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Friday

Here at Chez Galaxy, Friday nights could not be more exciting. On the way home from work, I decided to forgo the still novel pleasure of taking the Great Circle Line bus home--have I told you about the incredible view as you go along Stuartholme Road?--and head for my old Friday night pit stop, the Queen Street Mall.

All day, it had been just me and the microfilm machine for company in the Fryer Library, so I think I was craving a bit of human interaction, the bustle of Friday night shoppers, the conversation of retail workers.

I found myself, as I often do, salivating over various gadgets and appliances in a kitchen ware shop. They're all so pretty and shiny. This time I actually decided to purchase something, a 20cm skillet pan that I've been contemplating for at least a year. I'm not much of an impulse buyer. Now I won't have to lug the big frying pan out for small jobs. I'm especially looking forward to those moments when making Indian and Chinese food where they call for toasting various seeds or creating a flavoured oil to pour over the final dish.

Speaking of cooking, here's a blurry photo of an okra and potato dish I made last week:


After leaving the kitchen shop, I used the magics of a phone with an internet connection to look up the location of the new city branch of my favourite eco shop. They'd sent me a catalogue by email and I quite liked the look of a few things, plus since I lost my Sigg water bottle at a gelati counter on Lygon Street in Melbourne, I've been buying and refilling various plastic water bottles, which I really prefer not to do.

I looked at the water bottles, but my aesthetic snobbery got in the way of me buying a replacement. That, and I really want it to fit in the side pocket of my backpack, so I can try to minimise the chances of losing it. Well, I can live in hope. I've always been a bit prone to losing things. I remember when I heard that song that went 'Dancing in the disco, bumper to bumper. Wait a minute, where's me jumper? Where's me jumper? ... And my mother will be so, so angry...' I decided that it was my personal theme song.

Having put off the water bottle until another time, I looked at the magnet picture hangers that seemed to promise hope for renters who like pictures on their walls but aren't allowed to put up hooks or use blu-tack. Unfortunately they still involved double sided tape, but gee, what strong magnets, they could definitely keep the Andy Warhol pictures I drooled over at the GoMA shop in place, without damaging them.

I ended up buying some dish washing liquid, and then, as if to completely mock my earlier proclamation that I'm not an impulse buyer, I decide to get a Bokashi All-Food Compost Kit.

I'd never heard of them before, but just talking to my sister now, she says she's seen them on television.


Anyway, it's this bin you put your food scraps in, between layers of a Bokashi mixture, that's some kind of bacteria. Effectively what happens is that the food scraps get pickled, and after a few weeks of tamping down the bin, getting rid of air pockets, and making sure you put the right ratio Bokashi to food scraps, you can dig a hole in your garden and leave it for about three weeks, upon which time it will have turned into humus, full of nutrients for your garden.



I was a bit excited when I saw it at the eco store because straight away I could see that it was something that a renter could do, and now that I have a small patch of dirt, I also saw that it could help along my fledgling herb garden, which, by the way, was one of my new year's resolutions to establish. Even if I end up with too much pickled garbage, the pamphlet suggests I can give it to my local community garden, and since moving to this new place, I have one that I walk past most days.

I almost made it home for an exciting evening of setting up the Bokashi Kit, but I got waylaid by the bottle shop across from the bus stop and gave in to more traditional Friday night pleasures, treating myself to a Wine Adventure Pack consisting of six small bottles of Margaret River Reds.

See? The adventure never stops here at Chez Galaxy, even the wine attests to the excitementt.

Small News

On some days, you make small connections. They can be between various thoughts and concepts of which you were already aware, but it seems as though that unassuming link has finally bridged an abyss of incoherence and despair.

Cheese On Toast

The teenage girl who lives next door cried so hard just before. She wailed from a place inside her that had no voice.

Now everything is silent and I've made myself cheese on toast and a cup of tea for dinner.

Flower Power

I think it was Ben, writing at Sarsaparilla recently, who made a comment about being able to recognise a landscape you were familiar with, even when it was presented to you as being another place. He used the example of films and television programmes made in Australia that were set in European countries, so, for example, a corner of Adelaide University could be represented as a building in London circa 1900. If you'd never seen the Adelaide site, you'd be none the wiser, but if you'd encountered that building everyday of your undergraduate career, then you could identify the film maker's sleight.

Reading Ben's post, I recognised my own ability to identify the places and landscapes that have been prominent in my life. This sense of recognition, combined with a slight pang in the gut, is how I could pinpoint the location on display in a slide show at a friend's place recently. On the occasion of her son's first birthday, her husband had set up a computer in the background, showing the first year of E's life. In a sequence from a visit to his maternal grandparents, I could see E before the familiar hills of a distant Great Dividing Range with low dark clouds, hovering over the haze of the blue grey hills, suffocating with their insistent humidity. The surrounding vegetation was densely green, but in the foreground evidence of farm life, partially rusted, corrugated iron sheds and stalks of sugar cane, confirmed that I was looking at somewhere in Far North Queensland, not too far from Cairns. It turned out to be Babinda, a small town about 70kms south of Cairns.

Click on photo for credit

In October last year, I saw something else that reminded me of the vegetation of my childhood. I was visiting another friend. She was house-sitting at a property at Maleny, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, just north of Brisbane. It wasn't the surrounding landscape that evoked the visceral reaction that catapulted me back about 25 years, but the plants throughout the house of the somewhat luxurious cottage.


They were orchids, those exquisitely crafted flowers found principally in rain forests, which is where I encountered them, on our annual holidays to Cape Tribulation and the Daintree.

I remember the first time I saw one in its natural environment. It was growing from the side of a large tree. I identified it as a Cooktown orchid, which is Queensland's floral emblem.

I was excited to recognise it from my school books and all at once, I felt ridiculously proud that the state floral emblem came from the part of Queensland in which I lived, yet strangely puzzled by the lack of gravitas surrounding the encounter. Stumbling over such an important flower by chance seemed to be missing in the appropriate ceremony.


When I visited C I had to learn the story of the orchids. It turned out they belonged to the gardener and he cultivated them in a greenhouse at the back of the house and when they bloomed, he placed them throughout the house so they could be enjoyed by its owners.


I was awestruck by a weird combination of admiration at such skill (the rest of the garden was pretty spectacular too) and nostalgia for wonderful holidays in such a unique environment.


I remembered walking through rain forests and being lassoed by wait-a-whiles, dropping their spurred ropes to trap unsuspecting passers-by; trying to catch yabbies in rain forest creeks, but never being quite quick enough; daring to eat an unfamiliar berry because it looked so much like a tiny strawberry (luckily, it turned out to be a wild variety); being serenaded, as we made sand castles on the beach, by a tall man known locally as 'cane knife'; walking what seemed like miles to a shop we weren't sure was open, guided only by the marker of a very tall palm tree; and wading through mangroves up to our knees in their muddy stench, ever fearful of encountering a saltwater crocodile.