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  • What I’m reading

    The evenings are getting quite chilly (well, chilly for south east Queensland) and we’ve been lighting the wood stove, much the cats’ delight as they lie as close as they can to the heater without actually bursting into flame.

    I recently raced my way through Mira Grant’s Blackout, which is the final book in her Newsflesh trilogy. The trilogy is a near future where a virus brings the dead back to life as zombies. Both Feed and Deadline, the first two books, have been nominated for Hugo awards, which I find a little bit inexplicable. Perhaps not for Feed, as I thought that was a really good tense political thriller, but Deadline certainly veered into far more pulpy, mad science territory. Blackout continues as more of the same, and had too many flaws for me to rate it highly, despite the fact I really enjoyed reading it.

    I also recently finished The Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, which was a cute and funny romance, and in a completely different vein, The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, a rather long and sprawling epic set in North Korea which I think could have done with a little editing, and suffered a bit from “ooh, look how weird North Korea is”.

    I’m partway through a couple of memoirs/books of essays on motherhood – Anne Enright’s Making Babies and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. While I’m finding them interesting, and Anne Enright’s is amusingly enjoyable, I think pregnancy is the wrong time to read them, just because I think you need to have experienced motherhood in order to appreciate them. What I’m looking for, I think, is some sort of indication of what it’s all going to be like – but I get the feeling that’s something you’ve got to discover for yourself. I think I’ll stick with my more practical books – I have enjoyed Kaz Cooke’s Up the Duff and Kid Wrangling, and after reading the recommendation by Karen on Far Flung Four, I’ve ordered a copy of Robin Barker’s Baby Love. (“Is that a whole book about how to love a baby?” asked the husband.)

  • 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 feet and back pressing out occasionally in hard little lumps. When I rub his feet he wriggles, and I wonder if it feels ticklish. At ukulele club he shifted and kicked the entire time, and I patted my stomach soothingly. I imagine the body of the ukulele pressed against my stomach makes some interesting resonant noises to him when strummed, but I couldn’t decide if his energetic response was one of enthusiasm or disapproval.

    Thankfully we are gradually getting through our pre-baby to do lists, although as the husband pointed out, our lives aren’t going to stop once the baby arrives and there’s probably no need to treat it as an apocalyptic event. Most of the time I agree with this, but I find the inevitable changes that parenthood will make to our lives almost impossible to imagine, and this makes me look towards the future with a certain amount of wariness.

    At the moment I have been thinking about the point at which I will return to work, when the baby is about six months old. We’re intending to juggle both working part-time (or at least not five days a week) in order to share parenting duties, with a bit of grandparently assistance. For a variety of reasons, it has to be a see-how-we-go arrangement, which I find rather frustrating in terms of planning and imagining the future. The vast majority of our friends and acquaintances seem to manage this stage by having one partner (well, always the woman) stay at home with the child or children for a significant amount of time. Either that, or they’re single parents who use daycare. Given that I’m the higher wage earner, this isn’t really an option for us, and we hope to be able to share in parenting in as much as that is financially and logistically possible. I presume – I hope – that we’ll be able to make this work. It would reassure me more if any of our friends had similar working arrangements.

    I feel almost ready for this baby to arrive. Recently we’ve been spending our weekends doing things like reorganising the linen cupboard. This may not seem very related to baby arrival, but given that things like the mess in the linen cupboard have been my major source of teary pregnancy related meltdowns, the newly clean and organised shelves are making us both much happier. At the moment I am being paralysed by prams – the number of brands and styles and internet reviews, which go into mind numbing detail about the subtle differences in airflow between this model of hood and that. I’m going to go for something three-wheeled and rugged so I can go tromping around our area – I have decided in my limited experience that little children seem to be much more relaxed and happy when they have some time out of doors, either being carried around or playing out on the grass. So that’s my vague grand plan for baby happiness and my post-birth recovery – getting out for daily walks, remembering that the linen cupboard is clean and organised, and generally making the most of the time I’ll have away from work, doing the full time parenting thing.

  • 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 fairly sure it’s out of print, and I wanted my own copy.
    – The Dark Room by Minette Walters, because I enjoy her crime novels/thrillers.
    – Behold, Here’s Poison by Georgette Heyer, because I recently read and really enjoyed Cotillion, one of her Regency romances, and wanted to try one of her mystery novels.
    – Half the Day is Night by Maureen McHugh, because Culturally Disoriented put McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang on her list of Eight Great Science Fiction Books for Women, and I’ve been wanting to read something of McHugh’s since reading that list.

    Audio

    I’ve been listening to a lot of audio books recently, and it seems to have kickstarted my reading again for the year. What with driving and cleaning and the logistical challenges of transforming a junk room into a baby’s room (ie. where does all the junk go), I seem to have had more time for listening to books, rather than sitting down and reading.

    I read the first book in Dan Wells’ trilogy about a teenage sociopath (who is trying to avoid turning into the serial killer he thinks he’s destined to be) a while ago, and recently listened to the second two as audiobooks. They’re not great choices for audiobooks, at least not to me – hearing someone narrate horrible deaths and torture quietly into your ears is a bit unpleasant. But they were enjoyable well paced thrillers with a supernatural bent, albeit just on the edge of my acceptable level of horror (which is not all that high).

    I then listened to Cotillion, my first Georgette Heyer book (and a much more relaxing choice for an audiobook, being a fun and jolly romance with matchmaking and hijinks) and I’ve now decided that I must read more of Heyer’s books. Cotillion was tremendously enjoyable in a fun-and-jolly-romance sort of way.

    At the moment I’m listening to The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, which is a book I’m reading for a bookclub and therefore know nothing about (apart from the fact that it’s set in North Korea). I’m about halfway through, and at the moment would tentatively describe it as “epic literature” – but who knows what direction it’ll head in before it ends.

    Ordinary, Everyday Reading

    And as for normal books-on-paper, I just finished (and wept over) Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, which features women pilots and spies in WWII and is about female friendship and integrity and bravery and is just a really wonderful book – the Book Smugglers’ review tells it much better than I could.

    I’m also reading (not on paper, but on Kindle) Kameron Hurley’s God’s War, which is a fairly brutal sci-fi novel with bounty hunters that begins like this, which if you’re me sounds fairly irresistible:

    “Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.

    Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.”

  • 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 something much more exotic and interesting.”

    I am grateful that despite what feels like my constant whinging about being uncomfortable and achey, I really only seem to have one very uncomfortable day before I adjust to whatever my stomach muscles and skin are doing, and I also appear to have avoided any severe indigestion and water retention. I have occasionally puffy feet and a few reflux episodes, but no endless day to day complaints. As I am going to continue working until a week before my due date this is particularly helpful. Sitting behind a desk does make my back ache a little, but I’m sure it would be infinitely more unpleasant if I was sitting behind a desk with feet the size of balloons and doing vomity burps into my mouth all day long.

    (Now I have written about such things, of course, I will no doubt be struck down by reflux for the rest of the pregnancy.)

    People now seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to refer to my gait as ‘waddling’, such as commenting cheerily, “And where are you waddling off to?” While I do feel rather enormous, I had been fondly imagining this was all in my head. Apparently not, and I am in fact doing a fine impression of an overweight arthritic duck. Hopefully one with colourfully pretty plumage.

  • 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 are so intelligent these days,” I would say to myself lazily, switching the camera to AV mode, lying back on the couch and peeling myself another grape. However, as I’ve slowly discovered, my camera isn’t smart enough to deal with things like spotlights, and the camera doesn’t know the shot I’m trying to get. Also, I’m more intelligent than my camera. At least I fervently hope so. And given all those things, I’m the best person to pick the settings to get the shot I’m after, and that means getting off the metaphorical couch and learning how to shoot properly in manual mode.

    While technically I know how to change the ISO, aperture and shutter speed, I still feel somewhat unsure about what shutter speed is right for different situations. Unfortunately getting better at that is just a matter of practice – taking a lot of photos until knowing the right settings becomes automatic. And now that I have my new camera body I really would like to get better at shooting in manual, so that’s going to be my approach – switch the camera to manual mode, not let myself change it back, and take a lot of photos until I get a little better at it.

    I’m also giving myself a few assignments to complete in an effort to get to know the camera better and improve my manual shooting skills. (Because I couldn’t think of a nerdier weekend project than setting myself photography assignments. Believe me, I tried.) So! My thrilling photography assignments du jour, which I will work on over the next few weeks:

    Assignment 1: Meter locking! Where is the button or setting for it, and what difference does it make?
    Assignment 2: White on White! Take shots of some white on white still lifes to improve exposing for contrast.
    Assignment 3: Macro! Trying to use my macro lens on manual settings. Which I foresee is going to be a little difficult as I find it quite a tricky lens to use on auto. Or! Potentially my camera is too stupid to figure out my macro lens and perhaps it will become much simpler to use in manual mode. I guess it’s possible.
    Assignment 4: Focal Point! Figuring out how to adjust them with this new camera which has about two screens worth of menu settings regarding focus, none of which I understand.
    Assignment 5: Black and White! Figure out how to do a better conversion in Photoshop than the basic action I currently use.

    Once I feel like I’ve got a handle on manual shooting I’m thinking of some other things like trying shooting in RAW again (ugh). But first, manual all the way, until I can claim ninja photographer status and make myself a nice homemade cardboard badge saying as much.

  • 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 childbirth thing if I could, however I couldn’t really imagine something called hypnobirthing making a particularly dramatic difference to my approach to the whole shebang.

    My probably very innacurate summary of the heart of the course could be summed up as:
    1. Women give birth all the time all over the place;
    2. So let’s not freak out about it; and
    3. Mostly, try and relax. Like, really try and relax. Let’s meditate. And also do a bit of self hypnosis. And talk about surrender. And then watch some videos of people giving birth while looking like they’re peacefully meditating. Would you like a cup of herbal tea?

    I wouldn’t say I found the thought of giving birth particularly traumatic, but I was nervous about it – mostly about how well I would deal with the pain, and the thought of tearing and things like that. And I must say, after two days of hearing the phrase “your beautiful birth” about 200 times, doing relaxation exercises while listening to someone talking about surrendering to your body, and watching quite a few videos of some extremely relaxed women giving birth (breathing deeply while smiling beatifically, which really has to be seen to be believed), that nervousness has entirely dissipated. I’m not sure I’m going to get to the stage where I can essentially meditate while silently giving birth, but you never know I suppose.

    During the next two months I have a bit of hypnobirthing homework to do – mostly listening to relaxations and practicing a little hypnosis style stuff with the husband. I’m also supposed to be doing affirmations, but honestly, I just feel like a dick telling myself earnestly that “my body is surging and bringing my baby closer to me” (or something of the sort). I’m going to be open minded and try them out, but I just don’t think I’m an affirmation kind of girl.

  • 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 I was fairly eager to try it out in low light – it’s a huge step up from my previous body, and deals with high ISO like a dream, taking relatively clear photos with the ISO set at 2000, whereas my previous body would churn out horribly grainy photos once I got up to 800 or so. So I was relatively confident that I could deal with low light, but what I hadn’t considered was a combination of low light plus dazzlingly bright light from the spotlights.

    Everything I took with my own settings was horribly overexposed, and I couldn’t actually see in order to fiddle too much with them – I was shining my phone onto the camera so I could see which way I was turning the dials, much to the consternation of the people sitting next to me. “The director asked me to take photos,” I hissed at them reassuringly, so that they would realise I wasn’t being randomly irritating, but was instead being irritating at the behest of the director. I eventually gave up and switched to auto, which worked fairly well apart from dealing with the spotlights. I would have a series of photos where the actors in the background were beautifully exposed and clear, and the actor singing the song would be a glaring white blob. I’m not even sure how to deal with that – I would imagine if I adjusted my shutter speed so that it exposed the person under the spotlights properly, then the background would be completely black and you wouldn’t see the other actors at all. Not that I could see enough to try doing that in any case, so I kept shooting on auto and hoped for the best.

    I ended up pulling 50 semi decent shots from around 800, and the husband commented that it was lucky I’d had the nice new camera. Which is something that normally irritates me, when people look at a photo I’ve taken and say “Wow, you must have a lovely camera.” Because yes, I do have a lovely camera, but I would vastly prefer them to say, “Wow, you’re an awesome photographer”, as I like to have my ego stroked at every opportunity. But it’s not really something I can get on my high horse about when I’ve taken photos on auto, because apart from me zooming and pressing a button, I didn’t have much to do with the process. Although I did set the ISO, I suppose. Me and the D7000. We’re a team.

  • 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 recipe, as two cups in a cake with fruit in it is just too sweet for me. The apples cook beautifully in the cake, covered in a cinnamon and sugar mixture, and this is a lovely moist cake perfect for afternoon tea.

    ingredients:
    6 apples, or a mixture of apples and pears
    1 tablespoon cinnamon
    5 tablespoons brown sugar
    2 3/4 cups flour
    1 tablespoon baking powder
    1 teaspoon salt
    1 cup vegetable oil (I used rice bran oil)
    1 cup brown sugar
    1/4 cup orange juice
    2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
    4 eggs

    Preheat oven to 180C, and lightly grease a springform pan. Chop the apples into chunks, and stir in a bowl with the cinnamon and sugar.

    Stir together the flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the oil, orange juice, sugar and vanilla. Stir the wet ingredients into the flour mixture. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing together well. Presumably there’s some reason for doing this, but I’m not sure what – it would be simpler to just whisk them into the wet ingredients.

    Pour half the mixture into the springform pan, and spread it evenly. Gently spread half the apples over the cake mixture, and spoon the remaining mixture over the apples. Arrange the remaining apples across the top. Bake for about 1 1/2 hours, or until a skewer comes out clean. The cooked apples do make the inside of the cake a bit smoodgy, so keep that in mind when you’re testing.

  • 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 first time – they were all rather emotional moments, but few and far between. Apart from a few weeks of feeling nauseous between the first and second trimester, I have proceeded placidly about my business, getting slightly larger each week and finding it difficult to find the motivation to read my various pregnancy books. The actual birth seemed a rather distant event.

    This week marks my official entry into the third trimester, and I am suddenly rather alarmed. My reading has progressed beyond pregnancy to the “you are now at home with a tiny helpless creature who relies on you for everything” stage and I am trying to prevent myself hyperventilating all over the place. I don’t feel ready to be taking care of an infant in a mere three months time. I still find it hard to reconcile the wriggling little inhabitant of my midsection with an actual, honest to goodness baby that will appear in our lives. In three months. THREE MONTHS. Three months before our holiday to New Zealand we had an excel spreadsheet of all our accommodation and plans. We do not have an excel spreadsheet for this baby. I think perhaps we need one. How can I have a baby without a spreadsheet?

    I find the birth the least alarming part of the whole procedure – I’m a little nervous about it, and I don’t expect it will be particularly pleasant, but it won’t go on forever, and you get a baby at the end of it. And then you can clutch the baby and collapse into a howling pit of anxiety, or at least that’s the way a small part of me is picturing it at the moment.

    I feel large now, the glimpses of myself I first see in the mirror always a bit of a shock. My back is starting to ache and whenever my bladder is full the baby seems to kick me in it with unerring aim. I keep experiencing random and intense bouts of nausea, and am grateful when they happen to occur somewhere near a bathroom. I’m less than happy when they occur while driving, and next time, I am promising myself, next time I will pull over the minute I start to feel even slightly sick. For the good of my clothes, and the upholstery.

  • 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 (113 grams) at room temperature
    1 1/2 cups caster sugar
    3 large eggs, separated
    1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
    2 cups (approx 500 grams) sour cream
    3 cups plain flour
    1 tsp baking powder
    1 1/2 tsps baking soda
    3/4 tsp salt
    2 cups dark chocolate chips
    1/2 cup caster sugar
    1 tsp cinnamon

    Grease a 9 x 13 inch baking tin, and line the bottom with baking paper. Preheat the oven to 175C.

    Separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites in a small bowl until stiff, and set aside. Put the butter and sugar in a large bowl and beat together until creamy. Beat in the egg yolks and vanilla.

    If your name is Celia and you’re lazy, you dump in bits of the flour and sour cream alternately and stir the mixture all together until combined and quite stiff. If you’re a proper baker, sift the flour, baking powder and baking soda together in a small bowl, and then add it alternately to the creamed butter mixture along with the sour cream. And you’ll probably spill far less flour on the counter than I did. After the sour cream and flour is all stirred in, fold the stiff egg whites into the batter. Well, “fold” – it’s more a firm stirring, because the batter is quite stiff.

    Mix together the cinnamon and additional sugar in a small bowl. Spread half the batter mixture into the baking pan – it’s easier if you blog it in in spoonfuls and then smooth it out. Sprinkle the batter with half the choc chips and half the cinnamon and sugar mixture. Spoon in the rest of the mixture and gently smooth over with a spatula. Sprinkle over the remaining cinnamon and sugar, and then the last of the chocolate chips. Gently press the chocolate chips a little into the batter to keep them in place.

    Bake for about 45 -50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Cut into chunks and enjoy – it’s gorgeous while still a little warm, with the melted chocolate layer in the middle.