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Ok, so I love my food – I’ll be the first to admit it – and I’m not bad at making it myself. I work overnights, so I can’t just go out and buy Subway or some Sushi. Buying prepackaged meals is also expensive, not to mention loaded with empty kilojoules, even with the “healthy” options.

I decided a couple of months ago that cooking my own would be an interesting idea, starting with the one dish I could cook really well, which was pasta with my own sauce concoction. That worked really well, but wasn’t terribly healthy because it was loaded with ham, pepperoni and all sorts of fatty things. There’s no easy way to make it healthy, and to add a little variety I decided to change what I was cooking.

Devilled Sausages, Curried Sausages and a Chicken Rogan Josh were next. I made a few serves of each all at once, allowing me to have a single day of cooking for three weeks of food – easy to do and cheaper because I can buy the ingredients in bulk. The sausage meals were super-tasty, using Woolworths’ premium “heart smart” sausages which are amazingly tasty. Alas, the Rogan Josh was bearable, but I’m not going to do that again since it wasn’t exciting enough for multiple-meal goodness.

So I’d eaten all of those meals, and it was time to go shopping again. I thought that because I had a day or two to cook, and I wanted something good to eat, that I would hit up some recipe books and see what I could find in the “easy to make, freezable and good home cooking” category. I found Sausage Rolls and Chicken Parmagiana. I decided to make another small batch of Devilled Sausages because they were cheap, easy and tasty.

I made the Chicken first, since it’s really easy to make. I’ll make a recipe page and link to it from here. I cooked up the bacon with a nice big spoon of garlic, put it on top of the nice big chicken breasts, spooned salsa all over them, dumped the grated cheese on top and into the oven they went. Very simple, and very tasty. (Bob wasn’t impressed – he had to have a snack because he was hungry after just smelling them)

Chicken ready to go into the oven	Chicken cooked and lying in oily doom!
You really do need to drain off the leftover liquid from the combined forces of oil and liquid from the ingredients.
Leftover oily goo from Parma	Parma draining of ooze

Parma ready to freeze

While the chicken was cooking, I started on the sausage rolls (something I also need to make a recipe link for) They are simple also – mix up some milk and breadcrumbs and let that soak while you chop up two onions and two carrots really finely. Mix in about a kilo of premium beef mince (because it’s tastier) with the aforementioned ingredients and about a teaspoon of mixed spice, then make into rolls with puff pastry.

Sausage Roll breadcrumb mixture	Sausage roll filling
Stick them in the oven on a tray for half an hour or so at about 150 degrees to cook the filling, then 220 until they are nice and crispy brown. Perfect!
Sausage rolls fresh out of the oven	Sausage Rolls in a freezer container
Container stack	Mini Leftover bits

I had a bit of leftover mince and a bunch of pastry offcuts, so I made these mini snacks, cooking them the next morning for breakfast. Goddamn they’ll taste good for dinner

My next experiment will be to make blueberry and apple muffins – as much as I’d like to use ‘em instead of apples, bananas are too expensive at the moment

Through my doofing I’ve found that I know quite a few people into firetwirling with both Poi and Staff. There’s regular meets in Brisbane on Wednesday nights, and there’s a growing group of people meeting at Justin Park in Burleigh Heads (down on the Gold Coast) on Sunday nights. Bob, Brian and I were coming back from our mountain climbing expedition, and they are crazy Poi fiends so we went to check it out.

Shion, someone that we met at the April Fools’ Doof was due to come along as well – he’s a kickass Poi monk of super-1337 abilities – making some of our group look like real amatuers I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get some extended exposure photos of him, so the tripod and camera were taken along to give me something to do.

Bob and his tail Poi
Bob’s Poi don’t show up at night for long exposures, but this photo came out alright with the flash.

Brian one handed double Poi

Shion Painting Corkscrews with fire

Brian’s been practising using two Poi with the one hand, and this is a great example of how it looks with a long exposure shot using fire. Shion’s corkscrews are beautiful in real life, and this shot shows how you can paint some beautiful lines with an extended exposure – I like how it shows how the flame moves through the air.

Shion – Flower Pattern

Brian – Small Fire spin

That flower pattern was actually held for about thirty seconds – Shion’s amazing when it comes to being completely consistent with his moves. You could take quite a long shot and get a very concise pattern. The shot on the right shows Brian keeping the cords short on the Poi and spinning them between his hands and his body – scary if you’ve got loose clothing on, but it works nicely if you can do it

Shion

Shion – Fire Fan

The fire fans are quite amazing when there’s a good routine – as usual Shion makes it look great

Fire and lightning

Whirling LED Patterns

Towards the end of the night, instead of using fire, Shion busted out the LED Poi. The colours are great to watch in real life, but in the photo they make for truly surreal imagery. The photo on the right was right at the end when he wanted to see how some new moves would look, which I was happy to help with

Well, that was an amazing long weekend for me. I was working my usual overnight shift on Friday night and decided that I wanted to climb a mountain. Years and years ago my family and I (well, mum, my little sister and I; the other two are wussies) climbed Mount Beerwah, so that was a good start. Looking on the web I found the Glass House Mountains and Surrounds page on the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency website. There’s a few pages there with maps and so forth – we ended up relying on thismap in PDF form to get us there.

It only took about an hour or so, with a few detours because the roads didn’t seem to match up with the directions we were heading until we realised things aren’t signposted as well as they could have been around that area (if you’re heading north on Old Gympie road, don’t continue going north to get to Mount Beerwah, you have to turn left, as the other side of the sign correctly shows).

The first part was getting to the base of the mountain, that was pretty much 700m of just stairs. Not a good start for those of us that are bloody unfit and are carrying a shiteload of camera gear. Getting to the bottom of the climb face, we took some photos and planned how we were going to climb up. It didn’t take long to realise that the joggers I was wearing were pretty much useless for climbing and that the gear needed to be a LOT more compact next time. I got utterly stuck because the handholds are designed for people with grippy shoes – Bob helped from the top side and a friendly climber gave me a lift past the place I got stuck at. Hooray!

“Gravity’s a Bitch” – it’s written on the seat, and standing here you realise it’s right

Looking across to the coast from the bottom.

As I said above, I got stuck on the first section of the climb, about half way up – there wasn’t many hand or footholds that my shoes would grip on, but I got up there. Once we passed that it wasn’t too hard at all. We took the time to rest (my legs were shaking from holding me in strange positions) and take some photos.

Bob Lounging around

Brian Pondering his camera

We continued higher, with some good medium-level climbing and some good challenges – arriving at the next plateau we found that it was going to be hard to get up the next section. While Bob went further up the hill, Brian and I took the opportunity to take some more photos and enjoy the unimpeded view as far as the eye could see. We realised at that point that the light was fading – mainly because of the rain that was heading our way.

Bob pondering the rain	Brian Pondering the rain
Looking over Brian’s shoulder at the highest point.	Looking towards the rain

The decision was made to get down off the hill, and I lowered the gear bag down from that point with rope so I could climb down, then we went back a slightly different way that included some quite large steps to make it a bit quicker. As we went down the rain started spitting, increasing to a light shower by the time we were off the climbing section.

As we got back to the carpark the rain was falling quite hard, confirming that we’d made a kickass decision to haul ass off the mountain. Slippery rocks, cold weather and no light equal a sucky time.

On the way back we stopped at a little fruit market, picking up a really nice pineapple drink – mostly big chunks of the fruit and very refreshing! There was some quite cheap fruit too – two dollars a kilo for apples, oranges and mandarins. Coming back to Brisbane I wish I had bought some bananas, they were $7/kg there for good ones, and it’s about $10/kg for terrible green ones here.

Well, it’s been a long time since this site’s had naughty pictures on it, but I had to post this… I always make references to what I’m going to do to people with a pineapple, but I think this takes the cake

Well, so much for us losing our jobs at the end of August, as of a couple of days ago that’s changed to 30th of June. Damnit. That means I’m a month and a bit short of my employment anniversary, missing out on two week’s redundancy payout; not to mention a bunch of wages in the meantime. I’m hoping that I get one of the collections positions they’ve offered – there’s 15 going and they said they would prioritise by tenure and our KPI’s – which tends to help me

There’s also a position at Bigpond Customer Care at the Robina centre, doing part time customer care. It’d be less money (as will be the case in 99% of jobs I’m seeing) but it’s a job nonetheless. According to our operations manager, anyone that’s getting made redundant also gets priority as far as going for jobs in other centers as well, since they know our background etc.

If neither of those options come off, I guess I’ll be out of a job at the end of the financial year. Just as I thought I had myself all worked out, in comes that magical fuck-you-in-the-ass-yale boot from the world