Over the hills with a mountain buggy

My week spent trying out the mountain buggy was a busy one. I wanted to get as much use out of it as possible so I took it everywhere…the local shops, to the doctors and the local shopping centre and to the country. I even tried jogging with it.

We took the mountain buggy to a market in St Andrews. If you haven’t been to St Andrews market it’s held every Saturday in St Andrews about 45 minutes from Melbourne. Vendors sell everything from homemade soaps and creams to organic veggies with some gardening tools thrown in. I especially wanted to take the mountain buggy to see what it can do over rocks, hills and uneven terrain.

Well...all I have to say is that it did its job. It glides over everything with ease. It's so easy to manouver, even with one hand. With its swiveling front wheel I can turn the pram with one finger. Only takes one action to fold away. It can even stand upright while folded. I have no idea why I want it to stand up but it can.

[Eggs: actually I like the fact that it stands up. Our other one doesn't and it takes up too much room lying down. At the end of the day, all prams are a much of a muchness to me so it would be the little things like this that make me rate one over another. The major factor in it's favour IMHO is the big wheels and inflatable tyres. It *does* make for a smoother ride and it goes over stuff more easily. On the downside it's big, heavy and doesn't compress much when folded. I have yet to try one with suspension, but I suspect that benefits would be minimal and it would only open itself to being lowered and pimped. But tell me TJ wouldn't be the coolest kid in mother's group when he rocks up in a slammed and bagged pram with remote control hydraulics. He's gonna need some gold chains...]

There were a couple of things that I didn't like about it but I can overlook these..
1. It takes up nearly the entire boot of the car (which is fine with me...I put my shopping in the back seat anyway).
2. The basket at the bottom is a tad bit small for me.
3. It's back heavy.
4. Weighs 10.5kg (but still lighter than some).

At a retail price of $659 on sale this pram is a great buy. Even checked on ebay...people are selling their second hand prams from at least $450 (even better).

I love this pram...just wish that baby TJ did too...he was comfortable in it even though it was only for 10 minutes before be screamed to be picked up. I think he would rather be in his baby bjorn.

Ciao,
bananas

Scones at the Nongs

Had enough of work. I decided to take Tuesday off this week to hang out with bananas and the cherub. He's started to show a much wider interest in the world and seems to get irritated when stuck at home so we thought we'd head out somewhere. Where do you take a four month old in Melbourne during winter when shopping centres are getting a little stale? (Actually they've just opened some new sections at Doncaster Shoppingtown including the food court and it's looking good).

To the 'nongs!!! Bananas and I have long loved heading down to the Dandenong mountains for scones at Miss Marples. If you've never been there they have a very simple menu but it's all done well - the beef cottage pie, quiche and smoked salmon fingers are our faves. Don't worry it's not the salmon that has fingers (although I believe you can get that in Tassie?!?), but it's like an open sandwich cut into strips (like fingers) or maybe you're supposed or eat them with your fingers...



















But the highlight is the scones. I would insist that it's pronounced "scown" by the way (like in "own"). A "scon" is a school boy's way of showing manly affection by rubbing his knuckles on your head, and anyway, only peasants pronounce it scon :) But I digress...

Now even if you can pronounce it right I'd argue that the scones at Miss Marples are more like a tea bread. They aren't the right shape and their kinda fluffy, but they *are* pretty good and the "rather superb" jam they present with it is about as close to perfection as stewed fruit can get. Obviously lashings of thick cream are mandatory. Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' bout


















It nearly becomes a day trip these days with the shortness of daylight in winter and the time it takes to get out of the house with Eggs junior once you take a wonder around down there. You can always find new stuff in the puppet shop down the road from Miss Marples and once junior gets a bit older there's a whole bunch of stuff from there I can see my self stepping on in my lounge room. Despite the normal complications of taking a baby anywhere it was a great family "day" out. While it doesn't have the excitement of a track day at Winton or a morning blat on the bike through Reefton spur, "family" type fun is a different kind of fun. It gives you the kind of satisfaction that will most likely turn me into the pot-bellied older family men at work but meh - by the time you hit 30 a guy *knows* he no longer has a chance at a professional sporting career so what does it matter (no golf doesn't count, although hotdog eating might come close).

TJ’s First set of wheels

When we were on our pre-natal quest for baby stuff, one of the things that we knew that we needed was a pram/stroller…. never having a kid before we decided that we weren’t going to be one of those new parents that get carried away, especially on a pram/stroller. We thought that he is only going to use it two years, or at the most three, and will probably hardly use it anyway. All the reviews, blogs and friends swear by certain brands. We were told that the Bugaboo was like the ‘Louis Vuitton’ of the baby world and the Quinny was like maybe ‘Prada’. Despite loving fashion brands I just couldn’t bring myself to spend $1500 for a pram/stroller and not to mention these prams/strollers are quite heavy.

We were getting very confused and the baby stores weren’t much help so we decided to go with our initial inclination and bought a cheap and very light, but quite decent stroller that we found in ‘Toys R Us’. Being light was our main requirement…All we needed was something to push baby TJ around.

But of course after four months we are now in search for another stroller. Eggs doesn’t understand why. Let’s just say he hardly ever uses it anyway. Baby TJ hates his stroller - the wheels get sticky, it feel flimsy and pushing it up hill will put me out for a whole week. Now I am in search for the prefect stroller.

A beautiful friend let me borrow her ‘Mountain Buggy’ for the week. She loves it so let’s see whether I do too.

BTW quilt is finished.

Ciao,
bananas

Go the mighty Dons

To be a true Australian (at least in the Southern states) you need to barrack for a footy team. Until recently this facet of my life in Oz has been lacking. I grew up being asked "who do you go for?" to which I have always relied "I don't follow footy". This has usually been followed with the "is there sumfink wrong wid you or sumfink" look that all non-footy subscribers will be very familiar with.

It has therefore been my mission for the past few weeks to find a team. Bananas and various friends and workmates have been on my back about this for a while. But choosing a team is final. Period. You can never ever change your team no matter how much they start to suck or what kind of illegal activities their stakeholders are embroiled in. So choosing a team is not to be taken lightly. My problem is that I have no affinity or association with any AFL team. I have never lived in any of the suburbs and I refuse to choose a team by colours.

Bananas is a Collingwood supporter - so that's out. Not only do I have too many teeth to qualify, it would make things too boring at home. We have some good friends (let's call them "Cheng and Princess") who are the most avid asian Carlton supporters I have ever known. For non Ozzies, Carlton are the arch-enemies of Collingwood so on paper this would be an excellent choice. However, in recent months Cheng and Princess have managed to convert many others in limbo like myself to their crusade. I'm not one to follow the crowd so my quest could not end in that camp.

Hawthorn are a bunch of pretty boys and any non-Victorian team is obviously not on the cards. So who was left? Kevin Sheedy is ending an epic career as coach of Essendon, so they will be starting a new era. I figured this would be a good time to jump on board and embark on this new and exciting journey with them. Bananas' sister came down to visit a couple of weekends ago and she "goes for" Essendon. This pretty much sealed the deal as I now will have someone to gloat with every time the Dons pummel the Magpies, and Bananas will have only the toothless caravan-dwellers to console her. Excellent....

And after all of that, I have to admit I still don't care that much. But at least now when anyone asks me "who do you barrack for", I can answer with "the mighty Dons!!!" and no longer will I endure the blank looks and ridicule of not having a team to call my own.

Oh and if you're reading this Cheng - WE PWNED JOO BIATCHES!!!

Highway to Hell

Eastlink is finished. To celebrate the public was allowed to cycle or walk on segments of it before it opened up to real traffic. We were supposed to do the 30km bike ride but that didn't eventuate so we went down to walk in the Melba tunnel instead with the little fella and grab some snags at the "thothage thithle".

I'm not exactly sure whether we were celebrating another public asset being privatised or all the extra traffic that will get dumped on the Eastern freeway (heading into the city) and Heidelberg (heading towards/from the Northern Ring road) but they had a pretty good turnout in any case. Obviously this is all about me and how it affects my quality of life. I don't often need to head down to Frankston after all. I don't even own a pair of moccasins. For the non-Melbourne dwellers, Frankston is Bogan country (not that there's anything wrong with that). It might be useful for the odd occasion that we would like to head down to Sorrento or there abouts. But I'm expecting that the extra daily traffic I will need to deal with will make this seem fairly trivial. Time will tell...

/rant

Here's some piccies from the walk:



























We don't have many tunnels in Melbourne, but I do have fond memories of driving through tunnels in London as a boy. I never got to go through the channel tunnel to France though as it wasn't completed before we migrated to Oz. I hope I never break down in the Melba tunnel - there is a large dodgem van that comes to push you through in that instance, and I don't know how much my car would enjoy that. I noticed lots of revenue cameras as well - no speeding in the tunnell kiddies!!! Ok so maybe I lied about the rant being over.

Anyway, I'm sure Eastlink will solve alot of people's problems, just not mine. Maybe I'm not looking at this right. Maybe I need a holiday house in Sorrento to change my perspective...

Coffee Roasting attempt #2

After the fairly average ghetto attempt at roasting coffee in the wok, this time I used the popper. Apparently it's important to get one with the vents on the side instead of the bottom of the popping cylinder. This ensures maximum agitation of the beans and prevents the chaff (how cool is that word) from falling through the holes in the bottom, and oh how much chaff there was!

Now most keen home roasters perform a whole heap of mods to their poppers so they can better control the temperatures etc. Anyone who knows me knows that I suffer from a delibitating electronics curse. I must have done something pretty evil to an eight track player in a previous life to deserve such bad karma, because any electric/electronic goods I touch blows up. Because of this severe condition, I'm reluctant to hot up my popper with anything fancy like thermocouples and cut out switches. Besides, it's pink. And sparkly. And it's "Bratz". So it's cool enough already, or so my 6 year old niece tells me.

My awesome popper at work:













So anyways, 13 minutes in my unmodified popper gave me a fairly even roast in a nice middle brown colour. Comparing it to commercially roasted beans I had lying around it was perhaps a bit lighter but some of that could be attributed to the original pale colour of the "India Mysore Nuggets A" beans. What kind of name is that for a bean though really? That ain't very appetising - it sounds like the first thing that passed out of the wrong end of an Indian dude with Hemarroids.

Anyway, so this time I waited a couple of days to try the results and I have to say I was quite happy with myself. Even more than usual =P. I would actually choose to drink this stuff. I can see myself relying less on pre-roasted coffee and doing alot more popper roasting in future,. The downside though is that I can only do small batches so I'll have to roast frequently. Overall though I give this the big tick. If you want to make sure you're getting the freshest coffee at home while saving some dosh, invest in a $25 Bratz popcorn maker!!!

Finally a quilt

I think I am a wanna be house wife. I have been reading all these blogs where mothers have been doing super human things. They sew, work, bake, take care of 7 kids, volunteer and not to mention find a cure for cancer. I on the other hand get out of bed at 10.30am in time for breakfast at 11.00am. Though, I do get up for half and hour with baby TJ at 7.00am before we both head back to bed. You can still find me in my PJ's at 5pm.

Before my six month maternity leave started I had heaps of things that I wanted to do....honestly I haven't done anything except for finally starting TJ's quilt...I have been meaning to make a quilt for baby TJ since I found out I was pregnant. Now he is nearly four months old and I have just started. I did have good intentions....I bought the material 8 months ago. It took me 2 months to decide what colours... my husband can tell you that I am not very good at choosing colours. If you ask him, he will tell you about the time I insisted on a red/white mat for our living room by the time we got it back home it didn't match anything. Costing us a fortune the mat is still in our living room.

I still insist that I am very good with colours even though hubby will insist otherwise. I ended up deciding on a blue and green quilt. Can't go wrong with those colours for a baby boy especially with cars on the fabric.




















Getting back to the point, I do admire all the mothers that seem to do so much. One day I will get there. At the moment I will be happy enough to just finish my quilt.

Ciao,
Bananas

Making coffee

The idea of having fresher coffee really appealed to me, so I decided to have a go at ordering some green beans and roasting them myself at home. I bought a popcorn maker for this purpose having done some research and found this to be one of the preffered methods. Not just any popcorn maker mind you but the Breville Bratz popcorn maker. It's pink and has glitter. If adds a certain bling factor that was otherwise missing from our kitchen. It was actually the only one I could find when I went looking and for $25 in Target I figured I can't go wrong.

However, I decided to try using a wok first as this seemed instinctively an easier process to me and I am by and large a lazy person. That and I reckon it should give good results since you can keep stirring them and moving them around to roast them evenly.

Green beans to the finished product:

My results were so-so, but OK I guess for a first attempt. Having said that you're supposed to let them de-gas for a few days before tasting them but obviously that wasn't going to happen =P. They definitely didn't roast as evenly as I'd hoped as you might be able to see from my not-so-awesome camera phone pics. Some of the beans are noticeably darker than others. I intend to see if the Bratz can do a better job.