Giving thanks

Thursday was Thanksgiving here and it has become an American holiday that we truly love. Christmas with friends sans the complexity of gift giving...Ok so it's all about the food and being happy!

This year we were cooking for 21 adults and 6 kids! Talk about huge, but we pulled it off just fine thanks in part to the helpful contributions of our guests. My job was a turkey, two chickens, three potato bakes, four boats of gravy (and a partridge...oh wait wrong holiday), bread stuffing, and making sure everything hit the table on time! We also had a second turkey, a baked ham, roast pumpkin/sweet potato/parsnip and such American classics as green bean casserole, whipped mashed potatoes and oyster stuffing, and this year we even had a Norwegian/Portuguese fish dish!

My turkey sure browned up well. Nothing too over the top this year, just butter, sage, pepper and some citrus in the middle. 

I cooked the two chickens (for those oddballs who don't like turkey) on the rotisserie of the BBQ so they were so tender and moist! Not that you can tell the difference but one is honey, soy and ginger and the other is spicy adobo. As usual I can never throw out a carcass so I have just now completed the epic stock making session of '08, totally worth it!


You can see some of the food here (we were still bringing it out at this point) but I'm sure you get the idea.


Then there was the dessert table! A lot of Aussie contributions here, 2 pavlovas, 2 lemon meringue pies, a heaving plate of lammingtons plus a pumpkin pie and a whole lot of fresh fruit.


As usual we had an eclectic but incredible group of people. Only 4 Americans this year, lots of Aussies, and representatives of Norway, Sweden, Canada and Ireland.

One of the long tables required to seat 21+ people...John and Jo are the masters of large scale entertaining now!

The other fabulously laid out table!

Congrats!

Need I say more except YAY!

Love not H8

While we were in Philadelphia we were lucky enough to have been able to join in with a National Protest for Equality (in response to the outcome of Prop 8). It was brilliant! So lively and a lot of fun. Amazing to see thousands of people get off their butts and march to city hall, and the Philly rally was just one of many across the country.

I put together a quick vid mostly so that you can see just how many smiling people were there, pushing love not hate. That's right, all the people way off in the background of the square were part of it too. The march nearly lapped the block!



And of course some pics :D

Our friend Claire commandeered someone's flag!

I have one other unedited video of us marching through the final part of the square to get to city hall. I'm so glad we happened to be in the right place at the right time! This one is a bit more energetic :D It's been a while since I was at a good protest! Gets the blood moving.

Finally, I just want to thank all our straight alies out there, from the bottom of my heart. You don' have to be gay to understand the injustices here or to speak up about it. Thanks to Mel for marching with us when she probably would have prefered to stay in the hotel with her glass of wine! And if there is anyone out there who thinks they care about us but also thinks that gay people should be denied the right to marry, for whatever reason, please please do me one favour and watch this video. Please. Six and a half minutes of your time and I promise it won't do you any harm.

The city of brotherly love

I'm finally home after spending a week in Philadelphia at the big annual American Society of Human Genetic meeting. Good meeting, my talk went well and lucky for me I escaped question time fairly well unscathed (I was really worried given the controversial nature of my subject!)

The hotel was decent, big rooms, and connected to the conference center by a covered walkway (bonus). Philly was cold but not as cold as I was expecting. The clouds barely shifted above the buildings for the first few days, but thankfully there was only minor drizzle. The scenes of city hall and the surrounding buildings at night were pretty speccy! Very Gotham City.



We were right in the heart of downtown with a big undercover food market just next door, stocked with Amish treats, a cheese shop and fried oysters! There was even a pickle stand! Wewt. We were also very close to Chinatown and some great food (including a surprising Chinese-French-Vietnamese fusion) which always makes me happy :)


I didn't get in a whole lot of sightseeing, mostly because the conference took up so much time and headspace, but what I did see I really liked. Philly is a historic city and the interp is well structured but also nice and simple. The architecture is just gorgeous, especially with the drizzly grey skies and rich fall colours in all the trees.


We wandered through quite a bit of the historic precinct, and did manage to see the Liberty Bell in amongst the throng of people desperate to take its picture.


Not being an American I'm still trying to get my head around the concept of libery as it is used here. That confusion aside, however, there was some really beautiful interp on the way to viewing the bell, about civil rights progression through the years. Nothing on gay rights in that set but I was relieved to see the following 'monument' outside. More about that in the next blog post!

Philadelphia

Hello internets, sorry about the radio silence following our little moments of history making. I'm off to Philadelphia today for the big annual genetics conference and I'm a little peaky about it (I'm talking) and I've had a lot of work to get done before I go, not all of which is finished yet! Oh well. Should be a fun trip, although it is much colder there so I've packed my woollies!

When I get back I have some Halloween pics to post and maybe a few other treaties...but that's not until at least next Monday. Pax-

It's a new dawn

It's a new day... It's a new life!

Well, mixed feeling here this post-election morning. Absolute elation and incomprehensible joy that today, Barack Obama is President Elect of the United States. I can't believe I get to say that let alone be here to experience it. He's an incredible man and if he can pull of even half of what he hopes it will be just amazing for America. The US has always been a wonderful place for us in terms of living here but now I'm starting to feel the most incredible bubbles of love and maybe a touch of patriotism for this nation. Don't get me wrong, I'm an Aussie to the core, it's my home and I love it with a fierce loyalty and some level of blind passion. All I'm saying is that for the last 2-3 years here I've felt like I am in the world of the US but not of it. Now I feel a little more connected and, to continue the song quote, I'm feeling good.

However, back the the mixed feelings part. Texas is a red state, there's no denying that, so there was no spontaneous partying here. It kinda sucked talking to my online friends last night in Denver and even Canada where people were celebrating in the streets. Here we're walking on eggshells trying not to come into conflict with our friends and loved ones who we know voted red. However, in defense of Texas, when you look at the voting by county San Antonio, Austin and surprisingly Dallas were all Obama majorities! The other big downer is that it looks like Prop 8 passed in California (narrowly) which once again removed the rights of same-sex couples to marry. That's twice in Cali now, the poor buggers :( That one will have shockwaves through the country but we can only hope and pray that these things are getting nastier because they are running out of legs to stand on. Change is coming people, roll with it!

All in all, we watched history being made last night, sweet sweet history. McCain's concession speech was wonderful (linked below) and I'm hopeful that he will help with the next big task, which is to build bridges and begin to reunite this country that has been the grounds of a fierce two-year battle. I'm sure most of the country can at least unite in saying Farewell to Bush. Bring on January.

For those of you who missed the speeches, here they are:

YES!

[UPDATE: John McCain just gave the most impressive concession speech, so gracious. He has gone up in my estimation (although I always thought he was a good man, just not the right man). As for "caribou barbie"...]

YES YES YES YES!

Ok so it's only predicted at this point but wow. There is a love in my heart for America at the moment. Virginia - gold (well blue), Florida, finger's crossed...but even if the all go pink I think the fat lady is still warming up with her tralalas.

Back to juggling the idiot box and the laptop and this yummy plateful of apple pie!

Election update

For thems of you at home keeping an eye on this the NPR (public radio) site has really good coverage HERE.

The count on our TV screen is currently 174 to 64 in Obama's favour, with 270 needed, but it's still early days and the west coast haven't closed polls yet. Looks like the Dems have a majority in the senate already though!

It's an interesting night and we're still totally newbs at this.

Election night

Tonight is the night. We're off to watch the tallying. Fingers crossed for a no on Prop 8 and a yes to Obama as President!

And yay for passing 10,000 hits on the blog!

I'll try to post an update when we get home tonight. I wonder if we'll know by then?

I don't think we're still in San Antonio Toto...

A few weekends ago we finally made it to the botanical gardens and I'm really glad we did! It was a refreshing change, but I'll let the pics speak for themselves (mostly because we're going out soon and I have to run).

This lake was full of fish and turtles!

See, turtle! Well, if you squint you can see it. He's about 30cm long (good for soup?)

There were even random springs. Lots of limestone here and plenty of springs pop up from the aquifers below the city. Almost felt like being in a Roman grotto again...almost.

This is one of the big conservatories, and you can just make out the city skyline in the background. I am always surprised by the number of trees in San Antonio!

The interior of the conservatories was pretty impressive even without the 12 meter palms that you could look down on.

These beauties and more were in the orchid house (der) but I think this one looks like it has a tiny monkey inside it :)

This is one of my favorite kinds of orchids so I was stoked to find such a good looking specimen.

Not sure what these were but they sure are pretty.

And the obligatory head shot :D

Fall

Well it's that time of year again here, autumn, fall, halloween, harvest festival etc and all that good stuff. We've been both busy and slacking ever since Josie's parents headed back to Tassie, and I don't have time for an epic update now so I'll just post a bunch of pics instead and see who is still out there reading this!

Firstly, Fall brings with it pumpkins and candy...LOTS of pumpkins and candy!

Candy a go-go at our local Target

A human-chain of pumpkin carriers setting up a HUGE pumpkin patch at one of the local mega-churches

You can stock up on your choice of pumpkin for fall/halloween decoration at most of the supermarkets. This is was outside wholefoods. I wonder if any of them are actually edible!

y[ike]s

Just to let y'all know that, yes hurricane Ike is bearing down on Texas, but no we won't really be copping much more than some storms here. Evacuations along the coast have been moving fairly smoothly and I hope everyone will be ok. Yesterday it looked more like we were going to be in for a rough time, but the storm turned slightly. Good for us, bad for others I guess.

Even so, it is bound to be a soggy Saturday so I'm thinking we'll be up for some indoor R&R, probably watching Battlestar Galactica eps and enjoying our new (not so new) couch! Yep, we finally have something more than a chair to plonk down on. Our sitting room is hardly altered though, considering it is a measly 1.3 meter "loveseat" but it is still a huge change for us :)

Vittles

Jeannie and Big A arrive tonight so the apartment is looking shiny and new, so much so that I don't want to make breakfast for fear of lowering the tidy-level.

Just thought I'd post a few pics since I've had a run of picless posts lately.

Firstly, here's a shot of our dinner from the other night. We got home late and were too tired to cook so this is our "off" night! Surprising what's contained in the bowels of the refrigerator sometimes. Farmers market figs though ;)


Also, Josie was out babysitting the other night so I was able to whip up some contraband that I had stashed in the freezer (seafood that is). It is poison to Jo so I rarely ever even cook it at home, because of the smell. I did a pulp fiction style clean up after this one though, and it sure was worth it!


And finally, it has been raining on and off here for a week which means we got a shot at an unusual sight (for Texas anyway). This is off the balcony of our deck, pretty green for August eh?

A deliciously drippy break from the heat

Yup, it's Monday morning and it is raining! Seems appropriate really, but there's no dreary Monday-itis for this little duck, instead I'm grinning at the view outside my office window and enjoying the reprieve from the heat. Josie's folks arrive in a few days and everything is looking pretty green. We've dropped from high thirties to the positively chilly low thirties and I am even contemplating long pants!

Anyhow, weather aside, the weekend was great for the simple fact that almost nothing happened. It was one of those weekends that just seemed to keep on going. I got up at sparrowfart again on Saturday to get to the farmer's market and do a fresh bread run, and this time I even left the beloved to sleep while I shopped. The spoils this week included yukon gold and red skinned potatoes (to make up for having forgotten them last week), eggplant, more okra (yes it really is that good), a big bag of purple figs, some zucchini and some cherry and plum tomatoes. There was also a guy there this week selling some of the best looking herb plants I've seen in a while. If our deck wasn't already overflowing with edibles I would most certainly have taken a few off his hands.

Made it home with loot in tow, including fresh bread and some local crimini mushrooms (baby honey browns for you Aussie folk) from Wholefoods. Bastards still haven't restocked our favorite picholine olives but I'll forgive them this time because they did have some gorgeous ciabatta rolls topped with cheese and roasted hatch peppers...mmm

I didn't do too much post market cooking this time, but the plum and cherry tomatoes were promptly split and roasted with some garlic and rosemary. I stewed them down later and the combination of sour cherries and sweet plums made the most delightful pasta sauce - all smooth sweet acidity. But enough about food, I'm making myself hungry and it's only 11am. The rain is still falling and the ground outside my window is flooding. Got to love Texas for never doing anything half-assed!

What is that sound?

So this morning, getting ready for work (kind of) I was scrolling through the muted TV channels looking for some coverage of the 'lympics when I heard the strangest noise. After ruling out the wind (there wasn't any breeze), the A/C hadn't kicked in and it wasn't the train going passed...I was stumped. I called out to Josie "What is that noise?"

"It's rain dear..."

Oh. Wow, I guess it's been a while!

Port Aransas and the Texas Coast

A couple of months ago we went down to the Texas coast and spent a few nights with some friends. I didn't know what to expect but it was fun. A really different kind of beach than we're used to, more like some parts of Queensland I guess, but we had a fabulous time. We rented a house for a few days just down the street from the caravan park where friends of ours go every year, so we were effectively hanging out with local beach rats :D


It's about a 2-3 hour drive from San Antonio, depending on traffic, but really pretty through all sorts of (very flat) scrub and fields. When you get closer to the coast you hit a lot of refineries, and then those are replaced by coastal tourism...hotels, fishing suppliers etc etc. Our destination was Port Aransas, which is a barrier island (Mustang Island) so there's a big lagoon in behind and lots of birds. The water was insanely warm (over 30 deg C) and absolutely TEEMING with fish. Big ones too. Sometimes you could even feel them butting your legs! While I was out floating one day I had two little angel fish who came and swam with me, up over my belly and back for about 20 minutes! They were very pretty. The water was really nutrient rich, so a tad murky, but we got lucky in that there was no seaweed and no hurricanes (although we did catch a very pretty lightning storm).

Can't remember what time of day this was (evening I think) but it was still hot! This was about as much swell as we saw, but it was great for just floating around in. The peace of this shot is in stark contrast to earlier in the day, when the beach is covered in tents, blankets and umbrellas as far as the eye can see, not to mention people. There were people fishing over the top of people swimming even. And many of the tents had these kites attached to them, I guess so you can spot your stuff from the water. There was a bit of a tow, so it payed to keep an eye on some kind of landmark. The kites are also testament to the fact that there is an almost constant breeze, or at least there was when we were there.

Some of the local real estate. Pastels are in this season. There were also some fabulous "shacks" that we would have been quite happy living in, and some very grand looking houses!

The wharf at the end of the island (Port A proper I guess) and the sunset just before the lightning storm came across. There were some pretty impressive fishing cruisers moored here...the ones with the big game swivel chairs that look like glamorous dentist chairs attached to the back of the boat (stern?)

Same wharf about an hour earlier.

And from the look of these there is some pretty serious fishing that goes on round those parts!

One of the refineries on the road down to the coast. We could only just make out the oil rigs off shore, but these complexes were impressive. I love a good industrial site (aesthetic wise only though)

One of the many crops we passed. This one was gorgeous in its colouring, and we still don't have any idea what it actually was. It looked a little like it was related to corn, but hard to know when you're zipping past at 75 mph and trying not to get carsick!


The road out of the coast is of course a hurricane evacuation route. These warnings pop up every few miles but I wonder how well they are obeyed when it comes to the crunch. I've seen people fill up the access lanes on the highways here just to avoid a 10 minute delay due to an accident...

Matt in what seemed like a fitting shot...

Farmers market fun

So this weekend we thought we'd try something new, like getting me up at 7am on a Saturday! o.0 Wild and crazy I know, but if was for good reason (food). We wanted to get to a local farmers market close to opening time, before all the good stuff sold out. I'd been meaning to look up the farmers market scene in San Antonio for a while now, since the whole "shop local" thing here isn't even close to mainstream yet. I'd heard a story on NPR about a market that was being run by the Botanical Gardens, but sadly that fell on a Thursday. Not sure I could get the morning off work to buy vegies! Anyhow, I found this list of local markets, and there are actually quite a few! Not many on Saturdays but there was one listed at Olmos Park Basin that is pretty much on our normal Saturday morning route of breakfast tacos and shopping at Wholefoods. Seemed like the perfect one for us to check out. Opening time 8am. Gah.

I managed to drag my sluggish self out of bed. The beloved was sprightly as ever at that time of the morning and I only sensed a slight level of gloating at my suffering. A coffee and a shower later and I started to realise that mornings are actually kind of pretty. The sun doesn't burn quite so fiercely and the temp was only just pushing 90 (30)...not quite the 100+ that would settle in by about 10am.

Anyhow, back to the market...it was great! I must admit that I had low expectations...maybe 4 tables of mostly tomatoes, but it well and truly exceeded those. There were around 10-12 stalls (so still small by most standards) and the range of produce wasn't staggering, but the quality was excellent and very well priced. There were around 20 cars when we arrived at a little after 8 (ok, so it took me a while to get going) but by the time we had shopped there were more like 50 cars, and lots of people (and dogs) of all varieties. It just had a great feel to it, very small town, and we had to keep reminding ourselves that we were still in San Antonio!

As you can see, all sorts of yummies including Japanese eggplants, gorgeous peppers and the best looking okra I think I've ever seen.

Lots of melons too.

There were even gorgeous flowers! Pity we weren't going straight home. We didn't take any of these beauties home because we didn't think they'd survive their time in the PT.

So, here are our spoils. Tomatoes, two kinds of eggplant, okra, white onions, yellow fleshed peaches and a big bag of serrano peppers! I thought we were pretty restrained and I actually kicked myself later for forgetting potatoes, but oh well, next time!


Since it was before 10am when we made it back home (post breakfast tacos and bread shopping at wholefoods) I decided that I might as well put some of this stuff to good use right away. The first thing I made up was a batch of peach and serrano pepper jam, with a little orange and ginger. I didn't have any pectin on hand so it turned out a little on the 'sauce' side, but it's absolutely divine on ciabatta toast with brie, or on cold pork meatloaf.


I also slow roasted some of the tomatoes, eggplant and onions with some garlic and herbs, then stewed the whole thing down in red wine and put it through a coarse sieve to make a tomato base for pasta (which I'll be using tonight).

And after all that I needed a nap!