Lord, Julia, how did you do it?

I guess it's safe to finally reveal how we've been spending an inordinate amount of time on these past weeks....

Our appetizer and dessert entries for our annual competition with four other couples. I can only imagine what you were all thinking when you read that first sentence!

This contest started long before I met my husband and has evolved into a heated competition that he and his friends dreamed up to liven up our typical get togethers. A trophy of a mounted wooden spoon and secret ballot voting was even introduced last year. Last year our artichoke dip and pecan encrusted sweet potato pie didn't even come close to winning so we are determined this year and have spent several weeks trying out different recipes and testing the reactions of work colleagues. I know, it's a bit sad, but it's been fun. It gave Theo an excuse to get his parents' ice cream maker out of storage and gave me an excuse to go to the cooking store for a new ceramic tart pan. So, for the appetizer I'd made chicken liver pate with homemade rosemary focaccia bread. For dessert, we made a flourless chocolate tart with a chocolate crust and two flavors of ice cream: mint chocolate chip and white grape-lemon. We just couldn't come to an agreement on the ice cream flavor.

It's taken most of our Friday night and Saturday to make these dishes and I am exhausted before we even leave for the dinner party. On my ipod, I have been listening to Julia Child's autobiography about her and her husband Paul's years in France. God, that woman loved food! It was easily her obsession. She would spend days figuring out the exact amount of every ingredient that should go one recipe. My attention span wanes half way through a recipe that someone else has already figured out. And if I have to convert it from cups to grams, forget about it.

So, after having to chill my chocolate crust dough not once, but twice - first after kneading and then again after rolling it out and shaping it into the pie dish - I was not enthused about having to bake the crust twice before filling it with a chocolate mousse mixture to bake. The reason for the two rounds of baking of the crust is to use, in the first instance, uncooked beans or rice to weigh down the crust to keep it from rising. I accidentally skipped the step of placing baking paper between the crust and rice I was using and, thus, had rice baked nicely into my crust after ten minutes. With the time ticking away before we left for the competition and the air seeping out of the mousse mixture I had just beat the life out of, I started over on the dough. I luckily had just enough eggs and flour left and got the torte finished just in-time to wrap it in aluminum foil and get the next tram. In the ensuing hour or so of sitting on the counter in foil, not only did my torte not cool off, but it had turned into a fudgy pudding of sorts. All I could do was try to mask the mistake with chocolate powder. It still tasted good, but it just wasn't the same and everyone knew it.

Update: We got third place! Out of five... I can't help, but admit my disappointment. I will save you the post mortem except to say that all of the other entries were head and shoulders above last year's. We had a delicious meal and a great night. I guess that's what matters most.

Paradise Falls

We just got back from the movies...and I just have to write about it and tell everyone that they MUST go see "Up" in 3D. I know, I know, it's a cartoon...but it was the best movie we've seen in a long time. I won't ruin it for you. I will just say that the story is funny and sad and universal. Yes, I cried...more than once. And the animation into 3D really makes it a whole new experience. I wouldn't say that the 3D is riveting, but the story was definitely animated with it in-mind. Just when you forget you're wearing the big, clunky 3D glasses, a bird or dog seems to fly off the screen towards you.

Other than that, our weekend is off to a good start. I volunteered yesterday, plowing my way through editing research papers other volunteers have written about Sierra Leone where the NGO plans to begin micro lending. It's interesting and, yet, depressing stuff. My husband and I kicked off the weekend by treating ourselves to a new (new to us) Japanese restaurant and an after dinner drink at the neighborhood bar we don't get to often enough.

This morning I tried out a new aerobics class, Body Vive....snoozer! Friday night I was just too tired and in a funk to haul myself to a Body Pump class so I tried to make up for it with a Saturday morning class. It wasn't the same. It was a bit like taking a tai chi class with a kickball from Jane Fonda. And, yes, I mean taking it from 72 year old Jane Fonda...except that we were taught by a blonde version of Jack McFarland from "Will and Grace". Imagine it...Have a look at the class at www.lesmills.com. It would make for a great tv episode, but it wasn't a great workout. Tomorrow, I will be back at Body Pump and it is sure to kick my butt.

Well, have a great weekend everyone!

National Parks Darwin

Today has been a downer. I refuse to talk about work, but let's just say I almost walked out...again. Stupid people, superfluous reports, meaningless conversation...blah, blah, blah. It doesn't help that I am listening to Jon Krakauer's account of his trip up Mt. Everest in "Into Thin Air". So many people fighting physical and mental walls to face a mountain and do the thing they love...climb. It's enough to get me out of bed in the morning to want to listen to it, but I spend the rest of the day feeling like I am wasting time. I am lucky in so many ways...one of which is a four day work week...it's just hard to keep perspective some days. I think the scientific term for my condition is called "Being in a rut".

I have traveling on my mind a lot these days. And so I open it up to everyone with a question: Where would you go if you could hop on a plane tomorrow? Why? Oh, and this is now a public blog so feel free to forward my blog on.

So, I pour myself a big glass of wine and crack open my journal and return to my trip to Australia...

Day 3: Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks south of Darwin

The national park safari out of Darwin is definitely and adventure all its own, but I am having an unexpected parallel experience. I am the only American in a group of 11 tourists with a female Australian guide. There are two German women in their 20's, my husband and eight French people. Two of the French are probably Germany, but the woman complains so much and I could have sworn they are from Paris. (It turns out they are, indeed, German. They are from a place in Germany I had actually visited and they were both chemists, a relatively close occupation to accountants in the types of people they draw, the salaries, and the social stereotypes others bring to them so I expected to be fast friends, but either their strange sense of humor or ours or both left for a few too many awkward silences and so we kept our distance.)

For starters, my husband and I are the biggest. We are easily the tallest of our respective genders and we are the only two in the group with a few pounds to lose...and I do mean a few. We are both on the top end of our healthy weight ranges, but it's also the European weight range which I find to be much narrower than the American (or Australian, for that matter).

Secondly, our fellow travellers seem disproportionately insistent on fresh vegetables for meals. (I mean, come on, we are on a wilderness safari in Australia. We are not on a wine tour of Bordeaux.) The first lunch of foot long hot dogs was met with looks of utter disdain. (Remember, this is our first meal together and we are but a few hours into the trip. Normally, people are still on their best behavior at this point.) The tour guide serving lunch asked, "What's the problem, vegetarian?"

Dinner went somewhat the same. The coleslaw and potato salad, what our guide termed "the veg", clumped together with eggs and mayo went basically to waste and I think I was the only female to eat two water buffalo sausages. It might have helped had I mentioned that buffalo is one of the leanest meats - leaner than both pork and beef - but I didn't say anything. Let the food snobs go hungry. The leftover sausages will be our lunch tomorrow along with the untouched chew toys masquerading as kangaroo meat. And if our Australian guide isn't touching them, neither am I.

Yesterday we went to Litchfield National Park and saw termite hills ten feel high. One type of termite lines its hills up like graveyard headstones through some genetically programmed directional device innate to that species. Hundreds of thousands of termites will inhabit each mound. There are over 60 breeds of termites and little is known about them except how they stave off ants, their nemesis. Each termite has the ability to let off a musty odor. Upon seeing a soldier ant entering their territory, a termite will spray the ant with the seemingly innocuous liquid. The scent, though, tricks the soldier's fellow ants into thinking he's a termite and so they spontaneously and brutally eat the ant alive.

My husband demonstrated the termite's power by sticking his finger into a hole in a termite's nest. One never to be out-done by a dare and always up for a laugh, he happily followed our cheeky guide's request. His finger smelled of Stetson cologne for days. The hills, though, were fascinating. One side of the mound was hot. The other side, cool. They are built high to withstand floods in the valley and yet a resistant to fires in the dry season.

It's hard to get enthusiastic about anything in +90 degree weather except for maybe the waterfalls we visited for a swim and the chocolate covered strawberry ice cream bar I found at a gas station. I also splurged and bought two bottles of Riesling wine to eat with meals. I was glad I did because the beer the guys bought was so bad they didn't even want to drink it. Dinner was definitely a quantity over quality experience.

To be continued...

Say goodnight grandma

Say goodnight grandma shoes. I just finished my first day at work with my new Earth Aspire shoes. They are great! The sole isn't as clunky as it looks in this picture and it SO much more stylish than the MBT's I normally wear to work. They are also a fraction of the price. The Aspires have elastic around the top of the shoe that keeps the shoes on my feet unlike most flats. They also have the negative heel technology that keeps my posture in-line and I can go all day without back soreness. They also have nice arch support and are a soft enough leather that they stretch to accommodate my crooked feet. The only downside is that the the elastic around the top can pinch the back of your foot. It was just a matter of putting band-aids on the back of my heels. It was a small adjustment to end the stares at work and on the train.

I know this sounds like a sales pitch, but I wish someone would have told me about Earth shoes years ago so I thought I'd pass along the tip. I bought my through Planet Shoes, but Zappos also has them.

Going down under

I wrote this journal entry after a stop over in a Singapore airport on the way to Perth, Australia. I have added my comments in parenthesis.

"There are so many people here, moreover types of people and clothing, the likes of which I have never seen before. The people filling the flat belts, people movers, that run down the center of the terminals are mostly short, around five feet tall, skinny, and olive brown. One type of Asian woman I saw with beautiful long black shiny hair literally had no forehead. Her hairline started half an inch or less above bushy black eyebrows.

Many here are wearing white linen. Head to toe robes with the women wearing head coverings and the men in what I can only describe as vanilla sailors' caps atop heavily bearded faces. I must find out what religion promotes such elegant and soothing attire. It looks quite comfortable too. The women in full black burka, only their eyes visible, stand out even more against the sea of ivory robes. Where is this Jeddah they are going to? Departures is a sea of ivory speckled with black. (I later find out that Jeddah, Saudia Arabia is the country's second largest city and the principal gateway to Mecca, Islam's holiest city. Jaddah is the Arabic word for grandmother. Eastern folklore states that its the location of the tomb of Eve, considered the grandmother of humanity. The men are wearing the prescribed attire for a pilgrimage, an ihram, and the women are wearing their normal hijab, but probably a cream colored version. The simple, white Ihram clothing is intended to unify the believers and make everyone appear the same since Muslims believe that in the eyes of Allah there is no difference between a prince and a pauper. Having seen my fair share of gold laden and jewel bedazzled holy men, I find the ritual righteous in the best sense of the word and can't help, but think that someone all those years ago had a great classic sense of fashion.)

My first experience with an Australian was one of the Quantas flight attendants on-board our flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Singapore. True to form, after he asked where we were headed in Australia, he launched in with tips to see a deadly, wild lizard that has a peacock like feature to it's neck that springs to life when he is threatened and a tough man's crooked walk. (We later saw him from a safe distance and from behind glass in the Sydney Wildlife World.) And then there was warning about the crocodiles in Litchfield National Park and, most emphatically of all, the warning about driving in southern Australia and watching out for kangaroos. He was quite graphic in explaining that some 'roos are taller than my husband and can jump eight to nine feet vertically from a standing position and are so fast they will be 'on your bonnet' and through your windshield continuing completely through the car before the driver can even react. Welcome to Australia! Just like author Bill Bryson said, these helpful tips were all delivered in a bright and eerily relaxed matter-of-fact tone. When my eyes widened, I guess larger than anticipated, the attendant admitted he'd never actually hit a kangaroo in his 38 years. My husband concluded that he must just like to f*&% with tourists, but I think it's something more benign and cultural."

I've added some pictures of the crocodiles and kangaroos. We did take a boat trip through a billabong (i.e. lake) in Litchfield National Park infested with approximately 8,000 fresh and saltwater crocodiles. We saw a few dozen crocodiles perched on the banks, but they both couldn't have been less interested in us and also were very aware of their status at the top of the food chain. The kangaroos, on the other hand, did jump across our path a few times while driving in Margaret River and there were several casualties lining the road, but they kept to the open pastures for the most part and were pretty shy.