Home/away

Highlights from the past month of travel and everyday goings-on:

Away

I went to Cleveland for the first time for a conference. I didn't get to see much - it rained so hard most of the time I was there that I could barely see Lake Erie, the shore of which is about a quarter-mile from the conference center. I managed one outing - to the neighboring Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for an enjoyable couple of hours. I had mostly unremarkable conference food, but this Italian restaurant near my hotel was a much-needed oasis - and so good I ate there twice in three nights.

From Cleveland I traveled onwards to Ireland, where I met up with DP and Miss B and some of my in-laws for a few days of jaunting around County Galway and environs. Lots of striking scenery, visits with the Irish cousins, and many, many cups of tea. The food high point was dinner our last night at this stupendous seafood restaurant.

And for the long holiday weekend just finished, we went up to Boston to hang out with our people there - lots of beach and pool time, hitting all our favorite local spots, and of course plenty of ice cream.


Home

Speaking of ice cream, I'm pretty pleased to have found a local ice cream shop to supply my summertime needs. On our last visit, I snapped this view from the terrace of the weather changing over downtown Fairfax, just after a massive summer storm had passed through.

DP has been traveling even more than I have - so much so that he spent his birthday back in Canberra. But we still managed to fit in a birthday party for him between trips - I made his traditional birthday dinner of classic steak au poivre, and tried out some new buttercream techniques on the cake (doubling the recipe here).

Last but not least: I don't think I can find a food link for this picture, unless you'll indulge me in agreeing that she is a cutie pie. But I had to include her, because I have way more pictures of her than of food on my phone over the last month.

Status update

New kitchen installation, Day 1.

Short version: our transition is ongoing.

Slightly longer version: we've been camped out in northern Virginia in a friend's basement for 5 weeks; tomorrow we shift to a short-stay apartment closer to our new house/construction site. We have now officially entered the intensive phase of renovation, and our household goods are expected to arrive in port from Australia shortly. Summer vacation 2.0 is entering its final phase for Miss B, with just over 2 weeks until school starts. DP is enjoying settling into his new job, and my working life has entered an interesting phase, of which more later - right now I'm mainly focused on juggling between work and contractor responsibilities, interspersed with occasional interactions with spouse and child.

My mantra of the moment: "It'll all get done somehow." And I'm not complaining - I knew what August would be like when I signed up for this.

One of the main reasons that makes it all worth it: being able to join my family's Cape vacation for the first time in ten years:

S'mores

Desserts: my mum's chocolate cake, with vanilla buttercream frosting (top);
Food52 Shortcut Pie with a gluten-free cookie crust filled with roasted peaches and raspberries (bottom)

Highlights included s'mores on the back patio and a mass birthday party for all the summer birthdays in my family (about half of the 15 people in attendance - I contributed the desserts). Other highlights, not pictured: the cousins' sleeping loft; Mexican train dominoes; loafing in rocking chairs on the porch; unscheduled time with a lot of people I've been missing for a long time.

While you wait

Nearly four years ago I wrote a post about how stressful I find waiting, at a time when I found myself in a state of limbo, awaiting significant outcomes over which I had no control in my personal, professional, and national life.

Well, here I am again - and it doesn't feel as though I've gotten any better at being zen about waiting. Possibly even worse, at least at the moment, compounded as it is by grief. My current strategy is something I call "meticulous mindfulness" (or would "mindful meticulousness" be better? I can't decide), by which I mean that I am trying to focus on the things that I want to accomplish each day, and then trying to give each of those things my full attention. In the short term, when I can accomplish it, it stops the hamster wheel in my brain from spinning; and in the long term, I hope it adds up to a period of sustained accomplishment and satisfaction, rather than one of fruitless frustration.

So: this morning, I woke up early for Sunday, slightly jetlagged after returning from my second trip to the US in two months (this one, a family trip, was the one I had been planning to take this year). I lay in bed and thought about what I wanted to do with this unexpected block of time. Did I want to stay in bed and read, enjoying having nothing to do after three weeks of non-stop activity (including stops in five cities)? Or did I want to tackle some task on my monster To Do list?

I split the difference - I read for a while, and then I got up to bring my blog up to date. Here's some recent happenings, aside from what I've already told:

An impromptu family trip to Perth and the southwest corner of Western Australia during July school holidays that almost didn't happen, between DP's travel schedule and my father's hospitalization. But it did, and I'm glad we managed it - as well as this, which was on Miss B's must-see list: sunset over the Indian Ocean. Our last night before we flew back east, we went down to the beach in Fremantle and sat there to watch it happen.

The saying goes that in the midst of life we are in death, but the reverse is also true. My father died five days before Miss B's twelfth birthday, and I flew to Boston the day after. We had a family dinner and cake on the day with a few close friends, and with the help of some of the aforementioned meticulous mindfulness I was able to give Miss B the cake of her twelve-year-old dreams, even if I didn't manage a birthday post.

And to continue the theme: my oldest sister's birthday was the day after my father's funeral, and for my gift I made a birthday dinner, for her and all available family members. For dinner we had spaghetti al'amitriciana three ways: the standard version, as outlined in this post; a batch made with gluten-free pasta, for the GF contingent; and a vegetarian version for the birthday girl, substituting fried halloumi for the bacon. For dessert we had her favorite treat: birthday pie. I tested out Nigella's GF Pie Crust (a smashing success, even made under sub-optimal conditions in someone else's kitchen) and made maple-blueberry for the birthday girl (who doesn't eat refined sugar), and peach-raspberry for the non-blueberry fans.

That takes us up to early August...more to follow soon.

Vale Pater

One of the things that was weighing on me when I last wrote was that my father had been hospitalized in May, and that his condition didn't seem to be improving. I haven't written since because, as it turned out, it wasn't, and he died in late July.

My father was 88. He'd had a long, full life, and had been dealing with a number of medical conditions that had caused his physical health, emotional wellbeing, and quality of life to deteriorate steadily and significantly over the last decade. It turns out none of that prepares you when the time comes to say goodbye.

I went back to Boston to be with my family for the wake and funeral. My sisters and I spent hours composing an 8-page eulogy in which we tried to distill his essence - his kindness, his steadfast reliability, his sense of humor and enjoyment of life, his love of sports and music, his devotion to our mother and all of us. The priest who said his funeral mass - who also married DP and me 20 years ago and has known my family even longer - described him as a man whose "true vocation was fatherhood."

Our Boston community of family, friends, and colleagues turned out in force to commemorate him and condole with us. I've heard so many people say how much it means to have that support when someone you love dies, and now I know how true it is. I will always be grateful for that solace and care.

My father was a romantic but not sentimental, and couldn't abide most of the traditional choices for father-daughter wedding dances. All of us who got married chose instead to dance with him to songs that were his favorites, and that are bound up with our memories of him. This is mine.

New beginnings

Time for another lengthy update - and this time, a recipe! Lots has been happening since my last post, and I do mean lots....

In early July, I went with DP and Miss B on our first trip to Boston in nearly two years. I was so busy doing other things that I didn't manage to take many pictures, but I did record my first-ever taste of a Boston institution - Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee.

I also managed to record a few other highlights...

...a visit to one of my favorite beaches in the world, in southern Maine...

...and my first U2 concert in (gulp!) 14 years. I went with two of my sisters and one of my nieces who was born not long before my last show. She's only been to a few concerts, and this was her first non-pop show (or, as we said to her when the lights came back up and she was standing there looking like she'd been hit over the head, "That's what happens at a real concert!").

I left Boston ahead of DP and Miss B to fly to Mexico City for a conference. I was there for two and a half days and the only time I left the conference hotel was to attend the conference reception at the Museo Soumaya, which had a fascinating and eclectic collection, including this Salvador Dali snail with an angel on its back.

After the conference I flew back to the East Coast to meet up with DP and Miss B in Washington, DC. DP and I tag-teamed work meetings, and also caught up with some friends and took Miss B to see some of the sights. The Smithsonian Natural History Museum was top of our list; we went early to get an unobstructed look at the Hope Diamond before the crowds descended...

...and also spent some time getting up close and personal with some exotic butterflies.

I had forgotten how walkable DC is - much more so than Canberra. Our last day there was unexpectedly pleasant (DC in July traditionally being stinking hot and muggy), so we walked across a good chunk of downtown, taking in views of the White House and the Washington Monument...

...and ending up at the Lincoln Memorial in the early evening.

En route back to Australia, we stopped overnight in LA and had our traditional day out in Santa Monica - a last dose of sun, sea, and American shops.

Back to winter in Canberra, just in time to prepare for Miss B's 11th birthday, a visit from close friends from the US and, last but not least...

...moving house! Having found out a few weeks before our US trip that we had to vacate our rental property, we found a new house and negotiated a move date - 10 days after our return from the US and with overseas visitors with us. It was a frantic couple of weeks, but it all happened.

And to help us recover, we stuck to our plan of taking our visitors to Jervis Bay for the weekend - even if it was in the middle of the move. I ask you - given the choice between spending the weekend unpacking boxes or looking at this, what would you have done?

The unpacking continues, and life is returning to a semblance of normality. We're even seeing signs of spring in Canberra - but before we did, we had our first glimpse of snow in 3 years, which you can (barely) see here.

And finally - now that I've found (most of) my baking supplies, I've resumed making my new favorite dessert, which I mentioned in my last post:

It's so simple I'm not sure it even qualifies as a recipe, but it's delicious and lovely enough to serve to company. Here's what I do:

1. Make up a batch of 2-Ingredient Biscuits; bake half as a cake-sized round and cut decorative shapes out of the other half. Bake at 450F/225C as directed until lightly browned.

2. While the biscuits are baking, place a cup or so of frozen berries in an oven-proof bowl (I used blackberries). Drizzle with maple syrup and cook alongside the biscuits.

3. Whip about a cup of heavy cream to soft peaks, sweetening with a bit more maple syrup.

4: Assemble: cake round, fruit, cream, more fruit, decorative biscuits. Serve immediately.

Kind of like a giant shortcake, now I come to think about it. I frequently make a single one for myself when I want a bit of a sweet treat, and when I do I substitute Greek yogurt for the whipped cream. I like this even better, but I realize I'm probably in the minority there.

Whew! That brings us up to speed. One of the new beginnings referred to in the title is to get back to a more regular posting schedule, so more to come shortly, I hope. And I hope all is well (and calm!) in your worlds.

Holiday highlights

Part 1 of a random selection of things I enjoyed looking at, visiting, or eating on my trip to North America:

While in Montreal, we had a chance to catch up with oldest niece/cousin Miss I, who is in her first semester of university - at DP's alma mater, no less. It was fun to revisit some of the haunts of our college years, as well as see what she's discovering. And despite the amount of time I've spent in Montreal over the past 20 years, I'd never been inside the Art Museum until this trip, when Miss I, Miss B, and I went to take in a fantastic Chihuly exhibit while DP was off doing academic things.

My favorite Chinese restaurant of all time was Elysée Mandarin, in Montreal; it closed many, many years ago and is still lamented (perhaps that's why it still shows up on Montreal restaurant listings, even 15(?) years later). On our last visit, last year, we at last found a worthy successor, so Miss B and I took Miss I there for dinner after the museum and an afternoon of goofing off. It did not disappoint, including yummy scallion pancakes (which are really hard to come by in Australia, for some reason) and exotically colorful flower garnishes as part of the presentation.

After bidding a fond farewell to Miss I and Montreal, it was time to head to Boston for two weeks packed with family, friends, and local sights. We kicked off the first week with an afternoon spent walking a good chunk of the Freedom Trail (perfectly timed, as it turned out, to avoid the US government shutdown that started the following day) and taking Miss B for her first encounter with some of Boston's most famous Revolutionary War landmarks. We started off in Charlestown, at the Bunker Hill Monument (pictured above), then the USS Constitution at the Charlestown Navy Yard...

...then crossed the bridge into the North End to visit the Copp's Hill Burying Ground, the Old North Church, and Paul Revere's house. We had planned the whole expedition, at my insistence, around finishing up with dinner at the original Pizzeria Regina in the North End, my sentimental favorite. Sister/aunt M joined us for the expedition, and two brothers/uncles and a dad/grandpa further swelled the ranks at dinner.

Later that week, we continued the historical theme (kind of unavoidable when you're married to a historian) with a trip to Historic Deerfield while on an overnight to visit my sister-in-law R in western Massachusetts. Highlights included a one-room schoolhouse, a discussion of open-hearth cooking, and getting a real sense of how this quaint and quiet settlement was once precariously perched on the frontiers of European settlement in North America.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this trip was getting a taste of New England autumn, absolutely my favorite season any time, anywhere. I haven't experienced proper New England autumn for about 10 years, and I soaked up as much as I could, including vistas of foliage in Quebec and northern Vermont and fall flowers further south, like these gorgeous dahlias on the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls (another highlight of our western Mass. jaunt).

Still trawling through photos, so more to come soon, I hope....

Comfort food

This past week has not been one I will look back on fondly - as a native Bostonian, as an American, or, frankly, as a human being. By the time Friday night dinnertime rolled around, the hunt for the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect was entering its seventh hour. Updates were coming in by the minute (and sometimes by the second) in real time on Twitter, and I was following along from the other side of the world. The temperature in Canberra was dropping steadily. I was ready for something hot and comforting for dinner, grateful that all my loved ones in Boston were safe and well, and thinking of all those – in Boston and beyond – who are not so fortunate.

One Fund Boston

American Red Cross of Central Texas

Tomato-rice soup

Growing up, we always called this “rice and potatoes”, and we ate it like clockwork every other Friday night (alternating with pasta e fagioli) during the colder months, accompanied by crackers and cheese and grilled cheese toast. I’ve never found anything exactly like it, so I don’t know if my grandmother invented it or if it’s just never made its way into a cookbook. It’s full of starch, topped with cheese, and very comforting. I’ve tinkered with the recipe a little bit (mainly the soffrito at the beginning) to give it a little more flavor complexity, without diverging from its cucina povera origins.

2 Tbsp/30 ml olive oil

half a medium red onion

half a medium carrot

half a medium celery stick

1 clove garlic

2 slices spicy salami

1 bottle (700g) tomato passata or equivalent fresh or canned tomatoes

1 medium-sized white potato

1 cup long-grain white rice

water

salt

grated pecorino romano cheese, for serving

Heat olive oil over low heat in a medium soup pot. Chop the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, and salami finely into a soffrito (I use my mini chopper for this), and add to the pan. Cook for 3-5 minutes until the vegetables begin to soften.

Pour passata into pot; fill container ¾ full with water. Swirl around to get all traces of tomato, then add to pot. Stir thoroughly and leave to heat to a simmer.

While soup is heating, wash and peel potato, then cut into dice. (Size is up to you; the smaller they are, the faster they cook.) Add potato dice to soup, stir again, and leave to cook for 20-30 minutes, until beginning to be tender.

When potatoes are on their way to being cooked but not quite there, stir in rice and leave to cook again, 10-15 minutes, until rice is cooked but still somewhat firm.

When rice is cooked, stir soup and check consistency; thin with water if necessary. Add salt to taste and serve hot, topped with grated cheese.

Serves 6 as a main course accompanied by bread/crackers and cheese, with probably some left over.

Note: the rice continues to absorb the liquid, so as this cools it looks less and less like soup and more like risotto. If you have enough to reheat later, add some water to the mixture to get it back to souplike consistency.

Whoopie pies

Possibly DP’s favorite restaurant in the world is a sub-and-pizza shop located on a side street in downtown Portland, Maine. From this location, the shop has grown into a regional chain, with outlets in four northeastern states, but for DP and his family, aficionados of the shop’s signature sandwich to a man, woman, or child, only those made at the original location will do.

Much to the sorrow of my extended family of in-laws, I have never embraced ‘the Italian’ with the same level of passion. It’s not the food of my childhood, so it doesn’t set loose a flood of Proustian associations, the way it apparently does for them. But although I can’t enter into their tradition, I can understand it – I am a person, after all, who attempts to incorporate at least one visit to a particular North End pizzeria into my every trip to Boston.

So I’m willing to be supportive of the food obsessions of others. A few weeks before we moved to Australia the first time (ie in 2008), the three of us spent a week at the beach in Maine, about 30 minutes south of Portland. I knew there’d be at least one trip into town, timed so that we could not only buy Italians for on-the-spot consumption, but purchase a stash to bring back to Boston for DP and assorted siblings and parents. It was on this trip that I discovered, on my umpteenth trip, that Italians weren’t the only specialty available: there were also locally made whoopie pies for sale.

Whoopie pies are a Maine specialty (although whether they originated there or in Pennsylvania is a source of ongoing debate). They are a sandwich cookie, traditionally made with two cakey, chocolatey cookies stuck together with a creamy frosting. Imagine what an Oreo wants to be when it grows up and you’re probably not far off.

These whoopie pies were huge, gooey, and delicious. Miss B (then age 4), who remained dubious about the virtues of the Italian (despite an enthusiastic sales pitch from her father), latched on to these right away, and we shared several over the course of the week. She was quite downcast to leave them behind, knowing that they were unlikely to be readily available in Australia (or Boston, for that matter), and I promised her that I would figure out how to make them.

It’s only taken me four and a half years, but I’ve finally kept my promise.

#1 place

After a no-driving day spent taking in the ambience and delicious food of Montreal, we headed south back over the border and into the whirlwind that is every visit to Boston. We've spent the past few days cramming in time with parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins; re-visiting old haunts; and even trying to catch up with a few friends amidst the extended-family onslaught. The weather has been totally uncooperative, featuring mostly grey skies, temperatures in the 50s, and regular chilling, drenching downpours, and making me wish daily that I'd packed more pairs of long pants and fewer t-shirts and shorts. I've decided to consider it preparation for heading into winter in Canberra, and looking forward to picking up the boxes of warm winter clothes that I hope are waiting for us when we arrive in a few days. (Canberra correspondents, feel free to weigh in on what to expect in the next few weeks!)

Happy Monday to all! Hope your weekends have been as entertaining (or as restful) as you could desire.

New normal

A couple of posts ago I wrote about how I have struggled with when to break away from the blog’s standard format. I think I know what the main criterion is now: it’s when I can’t not write about something. This blog is, at its most basic, a chronicle of my everyday life, and some things happen that it just doesn’t feel right to have be invisible. Because when I look back at the archives, I’ll remember what was happening, and it will feel odd to have that missing. So I’m going to tell you about the unpleasant thing that I referred to in my last post.

Maybe writing about it will make it seem less surreal.

Wordless Wednesday

Summer = Beach
Duxbury, Massachusetts, August 2010

Tomato salad

I haven’t cooked dinner for seven days. I can’t remember the last time that happened. We’re visiting in Boston for a week, and our priorities for the trip were to organize a mini-move of some of our belongings from here out to the new house; to catch up with as many local friends and family as possible; and to squeeze in beach time wherever we could.

Well, the movers have left with six boxes packed full of miscellaneous household items, and as many pieces of furniture. We’ve managed two days at the beach. Dinners have mostly involved visiting favorite local spots with siblings, nieces, parents, and friends in tow.

Winter Classic

One of the things I missed about the northern hemisphere while I was in Australia was Boston winter. Yes, you read that correctly: cold, snowy Boston winter. Not, I hasten to clarify, damp, grey, raw Oxford winter, of which I had more than my fill in the years I lived there; but Boston's snowstorms and short days and wind chills are ingrained in my biorhythms.

Besides, winter has its compensations, the biggest of which for me is ice hockey. And if I can't be playing it (which I can't, since my kit is in a box somewhere on its trek from Canberra to Kansas), then I'll take watching it any day. But especially today, because today was the Winter Classic.

The Winter Classic is a fairly new but already beloved National Hockey League tradition, where one regular-season game is played outside, usually in a baseball or football stadium. It started in November 2003 as the Heritage Classic in Edmonton, and from 2008 has been played on New Year's Day, each year in a different city. This year's game was held in Boston, featuring the Boston Bruins versus the Philadelphia Flyers, at Fenway Park, the legendary home of baseball's Red Sox. I had been secretly yearning to go ever since I heard the announcement, but I had also looked at the ticket prices, which made me feel faint. I got busy with the move and Christmas, tickets started selling on eBay in the four-figure range, and I organized plans to watch the game on TV.

But I had forgotten to factor Santa (and his elves, some of whom it turns out we're related to) into the equation, and last week DP and I found ourselves the recipients of two coveted seats. This morning I bundled myself three layers deep, as if I was going skiing; we dropped Miss B off at my sister's for the day; and off we trekked to Fenway Park, surreally decked out in Bruins black & gold for the day and full of boisterous, exuberant fans in hockey shirts and tuques. The temperatures were fairly mild (no wind chill!), the atmosphere was great, and the Bruins even managed to win the game at almost the last possible minute--a pretty fabulous introduction to 2010. I hope it's a harbinger of things to come.

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year, and a 2010 full of good things!

Home made

Confession: I haven't managed to do any Cookbook Challenge cooking since I got to Boston. I blame the fact that I've only cooked dinner three times in the past 10 days--and one of those was Christmas dinner, which is about as far from a 30-minute meal as you can get. The rest of the dinners have been in restaurants or in other people's houses, as we make the rounds of people in Boston that we haven't seen for more than a year.

So most of the cooking I've managed to squeeze in has been of the "sheer necessity" or the "food gift" variety. In the former category, I made homemade mayonnaise over the weekend, for only the second time ever, when I realized we didn't have any.* In the latter, to bring to friends hosting us, things like homemade chocolates and, yesterday, these cheesy, salty, spicy treats.

Cheesy nibbles
Adapted from Tamasin's Kitchen Bible by Tamasin Day-Lewis
These have been described as being like "homemade Cheez-Its", but I think that's only because they're cheesy and it's really hard to stop eating them. Texturally, they are like tiny, crumbly cookies, and they taste complex and savory. To me they're more like what Cheez-Its want to be when they grow up.

110 g/4 oz plain/all-purpose flour
110 g/4 oz parmesan, grated**
healthy pinches of: salt, freshly ground black pepper, mustard, and cayenne pepper
110 g/4 oz butter, melted

Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Mix dry ingredients together, then add in butter and stir until mixture has the consistency of breadcrumbs. (Add more butter if necessary.) Make walnut-sized balls*** and place on baking sheet(s) lined with parchment. Bake 15-20 minutes (reversing position of sheet(s) halfway through) until lightly browned. Sprinkle lightly with more salt and black pepper after removing from oven, and allow to cool on sheet(s).

Makes 20-40.

* I also managed to slip this into the latter category, by bringing some of along yesterday as a gift--I thought my hostess would appreciate it.
** I used a mix of mostly pecorino romano and some sharp cheddar.
*** I used a deep teaspoon measurement to make half-balls. They were a good bite size and went further.

Happy holidays

Well, I didn't mean to go completely silent as soon as I hit terra firma in Boston, but that's essentially what happened. I guess that's the unintended consequence of volunteering to cook Christmas dinner for 12 people four days after completing a 10,000-mile trek. Not to mention all the Christmas stuff that couldn't be completed from overseas, like putting US stamps on 50 cards, buying and decorating a tree, helping my mother make the dough for the Christmas doughnuts, brining the turkey...and best (and most unexpected) of all, having a snowball fight on the Boston Common with DP and Miss B at sunset on Christmas Eve.

But it's all done now: the only things left to do are sit back and enjoy the lights and the gifts, and figure out creative things to do with the leftovers. I hope that you have had wonderful holidays, filled with good food, good cheer, and good company.

Worlds collide

Every so often, something happens to make me remember that the world isn’t quite as big a place as it sometimes seems when I contemplate the three-day odyssey involved in getting from, say, Canberra to Boston. Or vice versa.

I’m not talking about the juggernaut of corporate globalization, where you can find the same fast food and sports and children’s entertainment icons wherever you go, to the point where you start to wonder why you bothered to travel in the first place. I’m talking about little, quirky, personal things—like seeing the same 1984 Toyota Camry hatchback that was my first car 16 years ago: it and its Boston counterparts long since devoured by harsh winters and road-salt rust, but still going strong in Canberra’s relatively mild climate—that make me feel, for a full second or three, as if I’ve been thrust through a hole in the space/time continuum and I’m not exactly sure where I am. You know that feeling you get when you wake up in a strange place? Like that, only when fully awake. College sweatshirts; secondhand books; the WGBH logo at the end of a program on Australian TV; sometimes even a particular quality of light or air is enough to bring about this mental vertigo, part happy recognition, part homesickness. It used to happen in England, too, but the greater sense of disorientation in Australia (the distance, the reverse-seasons thing) has exacerbated it.

It happened today when DP walked in after work and dropped a Hershey bar with almonds on my desk. There are quite a few types of American candy readily available in Australia, manufactured specifically for the Australian market (usually in China), but Hershey’s isn’t among them. There’s a small grocery store in town that has a selection of stuff imported from the US; DP passes it on his walk to work, and stops in when he or Miss B is craving Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He spotted this, remembered it was my one of my favorites, and bought me one.

Where am I again? And what month is it, anyway?

(photos: album cover, Getting Friendly with Music, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra: exhibition of obscure album covers, Canberra Museum, June 2009; The Office (US) inspired graffiti, electrical box, Canberra neighborhood; the iconic Converse All-Star logo, Canberra shoe store; Hershey bar with almonds at the end of its long journey from Hershey, PA, USA)