Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Our friend's boyfriend

Our friend's boyfriend just friended us on Facebook. We hope this is a good sign. The boyfriend is clearly making an effort and he's a really nice guy.

Nathan and I will refrain from doing what we said to another friend a few years ago when she was dating someone new. We liked the guy so much that we told our friend if she ever broke up with him, and if we had to choose, we'd choose the boyfriend. It didn't go down well.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Frida

There is a Frida Kahlo exhibition on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the moment.

Kahlo is most well known for her confronting self portraits but I think one of her most striking works is this one titled The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.
The picture was a commissioned by Clare Luce to commemorate the death of her friend, Hale, who jumped to her death from an apartment building in New York.

I don't know what Luce was thinking when she commissioned Kahlo to paint her friend's remembrance portrait but the finished product was most certainly not what Luce had expected.


Sunday, June 26, 2016

Flower man

I'm loving this florist's arrangements. If I lived in Sydney, I reckon I'd be a regular visitor to his shop.




Saturday, June 25, 2016

Teddy bear banksia

The latest flowers on my dining room table are these cute teddy bear banksias, Banksia baueri. Nathan reckons they look like large hairy bollocks.

Nigella bites


I was lazing on the couch last weekend watching the Food network, when I got inspired by a healthy looking rice bowl dish that Nigella Lawson had whipped up.

I decided to head straight down to the supermarket and brought all the ingredients to make my own healthy rice bowl meals for the working week. It was a disaster.

The problem was that my rice bowl turned out nothing like Nigella's (I think I undercooked the rice).

Not wanting to tip the whole thing in the bin, I decided to set myself the challenge of seeing how many days I could actually eat the stuff before getting tired of it (Answer = I lasted the entire week....I can be stubborn). Admittedly, I also went about the task of tweaking the dish ever so slightly, day by day, in an effort to improve its palatability. After trying everything from fish sauce to actual grilled fish, the trick, it turned out, was lots and lots of avocado to counter the dry graininess of my undercooked rice.

I don't think I'll be doing healthy work lunches anytime again soon.

Moving office

A lot has happened around the world since my last post.

Fortunately, in my own little world, things have been fairly mundane.

I had been busy cleaning out my old office in preparation for moving into a new space this week. It's amazing how much crap I've accumulated in 10 years. And it's even more amazing how cathartic it has been to toss out a lot of that crap.

My new office is in an adjoining building. The office has been refurbished and it's a little bit fancy. I now have a desk that moves up and down and the lights are hooked up to motion sensors to save energy (so far, it keeps going off no matter how much I'm moving around). My new office is slightly smaller than my last but I think it's also a more functional space (and fortunately it's still big enough to house all the crap I didn't manage to throw out).

The actual building itself is old and crappy. I think it was build in the 60s and has a funky smell. The floors are uneven and you can see the patched up remnants of huge cracks in the walls where the building has shifted. I hope I don't plunge through the floors.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Saturday market and art surprise

My Mexican friend is in town. On Saturday morning we took her to the South Melbourne Markets for breakfast. I had to buy some flowers for a dinner party so we stopped by my favourite florist for some banksias (and a quick selfie).
 I took my friend to the NGV gift shop in the afternoon so she could buy some souvenirs. I was leafing through a book on aboriginal art and was surprised to see a painting from my collection reproduced in the book!

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Ali

I met Ali 12 years ago. It was at a fancy Australian American fundraiser in New York. As a junior scientist, I was completely outside my comfort zone (It was only the second time I ever wore a tux; the first was at my year 12 formal). In a cavernous hall full of amazing people (from TV personalities to media moguls), he was by far the biggest star amongst a sea of stars. Ali was the one all the guests wanted to get a photograph with.

RIP.