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It was a little bit wet on Wednesday night, so we couldn’t firetwirl in the Botanic Gardens. Instead we moved just a little bit to the River Stage on the end of Gardens Point. Here’s some photos from the night…

Here’s two of my “keepers” from the morning of 08/06/06. I was finishing work at 5am that morning, so I took my camera to work and went across to the story bridge and up to Kangaroo Point to take some sunrise photos. Pity it was a bit overcast as usual lately.

Bridge and Light

Brisbane City Morning

Ok, that sounds lame, but it’s appropriate. I was driving to work on Monday night, got to the end of my street and saw a small shape on the other side of the road. My brain said “Echidna” and then my eyes caught up and agreed, so I slowed down just in case it was – I didn’t want to run it over. Just as I’d slowed all the way down the crazy thing ran and hid under the middle of my car!

Putting on the handbrake and leaving it in neutral I jumped out of the car to investigate and called back to the house for someone to come and look after it (I was going to be late if I had to work out what to do with it) and in the meantime it had made its way out from under the car and was heading for the drain.

The phonecall went something like this (I called bob):
me: “uh, dude, come quick, there’s an echidna under my car”
him: “what?”
me: “yeah, you know… spikes, animal, echidna!”
him: [insert appropriate wtf-sounding noises here]
me: “yeah, it’s hiding, come help!”

Weirdest thing that I’ve called someone about since that time with the donkey and the waterme… never mind. Dad and bob got him into a box and put it in the ensuite, and he got out straight away and happily puttered around all night waking Mum and Dad up as its spines scraped past things. Eventually it went down between the shower and the bench, fell asleep and that’s where it stayed..

Getting it out from there was a serious pain – we tried being nice, leaving some water in the middle of the room in a box with the light off (since they are nocturnal, we thought it might come out for a drink) no go. Trying to grab it with a pair of big gardening gloves didn’t work either – bunching up in a defensive position made it stick in the corner harder. The same with trying to push it out with a ruler – jammed hard.

We called the koala center place in the local state forest, and they didn’t really know what to do with it, just suggesting to leave it in the local forest because it wasn’t injured. Aparrently there’s been quite a few things like this happening lately, animals going looking for water and getting lost in the suburbs.

Eventually dad got it out by just surprising it – getting a long ruler down between it and the wall quickly enough so that it didn’t have time to react – there wasn’t much chance of injuring it anyway because of all the spines in the way of where we were touching.

I’m kinda sad that I missed out on taking it back to the forest – I’d have loved to see it off and get some more photos – but it was taken back later that evening when I was asleep and put into an area with water and some nice scrub for it to live in. Who says I don’t have weird things happen to me on the way to work? Best reason ever to tell work you’re going to be late: “uh, there was an echidna under my car?” “what?” “yeah” “uh, ok then, see you when you get here.”

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