Tag: family

Free range chicken

I am a tender hearted person, really. I blink back tears when reading sad stories, watching advertisements designed to tug at the heartstrings, and go to great lengths to avoid maybe possibly slightly hurting someone’s feelings.

On the phone, my mum was telling me about this show she had been watching. ‘Jamie’s Fowl Dinners‘ had arrived in Australia.

I don’t like watching or hearing about animals suffering on their journeys to become food. You might say that I am wilfully ignorant. But there was no way I could ignore it this time because it was my mum telling me.

She said, ‘Did you know that chickens only grow for 42 days before they’re killed to be eaten? They grow up in cages and there’s not enough room for them to stand up. Because they don’t stand, they never grown bones properly. Their bones can’t even carry their own weight!’

‘EEEE, stop it, waaah!’ Tears were practically flowing down my face as I imagined the poor chickens, too fat and weak to stand up in the crowd.

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ mum marvelled. ‘I never knew!’

‘I wish they could grow chickens without brains,’ I lamented. ‘Just chicken bits that aren’t connected to feelings.’ Perhaps for some people, a chicken-sized brain is small enough to not worry about the chicken’s feelings.

Chicken is my favourite meat but I could no longer plead ignorance. From now on, I will only buy free range chicken. I already buy free range eggs.

Last week, I was proud of myself because to make sauteed chicken breasts with olive and caper sauce, I went straight to the fridge cabinet with the free range chickens. I didn’t even glance at the standard chickens.

I am lucky that I like leg pieces (thigh and drumstick) more than chicken breast. Chicken breast is very, very expensive. The free range variety is around £10 for two pieces. I used to buy chicken around once a month. To manage the extra cost, I will probably continue buying at the same frequency but smaller amounts.

Glasses understudy

My parents wanted to know if there was anything I needed from home. Damjan is visiting Australia and he can bring to the UK whatever I needed. I couldn’t think of anything when they asked me.

On Friday, my glasses fell apart. I caught the tiny screw in time and managed to put my glasses back together. It made me realise how vulnerable I was to glasses disasters. I had only one pair in this country.

So on the weekend, I called mum and dad.

‘Dad, can you give Damjan my old glasses? I think they’re in a black case in a green tub under my desk.’

Dad said, ‘I’ll go and look for them now…(short pause)… I think I’ve found them.’

‘Are they black? And squarish?’

‘No, not really,’ Dad said. ‘They’re more yellowish.’

‘Oh! Are they big? Or squarish? I have a really old pair, which are gold and round and really big. I don’t want those ones. I want the black ones.’

‘Hmm, I don’t think these are black…’

‘Can you send me a photo, dad? Then I can tell you if they’re the right ones.’

This morning, I was able to confirm they were the right glasses because this photo was in my inbox.

According to mum, the glasses weren’t showing up in the photo very well because the frame were too dark — which is why they had to find a model.

Strangers bearing gifts

When mum and dad flew to Europe to visit me this year, they flew with Vietnam Airlines.

‘I was worried,’ mum said, ‘because people told us that Vietnam Airlines always overbooks its flights. I kept thinking, “What if we get to the airport and there is no space for us?”‘

Dad said, ‘You didn’t need to worry!’

‘I know…’ mum agreed.

‘Because if there aren’t any spaces, they have to put us in business class or first class! We kept hoping that it would happen. Upgrade! Upgrade! Upgrade!’

‘But you didn’t get one,’ I said.

‘No, we did!’ mum and dad chimed.

‘What? You didn’t tell me!’

‘We didn’t know we were going to business class. They gave us the boarding pass and we went in the airplane and when we found our seats, it was before we went through the curtain, you know, the one between business class and economy. “Eh? We’re in business class?”‘

Mum waved her arms about. ‘Oh, there was so much space. You could lie all the way down.’

‘You know who gave us the upgrade?’ Dad said to me. ‘You were there!’

After four days in Paris, my parents and I split up at Charles de Gaulle airport. I flew back to London Stansted, and mum and dad went back to Melbourne via Hanoi.

‘Oh! The short man. The dwarf!’ I remembered the check-in person. Dad nodded. I cocked my head to the left, thinking. ‘Maybe he was sneaky and happy that he could give you this surprise present… This reminds me of a few weeks ago. I went to a shop and asked the lady for five little cookies. When I opened the bag, there were six cookies!’

‘Lucky! Maybe it was an accident,’ mum suggested.

‘No. I think it was a present,’ dad decided.

Jade Chef

‘You must think I’m crazy,’ mum said. I was in the kitchen watching her prepare a roast chicken. ‘The fridge is full of food and we’re going out to eat tonight, but I am still cooking.’

‘That’s okay, mum. It’s your hobby,’ I reassured her. I love my mum’s cooking. Since coming back to Melbourne, I have had all my favourite meals.

My mum is famous for the ‘little’ meals she prepares for my friends.

‘Oh, no trouble!’ she would say when people unexpectedly dropped by. ‘I’ll just throw something together, nothing special,’ and out of the kitchen would come a banquet.

Here is the menu from my 21st birthday dinner a few years ago.

By the end of Set 1, my guests had already conceded defeat — the tastebuds were willing but the stomach was full.

Yesterday, mum and I were in a homewares shop. I couldn’t find the muffin trays I wanted so we headed to the exit.

‘Hello!’ called the shop attendant.

‘Good morning,’ mum said.

‘Have you seen this before?’ The shop person held up a bright blue rubber tube. It was about three inches long and an inch diameter. Politely, we shuffled back into the shop to look at the tube.

‘Watch this,’ the shop person said. She inserted a clove of garlic into the tube, rolled it back and forth on the counter top, then shook the clove out into her hand. The garlic peel had been loosened.

‘In-teres-ting,’ mum said noncommittally.

‘Only two dollars!’ The shop person offered the tube to mum but mum stepped back.

‘Sorry,’ mum said, shaking her head regretfully. ‘I don’t cook.’

I gaped after mum as she waved to the shop person and walked out of the store.

Do they know something we don’t know?

I live in a nice neighbourhood. The houses are big and gardens are tidy. However, if you visit now, it’s starting to look like a ghetto. There’s rubbish on all the lawns: old furniture, dead computers, carpets and cardboard boxes. You can feel it in the air — it’s Hard Rubbish Day!

The first piles of junk started appearing about two weeks ago. It began with just one or two items.

“What’s going on?” mum and dad asked. “Is Hard Rubbish Day coming? How come we didn’t get a notice about it?”

In the next week, piles of junk appeared in front of more houses.

“Do they know something we don’t know?” We were bewildered. Finally, we caved into social pressure and assembled our own pile in front of the house. Our pile has big branches, an old toilet and a broken cupboard.

You’ve got to keep up with the Joneses.

An Australian treat

I’ve been visiting country bakeries. I’d say 20% of the reason I put my hand up for this job in Shepparton was because I wanted to buy baked goods from small country towns.

One of our favourites is the Nagambie Bakery. We’ve tried their apple cakes, carrot cakes, iced coffees, hot chocolates, foccacias and pizza bread, roast beef sandwiches, vanilla slices…

One day, Jamie recommended a particular sweet. It had a biscuit base, a lemon/vanilla cream cheese type-filling and a layer of red jelly.

“That’s a jelly slice, Joan,” Jamie said. “A great Australian treat. You’ve never had one? You should definitely try it, then.”

So we bought the jelly slice and it was, indeed, a treat.

That weekend when I got home from Shepparton, my mum and dad told me that Aunt Tuty was coming for dinner. Aunt Tuty grew up and studied in Indonesia. She came to Australia to do a Masters in Information Technology. She met a nice Australian bloke called Graham and they got married and bought a house in suburban Melbourne.

“Hello Joan,” Aunt Tuty said when she arrived. “How are you? When are you off overseas?” She was carrying a large white tray with a semi-transparent lid.

“What’s in there, Aunty?” I asked.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” she said. She placed it on the kitchen bench and lifted the lid. “Graham’s mother taught me how to make it. It’s very yummy and easy to make too.”

I looked inside to see an ordered array of cake squares with red jelly tops.

“I know what they are!” I cried. “Jelly slices! I had one the other day!”

“Jelly slices,” Aunt Tuty repeated. “Probably. I think Australians like them.”

Learning from a 7 year old

My mum is working hard to learn how to type Chinese using pinyin. When I’m at home, she asks me things like, “How do you spell cē? What’s the difference between guàn and kuàn?”

When I’m in Shepparton, though, mum has no one to help her — until this week, that is, when she realised she could ask some of the students she helps at school.

When I came home this weekend, mum pounced on me. “Joan, do you know how to type nü in the computer?”

The word nü is Chinese Mandarin for ‘woman’.

I knew the answer to this one. “Um, nü is spelled n and u with the two dots at the top. It’s a special character for the ‘yu’ sound. If you used a normal u, it would sound like nu, as in ‘effort’. The only other word I know that uses ü is lü, as in ‘green’. You can’t type nÇš on the keyboard. You have to type ‘nv’ instead.”

“How did you know that!” mum exclaimed.

“Someone taught me, I guess,” I replied.

“I asked one of my students. He’s a little seven year old and he said, ‘I think you type ‘nv’. Now every time he sees me, he grins and shouts, ‘Did you find it, teacher? Did you find nü in the computer? It was ‘nv’, right?’ Told you so!

“The next day, I asked him how to spell another word.” Mum wrote out the word fÄ“n, which means a ‘part’ or ‘portion’.

“The little boy looked at the word and shook his head. He said, ‘Um. I don’t… I’m not sure… But you can ask him.’ He pointed to one of his fellow classmates. ‘He’ll know! He’s got to Grade 5!’ “

Update 10:47 PM 31 July
For some reason, if you look at the Wikipedia article on pinyin, you can see the ü character with the caron accent (third tone in Chinese). When I copy and paste it into my blog entry, it doesn’t work in most browsers, even browsers where the Wikipedia article displays correctly. Can your browser see this or are they boxes? nÇ” nÇš lÇœ

The words display correctly on my desktop but not this laptop I’m using now or computers at work.

It’s a small world after all

Today was the second day of our negotiation workshop and the teacher introduced us to a class observer, Ann. Ann was visiting to see how the course could fit into a training program for school teachers.

During the morning break, Ann walked over to me. “Joan, I have to ask… Did you go to this Primary School?” She named a little suburban Roman Catholic primary school.

“Yes!” I was taken aback.

“I taught you!” she said excitedly.

“What?! What’s your surname?” She told me and my jaw dropped. “Mrs F? You taught me in Grade 1! Oh my god, that’s so amazing! You remember me?”

“I remembered your name.” Ann pointed to my name badge. Everyone in the workshop wore a name badge. “Oh, I remember how little and clever you were. You used to love writing poems. Do you still write?”

“I do! I have a website, a blog, which people seem to like reading.” I was delighted.

“And how about your brother, Jason? He was so cute,” she laughed, “and so shy. Is he still shy?”

I was so floored that she remembered both of us and our names from seventeen years ago. “Jason’s doing really well for himself. He’s not shy anymore, he’s very outgoing.”

“The stories I could tell!” Ann said. “I remember when we were at camp and at the concert, everyone had to go on stage and dance. Jason was huddled at the back, so scared. I thought he was going to have an asthma attack, he was that anxious!”

“And another time, we were learning about money. When I got the jar of coins back, just 5 and 10 cent coins, half the jar was empty! I looked at little Jason and his pockets were full and hanging so low. He had take all the coins!”

“I remember that!” I nodded. “Don’t know how I heard about it…”

“Well, it happened once and I thought, ‘Hmm, okay.’ But when it happened a second time, I had to talk to your father.” We both laughed.

“Oh my god, I can’t get over it. That’s so amazing. I was so little and you were huge, and now I’m an adult…”

“And I’m still an adult…” Ann added.

“I’m calling you Ann and not Mrs F…” I shook my head. “Unbelievable. And somehow, we’ve both ended up in the Negotiation class in the conflict resolution program. It’s such a small world.”

Banana ban

Sometimes, before I go to sleep, I think of all the yummy things I could eat for breakfast the next day.

“Oh, I can try cheese and toast…I’ll have some of that apple bake mum made today…I can fry an egg and tomatoes…”

But I wake up and I always crave the same thing: muesli, milk and a banana. This combination has prepared me to face the world most days for the past five or six years. But no longer.

Mum and dad came home from their weekly shopping trip with sad faces. “Joan,” she said, “There will be fewer bananas.” She pointed to the two lonely unripe bananas in our fruit bowl. “Those are the last ones for a while.”

Since Cyclone Larry hit northern Queensland in March this year, the price of bananas has soared. Eighty percent of Australia’s banana crop has been wiped out.

“They’re $7 a kilo now!” Mum exclaimed.

“How much did they used to cost?” I asked.

“Well, I used to get them at the market for as low as 79 cents a kilo. The normal price was about a dollar and even the worst case was $2.99 a kilo.”

I am now seeking alternative fruits to accompany my muesli but I can’t imagine anything satisfactorily replacing the squishy sweet goodness of the banana.

It is a mystery

“What’s this?” Dad picked up a thin 2.5 cm long cylinder next to the letter holder. Inside the clear glass tube was a tiny stem of tightly coiled copper wire.

“We don’t know,” I answerd. “It’s been there for a while.”

“It’s got…a solenoid in it.” He looked perplexed. “This is an important component of something.”

“That’s why I didn’t throw it away. It looked important,” Mum said cheerfully.

When mum and I left to go shopping, dad was still studying at the piece in puzzlement.