the States but still. There are only 50 of them being made so I suppose that’s what it is…
Then again my beautiful $1400USD Conn would go for over $5K here so I guess everything’s relative. Australia is just so… far away.
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Anyway. Last night we went to West End to get food and take a walk and we ran into… Austin Powers. We were baffled, and so we tailed him for a while (he’s Austin Powers! he must have been going somewhere cool, right?) but lost him in a carpark.
Then we passed a pregnant 15-year old wearing a shockingly short hot pink dress and an annoyingly enthusiastic cheerleader also in a shockingly short dress and it slowly dawned on us that maybe people were celebrating Halloween. Baffling, really, since Halloween isn’t exactly celebrated in Oz and who the heck celebrates Halloween 5 days early anyway??
We wandered to South Bank where there was a mad party going on in the Suncorp Plaza thing. Hundreds of Indians (the Asian kind, not the American kind ha ha) were all dressed up in traditional clothes and were moshing away to very loud drums and whistles. They were having a grand old time.
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On a completely unrelated note, why do they make plastic things so that women can pee standing up? What’s wrong with squatting in the woods?
October 25th, 2007 22:49
So I have decided that and I are going to do a kind of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants thing but with a cardboard box. A Friendshiphood of the Traveling Box, as it were.
He doesn’t know it yet.
So he’s sent me a bunch of care packages over the past year and I’ve just finally sent him one as his birthday is fast approaching. It was a good care package too… let’s see if American Customs digs out and disposes of the biltong! Are you allowed to send dried meat products to the States?
Anyway, I used the same box he sent me a package in… seems to have been an inside-out old chemical box from Harvard Med (am I right ??). The thought of this shabby brown box making the many thousands of miles journey from the States to Australia and back again numerous times while filled with interesting and tasty goodies, is appealing to me.
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Today at work someone fed me a shrimp cracker. I started eating it quite innocently: it looked like a rice cracker, but as soon as it entered my mouth, I knew. I spat it out pronto but still swallowed a bit of the residue and consequently I felt like throwing up all afternoon.
My stomach still feels queasy. I hate shrimp.
So for dinner tonight pretty much all I could manage was soup, which brings me to another story. Zaubi ate all the chicken noodle soup in his illness, so last weekend in the shops I bought some more. We were in the organic food store and so I grabbed the only two chicken noodle soups I saw and felt happy because even though they’re canned, organic soup must be marginally better for you than the Heinz crap they sell in Woollies, right?
It was only when I got home that I realized my error. The cans were not, as I had been cruelly misled into thinking, labeled CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP: they were labeled NO CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP.
Yes, my friends, yours truly had gone home with two cans of TOFU NOODLE SOUP.
So I ate one tonight and it was kinda gross. Moreover, the bits of tofu in there were cut and colored to resemble CHICKEN.
And I ask myself, why to vegetarians waste all this time trying to make tofu look like meat? If you want tofu, eat tofu. If you want meat (or chicken soup) eat meat for crying out loud.
October 22nd, 2007 19:13
The biltong actually turned out pretty well. I didn’t rinse the coriander off well enough, and I cut the pieces a bit too thick, and there should have been less brown sugar and more black pepper, but altogether it wasn’t half bad. Zaubi isn’t thrilled with it, but I fed some to a South African at work and he said he liked it! So there! I think it is pretty decent myself.
But the next batch will be better. I’m learning…
Zaubi is still sick. How long can one run a fever anyway?
October 22nd, 2007 19:09
I just read a description of what must be the worst movie ever:
“An 11-year-old boy’s amazing ability to break wind leads him first to fame and then to death row, before it helps him to fulfill his ambition of becoming an astronaut.”
October 21st, 2007 9:55
I have figured it out. I know the secret.
I have finally worked out how to make my $10 milk foamer do its job properly!
See, I always figured that the motor in the little foamer thing just wasn’t powerful enough, and that my dream of thick dense fluffy milk foam was impossible until I either found a manual hand air pump thing (of the sort they use in Europe, but which is not available here) or bought an actual coffee maker with the steam attachment thing (which is not going to happen). I mourned because it seemed my $10 thing could only make “dishwasher soap” bubbles which of course are completely unacceptable.
But no! I have worked out the technique! And it is terribly simple, so maybe I’m really dumb for not figuring it out earlier.
1) You must get air into the milk, so froth with the wand tip really near the surface of the milk, so lots of air gets in. This will result in “dishwasher soap” bubbles.
2) When your milk is hugely foamy and has doubled in size, then bring the tip of the wand well under the milk. Angle it and move it around so that you have a kind of whirlpool that is sucking the dishwasher soap bubbles underneath but *do not let the wand tip break air” because that defeats the purpose and will make more dishwasher soap bubbles!
3) After you’ve been doing 2) for a while, all of the dishwasher soap bubbles should vanish and be replaced by tiny fine bubbles. Then you can stop and voila! You’re done.
I’m sure you still make better foam with an expensive coffee machine, but I’m not *that* picky, and for $10, who’s complaining?
Of course, caffeine is bad for you. SO today I bought some decaf espresso (water decaffeinated, not chemically) and it tastes great. Mmmmmm….
October 20th, 2007 18:56
All I’ve done today is cook. Which is not necessarily a bad thing: I actually secretly like cooking (just hate cleaning the kitchen afterwards).
I made my first true attempt at biltong and 1 kilo of coriander covered meat is drying in the dehydrator right now. I bought some real yogurt starter and some more raw milk to make yogurt with later on. Tried to pulverize a bunch of almonds into almond butter but failed utterly (guess my food processor thing isn’t strong enough) and so turned it into these delicious wheat-free carrot muffins instead. Yum, wheat free. I used to cook this stuff all the time back in the day. I was actually debating not bothering to cook them at all as the batter was so good, it was just like a tasty pudding.
Also spent some time in an attempt to recreate the ridiculously good flatbread that I had back in Israel over a year ago. The woman who made it just mixed it up and cooked it on a dung oven on the dirt right in front of us and we dunked it hot in olive oil, thick sour yogurt, and mashed olives and it was just delicious. My attempt failed pathetically, perhaps because I was trying to make an unleavened version? and I was using wholemeal spelt flour (though I don’t see why that should affect it) and anyway I didn’t have a dung oven, just a BBQ.
I guess we all must have a cooking nemesis. For some, it’s soufflé: for me, it’s Israeli flatbread.
Lastly, I made dodgy spaghetti sauce with all the veg in the fridge + some mince that is 4 days over the due date. I smelled it and it smelled fine, which is why I used it, but I haven’t eaten it yet: perhaps I’ll be sorry I used it later? I’ll let you know 
October 19th, 2007 21:35
SO HUNGRY.
I’ve been fasting for the past 3 days, well, almost fasting: I’ve been eating apples. And a lot of herbal tea.
I think I kind of hate apples now. I cannot manage to eat more than 5-6 of them per day, no matter how hungry and lightheaded I am (which is very hungry and lightheaded).
I’ve fasted before, once in a while: I think it’s good for you and the benefits thereof are seriously overlooked in this day and age of instant gratification, processed food, and diabetes. So I do it once in a while. But I still always whine to myself about how hungry I am even though I am bringing it on myself! This time was the first time I did it with the apples, though. I was just recently reading about the toxin-grabbing abilities of pectin and so I thought I’d give it a whirl. And I can say, it’s better than not being allowed to eat anything, but not by much.
And no, I’m not a lunatic, a hypochondriac, or a New Age anything.
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Anyway. Meanwhile, Zaubi has been ill. He had a cold, it was getting better, he exacerbated it by biking really hard, and I guess it came back full force. Last night he had a temperature of 103.5 (that is 39.7 to you weird Celsius people) and I was pondering taking him to hospital but I figured they’d just give him antibiotics and I think antibiotics do more harm than good about 90% of the time they are given. So I put him in a lukewarm bathtub instead and he whined but I think it helped.
He seems to be recovering now and we have been watching an awful lot of bad movies since he is too weak from sickness and I am too weak from not eating to do anything more interesting!
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My surgery is scheduled for Mon, October 29th. I am kind of scared.
October 12th, 2007 19:12
I am in a spectacularly bad mood. It has been a long frigid (inside the ice cave of my building that is: outside it must have been high 90s) day fraught with too much traffic and too much programming. And one more thing has been knocked off my acceptable wear list.
I am starving and there is nothing to eat.
And the vet killed my possum.
It’s been a bad day.
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