Book of the week: The Cable Car and the Dragon

The Cable Car and the Dragon- Herb Caen.

Big Bro and I brought this book out in honour of Chinese New Year; it's the tale of two exotic creatures who both wanted a taste of a a different life. Charlie, a San Francisco cable car, is on the top of Nob Hill late one Chinese New Year's night realises that after "running up and down San Francisco for sixty years, (he) has NEVER seen a Chinese New Year's Parade or a Chinese Dragon". So instead of turning left towards Russian Hill, for the first time in his life he turns right, and ventures off the tracks into Chinatown. There he meets the dragon Chu Chin Chow, who for sixty years has lived a reclusive life in the hills across the bay, emerging once a year to head the Chinese New Year Parade through Chinatown.

This is another of my childhood books, probably bought when we visited my aunt in San Francisco when I was three (or else sent from there later). It's quite a wordy book- the recommended age of 4-8 years seems quite appropriate- and goes into details of the history and mechanics of cable cars, which Big Bro enjoys. It couldn't be set anywhere else- it's very much a San Francisco tale, with mentions of Nob and Russian Hills and particular streets. If When we take the boys to San Francisco I'll be making sure we take the Cable Car over the same tracks, looking down over Chinatown. Who knows, we might even ride Charlie.

One of my favourite bits of the book, which I always make sure I read, is the dedication:

For my son Christopher, who, having had the taste and judgement to be born in San Francisco in 1965, knows quite a bit about cable cars and dragons. He also knows enough about his father to listen to the following tale with an air of polite disbelief.

Book of the Week was devised by Suburban Sonnet

Book of the Week: Wynken, Blynken and Nod

I've mentioned before that I've been lucky that my mother has kept many of my picture books which are now gradually relocating themselves here. Eugene Field's Wynken, Blynken and Nod has been one of these, which I often bring out when the boys are in need of a calming book.

Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night

Sailed off in a wooden shoe

Sailed on a river of crystal light

Into a sea of dew....

It's a dreamy verse about three boys sailing into the sky, and I love its rhythm and quiet tones. Our edition is illustrated by Barbara Cooney, with beautiful monochrome scenes which match the quietness of the verse.

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The internet is a wonderful place, and in writing this I discovered a Denver link to Eugene Field, who was a journalist there for two years and managed to leave his house. The statue in the picture at the top, of the Fishermen Three, Wynken, Blynken and Nod, turns out to be located in Denver's Washington Park near Field's house. Of course I never saw it while we lived there.....

Learning about.... New York

Big Bro and I finished reading James and the Giant Peach last week, and with the finale of the peach's skewering on the Empire State Building and the seed ending up in Central Park as James' house. I suggested we learnt a bit more about New York this week. We managed a bit less than I had planned as Big Bro wasn't well in the middle of the week, but still learnt a bit- certainly enough for Little Bro-the-parrot to exclaim "wook, Empire State Building" as we walked through the (Melbourne) city.

To learn about New York landmarks we looked at photos B and I had taken on trips to New York, and watched a few YouTube clips, including:

This sight-seeing montage set to New York, New York - the boys enjoyed the limousines and black town cars.

The Wiggles' Central Park

New York State of Mind by Alicia Keys

We also watched clips of On the Town, which for whatever reason can't be embedded- but it did bring back memories of the D-Gen's Late Show spoof of the song (which is embeddable)

We also located some New York coloring pages and downloaded paper models of New York landmarks from a cool free site called Paper Toys- including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. These four structures, plus Central Park seem to be the top five recognizable New York landmarks.

We were going to make a few New York foods, but illness and time got in the way. In the end we used the leftover frankfurters from last week to make hot dogs in honour of the ubiquitous street hot dog carts, and didn't make Waldorf salad or a New York cheesecake, or have a bagel at the New York Bagelry. I got stuck with New York picture books- any recommendations?

It certainly wasn't an exhaustive study- which isn't the idea- but more a hope that in the future if Big Bro hears mention of New York he'll have an idea of what's there. B is off to New York later in the year so it will be a good test of what has stuck.

This weekend I am grateful for... a beach holiday

Another Maxabella-inspired grateful post, and this week I've been grateful for the chance to have a few days with B and the boys on the Mornington Penninsula. Good weather, child-friendly beaches, pick-your-own cherries and strawberries, a few mazes to solve, dolphins to swim by the Queenscliff ferry, some great places to eat and eat (and when all else fails, it's hard to go wrong with the occasional fish and chips), a back yard with a play structure, and those wonderful people at information offices and taking the tour of Cape Shanck Lighthouse who are genuinely enthusiastic about answering questions they probably face fourteen times a day: yes, I'm grateful!

And refreshed!

And very overdue with APrADa posts!! It's still happening!!

Days 7-8: Christmas Decorations

Before we had children, B and I never bothered about Christmas decorations. Our two US Christmases were spent away from home, so we enjoyed other peoples' decorations. Or, in 2005, we enjoyed Mother Nature's:

Maroon Bells, from Aspen Highlands (if you look closely there is a ski sign in the bottom right corner). It was an awesome day for skiing- and apart from a few probably-Jewish families, we had the ski fields almost to ourselves. Who needs turkey?

Now that we share our family with certain people with a vested interest in Christmas, we've started to decorate a bit. Of course there are important receptacles to be hung by the chimney with care:

And the all-important tree. Last year we had a plastic one (with built in fibre optic lights, no less!) given to us which, amongst post-Sweden craziness I decided "would do". But... it wasn't quite me. I had grown up with a living Christmas tree- the perennial sort, in a pot- so I had been keen to go down that path. After realising Sunday afternoons in December aren't a good time to look for a tree any bigger than your hand, we found a specimen about a metre tall- just right for little people to decorate.

As we decorated, Big Bro enthusiastically wanted "more!" but thankfully listened to the principle of "less is more". I managed to keep the tree to our meaningful ornaments- mostly things we've collected on our travels.

There are a few Swedish mementos, like the Dalarna horses, the glass balls we saw being blown at Skansen, and the stockings, and a gold Aspen leaf, to remind us of our Aspen Christmas.

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On the topic of trees, you can donate a tree to the Murray Darling through Carbon Catchers. For $8.80 you receive GPS coordinates for your tree, and can follow its progress for the next 30 years.

The three sisters garden

I've been meaning to post for ages about my crop rotation system- and hopefully writing this will give me the guilt impetus to put fingers to keyboard- but for the meantime accept that a lot of my vegetable garden design is based on the principles of companion planting. This means putting plants together by matching their needs (eg, acid-lovers), where possible putting two plants with complementary features together (eg, basil and tomatoes), and also considering the order in which plants occupy a bed (eg, putting nitrogen-hungry brassicas after nitrogen-fixing ("making") legumes).

For a couple of years I have been reading about the idea of a Three Sisters Garden, most recently at My Little Vegetable Garden. It's a great example of companion planting, and has its origins in Native American farming. The three elements, squash, corn (maize) and climbing beans were the three major crops of cultures such as the Anasazi. These were not the nomadic "Indians" of the "Cowboys and..." stereotype, but in fact had sophisticated villages, some of which still exist, like these cliffside constructions in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.

Mesa Verde is a plateau, and is it thought that the Anasazi inhabitants who lived there between 1400-700 years ago (before the majority of European historic buildings were built) made their homes on the cliff sides to maximise the use of the arable land on the top of the plateau for farming. Up there they even had irrigation systems, and the remains of squash, beans and corn have been found in the ruins. It appears that Mesa Verde was abandoned suddenly- in the space of 1 to 2 generations- and its people migrated south, perhaps because of drought.

Anyway, coming back to the Three Sisters, the traditional view is that the three plants- corn, squash and beans- are the sisters, each bringing something into the garden to support the other plants:

- the corn stands tall, and provides a scaffold for the beans to climb on

- the squash cover the ground, shading the ground to keep it cool and smothering weeds

- the beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil where all the plants' roots can use it

(I read somewhere that sometimes a fourth sister, a flower to attract pollinators, was included)

As you cruise the Three Sisters literature online you'll find various designs of how to lay out the plot. I think a lot of the design has to come from trial and error. I half tried last year, and my corn ended up being smothered by the rampant zucchinis. This year, in the hopes of a more harmonious sorority, I have curbed the enthusiasm of the "squash" sister by demoting it from zucchini to weaker cucurbits like melons and cucumbers (which are not without their own trials). The corn are Digger's Dwarf (so may fail on the tall front, hence the frame below) and the beans so far are Purple Dragon and Sex-without-strings (what a name!) that I picked up from a local school fair. The vibrant green shoots in the background are logan berries which believe that they should be the fourth sister.

So far things are looking ok- though I won't count my sisters until they've fruited!

This weekend I am grateful for....mentors, memories and history

Maxabella has been writing a weekly "grateful" post which is a great structure for a positive post and I've joined her linky list. There are lots of things I am always grateful for- a loving and wonderful husband and family being top of the list, and a wonderful circle of friends being a close second. But rather that restate this every week, I'll try to think of single defined events to be grateful for.

I was going to write that I'm grateful for mentors, music and television, but that sounded rather too shallow for my maiden post.... hence the retitling , m

entors, memories and history. So here goes. This weekend I am grateful for:

Professional mentors- who will park their egos at the door and say the right thing when necessary. I am lucky to have several.

John Denver and his music (and I'm grateful to B for loading it onto iTunes!)- a loop of Rocky Mountain High and Take Me Home, Country Roads kept me going through a tedious manual exercise at work, and had me thinking about the incredible beauty of the United States.

We saw the John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen, and that whole part of the Rockies would be an amazing place to live- as the song suggests. I've never been to the Appalachians, but from what I know they are similarly beautiful, in constrast to hard life of many West Viginians, depicted in fiction like The Bean Trees and The Memory Keeper's Daughter, and the real-life horror of events like the Sago mine disaster (and others; I just remember being transfixed by the unfolding Sago drama in January 2006). All very tangential to the music, but it was a great way to divert a flat mind for an hour or two!

A Digital Video Recorder- which let me watch the excellent Seven Ages of Britain weeks after it aired. And it was worth it- almost a potted tour of British historical artifacts. I wouldn't say I'm a history buff but I love books like Our Island Story and A Little History of the World which are full of facts presented in a concise, readable way. That they are both intended for children shows the depth of my interest in history!

Thinking of Christchurch

Seeing the pictures of this morning's earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, and hearing that it was more powerful than the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, I can only think it's a miracle that no one appears to have been killed. We visited New Zealand as newlyweds and I found myself looking over the photos. Thinking of everyone affected by it...

(Yes, that is a wizard addressing the crown in the last picture!)

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On an aside, for a long time I've wondered whether the seismic activity occuring at one place on a fault line triggers seismic stress elsewhere on at connected area (for example, around the Pacific Rim). The idea came to me when someone pointed out that two days after the 1989 San Francisco quake there was a earthquake in China that killed 20 people but was barely reported on. Teachers and lecturers always pooh-poohed this suggestion (over 10 years ago) saying that earthquakes are completely unrelated events, so I feel quite vindicated to read now that some seismologists now believe that there can be a connection. So if this is the case, we can only hope that any other activity related to the Christchurch quake occurs well away from any populations.

Snow day

I've been meaning to say.... a few weeks ago, we headed up to Lake Mountain to let the boys see some snow. Lake Mountain is Melbourne's closest alpine resort, with dedicated tobogganing slopes and cross country trails and- as we found- an easy day trip from Melbourne. Despite the advertising, snow in the Victorian Alps isn't guaranteed so I was impressed that there was a good 20cm coverage when we visited- plenty for the boys' preferred activities:

sliding (sans sled- hooray for waterproof pants!)

and snow man construction.

It was overall a good day- Big Bro keeps asking when we will be going again- but for the adults it was also memorable for the sights on the way up.

Lake Mountain is accessed through Marysville, which was one of the towns worst affected by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires (which also destroyed the Lake Mountain resort; rebuilding is underway). The town is rebuilding, but is still frighteningly empty: there were many driveways leading to an empty block, often with the remnants of gardens, and businesses operating out of shipping containers or temporary buildings, and burnt signs around the town. I couldn't take any photos there, but this is from the road between Marysville and Lake Mountain. Each of those eucalypt tree trunks is covered in new shoots emerging from the charred wood. If only everything else could recover that well.

Higher on the mountain the trees hadn't recovered as well, for whatever reason, making an eerie black and white landscape.

These are all pictures take from the road and I've deliberately left in a glimpse of how close the trees come to the road. This is a road leading down the mountains out of Marysville.

For all of us adults, seeing the closeness of the trees to the roads- and these were the major roads out of the region- made us realise how people were trapped in townships like Marysville and events of Black Saturday was suddenly more understandable, if such a horrible tragedy can ever be understood. The recently released Royal Commission into the fires includes a recommendation to clear zones along roads to make late evacuations a safer option.

The Colorado Bed- completed

Our Colorado Bed is just about finished! The whole process went fairly smoothly- first B and I dug as deep as we could into the compacted clay soil (uncovering buried treasures). Of course the boys thought this was great, and Little Bro has been saying "double, double" (=shovel, of course!) every time we head outside now.

I put all the salvaged plants into old potting mix bags which I knew I had been saving for just a purpose (without knowing what...!). We stuck a length of irrigation piping along the bottom of the trench, so that if needed in really hot weather we could send water directly under the trees. Then it was time to backfill- a total of 225 L of cow manure and mushroom compost, alternating with layers of the original soil and dry leaves. The hope is that it will blend up into a well-draining but water-retentive soil.

We let the soil settle for a week, and then it was time for the trees. This was the trickiest bit! As I've explained, we wanted silver birches as an aspen-lookalike. Silver birches come in a range of structures, from upright to drooping and, worse still, they come with a range of subspecies names! B and I agreed we wanted three upright trees that were around 2-3 metres tall, and settled on Betula pendula alba (aka Betula alba). First we headed up to nurseries on Sydney Road (including everyone's favourite, Hello Hello!) but the only place that had large enough trees for our tastes didn't deliver (and we couldn't fit the trees in our car). On the way home I suggested we check our local nursery-which delivers- and lo-and-behold, they had discounted their last silver birch from $45 to $25 and reassured me that they could order two more from their supplier. They also reassured me that in the absence of a label this was B. pendula alba. We went home satisfied that we were supporting our local business, and five minutes later our tree arrived. Too easy....

... or maybe not! The next day I got the call to say that the supplier had run out of trees! So the next weekend, we headed up to Bulleen Art and Garden to see what they had. I wish we'd started there- it's an awesome nursery! The boys loved the goldfish pond, the chicken coop and the carnivorous plants. I loved the range. There were heaps of birches of various description, all around the $20-30 mark. When I explained what we were looking for- a display trunk- the sales assistant recommended Betula pendula "moss white". Silly me said "oh no, we need alba", so two Betula pendula alba were delivered to our doorstep two hours later. And of course when they were lined up side-by-side with tree number 1, they were clearly different. Oh well, if the match is really too bad, we'll pull out tree number 1 and replace it with another Bulleen tree!

So in went the trees, in went some jasmine for the fence (we have a couple of vines further up the fence and love the smell on spring nights), and in went a huge rosemary from our now dedicated camelia bed. I'm growing some more rosemary cuttings to make a complete hedge. The "after" photo really doesn't do it much justice- thin, bare trees in front of a wooden fence really are a bit camoflaged but for now, here is the Colorado Bed, winter version:

Dig, Dig, Diggers

Our neighbours had some excavating done a month or two ago, which sparked Little Bro's interest in obsession with diggers and heavy machinery. I dug out a few of Big Bro's old favourites, which Little Bro now can't get enough of. Top of his list are:

Dig, Dig, Digging by Margaret Mayo- this is a series of catchy short verses about diggers and other mostly-construction vehicles:

Diggers are good at dig, dig, digging...

Fire engines are good at race, race, racing...

Cranes are good at lift, lift, lifting....

They can work all day, and Little Bro could listen to it all day.

Dazzling Diggers by Ant Mitton and Tony Parker- this is part of a series of catchy rhymes about different vehicles- Flashing Fire Engines, Tremendous Tractors, Roaring Rockets etc. Some of the rhymes work better than others (Dazzling Diggers is my favourite) but each page of every book has enough heavy machinery action to keep Little Bro enthralled.

Don't tell the American Association for Pediatrics, but I've also been showing Little Bro YouTube clips of diggers. I can't say I find them exciting- diggers making holes, diggers loading trucks, diggers dredging rivers, diggers carrying people, diggers dancing..... but Little Bro loves them. So much so that I have cut back on DiggerTube when Little Bro started handing me the iPad with a hopeful "digger?" The most interesting thing the clips have taught me is that there is Digger Land in the UK where "families can drive heavy machinery". I guess that could be us one day.....!!!

The Colorado Bed

My Australian Gardening Calendar labels July as "a month for garden design", and we've been doing just that.

Last December our huge apple tree fell down, converting a shady garden bed into a sunbaked crust over summer and leaving us with a blank canvas (well, potentially blank), thus:
The prime consideration in our design plan has been that the bed sits on the North side of our deck, so we want something that is both aesthetic and, like the apple tree, tall and deciduous (the usual shade-in-summer, sun-in-winter factor). I am happy to be corrected, but our requirement for tallness rules out most edible plants in a functional form- the apple tree's out-of-reach fruit was just a possum magnet. B and I quickly decided that this could be the spot for our long awaited "aspens".


As I have shown, aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) are for us a pure Colorado icon, as much as the columbine. White trunks, green leaves in summer, red or yellow in autumn, and bare white trunks in the snow.

The only problem with P. tremuloides aspens is that they don't grow at elevations below 1500 feet: they have no chance in Melbourne! There are other aspen varieties, but I suspect they're not really suitable for the small spot we have and besides, they're not "our" aspens.

So on to Plan B, silver birches (Betula pendula). There are heaps in our area, and with white trunks they are quite aspen-ish to our mind. When we were looking for a house to buy a few years back, one came up with a clump of silver birches, and we decided our future garden would have silver birches. In fact, they became a joke between B and I: until the apple tree's demise we would have had to clear some other garden bed for our silver birches but couldn't decide where. When I'd consult B about other garden design issues, his reply has been "I don't mind-I just want my silver birches". So it's quite exciting to finally have them in the works!

The apple tree's demise has sparked quite a domino effect in the rest of the garden. In the first place the soil in the bed is horrid, so we'll be digging in loads of manure and compost. I've already transplanted the long-suffering rhubarb to its third home, and to make room for the birches we have moved the Mexican orange blossom and the port wine magnolia to one side of the bed and the daisy to the lawn border. The two camelias were sent to our South side yard, which will now be an official acid-lovers bed (despite its own problems).

The plan is then to plant silver birches across the bed, so that their trunks will be a feature to look at. The fence will be covered in a creeper (probably Jasmine as we love the scent), and if I can ever get my cuttings to take root, we'll have a Rosemary hedge, which will tie in with the bed on the south side of the deck. I'm also in the process of ordering blue columbine seeds fron an American company, so the plan is to have wildflowers around our "aspens".

This is one of my biggest garden design job ever, so I'm dying to see the finished product!!

A Photo Tour of Colorado Aspens

Aspens (Populus tremuloides, the quaking aspen) were our favourite Colorado tree, and tied up with so many Colorado memories, a few of which I wanted to share. We'd love to have aspens in our garden, but they don't grow at elevations below 1500 feet. They have no chance in Melbourne! So our only way to enjoy them is from our photos.

Summer Aspens

Our Colorado summer involved lots of weekends in the mountains. As the Melbourne winter greys up, I keep thinking of what's happening up in the Rockies- are the snowbound trails thawing? Are the columbines blooming? Is Trail Ridge Road open?

Aspens are tall and thin, with white trunks, and brilliant green leaves. I could never get a photo that captured the feel of the leaves quivering (quaking, hence the name)- it's like a life force is in the leaves, beyond the normal vegetative state.

We visited the town of Aspen on the 4th of July- Independence Day- having driven over Independence Pass (and a couple of days earlier hiked the 4th of July trail), and- not ones to avoid significance- on the way in we stopped to admire the Aspen aspens.

In August we headed to Telluride, in the South West- I've mentioned it before in the context of columbines. On the way there we stopped at Elk Mountain Resort, which is a gorgeous place to stay, set in the midst of an aspen forest... but also (for us) a very bizarre place as we discovered it also houses the Valhalla Shooting Club, which runs tactical shooting courses like simulated terrorist situations. We just enjoyed the forest.

Telluride itself is just amazing in summer (I am holding myself back from just posting a zillion photos of it!)- one of my favourite Colorado destinations. It's a town in a mountain gorge, and on one side is an aspen forest.

Fall Aspens

Aspens come into their own in fall (yes, autumn!) when they turn a shade of yellow to red. Given that aspens are supposed to generally live in clonal (genetically identical) colonies propagated by root shoots I don't understand why red and yellow aspens can often be found close together- maybe a microenvironmental effect? While East Coast Americans scoff at the Colorado fall colours, we thought the aspens of Rocky Mountain National Park were worth the day trip!

This is Long's Peak (a notoriously difficult "16-er" mountain) framed by aspens in RMNP.

The first conference I went to was in Vail, and this was a view of one of the hills, showing the aspen forests which are overtaken by conifers at the more exposed points. The most memorable part of the conference (with apologies to the organisers) was that one evening there was a fire alarm during dinner, and who should be one of the responding fire fighters but thehusband of TV's original Bachelorette!Our final Colorado Fall experience was a hike near Steamboat Springs. We started in aspen forests...

...and ended up at this mountain lake, surrounded by snow by not yet frozen. It was completely magical. And a perfect fall finale.

Winter Aspens

Winter in Colorado was, for us, all about skiing. In our second winter we were good enough to tree ski. This is B amongst the aspens in Steamboat Springs.

And to finish up where I began:

Aspens in Aspen

Of Oils and Orangutans

Little Bro's had his first visit to Melbourne Zoo last week, and I would say on balance he enjoyed it. "On balance" meaning that we got off to a bad start, when the first animal we saw was a gorilla up close-and-personal (no chance of a photo!). Admittedly it was through glass, but Little Bro was still wise enough to know that responsible mothers shouldn't be leaving their offspring within picking distance of a Lowland Gorilla, and vocalised this opinion!

He did chirp up once I took him to the less threatening "ish,ish" carp enclosure (supposedly there is a hippo in there; I don't think I've ever seen it) and by the time we got to the monkey walk he was in his element. We'd bought Friends of the Zoo Membership ($100 for a year of unlimited visits) so I didn't bother being too ambitious, so after the monkeys we just "did" the tigers (which roared), the elephants (including Baby Mali in the distance), the orang utans, the giraffes and the meerkats, and that was well and truly enough for this visit.

The Zoo is running the Don't Palm Us Off Campaign which ultimately aims to use consumer power to reduce the demand for palm oil, much of which is being produced in plantations that are replacing Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests (so reducing orangutan habitat). The campaign is to demand that palm oil is specifically labelled in food ingredients lists, so that consumers can actively avoid it if they choose.

Palm oil and its derivatives are found in a huge range of processed food as well as soaps and cosmetics. The problem is that in Australia it can be listed under the generic "vegetable oil" label, or as a number of products such as cocoa butter substitute, emulsifier E471 and sodium lauryl sulfate so it's not that easy to identify. As this table shows, without this labelling requirement it's really hard for consumers to know what they¹re buying- even when companies provide information about which products are palm oil-free, there are heaps of intricacies to maneuver through: Sultana Bran is ok but Sultana Bran Crunch isn't, Haigh's and Lindt chocolate is ok unless it is filled. And buying soap without palm oil is a real challenge- it seems that most of the options are from online boutique companies.

The campaign is already having an effect: following public pressure a number of manufacturers- including Cadbury's and Nestle- are phasing out palm oil or switching to sustainable sources. But without the labelling change consumers have to take the incentive and time to research palm oil-free options for their shopping lists if they choose that this is a battle they care about.

We can only hope that this action is happening soon enough: some estimates are without action now, orangutans will be extinct in the wild in the next 10-30 years. It has been a dream of mine to one day take the boys to Borneo to see the orangutans in the wild, so switching my purchasing to palm oil-free products will be a small part towards getting there.

Beach holiday

Work took me to Queensland's Sunshine Coast for a few days so I squeezed B and the boys in my bag and we added on a few more days of R&R in Noosa. We had a wonderful time- highlights included the beach and pool, Eumundi Markets, the Ginger Factory (a boat ride, a train ride, icecream and gingerbread man souvenirs: who can complain?), riding the Noosa Ferry and ascending Mt Tinbeerwah to look over the Noosa River and hinterland ("climbing" is a bit of an exaggeration for the degree of difficulty for the adults, but as I said before, it was Big Bro's first unassisted mountain ascent).

Food-wise, Noosa certainly isn't home to obvious bargains, especially with the near-universal 15% holiday surcharge over Easter, but our favourite meal was at Trios at the Noosa Marina (floor to ceiling glass and no balcony combined with a late lunch meant Little Bro could cruise in the vicinity of our table without risk of a watery plunge... and a good view of the boats). An honourable mention goes to Rasa in Noosaville for the best children's menu item, a delicious chicken noodle stirfry.

Eight days away didn't feel like long (and wasn't) but in that time the garden had a few developmental leaps- infantile capsicums, tomatoes at the end of their season, yet more parsley, and a few too many weeds. The holiday is certainly over!

Kites Away!

Flying a kite is something I've enjoyed for a long time. It's only ever been on an occasional basis: I have a hazy memory of the maiden flight of my first kite- yellow plastic, with a picture of Charlie Brown- from when I was about five. Sadly, it flew only once, getting stuck in a tree (what else would a Charlie Brown kite do?) and breaking a strut.

When I was about 13 my dad gave me a kite. We only flew it every now and then, but one tradition was to fly it at our friends' farm south of Hobart, often after Christmas lunch. It eventually met its end in a tree, but before that I remember one windy spring day when I had a whole day without university lectures (unusual for me) and I luxuriated in my freedom by taking the kite to the Hobart Domain and flying it.

Every year, the City of Darebin, in Melbourne's North, has a Kite Festival. Since hearing about it a couple of years ago, I've been keen to go, and finally this year we made it. Big Bro even insisted on taking his fish kite, which we attempted to fly... which wasn't easy as at that stage I was there without B, so I was trying to marshall Big Bro into assisting to fly the kite while reassuring Little Bro that every time I ran along the grass I wasn't abandoning him! But we enjoyed watching the pros, as well as cruising the community stalls that seem to do the rounds of the festivals (Metro Fire Brigade balloons, anyone?).

Naturally the Kite Flying Association had the biggest and best- flying bears, a spinning windsock, and people using fishing rods to launch their kites! There were plenty of great designs- a bat, eagles, a shark, as well as traditional kite-shaped kits.

My favourite, though, was the squid looking down on the proceedings with a bemused twinkle in its eyes.

How do you like your chocolate?

I wouldn't go as far as to say I'm a chocaholic, but I do enjoy chocolate.

So when I was wandering around the shops at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport in December with a few last Kroner to spend, I was interested to see some out-of-the-ordinary chocolate varieties.

The Lindt Touch of Sea Salt got a good review at Chaos Theory, so I took a bar of that. Back home, I tried it... yeah, it was ok, though not something I'd buy again. It tasted like... nice chocolate... with a bit of salt. I'm sorry, but it just didn't do it for me- my first impression was that it reminded me of eating with my boys, where every now and then I wind up eating food A with a touch of random food B that they've mixed in- such as chocolate with a bit of salt. But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised- when we lived in the US I never appreciated the chocolate bars with embedded pretzels (really!), and I've never bothered trying chocolate potato chips. With a few exceptions (like maple syrup and bacon, mmm), I'm just not that into salty-sweet.

My second purchase was much more of a gastronomic success: "Winter" flavoured chocolate, with cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and ginger. Sounds a bit weird perhaps, but think of mulled wine or a ginger snap in a chocolate. To be fair, the flavour didn't go down so well with some people I offered it to- interestingly, males (B included) tended to give it the thumbs down, while females were generally appreciative. Given Marabou is a Swedish brand, I guess I'm unlikely to find any more Vinter Chocolate in Melbourne, so maybe one of these days I will have a go at recreating it myself.

So those are my weird chocolate flavours- how about you? What's the strangest- and best- chocolate you've tasted?

Frankston Sand Sculpting

The boys recently acquired a sandpit, so for a bit of inspiration we headed down to Frankston to see the Sand Sculptures.

The exhibit had the theme "Great Moments in History". Big Bro was pleased to see that his favourite politician was featured.

Some sculptures were still under construction, like this impressive "Great Buildings of the World".

And yes, this is sand, and only sand, that is making the bridge between the Petronas Towers and the round hole in the one at the far left (I am guessing it is the original design of the Shanghai World Financial Center). In all honesty, however, as we discovered when doing a bit of sculpting ourselves, the "sand" isn't the regular beach variety but more like coarse clay and very sticky. Which explains how the exhibit can run until April!!

As well as the sand sculpting tent, there was a sand-craft tent where for $5-10 children could use coloured sand to stick to adhesive patches on pictures, or layer the colours in a jar to make an ornament.

We all had fun at the exhibition, and to top the morning off we hit the beach for a bit of paddling (Little Bro's first interactive beach experience: he was fascinated by the waves!), watched a few boats passing under the bridge over the inlet, and had a tasty lunch on the beachside deck at Sofia.

Thumbs up to Frankston Beach for a great morning out!