Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I’ve got the flu, so not much to report for me. But I did take a constitutional this afternoon – the weather in Brisbane is just beautiful at the moment – so different from the putrid and stinky Februaries of the last decade or so. And I took some photos for a mini-architectural tour of my ‘hood.
If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.
New Farm apartment living by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Colonial grandeur by *phenomenologist on deviantART
House on Moray Street, New Farm.
Brisbane’s inner city suburbs are interesting in that they traditionally contained both substantial houses for the well off and small workers’ cottages. That’s basically because of the geography and the climate – the thing was to be up on the heights where the breezes could be caught. So Brisbane developed a fairly heterogenous culture. That’s not so much the case any more with gentrification and the housing price bubble. This house is on high ground close to the river – on the right hand side of Brunswick Street where the streets are wider and leafier.
California in Brisbane by *phenomenologist on deviantART
An interesting Californian style bungalow on the corner of Moray and Sydney Streets, New Farm. They’re not unknown and were mostly erected in the 1920s or 1930s, but really stand out compared to the Queenslanders surrounding them.
Vacant possession by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Empty house on Moray Street, New Farm.
Brady Bunch house by *phenomenologist on deviantART
A 60s or 70s style house on Oxlade Drive, New Farm, down by the river. It’s been beautifully and lovingly maintained, and I always think of it as the Brady Bunch house for some reason.
I quite like it.
There are a number of such houses in New Farm – built before it became impossible to demolish old Queenslanders because of heritage laws and Council restrictions. The brick apartment buildings date from the same period – a time when New Farm was far less posh than it is now, and inner city living wasn’t fashionable. In a way, it was an imposition of more suburban styles on an old neighbourhood.
Riverside grandeur by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Some big and gracious Queenslanders seen from the Powerhouse – across the Brisbane River in Hawthorne.
My husband and I have recently returned from attending a special meeting of Perth’s gay and lesbian Pride organisation, which finished last year substantially in the red and is trying to work out how to continue surviving.
I also want to announce to the LP audience that I’ve succumbed to this new-fangled blogging craze and am now to be writing a regular blog for internet news outlet, GayinWA.com.au.
My first blog entry can be found at http://www.gayinwa.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=152&Itemid=273
Onya, Quog!
Good for you Quog.
I bought tickets for the A-League Grand Final. The sound you can hear is my wallet gently weeping itself to sleep.
I put down a nice India pale ale. Didn’t have any grain but threw in an extra kilo of pale malt extract and some nice hallerteau hops for a bit extra flavour – mmmm!
Also did some gardening. Mother nature has been generous with rain – almost too generous in fact. Since we know that this will swing back the other way sooner or later, I highly recommend bromeliads as spectacular, tropical-looking plants. Many will survive by drawing on atmospheric moisture and can get by without ever being watered (though they look better if you do give them a drink every now and then).
Oh, and I scored a free beer fridge.
That was my Sunday.
cheers
Apart from having friends around, we continue to be gripped by box-sets of Battlestar Galactica.
BFF. I’m about to brew up a batch of Ginger Beer. Got all the stuff and gunk. You got any experience?
I want dry not sweet but very very gingery. Happy to have alcohol – does it make taste any better?
Get well soon Mark and that “Vacant possession” house is the kind of crap i always end up in… because of the beauty and the need to protect.
Francis, I can post you a recipe for a dry, alcoholic ginger beer that I have been very happy with. Nice and gingery and a bit bitey as well. My brother-in-law drinks it insted of beer as he is a type 2 diabetic and it does not affect his sugar levels (as long as he doesn’t have too many).
This made from fresh ginger BTW, not a kit.
Let us know if you want to try it and I will post the recipe on this thread.
I can suggest plastic bottles rather than glass as it can be a bit volitile if fermentation is not complete at bottling. Very dry but very yum. Might go and grab one right now.
cheers
BFF – email: fxholden@netspace.net.au
or we could start a thread over at my place. I have to belt out a few posts on hifi first – I’m behind.
I have a kit from http://www.liquorcraft.com.au/ and was going to use fresh ginger.
Ok, emailed it to you Francis. Come through at your end? Also forgot: http://www.jovialmonk.com is a good homebrew website – actually a blog. Tom (the jovial monk) is a wealth of knowledge on the subject of brewing.
Wandered out through 6 inches of snow to watch Elizabeth: Golden Age, and then bought 15 tons of presents to take with me back to Australia (I am returning for a brief holiday in a week). I hate present shopping.
Elizabeth was a tad overrated I thought. Great visually, of course, and Cate Blanchett was brilliant, of course. But it seemed like a series of vaguely connected separate scenes, linked by an inevitable conflict at the end. Also some of the dialogue was more like a pair of intersecting monologues in fancy language.
Still, that’s two hours much better spent than the 3 I spent trying to buy presents. overrated!
I went to work for a few hours yesterday, watched Atonement (which turned out to be a pretty damn good movie), and booked flights to Basel in April. Looking forward to seeing the Alps close up.
Bit the bullet & scrubbed the dwelling from end to end. Or at least gave it a start.
Boy from Flynn, I have been running a ginger beer plant on & off for more than 20 years. Have experienced none of the explosive tales my grandmother tells, though a dread of an eruption in the bathroom/shed/cool-storage-point-of-preference has possibly helped me to nuture it carefully to avoid blowing the roof off.
With your permission I am very keen to try the one you describe.
Ok, here is the recipe for anyone who wants to try it:
750 fresh ginger
1 cinnamon stck
8 cloves
1 lemon
2kg raw sugar
1 sachet safale yeast
Grate or food-process the ginger (no need to peel). Chop lemon into chunks. Add all ingredients to 3-4 litres of water and bring to the boil. Turn back and simmer gently for 1 hour.
Strain into fermenter and top up to 15 litres with cold water. Pitch yeast when temperature falls below 30 degrees.
Fermentation should be finished in 7 days. I bottle into 2 litre plastic bottles, 1 metric teaspoon caster sugar each to prime. If that’s not gassy enough, CAREFULLY increase the priming sugar – I really would use plastic bottles. If ferment is complete at bottling, it shouldn’t explode but there is nothing worse than a box full of little glass hand grenades. Leave a further 7 days at room temperature to fully gas. You can start drinking it then, it does not really need ageing like beer does.
This comes out at about 7% alcohol, cut back on the sugar if you wish to lowere it ie 2kg=7%, 1kg=3.5%
You could experiment with the amount of cinnamon and cloves.
You could also substitute a couple of limes for the lemon – lime and ginger mix well.
I have always used safale yeast but the original recipe calls for a champagne yeast – might be even better, have never tried.
There you go people, a ridgy-didge, dinky-di, true blue home made alcoholic ginger beer. Get into it!
Quiet Satuday. Reading God’s War, which I haven’t finished yet.Blogged a bit. Watched the Bill Sat night, read myself to sleep. Woken by unanswered phone call c. 1 am. Back to sleep. Sunday morning, watched Sunday interview with Nelson. Couldn’t believe trhey’re dredging up thios Burke stuff again. Must be desperate. (Trying to distract from 4 Corners tonight?)Watched Insiders.(’Don’t mess with St. Kevin. He’s much more on the ball than you are, Brendan’ was the message hardly overriden by the Poisonous Dwarf’s beat-up, which by this morning had cxollapsed in a heap, by the way.) Finished God’s War. Did some note-taking for book review I’m doing. Bagan on David Mattingly’s ‘An Imperial Possession. Britain in the Roman Empire’. Now this one is good, well worth a read.Microwave perhaps behaving oddly. Peculiar phone call message of vibrator. Interstate I think. Have know idea who it could be. Sunday TV, ABC, Miss Marple etc.Read some more, crashed.
You know you are getting old when…
Many of your favourite/seminal books dating from childhood onwards are now in the public domain and available as free downloads.
*sigh*
Went to brunch with best mate plus our high school teacher from several decades back (she ran the debating team) and said teacher’s nice husband, in a roomy light-filled cafe overlooking the river, on which there were children in brightly coloured paddle boats and swans both black and white that took me right back to Philosophy 1 (Logic). Temperature 38 degrees so sky a dazzling blue enamel, water glittering, sunlight bouncing off the architecture. Came home, rang my dad and promised to take him for a day trip back to the ancestral farmlands come Friday after the cool change. Read a lovely novel called The Pyjama Girls of Lambert Square. Watched three straight hours of semi-trash television: Kath & Kim rerun, the thing with Christina Applegate in it, Gray’s Anatomy, Brothers and Sisters.
I have no shame.
We went to the premiere of Desert Heart, a documentary by David Batty of Bush Mechanics fame.
It is the story of the Yulparija who left the Great Sandy Desert forty years ago. They now live as saltwater people in Bidyadanga south of Broome. In 2006 young artist Daniel Walbidi joined members of the tribe on a journey back to their land.
More at “Labor View from Broome’. It will be screened by the ABC in March.
Truly inspiring. Don’t miss i!
The cinnamon & cloves are new touches for me. Can’t wait to see how they go. Most of my experimenting has revolved around the amount of sugar.
One of my earlier jobs was with a scrub pulling plant owned & run by a Quaker, who would have recoiled in horror if presented with a cold stubbie.
A litre of ginger beer was always packed with his lunchbox. One day due to some auspicious event I cannot recall, he had a bottle for each of us. So sitting with our backs to a stickrake, we each gratefully drank our litre.
Like a cider, it waited 5 mins then made us light headed and numb all over. The stuff was incredibly alcoholic. We could hardly get up after lunch.
The boss, clearly hardened from long years of regular consumption, was totally unaware (& to this day probably remains so) of ANY breach of his religious teetotal beliefs.
from dusty kiribati the photos of my own new farm break my heart. a friend on mine lived in the building in the first photo, ‘apartment living’. i’ve lived in one rattling, run down share house and two beautiful old apartments in new farm. and now i’m homesick.
BFF at#14, is that open or closed ferment?.Is that Safale us-05 yeast?..Sounds good..Will try for sure.( one tsp castor about two ordinary sugar?)
..
Have been brewing last few lots of beer with Cascade basics and a good result was Saflager W-34/70 yeast,CSR, and low temp(longer)brewing time. Also, plastic 2ltr for Gb is great, less washing, quicker to fill and one or two makes a happy brewer
I’ll bung in a report on the GB in a few weeks time..
Wait ’till you smell it simmering Steve. It has a lovely gingery, spicey, Christmas punch type aroma. I was a little surprised at the spices when I was given the recipe but they really work in well.
All ginger beer has some alcohol in it although it’s insignificant in the sweet soft drink version. He he, your poor old ex – boss sinned every day of his life without realising. You wouldn’t have the heart to tell him would you? An austere life out the window – take more than a few hail Mary’s to fix that.
Lang, I always do a closed ferment. Off the top of my head, I can’t think if it was the particular safale strain you are referring to but I imagine any safale would probably be fine. As I said though, the original calls for a champagne yeast. Yes, that lower fermenting temperature (17-18 degrees for most ale yeasts) definately results in clean brews though it is good to give it a fortnight at those temperatures and allow it to rise back up to the low twenties for the last 72 hours to be sure ferment is complete. Try visiting http://www.jovialmonk.com – there isn’t much he doesn’t know about the subject.
cheers all
Thanks, joe2 at 7.
Unfortunately still crook. Nastiest flu thing I’ve had for yonks.
I’d love to go and love that house – I have enormous nostalgia for run down unrenovated Queenslanders from my student poverty days. Unfortunately, in this neck of the woods, even a “renovator’s dream” is likely to be far in excess of my budget.
Get better quick Mark. What a gross weekend for you. Lovely pictures though.
I can’t remember the weekend and I wasn’t even drunk. It’s just too long ago.
That’s right – family went to a party and I stayed home to recuperate from a busier, more sleep -deprived week than usual. Read a bit of Tamarisk Row and had a bit of a larf at what Murnane thinks about Proust whilst reading some of his essays.
PC you have no idea how good it makes me feel that some people still remember their first year at uni.
i.e. that I thought I was odd because I remember mine too….
Thanks genevieve!
Oi — go outside and have a look at the moon! Huge golden Chinese paper lantern on the horizon. Where I am, anyway.
This is the most recent thread I feel allowed to say such a thing on.
Hmm, unless you’re in central Queensland PC, it must look the same all over Australia at the moment.
I’m assuming that in some places, there are clouds. Of course I could be wrong.
Reporting nice moon here tonight with not many clouds, Pavlov’s Cat. Just hope all the pussy cats are sleeping inside tonight, as they should be every evening and not stalking our bunny rabbit whose name i shall not tell.
Fear not, joe2, they live exclusively inside, as the RSPCA recommends. I have hundreds of honey-eaters and rainbow lorikeets and two blue-tongues in my yard, and I would like it to stay that way. The bunny is quite safe.
Mind you, this item caught my eye in today’s dead-tree Oz, where the photo was even more spectacular than it is here.