Valē, Nanna

On Christmas eve, Nanna (Mum's mum) passed away in hospital. She will be sadly missed by us all. Her funeral was held in Toowoomba today, but unfortunately we couldn't attend. So we had a quiet morning here at home in remembrance. The photo above is a couple of years old, but shows the whole family together and happy.

Christmas Photos

Here is a small selection of photos from our Christmas Day. We all had a great time, even if we were run off our feet the whole time (hence the lack of photos).

2008-12-25, Christmas Day 2008

We had Christmas lunch at our place, with Jess and Kelli cooking up a storm (and only breaking one glass platter - Jess still has a bit cut down the back of her leg to prove it!). After lunch there was a brief nap time allowed, then it was down to Jan and Graham's place (who were in Townsville for their Christmas) to dive in their pool with the kids. After splashing about there for a couple of hours we headed back home for a quiet dinner comprising of lunch leftovers fried up on the barbie, along with some prawns that Brendan and Jess bought along.

All in all, a good day was had by all!

Merry Christmas everyone!!!

Tis that time of year again - Dec 24 to be exact! And it's a beautifully warm 32-degree day here in sunny Cairns. It's almost warm enough for me to be bothered closing up the house and putting the AC on, actually. It's shaping up to be a warm day tomorrow as well, albeit slightly overcast. We haven't had any serious rain this season yet, so hopefully it will hold off for one more day.

To all our friends and family all around the globe, near or far, we'll be thinking of you all tomorrow, and hope you have a lovely Christmas day planned where-ever this may find you. To those lucky ones who have some time off (I'll be working on the non-public holidays this year, unfortunately), make sure you enjoy the break, however swift it may go. We hope to catch up with everyone in the coming year!

Happy Christmas everyone!
And a very exciting New Year!

love,
Matto & Jess!
(and Badger!)

More new toys - new camera

In our quest to spend as much money as is humanly possibly on this upcoming holiday, we've added another $400 to the tally by picking up a new camera:

It's an Olympus Tough camera - the one that's advertised by the big slobering dog chewing on it, and it still being OK afterwards. It's supposed to be waterproof to 10m, drop proof from a height of 2m, and still work fine in temps down to -10. So, from the perspective of all that, it should be just what we need for this trip! Yesterday Warren emailed me to let us know that it was -15 when he got up to go to work. So it's going to be a bit chilly, especially with us used to the middle of a tropical summer!

We've been meaning to replace our old camera for a little while now, as it was only a cheapie from BigW when we bought it to replace the broken old Canon, and just to have something. It's lasted OK, but it really doesn't take a good photo, and that something we wanted if we're going all that way. We were (OK, I was) originally leaning to a more advanced Canon camera, but in the end the Olympus won out, simply because we won't need to worry about it anywhere near as much as a good camera. We can throw this one in a bag, or sit on it, or whatever, and it should still be OK. It's certainly built like the proverbial brick out-house, so I dare say it'll stand up to whatever punishment we can dish out.

Mr T has had one of these camera for a couple of years now, and speaks very highly of it. I remember when he first got it, and was showing off photos taken underwater in his pool. His is still going strong years later, and in his words "if it was to break, I'd buy another". So that's a good enough recommendation for me. Hopefully we'll get just as good service from ours! Now I can't wait to try it out for real!

On the topic of the trip, everything's coming together. We've done our online registration for entry to the US, and have been approved, so have added those passes to our pile of documentation we'll need to carry. Our new fancy carry-on bags arrived a couple of weeks ago, so they'll make life a lot easier, and keep us a lot more organised, so long as they'll let us on the plane with them. Technically, they're just smaller than all the airlines' quoted dimensions for carry-on baggage, but they just look huge. Fingers and toes crossed that we won't have a problem.

Ginger Beer - continued

2 and a half weeks ago, I put on a Ginger Beer brew, hoping to have it ready in time for Christmas : Life in FNQ - Matto & Jess: Ginger Beer . Well, 2 and a half weeks later, it's still in the fermenter, bubbling away. The rate of bubbling has remained steady the whole time - 1 bubble every 10 seconds.

The problem is that the fermenting should only have take 5-7 days, maybe even less given the heat up here. So something's going wrong, and I suspect it's my method. When brewing beer, you want to leave it keep fermenting until a couple of days after it's stopped bubbling. This ensures that there's no sugar left in the brew when you bottle it. This is important, because when you bottle it, you add a specific amount of sugar to each bottle before capping. What this does is re-start the fermentation inside the bottle for a little bit, which produces CO2, which is what makes the bottle fizzy. If you bottle the brew before it's finished, then you end up with an unspecified amount of extra sugar in each bottle. which typically results in a large boom, and a shower of beer.

I'm thinking that, since Ginger Beer is generally sweeter than a normal Lager, I probably should have bottled it a week ago, since we would want some of the sugar to remain in the drink. The wash started off tasting wonderfully gingery, but has steadily lost flavour. It's still ginger now, but it's a very weak, watered-down ginger taste, as opposed to the strong, full-bodied knock-you-down-and-flog-your-wallet ginger taste it had when we first stuck it in the fermenter. So I think that's got something to do with it.

As for this batch, I'm not sure what to do with it. It's Christmas in a couple of days, so I've missed my chance to have it ready by then. Should I bottle it now and keep an eye on the bottles to see if they're looking like they'll explode? Should I cut my losses and just throw it out and start again? Should I use a Turbo yeast next time to try to ferment it quickly?

I'm not sure what I'll do at this stage. Probably just keep looking at it wondering when it will be ready for me to drink (which, lets face it, was the whole point of this exercise!). I'll try and bottle it in the next day or two though, and will see how it tastes after it's had a chance to fizz up, and once it's nice and cold. If you don't hear from me again after a couple of days, send the paramedics and the HazChem cleanup guys!

Finally, a new TV!

In September, our TV blew up, as I reported previously here : My Home Theatres...

Since then we've been making do with the replacement baby TV in the lounge, but in practice we mainly only watched the little LCD TV in the front room. It was handy, and since we'd watch it over dinner, we'd usually end up just staying out there, sitting on the dining table chairs to watch whatever we wanted to. But that meant our lovely plush recliners were sitting out the back, feeling very unloved. And as nice as I think our dining table chairs are, they're no recliners.

So on Saturday, we went down town to have a look at some TVs. I had promised myself that I wouldn't buy one before the Christmas sales, in case a good deal came up. I was hoping to pick up a Sony if they did their "Free PS3" deal again, not necessarily because I wanted a Sony, or a PS3, but because you just can't say no to a free PS3. Panasonic, however, were doing runout prices on the older model TV's, and had a promo running that if you bought a FullHD TV between now and Christmas, you got a free Nintendo Wii with it. Again, I didn't particularly want a Wii, but I DID want the Panasonic TV.

The particular model I was after (PZ800a) has earned very good reviews, and is generally regarded as actually having a better picture quality than the newer model (PZ850a), despite the 850 being built in Japan. I'd had my eye on the 800 for a few months now, but just couldn't justify the $2800 asking price.

JB HiFi had them on run-out though, so we went in to have a look. The intention was to compare the picture between a 42" normal HD plasma, with the Panasonic FullHD. The normal plasma was about $1200, so it wasn't an inconsequential price difference. Almost twice as much. After looking at both TV's though, I came to the decision that I really wouldn't have been happy with the cheaper option. Sure, it was cheap, but it didn't look anywhere near as nice, and actually looked permanently (slightly) out of focus.

Upon talking to the sales guy about them both, he revealed to us that he was actually finishing up at JB the following day, and so would be long gone before any manager has found out what he was doing. So, for Saturday and Sunday, he was selling everything for cost + 1%. He said he liked making people happy, and big discounts did that, and that buy the time people noticed it would be someone else's problem! So he called up the stock control on his PDA, and showed me that it was listing their buy price for that model for $2200, so said he would do it for us for $2220! Not a bad saving off RRP!

So, the next thing you know...



It's a Panasonic TH-46PZ800A - a 46" FullHD plasma TV. It's got both the digital and analogue tuners in it, and picked up all the local channels on it's second go (missed all the channel 10's on it's first pass). I've already hooked it up to the PC, the XBox and the sound system, and it's all working perfectly. It's even got three HDMI ports for that future XBox360/PS3...



We were lucky to get it home on the back of the ute (it wouldn't come close to fitting in the Pathfinder, and being a plasma, you can't lay them down) before it started to rain. We were home not 5 minutes, and were suddenly engulfed in a surprise downpour. Would have been very cranky if we had been out still!

After getting it all set up and connected, we gave it a good test run with the last round of the V8 Supercars for the year, and the last race ever at Oran Park before it's turned into a housing estate next year. To say I'm happy with the performance of the TV is a complete understatement - it really is amazingly good, and I'm very happy we finally decided to spend the extra and get the one we wanted.



Unfortunately, the sad thing involves our Free Wii. It's done by redemption, so on Sunday we went to the website and filled in all our details. It printed off a page for us to mail in with our original receipt, and once verified, they would send us out our free Wii. Jess was mucking around on the website, and ended up coming across a section in the FAQ entitled "My Wii hasn't arrived yet - when can I expect it?". And the answer was "Panasonic intends to have all Wii's dispatched for delivery within 30 days from the 1st of February 2009 (my emphasis).

So we're not even going to have a chance to play with our Wii before we go OS, and we might even be back before it arrives!!! It's not a problem for us, but it makes you wonder how many people bought a TV on the promotion with the plan of giving away their Wii as a Christmas present. Of course, from Nintendo's perspective it's a great strategy - keep as many Wii's on the shelves leading up to Christmas for people to buy, then give away the surplus stock later. I'm sure ours will arrive, and it's not as if we're holding our breathe for it, but it's still a bit of a downer after an exciting weekend.

Ginger Beer

I've made a couple of different ginger beer brews now, but wanted to try something different this time. Warren had emailed me his Super Secret recipe, that he's been using to cook up some nice brew over in the 'States. Apparently it's nigh on impossible to buy a proper brewed ginger beer over there! No ginger beer, no Bundy - why would ANYONE live there??? :)

No one seems to make ginger beer these days like we used to do when we were kids. I remember having a ginger beer "plant" (the yeast), that you'd keep in the fridge in a jar covered with gauze. It was always a big deal. We'd mix it up in big buckets, then pour it into 2L soft drink bottles in the laundry. After a couple of days, they'd start exploding, and you'd suddenly feel like drinking some ginger beer every time you walked past.

Maybe that's why no one does it that way any more!

Being a proper recipe, we needed some ingredients.
Being a good husband, I sent Jess to the shops with a list. :)

Warren's recipe was set up to make 10L of brew. But I have a 20L fermenter, so we decided we would simply double everything. Unfortunately, the first step involves cooking all the various ingredients in together. And our biggest pot wasn't big enough. So we did it in two passes, and poured it all into the one fermenter when finished. It took a bit longer, but should be the same in the end!



It doesn't look the most appetising at this stage, but it smelled divine! Looking back, I think we could have done with cooking it all a bit longer. We followed the recipe to bring it to the boil and then simmer for 20 mins, but I think our simmer was a bit too low a heat. I think either simmering it higher, or cooking it longer might have unlocked some more ginger flavour. We'll see how it goes, and alter the recipe for next time if we need to.

After everything was cooked, we simply tipped the wash (ginger bits and all) into the fermenter, and filled it up with another 16L of water and added the yeast. It's been bubbling away in the shed now for almost a week. It's not been brewing too quickly though, which is good, so we'll just keep an eye on it, and bottle it only after it's finished it's primary fermentation. To bottle it too early will result in explosions!



I've still got all my beer-brewing equipment, so I can test the specific gravity of the wash to determine when it's finished fermenting. We'll bottle it into some brown plastic 700ml bottles, which are worth their weight in gold. No longer do you need to worry about glass exploding, or smashing bottle caps onto the top of the glass with a hammer to seal them - simply two glucose drops, fill the bottle with ginger beer, then screw on the lid, same as you would a 2L softdrink bottle. Much, much easier! Plus, if you do get it wrong and they ferment more in the bottle than they were supposed to, they don't explode! They just expand out into a huge ball!

This batch should be ready for a taste test in about 2 weeks from tomorrow, which will have it just in time for Christmas. Trev is already planning to spend Christmas day drinking Dark and Stormy's - ginger beer with a shot of rum. Although I'm not sure he's factored in the alcoholic content of the ginger beer! I'll let you know how it turns out!