o frabjous day!

o frabjous day! books, recipes & other things

  • Imagining the future

    My 35th week of pregnancy, which means if all goes according to the books, I’ll give birth in about 5 weeks. A little over a month. Barely any time at all. My stomach feels like a drum, my skin stretched tightly, and it’s easy to feel the baby shifting about and stretching inside now, his…

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  • What I’m reading

    Secondhand I visited the secondhand bookstore in Mapleton with Naomi on the weekend (I find it terribly hard to just walk by secondhand bookstores without even taking a little look) and bought a few things: – War Crimes by Peter Carey, which is a collection of short stories I read last year and loved. I’m…

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  • Ducky

    My father sent me an email from China suggesting we call the baby “Hercule”, to which I composed a polite response advising that I was sorry to disappoint him, but that the names we were actually thinking of were rather boring and traditional. “If you were born now,” he told me, “I would call you…

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  • Reading the manual

    For the last couple of years I have mostly used my camera in aperture priorty mode, occasionally in shutter priority mode, but never in full manual mode. This means the camera is always deciding some element of the settings for me, rather than me choosing all the settings based on a particularly lighting situation. “Cameras…

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  • Going deeper

    Horace says that you’re feeling sleepy. Veeeerrry sleepy. I did a two day course on hypnobirthing with my sister in law, mostly at her suggestion. I quite liked the idea of a course focussed on natural childbirth though, because I’m a bit of a hippy, and I was planning on doing the whole drug free…

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  • Dream team

    I was asked to take some photos at a rehearsed reading of a new musical, Billy Buckett, last week (a rehearsed reading is basically a run through of a musical without formal choreography where the actors are holding their scripts). I had bought a new camera body that week (my very belated Christmas/birthday present), so…

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  • Apple Afternoon Tea Cake

    We’ve been getting lots of apples and pears in our box of local fruit and vegies from Food Connect, and I used some of the older ones to make this apple cake, which I adapted from a Smitten Kitchen recipe (yes, my favourite source of cake recipes online). I’ve halved the sugar in the original…

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  • 6 down, 3 to go

    I haven’t written a great deal about being pregnant. I’ve even had a hard time recording occasional moments in my pregnancy diary, mostly because my pregnancy has been uncomplicated and pedestrian, and hasn’t impacted on my life to a great extent. Finding out that we were having a boy, feeling the baby kick for the…

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  • Sour cream and chocolate chip cake

    This is a lovely tea cake from Smitten Kitchen – I made it to celebrate our ukulele club’s first birthday. As you’ll see the batter has quite a bit of sugar, and is a nice light cake with a crunchy outing – a lovely cake to serve in squares for afternoon tea. ingredients: 1/2 cup…

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  • Buttermilk Roast Chicken

    This chicken from Smitten Kitchen is far more delicious than this rather yellow photo makes it out to be. The chicken pieces are marinated in the fridge overnight in a buttermilk mixture, and then baked at a nice high heat, crisping the outsides. The marinade makes the chicken beautifully tender, and given that most of…

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