Papaya? Red? It's a particularly boring melon. Went looking, and sure enough, found
this page from
Papaya Australia, which shows these
two, which it calls “red papaya” and “yellow pawpaw” respectively:
I have a very strong suspicion that this is more bad language, but this tells me a number of
things:
It matches exactly what the sales assistant at Woolworths said.
The “red papaya” is the normal papaya that I know.
What I got was most definitely not a “red papaya”.
Linden (as his name proved to be) was supposed to pick up the new lounge room suite
in Miners Rest at 9:00 this
morning and bring it here. OK, we're in no particular hurry, but when by 11:40 we still
hadn't seen or heard anything, it seemed strange, especially since I had never received a
call back from Linden. What if something had gone wrong and he had the wrong number and
couldn't contact me? Called up Debra, who confirmed that the furniture had been collected
at 9:10. OK, maybe Linden did have trouble contacting me. Called him up. No, all
OK, he'd be there in 25 minutes.
Three-quarters of an hour later I saw a truck arrive at the gate. OK, must be Linden.
Waited. Waited. And then the phone rang: Linden, “Is your house number 29?”. At least he
had the right phone number.
Unloading the furniture was fun, Still, we got things arranged:
On the whole, the fisheye version looks less strange than the rectilinear version. But
somehow there just doesn't seem to be a good projection of this kind of angle.
We planned bogrács gulyás for dinner
this evening. But what does that mean?
It's Magyar, and the
translations I have seen say something like “cauldron goulash”. And Google translate translates it as “potato goulash” or just plain “goulash”, depending
on whether there's a space between the words or not. But why “cauldron”?
Nowadays, of course, we have Wikipedia, which (currently) shows the kind of cauldron implied:
The implication is that this is the original goulash, and the name really means “herdsman
cauldron”. Magyar is hard to understand at the best of times, but this one is interesting,
almost more a part of tradition than a straightforward recipe name.
Chris' sister Melanie has been here relatively frequently lately, because her horse is here.
The last two times she had wanted to bring her son Will with her, but he had been unwell.
Today was the other way round: he was supposed to be unwell, but she brought him with her.
Unfortunately, he took a liking to Piccola,
and discovered that he was allergic to (specifically) Siamese cats (as Melanie clarified).
Fit of coughing, and off home early for the medications that Melanie had forgotten to bring.
Chris Bahlo had arrived for dinner with a bottle of champagne to celebrate her new car. I
saw it in the daytime, but was too busy to take a photo. Here it is as they're leaving,
taken under lighting conditions where I could barely see the car:
Into town this morning with Yvonne, she
to Pilates, I to buy some kitchen
appliances from ALDI: a range hood and an
induction cooktop.
Why? They're cheap, and I can bring them back again if I don't like them. The most
important reason, though, is that buying them is the only way to find out the
specifications, maybe only by trying them out. They'd save themselves a lot of money with
better descriptions.
The first shop (town centre) didn't have any cooktops left, 1 hour after opening. Off to
the shop in Learmonth St, near the
now-defunct Masters,
where they did. Then back into town with intent to pick up some odds and ends at Woolworths, but I didn't have time. The expedition
had used up the 60 minutes of Yvonne's training, and I had to pick her up first.
Woolworths is a never-ending source of commentary. After previous experience, I use coins
to disengage a trolley, not tokens. Today I put my coin in the trolley, but it didn't let
go of the chain. Fortunately the one in front wasn't connected, so I ended up with two
trolleys, and couldn't get my coin out of the slot:
Off to the information desk, and offered the assistant both trolleys for $1. She jiggled on
the chain a bit, extracted my $1 and gave it to me. The speed with which she did it
suggests a certain amount of experience.
Checking out was fun. All except one of the checkout terminals was occupied, and the other
one was busy dumping its heart out. The information stated that it was dumping diagnostic
information to a file with a name starting with C:\.... Tried to take a photo of
it, but an officious shop assistant got in my way:
Somehow I've been very busy lately, and so it's not surprising that we haven't planted the
bulbs I bought on Wednesday. I wasn't expecting them to start sprouting, though, but
the Crocus sativus had developed shoots up
to 5 cm long. High time to plant them.
That's on the same piece of paper! I don't even understand the symbols at the top. Does
the “10 cm” mean flower height?
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
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but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
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