Pani Kadju!

Crush the cashews


Caremelize some sugar
Stir in the crushed nuts into the mixture
Pour it over a flat surface and cut into squares


Simple as that!!

Mrs. Craddock by W Somerset Maugham

Bertha Ley is a beautiful, intelligent and well- refined young lady who falls madly in love with the handsome Edward Craddock, a farmer and a tenant of his father. The objections of her well-bred relatives’ only aids in driving this determined young woman to marry this man who she believes is the only man for her. But the honeymoon ends too soon and Bertha realizes that Edward can’t return her the romantic love she offers him. Edward is a dutiful and rather self-centred gentleman who respects everyone’s wishes in the same way as to those of his wife’s. He has no priority set towards his wife’s requests and sets out to drive two ladies to town while his wife is on sick bed after a still birth simply because Bertha’s request for him to stay at home with her came later than the ladies’ request of driving them to town.

Depressed and bored Bertha sets out to join her aunt in travelling to Rome on holiday only to return to Edward again and again, and find herself trapped in a loveless marriage that she didn’t wish for. Ironically the man who was initially loved only by Bertha but looked down upon by everyone else ends up being loved and highly admired by all but one…...Bertha.

Somerset Maugham takes us into the lives of a handful of characters very different to each other and when brought together inflicts pain and joy upon each other due to their differences in nature, and not because one person is morally better than the other.

Nice read.

What goes into a Marshmallow

Heaps of sugar mixed with a little bit of water



A touch of Gelatine for that sticky feeling



Pinch of colour & essence
And a dip in icing sugar for the finishing touch



And loads and loads of air bubbles trapped inside!!

Being Project Manager

When you are in charge of receiving a specialized piece of equipment, doing the site preparation, installation, getting it up and running, and making sure it's doing what it's supposed to do, everything that can go wrong does go wrong! When you've thought through all the necessary precautions and think you've handled them all, you find there's something you missed! When you think that it cannot get any worse, it does! Finally when you think you've worked out all problems, you are proven completely and utterly wrong!!

I'm talking about this new piece of equipment that our research group decided to invest in. Yes it's a great investment specially for my research work. But so far I've been going out of my mind with trying to set it up!

It all started when the dispatch of the equipment was delayed by the manufacturer who's in the UK. Not my fault, but it's pretty annoying when you've got an oblivious agent who has got no idea what's happening, and a 9 hour time difference with the main company!

All the while I was doing the site preparation, like finding a suitable place (negotiating with people who are very possessive of their labs is not too easy either), thinking through the connections, and placing orders for the accessories and fittings, which also gets either delayed or ends up in someone else's mail box!!!(for some obscure reason)! and all the while I'm running around like a headless chicken trying to locate the parcel which had been delivered two days ago!!!

Anyhoo,, at long last the equipment comes in....hooray!! so we gather around and unpack everything, and with a lot of manpower lift up the 70kg unit up onto the trolley/stand that I designed and got custom made for this, only to find that it's sagging under the weight! grrr! I wrote it down in plain English that it needs to withstand at least 80kg!

Then we eagerly rummage through the rest of the package. Lots and lots of accessories, fittings and parts all in a number of boxes......but no instructions manual!!! oh yeah there was one with about 5 pages which said, open the package, locate the pump (as if a 20 kg vacuum pump is easy to miss!!), check whether everything is in order etc etc...........But no instructions as to how to set it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unbelievable! They send us a highly specialised piece of equipment which is all disassembled and expect us to try and put everything together!!!???!!@!!

So I write to them and again the 9 hour time difference means I have to wait till the next day for a reply. And the next day I get a reply, with apologies about the shortcomings of the current instructions manual (shortcomings??!!*#&*!) and instructing me as to how some of the pieces fit together...and I said 'some' not all! so again I have to write to them specifically asking them about each and every connection, and I get a reply the next day. And the worst part is we need to set this up really fast, and test if it's working properly before we pay them! and we need to pay them within 30 days! already 2 days down for the missing instructions which wasn't even my fault to begin with!

Ok finally we get all the instructions that we need, and we go about putting it together, only to find that fittings don't fit, joints don't join and their tubes and hoses are not long enough!!!!!!!
Unbelievable!
So I start looking for vacuum hose suppliers, not very many around where I can get a fast delivery, but finally manage to find one and to my relief it's in stock (at least that's what I was told), so should be here in 2 days.
And I get the workshop person to grind, drill and modify the fittings to fit!

Then I find that there's a small issue I overlooked. I was planning to connect the gas tube of the equipment to the gas supply of an existing system, through a simple T connector. I measured the sizes of the tubes and both of them seem to be 6 mm (never rely on a broken vernier calliper!). Later on I realize that the existing system is from the US which means they use the imperial system so that tube is actually 6.35mm or in other words 1/4 inch! Doesn't really fit with the new UK equipment! Gggrrrhhh!!! Why can't the Americans use the metric system like everybody else does?? would make life that much easier for us poor souls!
But luckily the workshop guy managed to fix the problem but not before teasing me around with "oh, you are in big trouble here!".

And of course there were other subtleties that sent me running around looking for solutions, but I'll spare them here.

Ok, so now all the connections are done and everything seem to fit! But I still haven't received the vacuum hose that I ordered. Expecting another 'sent to the wrong person' escapade, I run around to check the mail centre of the university, only to find it never got here.
So I call up the supplier, who answers my question rather sheepishly "ehh...we kind of ran out of it.., so we had to wait for the next delivery" !!!!!??!!!!##$*?&**#&^!!???

Oh god! so now we are nearing the 15th day mark. Hopefully the hose will get delivered tomorrow morning, in which case 'hopefully' I will be able to get the thing up and running (fingers crossed!) but of course I wouldn't be surprised if some issue does turn up! I'm kind of sure that something will turn up......I have a gut feeling.......but of course I'm feeling paranoid!


Wish me luck!

Bruno's Sculpture Garden, Marysville

As promised here is a glimpse of the Sculpture Garden that we had the good fortune to pay a visit to.


Bruno is a Belgian expat with a talent at making sculptures that are a bit on the funny side. And just like his sculptures he too has an unusual sense of humour. Most of his sculptures are made out of Terra cotta along with some day-to-day accessories.

The fun part of it is exploring through his rather overgrown garden. There you get to meet various creatures and people in every nook and cranny, some hidden away among the bushes, some having a bath in the ponds and puddles and some up in the trees.


An alligator on the rocks


This one is a bit creepy... it's located such that it catches you off guard


The mouse man....take a closer look (below picture)


How many mice can you count?


Carved out of a tree


If you follow the sound of the music, it will lead you to this man


A handful of water


Pocahontas


The bird man


A Yogi


We started off the morning visiting this place, so needless to say the whole day was invigorating!

Shades of Autumn in Marysville, Victoria

The Victorian ACS conference was held last weekend in Marysville (that's about 2 hours drive from Melbourne city). So Yasas was to attend the conference and I was to tag along with him.

Expecting a remote country area I took along two books with me to keep me company. I was expecting to be stuck up inside a hotel room reading about Nanophotonics. Fortunately that was not to be. Nature was so unforgivingly beeeeauuuutiful that I spent both days outdoors.



The mountains.... the trees.... the mist.....



Yellow is now in fashion



A combination of colours



Look at the shades of colour!!!


An unusual mushroom



A serence duck pond


Cockatoos, looking for lunch under the bed of fallen leaves.


Parrots in colour

On the second day we formed a kind of wives' club, Several spouses of the conference attendees got together and did some walking.

We all enjoyed "The Sculpture Garden" which truly deserves a separate post. And then the 4km walk through the woods to see the Steavenson falls.



Waterfall in the middle of the woods

Ballarat, the city of gold

Ballarat is just over 100 kms west of Melbourne. Even though there's not much happening there right now, it has been 'the place to be' less than a century ago.

It all started when a couple of wanderers came across a nugget of gold lying around on the ground. How lucky is that?? So the news spread and as you would have guessed, people around the world packed up their things and came running down here. Most of these migrants came from England and China.

But of course not everyone was lucky, according to statistics only 1% of the gold miners actually hit the jackpot. However the consolation prizes were enough for most miners to buy their own cottage and move out.

The preferred method of transport in Sovereign Hill

According to a guide there Ballarat has (or rather had) the most purest form of gold occurring in nature, second place went to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, and third came South Africa. However I could not find any sources to back this up, so I'm still a bit critical about that statement.

Anyhow, just over a period of half a century the city of Ballarat managed to export tonnes of gold before the last mine was closed down in the 1920's. So there isn't much gold around these days.

Some people are still hopeful that they might find something that glitters!

The major attraction of the place is "Sovereign Hill" which recreates life in the 1850's golden era. It's a whole village with gold mines, blacksmiths (who process the dug gold) miners quarters, shops, schools and what not. This is a real nice place to experience life back then, and you can easily spend a whole day walking around, exploring mines and learning all about gold.

A blacksmith, pouring the molten gold (1200 Celsius) into a mould, to make a bar of gold.

Towards the end of our small vacation in Ballarat we popped into "Kirrit Bareet"which is an aboriginal gallery. The place wasn't marketed as much as the other attractions, and it wasn't a very commercialized entity either. But there we learnt that there was another side to this gold coin. The pictures and stories on the walls told us a different side of the gold rush.

Before the whole gold rush thing began, this area was inhabited by the aboriginal people. The gold rush created in the mid 19th century saw them losing their lands and their lives. Few of the natives stood up against the white man, only to be perished under their aggressive rule. Some miners actually had an aboriginal person's skull hanging outside their door, so as to scare them off!

All the other places we've been to in Ballarat talked in detail about the harsh conditions the miners had to face in making a living, the way they stood up against the unfair conditions under which they had to work, but I don't think that in any way compares with the injustice that the aboriginal people had had to face, and it was a bit disappointing that it wasn't even mentioned anywhere other than on a wall in this small silent gallery.


An unexpected find. A vintage car exhibition

Once in a blue moon

The blue moon from NASA

I've wondered about this expression once, sometime back. Blue moon? why blue? were there any instances where the moon appeared blue?

Today, I came across the answer in an unexpected manner. I was reading through a Physics book called "Absorption and scattering of light by small particles", which is quite nicely written I have to say.

Anyhow, the part about the blue moon....I think we are quite familiar with the reddening effect at sunrise and sunset, which is partly the result of light scattering from airborn particles. Ok I'll spare the scientific details......

Similarly there's a 'bluing' effect, but for this to take place the airborn particles must be within a narrow range of particle sizes, which is very hard to come by, hence the term 'once in a blue moon'.

However, there have been instances recorded in history where the sun and moon were observed to be blue, specially after the giant eruptions of the volcano Krakatoa and following huge forest fires in Canada.

If you'd like a more scientific explanation see here & here.

Mini Pizzas

Ok, so they are not exactly pizzas for they were made out of puff pastry. But they look pretty much like pizzas! So that's good enough to call them pizzas. and if you really love pizzas you can use the pizza dough instead of pastry dough.

Eeeeazy recipe, great for an afternoon snack, or any other time for that matter.

Just get a layer of puff pastry (yeah the frozen ones the that come all packed up for your convenience) cut out circles of the size you would like them to be. Well, if you are the very traditional kind of person with lots of time to spare, you can spend a few hours to make the dough, knead it and what not......as for me I've got other things to do.

So next apply a bit of tomato puree (or again if you want to go conservative, do it the traditional way) on the pastry. Top it with a slice of cheese, mozzarella preferred, but any cheese would do. And add bits and pieces of whatever you like. I used mushrooms, capsicum and tomato.

If you want to get the browned pastry effect just brush the pastry with some egg wash.

Then pop it in the oven (180 degrees Celsius) for about 15 minutes, when the pastry aroma begins to leak out into the kitchen, you'll know they are ready to be consumed!!

The Phillip Island

The Easter gave us a chance to take a break from our busy schedules and dash out to Phillip island, which is a small island (literally small...only 26km across at its furthest) just off the Australian mainland. Even though it's an island, it's connected to the mainland by a bridge which made it a lot easier to be able to drive down.

The Penguin Parade

This is what Phillip island is famous for. Everyday at dusk little fairy penguins (The smallest species of penguin in the world) would return home from a day fishing at sea and make way across the shore to their burrows. So we all gathered at the beach where this spectacle was to be seen. Just past 8 pm shiny white bellies started appearing at the edge of the waves and started making their way slowly ..cramming their necks and doing the swaying back and forth penguin walk! Cute!!

But it takes quite a lot of patience to observe this parade, for little penguins are very very scared of potential predators like Sea-Eagles. The funny thing is by the time penguins come ashore the sea-eagles would be safely asleep in their nests, but little penguins don't know that, and every time an inquisitive sea-gull flies past all of them would turn back and run towards the waves.

Unfortunately no one's allowed to take any photos, because the camera flash would temporarily blind the little penguins.

Working Horse festival

We were in luck! this festival took place right on the weekend that we were there.

Met some very interesting characters and societies..

hee haw...



The Chocolate Factory

Yum!!!

Sleepy Koalas

And other species...

That was quite a good holiday!!