You call that a Water Baby? THIS is a Water Baby

Both of my kiddies are enrolled in a swimming school we feel reflects the kind of learning we want them to have when it comes to water.  King’s focuses not only on water safety and survival, but correct technique from their very first class through to the teenage swim squads.  They theorise that if kids learn perfect technique from day one there won’t be a need to undo bad habits and fix messy swim stroke later on should they want to go further and have a swimming career.

In high school I was very good at swimming and used to win swimming races quite a lot.  Unfortunately I had zero technique and did it on talent alone.  I clearly remember an exasperated friend who used to train with the AIS turning to me after coming second (again) and panting, “I don’t know how you do it Bec – you look like a drowning bloody chook when you swim but you beat me every time!”

Unfortunately while talent will help you win your zone, regional or even state carnivals, it will not get you to the nationals, let alone the Olympics.  Hence I have placed my children in a swim school that won’t just teach them how to swim but will teach them how to swim properly so they can go as far as they like with it.

Originally I thought Charlotte was the water baby in the family.  She loves bath time, adores swimming…well really she just loves anything at all to do with water.  Then James came along and I realised what a water baby really is.

A water baby will stand there grinning a goofy grin of triumph after he manages to pull the dog’s water bowl down on himself because at least he’s wet.  Then he will sit in the puddle and turn blue from the cold while he splashes.  A water baby will spend the entire time his sister is in swim class trying to get into the pool himself no matter how many times he’s reprimanded, smacked or turned upside down and tickled until he is gasping for breath.  A water baby does not go to swim classes to learn how to swim – he goes there purely to maximise the amount of skin that’s touching water. 

From the moment we enter the sliding doors at the pool to the moment I strap him, protesting stridently, into the car, James’ singular focus is on being in the water.  He does not wait for Mum.  He doesn’t care if no one catches him when he goes in – you’d think he’s perfectly happy to drown.  It is exhausting. 

These days I try to time our arrival at the swim centre so I have just enough time to throw him into his swimmers before class starts.  Charlotte and I wear our swimmers there with dresses over the top for quick stripping purposes and our shoes are always slip-ons or sandals.  There can’t be a single moment where we’re delayed because in those supervision-free moments he will find a way to break free and throw himself into the deep end.

I am convinced that swimming classes boosting his water confidence is having the opposite effect to the desired outcome.  He is not learning respect for the water and how to get himself out of trouble.  He is learning how to jump from a great height into God-only-knows-how-deep water and thrash until he’s rescued.  It amazes me that he comes up beaming every time.

Now THAT’S a water baby.

More Secrets - Canberra's Forgotten Arboretums

So I promised you that if anyone sent me anymore “secrets of Canberra” I would publish them here and let you know.  Most of you are familiar with the controversy that is John Stanhope’s National Arboretum. 

I personally think it was a good idea.  I know there was a huge cost involved.  Yes, I’m sure we could have spent it on lots of other worthy projects.  No, it was not the smartest thing to attempt to establish in the height of a drought.  But, let’s face it, you don’t get a national asset like Commonwealth Park or the Governor General’s residence by pinching pennies and thinking small.  You need vision and you-know-whatsits of steel.

Anyways, tonight as we had dinner with the family the subject of Environa came up.  Most of the people present had never heard of it before but Charles’ Aunty Bev, who knows quite a lot, knew about it and she knew about Erica’s hidden Parliamentary Triangle suburb. 

As we discussed the things people don’t know about Canberra, Bev tossed me another one.

Stanhope’s arboretum is not Canberra’s first.  She claims that originally there were 52 or 53 – some of them out of town, some of them around town.  She’s even been into the bush where one of the original ones is still going strong, quite forgotten by the world.  Over the course of time many of them have disappeared through development, natural disasters or neglect. 

I’m on the trail now to find some of them.  So far we have:

* Lindsay Pryor Arboretum (burned out in the January fires)

* Westbourne Woods (still largely there)

* The Cotter Block Arboretum

* York Park Oak Plantation (still kind of there)

* Bendora Arboretum (still there and magnificent despite a bunch of fires)

* Glenloch Cork Oak Plantation (now the largest Cork Oak plantation in the southern hemisphere)

Know of any of the others?  More info as it comes to light!

Apparently Today was my "Day Off"

This morning right before I got up I was chatting away to my husband when this little verbal gem popped out of his mouth, “Well unlike you, I don’t get the day off today.”

Day off?  Huh?  Am I going to a day spa?  Have the Christmas elves come to do all my cleaning during the night?  Was I missing something?  Oh no – he’s referring to the fact that I don’t have paid employment on Wednesdays. 

Now normally as I go about my business on Wednesdays I don’t really think too much about all the chores I have to do while I have two kids in tow – I just get on with it.

But today I continued to seethe on and off all day about the “day off” comment.  While I washed, mopped, vacuumed, dropped off forms, wrangled my way through swimming classes with the kids and sorted washing I tried to work out how on earth what I was doing could possibly be referred to as a day off.

All I could surmise is that the man is obviously deluded.  Staying at home to do chores and errands with two bored children is a tad harder than going to work and wrangling my way through legislation from the comfort of an air-conditioned office with a padded executive chair.  Let’s face it, if the stay-at-home gig was really such a picnic I’d be doing it full time. 

It’s 3pm now and I haven’t sat down all day until now.  I’ve got stacks more chores, dinner to cook, another batch of gingerbread to make and, if I get through all of that, I might have a chance to work on some of the Christmas gifts we’re meant to be making.

I don’t know what time the work will run out for me but I’m clear on one thing – the instant he gets home he’s going to apologise for the “day off” comment or he’s going to die.  The choice will be his.

*  Bliss.  I’ve just realised that he’s got all next week “off” while I work.

Did You Know?

It astounds me how you can live somewhere for ages, thinking you know everything there is to know about it and yet you can still have moments where you suddenly realise that you’re not privy to some of it’s most intimate secrets.  It’s a bit like being married to someone for 20 years and then discovering that he had a whole other family complete with wife and kids before he met you. 

I’ve lived in and around Canberra almost my whole life and she still shocks me.  I didn’t know anything about the 1971 flash flood and drownings at Yarra Glen until two years ago when people protested the sculpture that was raised there...and not dedicated to the victims.

Similarly I had no idea that there had ever been brickworks in Yarralumla, let alone that they still existed, until I saw a news segment about the planned redevelopment there.  

Further discoveries include;

*  The Weetangera Cemetery

*  A bunch of stuff about Commonwealth Park including the buried Flugelman sculpture.

*  The All Saint's church in Ainslie that used to be the Necropolis train station in Sydney.

*  The heritage listed CSIRO site otherwise known as Gungahlin Homestead.

Anyways, apart from all those lovely little historical discoveries today I discovered something that floored me.  I was checking out a friend’s address on Google maps when I noticed this;

Yup.  A whole suburb out near Hume called “Environa”.  And it looks like a really well laid out and planned place.  At first I thought it must be a new subdivision and I instantly went looking for property for sale there.  Nope.  Nada.  Almost nothing on Google at all.

Why?  Because Environa was a subdivision 80 years ago!  You can read all about Environa, the original plans, the structures that still survive there, how it died off thanks to the depression and how the family have preserved aspects of the suburb that never was here.  You can also see the original lithographs promoting the subdivision here. 

Enough of the infrastructure exists today that you can see geographical features on Google satellite photos which were obviously the original main roads of Environa.  I'm still not sure why this discovery shocks me, it just does.  Maybe because I was absolutely primed to buy one of those blocks because it looked like a thoroughly modern well-designed suburb from the safety of Google maps and I loved the sound of it.  Environa.  It sounds like something our current government would come up with upon the establishment of a "green" living suburb.  *sigh*  

Anyways, to discover more interesting facts about Canberra and her long-forgotten secrets I suggest checking out Dave's ACT.  Dave is a Canberran historian who has documented what he calls his "urban exploration" of Canberra in his blog.  It's a fascinating read.

One final note - my friend Erica has also sent me the link to another little-known Canberra secret - ironically another vanished suburb right in the Parliamentary Triangle that is now celebrated by the fossicker's delight known as geocaching.  Good job Erica!

Feel free to write to me with little known facts and I'll pop them up for others to wonder at!

Christmas Gifts - Gingerbread

Today’s sustainable Christmas gift project is …gingerbread men!  Or in this case, gingerbread trees because my kids have lost my gingerbread man cutter.  Nevermind!  Every year I make a huge amount of gingerbread for dispersal at Chrissy gatherings.  The concept is lovely – a folksy Christmas tradition that looks good, smells great and tastes like distilled essence of elves, tinsel and fairy lights all in one.

The reality is appalling.  It takes ages to make, I always have at least eleventy million moments where I think the dough is shot to pieces and can’t be rescued and all up it takes about three hours of my life and approximately four months off my life expectancy.  Yet somehow come November I’ve forgotten all that and I think, “Christmas is coming…I know, I’ll make gingerbread!”

So while the recipe is below I’ve decided to jot down a few important gingerbread-related pointers first as a reality check.  In no particular order;

1.)  It cooks quickly.  By the time you’ve cut out the next tray of gingerbread, the first one will be ready.  It takes about eight minutes which means you’ll be on your feet for at least an hour rotating gingerbread in and out of the oven.  You can tell that it’s ready because the edges of it are turning brown.

2.)  Gingerbread is pretty malleable when it first comes out of the oven and it sweats as it cools.  So use a sturdy egg flip to shift it and make sure it goes onto a flat wire rack – don’t stack them on top of each other to cool or the upper layers will be misshapen and the bottom layers a bit soft.

3.)  If you make it when there are people in the house you need to resign yourself to the reality that not all the gingerbread will survive contact with the enemy.  The very sternest of death threats will ensure that 90% of your biscuits survive until morning but that’s all you can hope for.  You can improve the odds by rolling the last little odds and ends out and baking what I like to call Picasso biscuits which have no discernible shape.  Let the marauders take the Picassos – save the Rembrandts for your Christmas function.

4.)  Take your time making the icing and when it says add the icing to the egg white slowly, we mean s-l-ooooo-w-l-y.  The test to see if you made it right is to tilt the bowl onto its side.  If the icing doesn’t move you made it properly.  The pay off for taking ages to make is of course that gingerbread icing is the easiest icing to work with and goes on beautifully.  Free form any design you like – all these Christmas trees took me ten minutes maximum to ice while Charles applied the “baubles”.  It’s pretty hard to make your biscuits look bad.

5.)  Caveat to #4 – there are no guarantees and sometimes your bikkies will look terrible.  Somehow my snowman started looking like Orko from He-man as I iced him.  

Then Charles got the giggles and gave it eyes.  It was not an improvement.

Please note people that I doubled the recipe below and it made the quantity you see in the photo minus a few test pieces identified for quality control purposes by Charles and Charlotte and, of course, the Picassos.

Ingredients:

125g butter

½ Cup brown sugar packed firmly

1 egg yolk (save the white for icing)

1 teaspoon bicarb soda

3 teaspoons ground ginger

2 cups plain flour

3 tablespoons golden syrup

Icing:

1 egg white

1 cup icing sugar

Method

Cream the butter and sugar until they’re fluffy.

Add the egg yolk and beat well.

In a separate bowl sift the dry ingredients and mix together.

Gradually add the sifted dry ingredients and golden syrup to the butter mix.

Mix well and knead lightly.  If the mix is too dry, add more butter and syrup.  Add more flour if the mix is too sticky.

Rub flour over your rolling pin and then roll your mixture to a height of 3mm.

Cut the biscuits out and place them on a tray lined with baking paper*.

Bake in 180°C oven for 8-10 minutes until gingerbead goes golden brown.

Icing:

After the biscuits have cooled, it’s time to ice them. 

Beat the egg white until stiff peaks form.  Place icing sugar in sifter and add gradually while you beat.  One or two taps of the sifter against the beater at a time slow, people, not a quarter of a cup a go. 

Once mixed put it straight into an icing bag and start drawing.  This icing literally “dries out” so the sooner you use it, the better.

For an awesome look add some lollies using the icing as glue.

Om noms people – enjoy your gingerbread!

*  I like to roll the dough out onto baking paper, cut the biscuits and then lift the surplus dough from between the shapes.  I am nowhere near good enough in the kitchen to move raw gingerbread dough from the rolling surface to a tray.  But best of luck to you if you want to give it a go.

How to Counterbalance Study with Brainlessness

A frequent TC blog reader friend of mine pointed out today that for a while there not so long ago this blog went through a bit of a drought and now, suddenly, I’m back to regular posts.  Any reason for that?  Well I’d have to say that it’s got a lot to do with the insane decision to return to study before all of my course credits expired.  Let me explain.

I hate higher level learning.  Even as you sit through your classes you know that you’ll store the knowledge you’re meant to be soaking up into the “3 months max” mid-term memory centres.  The instant you finish your final exam, 90% of the semester’s efforts will be dumped from your hard drive.  Of the remaining 10% it will break down like so – 4% retained because it’s actually useful, 2% retained solely for trivia nights, 2% hidden in random memory centres and only ever used to win an argument when your chips are really down and the remaining 2% is the stuff that, while thoroughly useless, refuses to leave of its own volition and must be eradicated over time mainly through the consumption of alcohol.  Much alcohol, mainly vodka.

During periods of study I turn into a total zombie.  I withdraw from society and exist solely for work, kiddy-related activities and study, study, study.  All other intellectual pursuits fall by the wayside.  I have a theory that you are only given so much smart to work with.  If you use it up during semester trying to turn a recipe into biscuits or read a map, you will be rendered totally incapable of understanding the long term implications of Commercial Bank of Australia Ltd v Amadio no matter how many times you read it.  You can, however, counterbalance the drain on your brain power with the application of brainlessness.

Observe.  Bec’s usual activities – unguided study on topics that interest me, building, craft, cooking, etc.  Bec’s activities during study?  Well let’s see.  My accounting diploma gave me insomnia (which weirdly seemed to afflict all accounting students) and we all found ourselves watching some awful soap opera thing called “Sunset Beach” – the only program available on television at two in the morning apart from infomercials*. 

Sunset Beach was something like Days of Our Lives on a beach where the total implausibility and continuity of the plot and characters had been ratcheted up to within an inch of it's carefully contrived life.  Looking back now I'm convinced it was a bizarre sort of quasi-experimental test either to see how much tripe the public might swallow or to see just how cheaply bad television could be made.

During semesters we were all thoroughly hooked (and I do not mean just the women.  Even the guys were watching Sunny B and shuddering, “Oh my gawddd” over the juicier plot devices).  We’d gather in the CIT canteen over coffee to discuss Annie’s shock return from the dead** and whether Caitlin would ever reveal the loss of her pregnancy to Cole***.  If one of us was managing to sleep at night the other insomniacs would dutifully relate the contents of each night’s episode.  Even being temporarily banned from the cafeteria for re-enacting a particularly moving scene using the fried rice and awful spring rolls as props**** did not clue us in to the fact that we were way out of control.

And then something weird would happen.  Come holiday time and every single one of us would be back to the Financial Review and Four Corners.  Obviously Sunset Beach was our mental escape – a mindless distraction to counterbalance the mind numbing pain of audit control procedures.

Law was a similar story only this time we’d gossip over WHO Weekly and watch crap exposés on Today Tonight or A Current Affair.  You’d plow your way through as much Garcia v National Australia Bank as you could and then read something refreshingly vapid about who had been caught with whom celebrity bed-hop-wise.

With two kids, a husband and a job these days I have no counterbalance for the mental strain of study other than sleep.  And that’s okay but it means that semesters are like mental marathons. Now that it’s all over I feel like I’ve just been let off the leash.  I’m gorging myself on socialisation, building projects, craft projects, cooking escapades and snuggling up with my small family unit in bed.  And blogging.  Always with the blogging.

So there you go – expect much December and January and then nothing through until June!

*  And there are only so many steak knife sets you can own before you realise that, while using a steak knife is incredibly cool, a can opener is a much easier device to open cans of dog food with.  Faster, too.

**  Wanted for a crime she didn’t commit Annie hid in the coffin of a dead guy who was being flown across the country for burial in order to escape.  Unfortunately for Annie the widow of Mr Stiff decided at the last minute that it would be cheaper to cremate him before shipping.

*** Lost the baby in a car accident but was afraid she’d lose her man if she ‘fessed up because she thought the baby was the only reason he married her.  It wasn’t.  Aw.

**** Snow and search flares if memory serves.

Tip Shopping and Furniture Restoration 101

Our society is shocking when it comes to consumption.  We’re thoroughly materialistic and we’ve tricked ourselves into believing something new is better than something second-hand.  Thanks to IKEA and the like it’s a simple matter to toss an entire room of perfectly functional furniture in favour of something new purely for the “look”.  Don’t get me wrong – I love IKEA – but I think the cheap price persuades people that their products have low value and encourages them to chuck it as soon as they’re bored with it.

I learned at my mother’s knee how to lovingly restore an antique, make it the centre of your home and dress the room around it.  From my father I learned what a throwaway society we are and how much awesome there is to be had at the local tip.  Consequently, as an adult I have a few antique pieces I’ve collected over the years and a bunch of stuff I’ve discovered tucked away in second-hand charity stores, garage sales and the tip shop.

Of all the second-hand retail outlets in the world I love the tip shop the best.  It’s only a step away from foraging in the rubbish yourself and it’s a good step to make - someone has sorted the trash from the treasure for you.  It’s amazing what people throw out and there’s always a bargain to be had.  In the spirit of encouraging you all towards living a more sustainable life without sacrificing style (not to mention saving you a bog-load of money), I thought I would share with you one of our recent tip shop journeys from start to finish.

First of all, buying anything purely because it caught your eye is a no go.  You have to identify a need for it first.  This can be very hard because the tip shop is like an Aladdin’s cave of wonders and is filled with mounds of stuff I never knew I wanted so badly I’d give a kidney for it.

To help with the “need” versus “want” issue, I like to keep a list of things we have to do around the house.  When I’ve got some spare cash and a specific project in mind I’ll visit the tip shop and try to find something to work with.  The advantage of having my project list at home is that if I see a bargain that would suit a different project while I’m there, I can scoop it up guilt free and leave the other project for another day.

In this instance we’ve had a chest of draws on our “to do” list for a while now.  This is because Charlotte’s room is a perpetual mess mainly due to clothes.  It looks like everything she owns was fed through an industrial fan on the ceiling and left wherever it landed.

The reason?  Well, recently she began dressing herself.  The problem, as Charles rightly pointed out when I expressed my frustration, is that the shelves in her wardrobe are poorly designed for little hands.  She tugs one thing out and everything else comes right along with it.  Give her two days of dressing herself and everything she owns is on the floor with no discernible difference between clean and dirty.

Trying to change a person is an amazingly difficult thing to do.  Working with habits that have already formed is a lot easier and makes for a happier home.  So rather than try and "educate" her about the right way to handle clothing on shelves we decided to go with some draws she could rummage through.  Consequently a new chest of draws for her has been on our list for quite some time.  Unfortunately a good set are hard to come by (not to mention at least $300 brand new) and we’ve just been keeping an eye out while we go about other projects.

On this particular trip to the tip shop we were on the hunt for a plant stand for my Dad for Christmas.  He’s building an undercover pergola like ours and has specifically requested one of my revamp specials.  No joy with the plant stands on this particular trip but the tip Gods had something else in mind so we wouldn’t go home empty-handed.

Enter this little beauty:

We checked it out and it was very solid, only needed minor reinforcement and had scratches and gouges all over it.  It was also missing two knobs. The draws were also on rollers and easy to open and close (a must for littlies - although you can install your own if your draws don't have them).

Next up you have to negotiate a price and seal the deal.  Here is where I reveal my most excellent bargaining tip for the tip shop.  Decent people should skip down to the paragraph marked with a * because I assure you that while it is 100% effective, it's a low, dirty tactic and you will be disgusted.  (Although not as low as removing draw knobs and pocketing them to make a piece look rattier than it actually is which is, of course, something I would never do.  I’m just indicating that there’s always someone lower than you when it comes to bargaining tactics.  Set your own standard people.)

When you really want something, find something similar first.  Call your friendly tip shop person over and ask them for a price on the second item (the one you don’t want) first.  Now is your time to go all out for that Academy Award nomination.  Regardless of what price they quote you, your eyebrows should disappear into your hair and you will need to load your sentence with all the incredulity you can muster.

“$40???  Whoa!!!  Er…how about this one?”

It is important not to overdo it.  Don’t mention your budget, what you can afford, etc.  And don’t even try to haggle or bargain.  Just deliver a healthy dose of natural surprise with a tinge of mild embarrassment.  In this particular instance the first “decoy” chest of draws – a flimsy arrangement that probably would have fallen to pieces in the back of our car on the way home – got a quote of $40.  Employing my shock and awe technique got us a quote of $25 on the solid draws of awesome that we were really after.  Hurrah!

*  Welcome back decent people with highly evolved bargaining etiquette!  Now that you have paid way more than you should have what the friendly tip person quoted you, you are now in possession of your chest of draws!

The first thing you should do when restoring your draws is remove the hardware from the outside.

Now is a good time to reinforce anything that looks loose, add more nails/screws, WD40 any sticky rollers, etc.  Then you want to survey the superficial damage on your find.  In our case the gouges weren’t too bad – more like deep scratches – and I was able to get them out by hand.  If you’re missing bits or the gouges are too deep, you’ll need some wood filler before you can sand everything to a smooth finish.

Start with 80 grade sandpaper.  Always sand in the direction of the wood grain and use long strokes until the gouges disappear.  Now hit it with the 120 grade sandpaper.  This is finer and will be enough to give you a smooth finish under your paint.  Don’t stress that your furniture looks patchy because your sanding has removed the varnish completely in some areas and not at all in others.  At this point you should give the whole thing a light, all-over sand with the 80 grade first and then the 120.  Do not try and make it look good.  You’re not looking to do anything other than remove the gloss so your primer will have a better surface to stick to.

Your hardware store should be able to advise you when it comes to finding a suitable primer.  Essentially primer is a paint that locks in stains and makes a water-based top coat stick to older oil-based varnish.  We've used Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3.  Use a paintbrush and only apply a thin layer.  Be warned it looks like hell when you put it on – thoroughly streaky and generally awful.  Keep in mind that this is not your topcoat and it doesn’t have to be even and perfect.

After your primer has dried, hit it with a topcoat.  In our case we’ve gone for two coats of semi-gloss in Antique White.  Give your piece 24 hours to dry completely and then either reaffix the original hardware or pop on something new*. 

Good as new!

*  Our draws were missing two knobs and I’ve yet to buy new ones.  I wanted to make sure the original draw handles would work with the new colour and they do!  Now I just have to find a nice set of four knobs that match the handles to finish it off.