Local exploring

Here's a quick recap of what I've been up to since my last post in early September:

Trying out the VRE station that's five minutes from our house for a day of commuting to meetings in DC - infinitely preferable to navigating traffic!

The VRE doesn't run on weekends, so the station does double duty as the home of our local farmers' market - great local produce and flowers.

Unpacking and renovating continue - at a slower pace now that we're nearing completion on both. Here's a shot of my very old slow cooker (a wedding present) cooking its first-ever batch of Disruptive Bolognese using a mix of farmers' market ground beef and turkey (a resounding hit!). In the background is the recently installed backsplash, the last major piece of work in the (now-complete) kitchen.

Thoroughly enjoying my first proper North American autumn in a very long time with some festive front-door decoration...

...as well as the view from our new window seat - Miss B and I agree this lamppost is like a bit of Narnia on our doorstep...

...and having this view a few steps from our front door is pretty nice too!

When we can tear ourselves away from nesting, we're enjoying having DC close by for fun as well as work - it's kind of amazing to see these iconic buildings pop up in the distance as you wander the city.

And, last but not least - a new recipe to share as I re-deploy a time-honored strategy suggested many years ago by my English friend E: "make friends with cake". In this instance a batch of cinnamon sugar scones, which I brought to share at a coffee morning recruiting parent volunteers at Miss B's new school. I met a few people, and signed myself up for a few things - another rootlet put forward into our new community.

Deep space

My sister and eight-year-old niece are in town for a visit, selflessly trading in three weeks of Boston summer for an equivalent amount of Canberra winter just so they can hang out with us. We stuck around Canberra for the first several days of their visit so they could recover from jet lag, so took the opportunity to play tourist where we live, which usually leads to an interesting discovery or two.

On Sunday we took them to the Canberra Space Centre in the hills near Tidbinbilla, about 40 minutes outside Canberra. It’s a little surreal: some buildings and a cluster of giant satellite dishes sitting in the middle of open country, with sheep and kangaroos grazing nearby.

Without having planned it, we happened to be visiting in the run-up to events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. I found out quite a bit of stuff I didn’t know, mostly about how involved Australia in general, and this centre in particular, has been with NASA space exploration. Anyone who has seen the movie The Dish will know about the Australians’ role in transmitting the signal from the first moon landing, but the movie fictionalized a few things, including the location of the eponymous satellite dish. It wasn’t in Parkes, NSW; it was near here and now resides at the Canberra Space Centre. (They also didn’t play cricket on it, which bummed me out a little bit to discover.) And today, this centre is one of only three stations in the world which make up the Deep Space Network; the other two are in California and Spain, strategically spaced so that, as the earth rotates, someone is always pointing in the right direction for observation of and communication with spacecraft.

The little museum was crammed with lots of other interesting facts and artifacts, from details about why it took so long for an American woman to go into space (surprise! Sexism), to a scale-model replica of the solar system hanging from the ceiling that shows just how much bigger Jupiter is than all the other planets (and which Miss B found totally entrancing).

So if you happen to be in the neighborhood (or about 35 km from the neighborhood, which is more likely), and you’re at all interested in space exploration, drop by. It turns out to be a pretty cool thing to have out in the backyard, regionally speaking.

Locomotive love

Q: What do you do when you have a four-year-old who’s mad about trains, but you live in a city which has no trains to speak of?

A: You take her to the one place in town that not only has trains: they have kid-sized trains that she can ride on as many times as her heart desires (and her mum can pay for).

Last weekend, that’s what we did: took a jaunt with some friends to the Kingston Miniature Railway, where two Sundays a month train enthusiasts large and small can pay to ride on miniature trains pulled by real, working, miniature steam locomotives (and some petrol-powered ones too). The railway is run by a club of model train engineer enthusiasts and is, as far as I can tell, a labor of love. We ended up chatting with the wife of one of the engine drivers, who told us that the club members not only put up and run the miniature railway, but also actually built the tiny engines. It costs nothing to get in, the train rides are pocket change, and there’s even a picnic area (with, yes, working gas barbeques) if you want to settle in for a meal or throw a birthday party for your favorite Thomas the Tank Engine fan.

It might be constructed on an old rubbish dump, but the Kingston Miniature Railway seemed like a magical place to me: everyone there was enjoying themselves, from the people running the whole outfit to the smallest kids standing (or in Miss B’s case, jumping up and down) in line, patiently waiting for their turn to ride on a real steam train. And yet there was no hassle, no crowds, and no exorbitant costs. It was just a simple recipe (trains + love + kids) for a memorable day out.

Portable refueling ideas for trainspotters of all sizes
Since food, in my opinion, improves almost any occasion.

- Bacon and egg pie
- Cold pizza
- Flapjack
- Turnovers