Month: April 2008 (page 3 of 8)
On one hand, I hate being the type of person who orders a “decaf skim latte.” I mean, really, what’s the point? But on the other hand, it’s either this or nothin’. And on a rainy, crappy day like today, I just can’t take nothin’.
Flemington Markets
Last week Eva kindly invited me to accompany her, Steph, and Kathleen to Flemington Markets on Saturday. I’d been to Paddy’s in Chinatown before, but this is the big market out near Homebush. It was INSANE. Hundreds of stalls with people selling fruit and veggies by the boxload, and it was all incredibly cheap. Bananas for $1/kilo. Whole crates of apples for $5. A one-kilo bag of peeled garlic for $2. We rented a cart and started piling stuff up. A couple hours (and one cramped car trip) later, we pulled it all out in Steph and Eva’s garate to divvy up. For less than $20, I ended up going home with apples, bananas, plums, mandarins, a pineapple, a pomelo, beans, coriander, cherry tomatoes, purple sweet potato, asparagus, the aforementioned bag of garlic, and nine(!) bulbs of fennel. So of course, now we’re cooking everything in bulk and stocking up the freezer for winter…
This article about books written by computers reminded me of something… Oh, that’s right! The Great Automatic Grammatizator! The obvious next step is for this Philip Parker guy to start paying “real” authors not to write.
I absolutely love this skirt, but all up with shipping it works out to about AUD $100. That’s an awful lot for a skirt you have to sew yourself… (Link to Clothkits courtesy of Alison.)
As of today, I am officially FOUR WEEKS away from the Sydney Half-Marathon. I’ve already run three times this week, so I’m going to cut back the distance on my long run today and go for a timed 10K just to see where I’m at. Then I’m hoping to do my first 10-miler on Sunday the 27th, and my longest pre-race run, an 11-miler, on Sunday the 4th of May. (I’m hoping that race day adrenaline will be enough to push me through the final two miles.) For the last weekend pre-race, I’ve just signed up to do the Mother’s Day Classic (8K fun run) on the 11th. I figure that should be a nice easy way to get fired up before the big day on the 18th.
As for my goals, first and foremost I want make the 11km 75:00 cutoff point. Once I do that, my goal is just to finish. If pressed to set a time goal, I’d have to say that finishing in less than 2.5 hours would be fantastic. That would bring me in just before Norma Wallett’s time of 152:52 from last year, when she was the oldest competitor (at 78!) to finish the race. So yeah, I’d like to match Norma’s pace. 🙂
From Life in Chippendale: “Chippendale Property on the Rise.” According to today’s Sunday Telegraph, Chippendale was #2 on the list of best performing Sydney suburbs in terms of property value. Over the last 12 months, the median property value here rose by more than 25%. Sweeeeet. The actual median price in Chippo is around $640K, but we paid substantially less than that for our 3 bedroom town house. (Note: I think the previous owners could’ve easily gotten that amount if they’d wanted the hassle of going to auction.) So if/when we ever decide to sell, it looks like there’s a good chance we’ll be making a profit!
Of Breakfasts and National Differences
The Snook made us oatmeal for breakfast this morning, so I was nomming my way through that when I read this thread on the great Full British Breakfast (which is more or less the same as a full Australian breakfast). Yum. Not something you can eat every day, but when you’ve got a hangover, it’s the Best. Thing. Ever. I was surprised at the couple comments from Americans who couldn’t fathom eating baked beans at breakfast. Huh? I don’t remember ever thinking that. I mean, baked beans = double plus good, no matter what time of day (as far as I’m concerned). But anyway, the whole point of this is to mention that towards the end of the discussion, somebody linked to the Wikipedia page for “biscuits and gravy”, and I nearly choked on my own drool. There’s not a lot I miss from home that I can’t get here, but that is definitely #1 on the list. I’ve tried making it myself, but it didn’t turn out well. The biggest obstacle is finding the right sausage. American-style breakfast sausage – the heavily spiced “Jimmy Dean” type – just doesn’t exist anywhere else. Maybe I need to try to make my own…
Cool. The SMH travel writer visited Sakai-san’s restaurant in Tokyo. I’d love to do that. And despite the guy’s protests about all the food in Tokyo being expensive, that dinner works out to about AUD$150 a head (including drinks!). You can spend a lot more than that on a fancy night out in Sydney…
Wow. If Sartor’s new planning laws go through, I guess the gentrification of Redfern will get fast-tracked, huh? Some property-minded friends of ours were trying to convince us to buy there last year in the expectation of making a mint when Sartor’s plans to redevelop the neighborhood finally happen. Of course, they didn’t anticipate that the government would be allowed to sell your property right out from under you…