minimania

List time

It seems like no time at all since I was doing my Christmas list, and I still haven't finished playing with all my toys, so this list is actually proving a little tricky to compile. Also, because of having received two marvellous cookbooks for Christmas which I'm nowhere near done with exploring, it just seems greedy to include my usual parade of food-related reading matter, so I've cut that down drastically from the 6-8 volumes on my wish list too.

If you're feeling creative and want to deviate from the list, Djelibeybi has access to all the CDs, books, DVDs, etc. we have around. Current interests are including: complete obsession with composition, getting very into more experimental/improv/electroacoustic stuff, trying to play the flute a bit more and experiment with some improvisation there, bread-baking, house-which-is-not-yet-ours-but-hopefully-will-be-soon.

As always, this list isn't a hint. It's for people who were going to get me a pressie anyway but don't know where to start. I hope it helps!

I don't think I can be bothered to put these in any sort of order because I've struggled enough with trying to think of stuff this time, so they're just going to be random. As always, Amazon vouchers are VERY, very welcome. They are not a cop-out or showing a lack of imagination, and this year more than most, with a house to do up and starting uni in September - a little spending money to play with would be awesome. iTunes vouchers are good too (in ££s though, I don't have an Australian account so can't use ones in AUD)

Zoom H1 digital recorder. Tiny, light, surreptitious. I tried to make a workable field recording setup out of my iPod Touch and 2 lovely mics, but have been entirely unable to without buying adaptor cables that are almost as much as just getting one of these, and it seems that the adaptors may introduce noise into the recording anyway, so I've given up and after some research, the H1 seems to be the answer.

Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard. Dan Lepard is one of the gurus of bread-baking and while I don't think I'm quite ready for his (sourdough-intense) bread-baking book, this one does have some fabulous-looking bread recipes, an introduction to his bread preparation techniques and some amazing-sounding other cakes and biscuits and things. Chocolate custard muffins, anyone?

The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together by Twyla Tharp. I absolutely loved Tharp's The Creative Habit. It was a real inspiration to me and really helped me get back into serious composing. This one, on collaboration, I think would be very helpful - I'm coming across more situations and having more ideas requiring collaboration, and it looks like this could be a useful read.

A proper paella pan would still be nice. They say the carbon steel ones are the best.

Either TransAmerica or TransEuropa. We used to play TransAmerica in our lunchtimes at LBi and it's a great game for 2 or more people. Quick and fun. TransEuropa seems to be a new version - same rules, different continent, so either would be fun.

Prokofiev Violin Sonatas, Gidon Kremer & Martha Argerich. I bought their complete Beethoven sonatas last year and it is just wonderful, so I'd love to hear what they've done with these.

Marc Johns: Fuck Art, Let's Be Hedge Fund Managers print. I LOVE this post-it-note artwork. So much that I actually wrote to him and asked him to make it a print. And he wrote back (about a year ago now) and told me that, lo, there it is in the store. I think this would be great on my studio wall, don't you?

The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. This one was recommended by @pkpiano - I've read three of his previous recommendations (Art & Fear, The War of Art and Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit) all of which have been fantastic and have shot straight to the top of my best-creativity-books-ever list, so I'm very interested to see what this one's like too.

Roussel's Joueurs de flute. I love this set of pieces. I played a couple of them during my brief stint of flute lessons at the Sydney Conservatorium and have always wanted my own copy. I don't mind which edition, but do check to make sure it includes all four - some publishers sell them as individual pieces...

A friend on Twitter has strongly recommended this fascinating-looking book: The Flavor Bible, which is a book for cooks who make things up as they go along. It includes adventurous food pairings, but also sections on how flavour works and how to combine different flavours effectively. Similar, but focused more on the pairings and an anecdotal style (both books have their fans, and the reviewer I found who had reviewed both came to the conclusion that they were pretty complementary) is The Flavour Thesaurus, which also looks interesting, if perhaps a little opinionated (she doesn't like chocolate & beetroot cake apparently!). At any rate, while I have a specific recommendation for the American book, either one would be very interesting indeed, especially with a shiny new kitchen to cook in soon...

Pelagia and the Red Rooster. The second book in this series was even better than the first - looking forward to see what Boris Akunin does with this one.

Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days. The first Hummingbird Bakery cookbook gets pulled out regularly here - their cookie recipes are amazing! This book includes their rose cupcakes, which I was hoping would be in the first book, and expands out into whoopie pies, which sound like fun to make.

Nice new well-padded oven gloves because ours have been leaking stuffing for a couple of years now. Preferably glove-style and not joined together (those long teatowel-style with pockets on the end freak me out). Please, no blue. Other colours are fine, especially if they're red/orange/purple/green, etc.

Some nice modern salt & pepper grinders (note: grinders, not shakers, pls!).

Just about anything from Georg Jensen would go down well.

Could do with a really nice fruit bowl. Something stylish and classic and presentation-y - suitable to leave out on the table or bench and give a sense of occasion. Stylewise, I'm liking Bloom by Georg Jensen, Alessi's Port Basket & Alessi's Marli baskets (although I think the Marli would bug me because as soon as I picked it up it'd be lemons all over the floor but I love the styling). I think I'd prefer stainless steel/silver over glass or wood. Sorry - this one's vague but maybe you'll find something...

It is not impossible that there may be a need for me to sew stuff - hemming light curtains, making cushion covers on the cheap, etc. and it could be handy to have a sewing machine at some point. If this appeals, John Lewis has a red sewing machine :-D (oh all right, it comes in white as well) which is suitable for light to medium fabrics & does buttonholes. The cheaper model is light fabrics only, so guessing that's only suitable for clothes but in the reviews for this one (the red, more expensive one) someone said she sewed oilcloth cushions just with a sturdy needle installed & no problem. But as you can probably tell, I know absolutely nothing about these things. Might be a useful thing to have though.

I'd really rather like to get an easel for my studio. Cass Art usually has nice ones & they're often super-cheap. Would need to be able to hold A2 paper at least. And I think a freestanding one would be better than desktop, but I could be wrong.

Update 29-Mar: It seems that Some People have left things rather to the last minute, so I've been asked to add in some additional stuff. However, this is proving rather difficult and I feel I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit simply because I can't seem to think about anything but house-panic and work-panic and other sorts of panic at the moment. At any rate, here goes...

The Silver Spoon or 1080 Recipes, Phaidon's Italian and Spanish cookbooks, respectively

Peyton & Byrne British Baking - think this one would really come into its own when we have to leave here and no longer have access to chocolate marshmallow teacakes

Design*Sponge at Home - haven't seen this book live in person, but I've been a fan of the blog for a while and she usually picks interesting interiors to profile

Terence Conran: Essential Colour - colour is a topic that isn't really covered in Conran's Ultimate House Book, and it's something I'm trying to understand a bit better - this looks like a good introduction that focuses on what colour does and how to manipulate it, rather than just putting together suggested colour schemes.

Marc Johns has a marvellous new series of prints out of objects reading books. I think a group of "Salt shaker reading JD Salinger", "Frying pan reading Walt Whitman" and "Bananas reading Shakespeare" would look lovely, framed, in the new kitchen.

Interesting-looking design books that I haven't discovered yet. Perhaps especially books on interior design of small spaces?

An IOU for a frivolous something for the house if we ever get it???

Get my CD player fixed for me??

A ticket for Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach?

I think I have now run out of ideas. So sorry. Will try to do better at Christmas... Who knows. Maybe we'll almost own a house then.

Resuscitation

This blog has been pretty much inactive for quite a long time now, and as I'm starting a new personal project that isn't really appropriate to talk about anywhere else, I guess this is the place. I never meant for this blog to turn into a dumping ground. I almost wish I'd just left it as my Vox blog and not updated it, but heigh ho. It's as good a place as any. The only other alternatives are to put it on my Tumblr, which doesn't really have an identity yet and I need to work out how I'm going to use it - probably as an aggregator for my assorted creative stuff ultimately - or start up yet another brand new blog, which seems silly.

So here I am. With what will probably be, for most of you, a very uninteresting project. I will start with a story.

Four years ago I started seeing a nutritionist. I was vastly overweight (clinically obese), always exhausted, with a wide variety of health problems, and I was sick of it. My main goal wasn't actually weight loss, but to regain my lost energy and try to get back into composing.

My nutritionist put me on what I've always thought of as the 'deprivation diet'. I know that's not a helpful way to think about it, but that's what it was to me:

• no wheat
• no dairy
• no red meat
• no salt
• no sugar
• no coffee
• no tea
• no alcohol
• no yeast

I think that was most of it. There were probably a couple of other forbiddens in there, but these were the biggies. My favourite things in the world are fresh bread, fresh cheese, fresh coffee, so just from that you can see that this diet was never going to make me happy.

Well, the results - physically - were spectacular. For the first time since I could remember, I could go out in the afternoon and straight on to a dinner engagement (admittedly where I couldn't really eat anything) without needing a nap first. I had way more energy than ever before, I shed weight by the truckload - 14kg in 6 months and looked and felt fantastic. Apart from the raging depression which set in after about a month and never really went away the whole time I was on it and for quite a while afterwards.

And, for the most part, I managed to keep the weight off too. Until I put my foot down wrong in a patch of wobbly paving in Brick Lane on my way to work one day in November 2009, which resulted in a sprained ankle and bruised bone which took a year and a half to heal, and was swiftly followed by another sprained ankle (the other one) and just as that was starting to heal, a snapped calf muscle. So, basically, for the past two years I have been unable to exercise. And as one of my many and varied health problems is that I have PCOS and insulin resistance, this means that the weight has just piled back on.

I am now back where I started four years ago. But the thought of taking on the deprivation diet again, in spite of the excellent physical results, is just too much for me. For weeks I've been trying to work out a way to balance what I learned from that diet with the food I enjoy and have been failing parlously. Then this week a couple of friends on Twitter somehow started talking about Weight Watchers. They had good things to say about the system and I recalled a school friend in Australia also had great success with them and has kept the weight off for several years now.

So last night I signed up. I went along to my first meeting and signed myself up for a month. The system seems pretty flexible, if maths-heavy: they have a system of points based on the nutritional value of the food and how much of its own calories the body burns while processing it. Sort of more intelligent calorie-counting (and a very canny move on WW's part - proprietary calculations!). The good thing about it is that no food is forbidden. You have your allocation of daily points, then there's a weekly allocation too which helps if you go out for dinner. Beyond that, if you want a Mars bar, you need to cut back somewhere else. And unlike many diet plans, it doesn't simply revolve around prepackaged food. They have a calculator so you can put in the ingredients in your home-cooked food (this morning I put in my bread recipe, told it it makes 36 generous slices and now I know what they reckon my bread is worth) which pretty much allows you to calculate anything you make.

So I'm signed up. I'll test it out for a month or two and see what happens. Mostly I liked the idea of checking in every week. Accountability has always been a big thing for me - it's why I put so much of my life online - if people are (or may be) looking, then I'm more likely to push on properly. My first goal (assigned by my meeting leader, which happily more-or-less coincides with the goal I've set myself for the year) is to get down to 76.9kg, 5% less than my current horrific weight of 82.2kg.

Today, of course, is day 1. Obviously there's going to be a lot I need to work out, and I don't fully expect to manage to keep entirely within my 26-point allocation each day this week. Today I'm mainly focusing on seeing what the point value of a relatively normal day is, which is proving an interesting exercise. My normal-ish breakfast of homemade bread toast with Vegemite, a cup of coffee and some fruit comes in at 5 points, which is at the upper end of the breakfast points in WW's sample menus (3-6 points, mostly), which is comforting, because I do love my breakfast. The only tweaks I've made are to use a bit less butter than I would normally and to have one slice of bread instead of my usual two (but, being honest with myself, the second slice was almost always more out of habit and yum than really being hungry for it).

So far, while I'm liking the sound of it, I'm thinking that a large part of its success is likely to come because of "oh feck it, I can't be bothered working out the points in this yummy thing, I'll have a carrot", but hey, that's no bad thing.

But only time will tell how it works for me. One of the issues with PCOS, if you're not familiar with it, is a really slow metabolism - they say that if a woman with PCOS eats exactly the same thing for 5 days as a normal woman, then she will have actually eaten food for 6 days. Which is the problem for me with many diets - they prescribe too much food as a base and I actually put on weight while doing the diet. From reading the WW forums though, there seem to be many women with PCOS doing the programme and slowly achieving success with it (weight loss is hard with this condition and the slightest slip-up piles it back on again. Ironically, the more weight you do lose the less the symptoms affect you) and someone said that she finds that if she sticks to her daily points allocation and doesn't use her weekly points, then she loses weight; if she uses her weekly points, she doesn't, so I'm taking that as something to aim for.

So we'll see how it goes. I don't know whether anyone's still reading this blog, or if you're interested at all, but I just wanted to track this journey somehow and see what positives I can pull out of the experience.