I cain't get no... salisify

But I seem to be getting a slew of Salsify seed - the roots are pretty feeble (one eats the roots of the 'oyster plant') but they're out in large purple flower and seeding copiously. A lot of my veg seems to be heading rapidly to seed - silver beet, lettuces, broccoli, carrots and parsnips and leeks and spring onions bulb fennel and flatleaf parsley. I am doing my best with new ones, but it's a bit irritating having got this far with them to have breeding not feeding us. Still we have a lot of lettuce growing fast, some silverbeet, a few strawberries, and still have some peas and carrots. The Zucchini had its first flower out today, and it looks like I'll have cauliflower ready in a week or so. Tomatoes are out in flower, there are onions that could be harvested, and the garlic is looking promising. But we seem to bounce from glut to scrape along to glut... it's quite a balancing act.

Amazon Affiliates try out

Blue-tongues and mincers

I am a slightly happier camper (although still worried, in case it runs) about my dogs and the venomous reptiles. Puggles called me from my desk with a furious barkathon this morning -- we had blue-tongue on the back verandah. He was barking from what was quite a safe snake distance. Dear old Roland would have stuck his nose in it. Anyway, I gather the big lizzies and the snakes don't usually co-occur so that works for me too.

We celebrated the arrival of the mincer with some wallaby meatballs (which were delicious, in a coconut-cream and chili sauce).



Did it ever take the pain out of hand-mincing! Vrooooooom... done. About as long as it took to say vroooooooooooooooom. Peter picked it up at a garage sale, and what a find it is. The cat's fish - normally a hell of a process... happened about as fast as I could feed fish. Next task, sausages...

I joined Amazon associates this evening so hopefully I'll be able to get a commission on books people buy from the links on the site. Always room for hope, I suppose.

that's a lot of meat.

Oooh. Ate too much, too rich... We had a very simple tea of crayfish (spiny lobster) salad, fresh lettuce (now growing slightly faster than lighting speed) and half-rye bread.

Even by my picky standards it was bloody good. Australia - or Flinders island in particular, is forcing me into changing my ideas about crayfish. Picking the meat from the bodies and leg bases was one of those 'ought to do that, but it takes a lot of time for very little meat'. We didn't even bother with the legs much, and if anything turned the whole thing into a crayfish bisque.

I went diving this morning with my regular partner, and we went to a nearby little limestone reef. We had the most appalling beach launch with a good third of the ocean ending up in the boat. Wet clothes, Barbs got soaked as I tried to turn the boat around into the waves, with water breaking over the stern and side, before I got it bow in. I only saw 3 crays - 2 on the small side, and one thumper that I caught. Pleased to have at least got something, I went back to the boat and found my mate had also only got one - its twin brother. They both weighed over two and a half kg apiece, so even one cray is a fair amount of eating. It was nice diving, shallow enough for me to feel comfortable - 6-7 metres, and with interesting formations and lots of pretty sponges and some small fish I didn't know (yes, I still love looking at fish) and some very large sting-rays. Pleasant, pretty diving, not washy-scary might get stuck in this weed/crack etc, which is maybe why I saw so few crays. When we got out - the perfect painless extraction to make up for the launch, we went to his place, to cook the crays. I wanted to try my new pot, but he wanted a hand with his brakes, and keeping my dive partner alive won. So we made a fire and cooked the crays, and then he decided he'd ask me just to vacuum pack the tail and keep the legs and feeding claws for his tea, seeing as he'd kinda modified his vacuum packer with a pick-axe. Yes, really. I offered to toss the cray debris out with all of ours at the tip as he didn't want the body.

So after I'd vac-packed ours and his I was left with bodies. Leg bases and gills and the extra little feeding palps etc. I thought well, I ought to be constructive and pick it, like one does to crab...

Well I ought. And will in future. The tail meat weighed 900 grams - 2 pounds, for each cray. The legs and feeding claws, another 300 maybe. And the meat from inside the leg bases - 2 crays admittedly, came to 765 grams. We had roughly half of that for our evening meal, and Barbs and I were both stuffed to the back teeth - it's very rich.

That's a lot meat to chuck away.

the tea-boy

Well it was the local fair today, and I got straight-armed into being a tea-boy on one of the stalls. It was very quiet, even for the island. Still it's a bit of a family event, with your various friends and acquaintances all showing up for a range from polite social chatter (those you don't know too well) to the normal smiling barrage of insults from you do. I was rather taken aback by one newcomer who introduced himself and his wife and kids as having bought on the island because they'd read the blog. Nice folk. In repayment I gave his toddler a useful wooden coffee stirrer to - as his father suggested, stick up his nose. All part of keep the island - or at least our doctors - working! I think the local tourism industry and property merchants should pay me a commission, or at least take me fishing in repayment. I'm cheap at ten crayfish and fifty flathead a year... seriously, those I catch myself. The King George Whiting, stripy trumpeter, yellowtail kingfish are the learning curve targets for the next year or two. Now if Peter finds me a Seagull for the zoodiac I can pop out to continental shelf and catch blue-eye trevalla and tuna and a few marlin... Put that 'phone down. You don't need to pre-emptively call out the the SES! The Zoodiac's future is very much an inshore vessel, even if theory has Craggy island quite close. If we ever do those sort of expeditions we'll do them as a little gallant company of vessels.

It's the 11/11/11.

My parents and Barbs parents served in the World Wars. May we never come to that again, and let us remember what they opposed for us.

I was feeling a bit off-colour yesterday and today. To whine, it's always hard finishing up a book. Hard pushing... demands on my mind and body and family life, and then very little in the way of reward for some time. No feedback from readers for a long time. Even merely getting paid usually involves a lot of nagging. I thought I'd set up an Australian US dollar account yesterday so I could start going direct to Kindle and finally do something that I could have direct input and view of, and get 70% instead of 8% of the sale price. It's not of many copies, but it's cash coming in, hopefully for some years... only to have Westpac tell me that would be $50... a month. It's just not worth it. So right now I am muttering in unadulterated irritation. It will have to be done by cheque. Which will cost me extra, and mean payment only happens if we're over $100 threshold every 3 months. And then Westpac will take up to 6 weeks to clear it - something which dates from the mailship era, before the invention of those odd little silver birds and the steam driven internet. What a bunch of useless bastards the banking industry is. Now judging by the US sales on shorts, that will happen. Those add up 100-150 dollars a month, split between Eric and I. The sale of the rest through Naked Reader... well, I don't know. But I'm guessing it comes to something (I've been promised figures, but really this is why I want to do this for myself, directly. No more having to ask, and ask and ask. I appreciate they're doing their best, and struggling with being too small for too much work, but I do need this.). The UK Amazon sales however... are pretty feeble. I would yet to have got anything from them for all the shorts that are up there (the electronic payment threshold is $10 -which means I'd have a few pounds trickling in, if I was paid that way, but it might take two years to get a cheque. Yes, more stories and it will get faster. The idea behind all this is to add a cash trickle into the account to help to slow the steady monthly bleed while I wait for the if I'm lucky twice a year inflows from publishing. It won't be a flood, but publishing is being slower than usual and not keen on buying... so we have to keep trying. Not helped by Westpac who suggest I get Amazon to change their way of doing business. They also suggested I get my publisher to do things in ways that make their lives easier... I give up with these people. Do they get that actually I need Publishing and Amazon? They do not need me. I suppose that's what it is with banking. They do not need you, there is always some other sucker.

Anyway. Nil Carborundum Illigitimi
There will be e-books forthcoming from Dave Freer directly.
The hell with all of them. I will beat them yet.

We have rumbles

It sounds as if there is thunderstorm about. Which is quite odd, here. Worth commenting on, which it wasn't back in South Africa.

I must get up onto the roof and put a mesh sleeve over the chimney, as it has warmed up to the point we're not really likely to do fires again for a few months.

We had a really alien and exotic dinner tonight. One of those things that people eat in furrin parts... ergo, roast chicken. I discovered one I didn't know we had in the freezer and so I cooked it. We really have to get the raise chooks for meat stakes soon. In the next year or so.

I used some of our frozen apple stock and extra eggs to make apple Brioche



which I was quite pleased with. Pretty.