Fin's latest fetish

Ignored tell-tale warning of silence coupled with Fin's absence. Upon investigation, found my that he'd customised a new pair of work shoes.

No fail, no-knead bread recipe

From the New York Times, Wednesday November 8, 2006.

From Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery.

Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose (plain) or bread flour, plus extra for dusting
• 1/4 tspn instant yeast
• 1 and 1/4 tspns salt
• Cornmeal or wheat bran (I didn't have hence didn't use this)

Method

1. Combine flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Add 1 and 5/8 cups of water and stir until blended. Dough will look shaggy and sticky. Cover with gladwrap. Place somewhere warm (at least 21 degrees C) for at least 12 hours, preferably 18.
2. The dough will look bubbly when ready. Put some flour on the kitchen bench and turn dough onto it. Sprinkle with a little more flour and fold onto itself. Cover loosely with gladwrap and let it rest for 15 minutes.
3. Using enough flour to stop the dough sticking to your hands, shape the dough into a ball. Coat a cotton / linen teatowel with flour (or cornmeal / bran) and put dough seam-side down onto the teatowel. Dust with more flour and cover with another teatowel and let rise for about two hours.
4. Half an hour before dough is ready, turn on the oven to 230 degrees C (450 F). Put a heavy covered pot (casserole dish etc - I used a pyrex casserole) in to warm up. Once dough is ready, carefully remove casserole from the oven and turn dough into it. Cover with the lid and bake for 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes (to brown).

Mine only needed an extra 5 minutes to brown.

All Saints Day

Finally starting to feel at home at church (Church of the Good Shepherd) - though obviously still stand out enough after 8 months to receive welcome presents from a couple of the kids in Sunday School (see pic) ... very sweet. All Saints Day today - we were asked to think of people who had died who we thought of as Saints ... three people came to mind: Yolande Peirson and Beryl Redshaw (from Holy Trinity days), and James McIntosh.

It was a beautiful warm Autumn day today. I'm not long home from a walk along the river, the banks of which are looking extremely bare - it looks as though someone has cleared all of the undergrowth and with no leaves on the trees, it's pretty sparse. I'm heading to DC tomorrow for a couple of days to assist with some usability testing. It was going to be for the whole week, but they had trouble lining up enough participants, so will be back Wednesday ... so it's off to pack.

Alba Tour - August September 2006 - Week 2

Saturday 26 to Saturday 2 September: Coldingham to Killin

We drove into Edinburgh from Coldingham the next day (27th) and after parking, found The Elephant House cafe that we remembered from last time and stopped for what was becoming our essential before-spending-the-day-walking-around-for-hours cup of tea. Enjoyed a 'highlights' tour of the National Museum after that. Fantastic collection. Then we walked back down the BIG hill to the carpark, under my mistaken impression that we only had limited time. I had somehow missed seeing the second column of hours indicating that all-day parking was available! Back up the BIG hill to find the pub which was the meeting place for the 'Rebus' walking tour. Our tour guide was mildly opinionated and enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but it was still fun walking around the streets and seeing the settings for the stories.

After a quiet night and some beautiful birthday fruitcake which Jane had thoughtfully brought from home, we drove north towards Lonmay. It was a 'funny' (read grumpy travel) day. We stopped in Arbroath, but didn't go into the Abbey (to see the Declaration) because we also wanted to get to Forfar, a little further west, where Jane had found a good place for ordering a made-to-measure McEwen kilt for Mum. We had wanted to stay on the coast at Stonehaven, and so stopped there on the way north after Forfar, as well as cramming in a quick walk down to see Dunnottar castle, before going further north again to Lonmay (just south of Fraserburgh). It was a pretty long day.

We left Lonmay and went first to Fraserburgh to see the lighthouse museum and then towards Inverness and the walked around the battlefields of Culloden before heading to Tomintoul for the night. We made our way from Tomintoul to Fort William the next day and were glad to arrive at Achintee mid-afternoon. It was as nice as we remembered from last time, in a perfect location at the foot of Ben Nevis with nothing else around except for a handy pub about 20 metres from the house.

The 31st was a big day for Jane - she was up and out at the crack of dawn to climb the mountain (Nevis is usually translated as 'malicious' or 'venomous mountain'), whilst Mum and I opted for a steam train ride to Glenfinnan and back.

Friday 1st September was a momentous day. We said goodbye to Achintee and Ben Nevis and drove to Kilfinan on the east side of Loch Fyne on the Cowell Peninsula with the singleminded aim of finding Castle Ewen after our failed attempt three years ago. We were cutting it fine, arriving around 3.00 pm in the afternoon at Kilfinan. We weren't exactly sure of the location even though Jane had done a lot more research, so we stopped in at the Kilfinan Hotel to enquire. It turned out that the hotel has a strong connection with the 'Castle'. Clan McEwen keeps a huge visitors' book of sorts there and the manager had a handy printout with directions. Getting there would take us about 40 mins walking each way - cross country. In spite of the time of day, we were pretty determined and set off. We successfully (mostly) negotiated a few small creeks, some fences and finally a bit of a bog and arrived at the cairn that marks what is supposedly the site of the original castle. In the attached Google Earth shot, you'll see (maybe) a pin that marks what from memory is about the spot.

Alba Tour - August September 2006 - Week 1 (cont)

After Paris, we had another night at Mme Roussel's in Albert, narrowly avoiding a middle-of-the-night-visit from the usual occupants (farm labourers, arriving late from ?) before heading back to Dunkerque, then Dover via the ferry, the next day. We arrived back in the UK around 2 and then drove about 200 miles up the east coast to King's Lynn. We found a cute pub called the Lattice House and I remember having a decent beer (Mum and Jane were onto Guinness at that point ... nothing like it as a salve to travel woes!) and sausages and mash. The hostel was cute, though enforcing a peculiar practice of seating all its guests at the communal table for breakfast the next day. Everyone at the table seemed kind of bemused by this (especially the group who, after sitting at a table a little apart, were requested to reconsider!).

After breakfast and a couple of return trips to the hostel (first for the road maps, which I'd left lying on the entrance table, second for Mum's parka which had slithered under the bed), we drove west to Haworth, home of the Brontes, to visit the Bronte museum there ... it was kind of depressing to read about their lives (which ended before any of them had reached 40 - makes me thankful, as I think about it, to have the opportunity to wallow in my various my mid-life crises) and the conditions in which they lived.

We meandered north-east-ish from there to the big YHA in York and collapsed in our room. We walked around the city walls the next day, visited the National Rail Museum (where we had a very tasty Devonshire tea), and then wandered to Betty's Tea Room which Jane had read about. We were sadly beyond lining up (and had had our daily quotient of scones), or would have joined the queue to wait for a table. We settled on purchasing some tea instead, before hitting the road again to head further north.

We stopped briefly at the Lindesfarne crossing and then on to Coldingham Sands, arriving in time for a beautiful sunset which we enjoyed over fish and chips at nearby St Abb's - our attempts at dining elsewhere failing miserably due to Bank holiday. Coldingham Sands was a nice, if remote, hostel, though we had to share our room with someone who had a few words to say the next morning after she'd been rudely awoken by Mum's regular 6.00 am morning conversation. Gracious as ever, I found myself easily (so easily ... sigh), pettily, retaliating that she had preceded the favour by waking us up when she entered the room the night before. I then spent the next hour or so thinking about what would have been a more satisfactory retort. The joys of travel - so expansive to one's nature.

Alba Tour - August September 2006 - Week 1

Friday 18 August to Saturday 26 August: Dover to York via Iepers and Paris

It's hard to remember back to our very eventful holiday in August / September. I think it took a month to recover once I arrived back. I flew out on the 19th of August for a relatively easy 8-hour direct flight to Gatwick. All the last minute stuff (including saying goodbye to Fin and Tutu at the kennel) seemed to fall into place OK. Jane, Mum and I didn't really have a backup plan if we somehow missed finding each other (they flew into Heathrow), so I was quite relieved when they wandered into the car rental place at Gatwick airport the next morning - after what must have been a bit of an epic trip from Sydney.

The trip from that point is a bit of a blur. We crammed a lot in - plenty of highlights, plenty of navigational glitches but no major unfortunate incidents - if you discount the sledding trip I took down a flight of stairs (sans sled) a couple of weeks in ... and Mum's bung knee from our tandem cycling trip along the Avon & Kennet Canal in Bath. It would have been nice to spend a few extra days at the posh new spa that opened there this year ... next time!

There's a problem loading pics, so just one for now: Capel Le Ferne at Dover (remember the Battle of Britain? There's a memorial there overlooking the Channel. We spent a couple of nights in Dover after arriving. While there, we went for a walk along the cliffs to the South Foreland Lighthouse - a lovely walk, followed by a quick beer in the Coastguard pub at St Margaret's Bay before the return trip.

A few more pics. From Dover we caught the ferry to Dunkerque and, after disembarking, drove through torrential rain to Iepers. After finding 'B&B Hortensia' in Iepers, we walked in the rain down to the square, had a quick meal, then joined about 150 other people who had gathered to listen to three men from the local volunteer fire brigade play the last post under the Menin Gate. It has been played at 8.00 pm every day since 1929 (excepting during WWII) - it was very moving.

The second picture is of the memorial at Pozieres. Our reason for the trip to the Somme was mainly to visit Villers Bretonneux and see the memorial to two distant relatives (of Mum's great grandfather), William Henry Hannam and Arthur Hobbs. Both enlisted in the 45th Battalion (12th Brigade, 4th Division). They arrived in France in June 1916 and fought at (and survived) Pozieres in August.

They both died six months later about three days apart. The Red Cross 'eyewitness' records provide heartwrenching accounts such as "I was told by W.H. Hannam, a cousin of Hobbs that he was killed in a trench at Gaudecourt on Feb. 19th by a shell which bled all his chest away. Probably he was buried in the trench at night. Hannam was killed at the same post on Feb. 21st. They were both old friends of mine." Of Hannam's death, one witness states "I was an eye witness of this casualty. Hannam was wounded by a [pice] of shell which almost severed the left leg, during the attack at Gaudecourt on Feb.21st/17. He died at the dressing station about 1 and a half hours after being wounded Cpl Mayne and I (both of 45th) buried him at rear of Parados near where he fell. We put a identity mark on the grave. He was about 5'6", med:build, fair 20 or 21 years." The trip through the Somme Battlefields was bizarre - there were so many cemeteries in the middle of nowhere. Every mile or so we would pass a field where smack in the middle was an immaculately kept memorial to people from some distant country.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. After the gravitas of the Somme, we took the train from Albert to Paris ... for the day. Here we are stuffing our faces after walking the VERY long Champs Elysees to view the Arc D'Triomphe (which was sadly barricaded from the world by much fencing). After lunch we queued to visit L'Orangerie, purpose built to house Monet's waterlily series. Following that, Jane managed to squeeze in climbing halfway up La Tour Eiffel (whilst Mum and I found a place to collapse for a while).

Orphans Tour

Thinking back to what's happened over the past few months (besides the epic hol - more to come on that later). Steve (work friend) was very lucky to get tickets to the Tom Waits 'Orphans Tour' in Chicago in August. We flew down on the day (narrowly avoiding missing our flight on the way there and stuck in the fallout from the terrorist scare whilst trying to get back the following day). Chicago is a great city. We stayed in the centre and had time for a wander along Lake Michigan before the concert. We had terrible seats but the atmosphere and the concert itself was fantastic. See the setlist on the 'Eyeball Kid's' blog.

And here's a few photos from Millennium Park. There's an amazing 'music pavillion' at one end designed by Frank Gehry where we sat for a while listening to an orchestra rehearse.

Fall

No, I'm not dead and no ... no blogging doesn't equate to having established a 'life' ... I just had a blog hol. Very sad to see the contents of my last post. An update for November before I go on to grander subjects. It was Halloween here last night - too cold to stand on the porch to dispense treats, so I bunkered down in the back of the flat only betrayed once or twice by Fin barking at the doorbell.

Nov 2006	Temperature	Humidity	Sunrise	Sunset
Wed 1	29.7 F (-1.3 C)	51%	6:53 am	5:00 pm