My recipe for Balsamic Toffee (don't try this at home)

I've got the crit group coming over tomorrow. We try and eat healthily between bouts of chocolate, so I'd decided on a roast pumpkin salad with fetta and pine nuts. And on top, a drizzle of sticky balsamic. Only problem was, I'd run out of the sticky and had to make a fresh batch (put balsamic vinegar in pot, reduce, voila).

Now they're a lovely bunch, the lulus, and not all that fussy when it comes to food. Keri has even been known to try 'green stuff' and survive.

However I think even THEY would baulk if I tried to serve this:

In case that photo doesn't do it justice, what you're looking at resembles hot volcanic rock, and when I took the photo it was still crackling and popping like it was about to spew lava at me.

I'm actually quite proud of it. I've never burnt something so thoroughly in my life. I couldn't help smiling when I brought the pot in from it's decontamination point outside the back door. Not that I should be smiling - I think I just killed over $200 worth of Le Creuset pot.

My gorgeous father in law said I'm more than welcome to blame him for it, since I was gabbering to him on the phone when the smell of beyond-burnt vinegar reached me on the sofa.

Maybe I can save the pot. I think it should've stopped popping by now and be safe to take to with a crow bar.

Monday Reviso update

18 pages further along. Not as far as I hoped to be, but I did an extra reviso of 50 pages for my Golden Heart entry. I enter this little baby every year with the same sterling result of nada, but it's such a thrill to enter that I can never resist.

I managed two early morning cafe jaunts. I got totally burned at one by adding extras onto my breakfast, not realising they were $4 dollars a pop so that I had to work half the morning just to pay off my breakfast debt. Needless to say that misleading blackboard won't be getting my custom any more! AND the bacon was awful, the eggs were done on the griddle and the toast was mushy. I think that about covers it. Oh, no, and the coffee tasted like aniseed and I still can't figure out why. I'm all for a nutty coffee, but aniseed first thing in the morning? BLERK.

But still, 18 pages is 18 pages closer. Hopefully more to report soon.

What we do when revising gets too hard

What do we do? Why take a break, of course.
And this kind of faffing is among my favorite kind and incidentally the sort that can suck HOURS out of your day.

Backstory: I bought my much anticipated and shiny new laptop last week. There it is to the left.

Pretty in all the right computer spec ways, but Oh My God, could it BE any more boring?

So off I went, in my best faffing fashion and found http://www.schtickers.com where they have lots of ways to pretty up your otherwise generic/boring/coma-inducing black laptop.

Of course it took me *some time* to chose a design. And then *some more time* to discover that I wanted to design my own. Then *even more time* (and to be fair I've been sick and couldn't do much else) doing some truly awful ink drawings of flowers and leaves before FINALLY throwing my hands up in the air and tonking on over to istock to savage some photos.

This laptop is all about the writing. There will be no internet, there will be no email. So I figured the skin had to be all about writing too. My brain (not functioning on all cylinders, but still hanging in there), took me back to a particularly special time in my history when I first realised I wanted to become a published writer. I was about seventeen. Picture it. I was sitting on the floor in front of the fire at home, curled up against my mother's chair, a spot that had seen countless conversations on everything under the sun.
Mum: So, if you could do anything in the world, whatever you wanted, what would it be?
Me: I'd be a novel writer.
Mum: (rolls eyes). Not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Something real. What would it be?

Of course then I had nothing to say because I'd really given the question some thought. It set bells off in my head and made me want to cry whenever I thought about it. It still does.

It took me some years to get back to my pie in the sky, but it's always been what I wanted more than any thing else.
So I made this laptop skin and hope that the good people at whatever Cafe don't laugh too hard at me. I reassure myself that they'll have no clue what it really means.


I also find it funny which is a bonus.

I figure when I get my first publishing contract I'll have it redone to say "eating pie in the sky since xxxx"

Or maybe I should've gone with those ink drawings after all....

In any case, I think I'll be doing these on a regular basis. It feels good for the soul for some reason.

Hairy for the Cause

For the past week or so, I've been looking around me at the men at work thinking 'you look different in a kind of dangerous/porn-star kind of way, but I'm not sure why'.
Then, sitting in a meeting today and gazing across at the normally squeaky clean Jan, I realised 'IT'S MOVEMBER!'
I love Movember. It's such a good cause. Prostate cancer kills just as many men as breast cancer kills women (who knew?) and Beyond Blue do some fantastic work too.
And each guy has a different reaction to his mo. Some are embarrassed, some can't stop touching it while others send a picture to everyone they know with growth updates.

If a heap of guys growing facial hair for a month draws awareness and some well needed funds - then I'm all for it! I'll even try and grow my own Mo in a statement of solidarity. I'm sure I've got it in me. Or maybe I could just grow my armpit hair, or wear my bra on the outside for all of November.
Or just donate. That's a plan.

Update for Monday

Revision Update:
Today, while sitting in a meeting where I served no other purpose than to make sure the web hookup didn't fall over, I wrote the end of my synopsis. Yay team Reviso! I'm sure they wondered what the heck I could possibly be writing when it was a Partner's meeting and let's just say I'm not exactly Partner material. More than one confused look was thrown in my direction, I can tell you that much.

Tonight: I have to proof it so I can send it through to the lulus in the lead up to our critique session this Saturday. So it's finished for now, I guess, because they always give me food for thought.

Strange happening of the day:
On my lunch break, I locked myself out on the balcony at work by mistake and had to wait for security to come unlock the door. It was the same guy who gave me a serve last week for moving one of the coffee tables so I could type on it. I think I'm his Dennis the Menace.

NanoReviso

It's supposed to be Nanowrimo. Write a book, or 50,000 words of a book, in the month of November.

But now is not the time for me to start a new book. I have a perfectly good old book that's begging to be finished. So I've changed it to NanoReviso.

There are two hundred pages of manuscript that need rewriting/pulling apart/binning and if I do ten or so pages a day.....well it sounds easy. But it's been like trawling through treacle these past few weeks. Which for me normally means I've taken a wrong turn somewhere, or am writing something that would be better skipped. Time to move on to the next shiny scene rather than trying to link them together far too chronologically.

Or maybe I'm just nervous about getting to the guts of the novel where I've made some big but really cool changes in my head that scare the pants off me. Somehow I have to get the good stuff on to the page.
But hold on, just typing that sentence made me realize how monumentally stupid I'm being.

JUST WRITE THE FREAKING BOOK.

I think I need to go here and get me some pep talks from my favorite writers.

But for anyone who's interested - it's not too late to start writing your first novel!
Go here www.nanowrimo.org for details.

And stay tuned for updates on how I'm going with it.

Wicked Good

You know you're excited about something when you start counting sleeps.

So I must have been really looking forward to going to see Wicked because I'd been counting sleeps ever since L gave me the tickets for my birthday. Yipee! Fabulous show. Yipee! Yummy dinner beforehand.

We had an amazing dinner at Gingerboy. It's only a tiny restaurant, sitting maybe 50, but the walls and ceiling are like a bamboo screen with a starry night behind it. I got lucky and took the bench seat, but TJ had to put up with the prespex wonder chair that did nothing for butt comfort.

This photo is from The Age because I left my camera behind.

We had big tall fruity cocktails to start with, followed by scallops with crumbly stuff and coriander on top, son-in-law eggs (battered and deep fried egg with yummy chili dip) and then a really good duck curry. Really good. I mean, I have a problem eating duck for the same reason I have a problem eating quail and lamb - they're so cute. I don't want to eat anything I would normally fawn over. But I'm ashamed to say, it smelled so good that gobbled it down and then chased coconut rice all over the plate trying to get that last little bit of fragrant sauce. Then it was onto the dessert platter and before we knew it, it was time to roll off to the theatre.

But no.

Wait.

How can I not tell you about the desert plate? I love this (now old) trend of a little bit of everything on the desert menu carefully lined up on a long plate and plonked down between the two of you. I can never choose which desert to have, and it only ever ends in a growly husband when I poach off his. So, on the plate:

1) sticky black rice w mango and jasmine tea icecream (7/10)

2) tofu cheesecake w crispy sugary thing on top (10/10). Both of us had read this on the menu and said 'blerk, no WAY are we ordering that' and yet it was divine. Smooth and cheesy in a way tofu should never be. Or should always be. One or the other.

3) pear and cinnamon pancake with red bean icecream (3/10) - This was my choice if I had an individual dessert, but it was very ordinary. Sue me, but redbean icecream should be a redder, and beanier. Don't give me Asian Lite!!

4) vanilla and apple dumpling (4/10) Was Tony's individual choice, but again, was a little disappointing in a chewy, apple wrapped in dimsum pastry kind of way.

5) white chocolate cold pudding (8/10). Really a pannacotta, so as such, very yummy. However don't make the mistake of saying to the waiter 'the pannacotta was nice' because their reply will be something like "it's not pannacotta because that's not asian. It's a cold pudding."

To which *I* say - if you simmer up cream, sugar, vanilla then add gelatin, you can *call* it whatever the heck you want -- it's panna cotta. I almost wanted to kidnap the 'cold pudding' and take it back to its Italian heritage at Pelligrini's, but then their creme caramels might have taken offence. So I gobbled it down instead.

So as you can see, it was piglets anonymous and tight trousers after the Gingerboy adventure, even after the waitress told us we'd been 'circumspect'. I'd hate to see indulgence!

Then onto Wicked, which was fabulous. Clever use of the original story and I was entranced the whole way through. We had amazing seats that only L knows how to source (how does she do it?) and the night zoomed by.

Go see it!

Go eat at Gingerboy under the starry bamboo sky on a clear perspex seat. You won't regret it.