Happy Birthday, Dave! (Want a Band-Aid with that chocolate cake?)

Happy Birthday to my One and Only...

Relaxing at The Vintage Bean in McLaren Vale, contemplating a Very Large Cappuccino and a slice of the most amazing chocolate cake, into which our hosts put a birthday candle in honor of the occasion --

Chocolate on top of chocolate today. Before we headed out to the Bean, we'd swung by the local Cheesecake Shop (not to be confused with Cheesecake Factory. At the Shop, they bake and sell cheesecakes and gateaux; it's not a restaurant) and picked up Dave's actual birthday cake...

...which appears here still in the box. Yee-ouch. He'll be about a week eating this! This is their Enchanted Forest cake, the most outrageous cake in the store. Then it was over to the Vintage Bean for coffee --

-- portrait of the photographer, looking a trifle less gargoyle-like than usual. Gak. I hate pictures of myself, which is why you seldom see them. And then, back home...

...Zolie checked out Dave's birthday card. Tried to get a shot of her with her nose inside it, but she wouldn't stay put long enough for me to get a good one, so ... here, she's captivated by a bird outside the window. Good enough.

Full marks to Dave for making the best of a birthday that started under a bit of a cloud. He hit the deck yesterday during a bike ride in treacherous terrain, and will be healing up for the week while he works on all that chocolate. He swears up and down that the wounds aren't as bad as they look, and the backache is worse...

Hmm. That can happen, when you land on your lumbar, on the curb. In fact, he's starting to recover already, which is nothing short of astonishing. If it were me falling off the bike, I'd be in a full body cast for at least six months, and then in physio and chiropractic for a year. Dave ought to be up and at 'em by the end of the week, and then ... well, back on the bike. Fingers crossed. Fortunately, in all the many years he's been riding downunder, this is only the third time he's hit the deck, and if he stays on the average, he's not due to for the next chute sans gravity (that's one thing I learned from Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin...) till around 2022.

Here's hoping. And praying.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

Anyone for coffee?

My can of Raja's Cup, with the shaker
of cinnamon and the carton of rice milk
that makes all this go...

Coffee. I do love coffee ... especially the cappuccino variety from any cafe serving La Crema (like the Golden Fleece in Willunga, and the Old Courthouse in Wellington). The only coffee I don't actually like is Lavazza, which doesn't have a lot of flavor -- frankly, you can make better at home.

There's only one problem with coffee and me: my heart won't let me drink it more than once a week, because the caffeine gives me all kinds of problems. Ever heard of ectopic heartbeat? Google it. It ain't fun,

Meanwhile, Dave is a coffee connoisseur who can drink it by the bucketful any day, all day, leaving me in the position of sighing, "Don't worry about me, I'll just make a cup of tea." Not that I don't like tea; I do.

So I've been looking around for things that'll substitute for coffee, and in fact I'm found two, both of them so flavorful, you'll actually drink them for the pleasure of drinking them. I've had ersatz, long, long ago -- something called Nature's Cuppa, a coffee substitute based on grains, I believe, and shipped out of eastern Europe. Their coffee supply stopped utterly during WWII (what a shock), and they experimented until they found something that'd do till they could get a supply going. I wasn't terribly impressed with the ersatz, so I investigated decaf.

Well, decaf is all right insofar as it tastes like coffee; the problem there is the process by which they rip out the caffeine. Suffice to say, decaf is not something you want to be drinking, if you care about your health in the future. It's ... toxic. So, what else? There had to be something.

Last year we discovered Wild Siberian Chaga, which is actually a wild-harvested mushroom (known in Siberia as "Mushroom of Immortality" because of its antioxidant properties.

At first we were drinking chaga as tea, and the taste is, without one iota of exaggeration, awful. You choke it down because it's so goooood for you. Just hold your breath and swallow, and remind yourself why you're doing this...

Health. Oh, yeah. Right. Ugh.

Then it dawned on me ... chaga isn't a tea, it's a coffee. So I made a chagaccino -- yep, treated the chaga like the coffee component in a full-on cappuccino, and ... whaddayaknow? Fantastic. Chaga coffee is an extremely pleasing beverage, and if you know how to make cappuccino froth at home -- the real deal, stands up for itself, an inch thick on top of the cup -- without requirement for a two thousand dollar barista machine, you're home free.

Like this, below ... cappuccino so good, Dave had to take a phone pic and send it to facebook. I give myself a small pat on the back for this...

Any guesses on how to get stand-up froth an inch
thick, without a frothing machine? Hehehe...

Dave's phone pic...

But wait, there's more. Dave and I were at the Espressoholic Cafe in Aldgate a couple of weeks ago; they not only serve coffee, they SELL coffee -- so many varieties on a great shelf on your right as you walk through the door into a heavenly aroma...

Dave chose a dark Dutch chocolate coffee, which is his "special coffee," a reward after a long bike ride -- such as today. In fact, he's still drinking it as I write this. I just sighed and browsed the shelves, not expecting to find anything I could even think about drinking. And then ... aha.

Well, now. Raja's Cup. It sounds Indian, and the label says it's rich with Ayurvedic herbs which are as loaded with antioxidants as real coffee. Then again, it also says it tastes like coffee, and it doesn't. But I couldn't resist taking a can home for experimental purposes.

Yes, it's Indian ... from Fairfield IA, USA (!), the town where the Maharishi fetched up at last about forty years ago, and built a college. It's a center of Ayurvedic medicine and transcendental meditation, so it makes sense that when they figured out a coffee substitute, it would be based around Indian herbs.

Now, I won't say it tastes like coffee; I won't even say it tastes good ... in fact, it doesn't, until you add a good dash of cinnamon and a generous splash of rice milk. And then ... synergy. The result is fantastic. Very close in texture to coffee, with a flavor you just have to experience. Perfect coffee substitute, and loaded with as many antioxidants as coffee, if not more!

My work here is done.

You never notice it till it's not there. Or, thank gods laptops have batteries!

Electricity. Love it or hate it, you can't live without it. You might think you can, but the truth will jump up and bite you. We're heading out on another fascinating trip ... to the local hardware store. For a couple or three new powerstrips.

I could wish houses built in the early/mid 1990s had been designed with gadgets in mind, but the truth is, when this house was built, the most you had to think about was a TV, (with a cathode ray tube burning hot and bright in he middle of huge box), a single computer in the home (probably cost as much as the car parked on the drive), and a microwave and blender having a fight over the powerpoint in the kitchen.

These days, it's at least ten gadgets per room, including the bedroom, and every house Dave and I ever lived in was literally rewired on the fly with extension cables and four- or six-socket powerboards to accommodate every conceivably gizmo. Uh huh. Problem is, they don't last forever, and when you get a duff board, you start to blow breakers.

Brill, Utterly brill. So here we go on the yearly pilgrimage to Mitre 10 for a new one or two. Dave asks, "How many of these are we going to replace?" I'm thinking, at least two. How about getting a spare, for the next time we start popping breakers?

Such excitement!

Still, we had a marvelous Saturday. Grabbing the chance to get away from care-giver duties for an afternoon, we headed south to Second Valley and Cape Jervis. The spring-like weather continues ... technically we're still two weeks off the beginning of Spring, but you'd never believe it was winter ... and we took a walk from Leonard's Mill to the old port of Second Valley and back before driving on south to the point where the Sealink car ferry takes on passengers and vehicles for Kangaroo Island. So --

Here's Dave at Leonard's Mill with the just-delivered coffee -- the deliberate wide shot shows you we're on a mezzanine, with the foyer of the cafe-restaurant down below:

And here's Jen at the Cape Jervis lighthouse, a few hours later ... neat lens flare:

Getting away from carer duties even for short sprints into the fresh air and sunshine is not important; it's vital. Chore by chore, hour by hour, caring is usually dead easy. It's just stuff you do. But it goes on and on, it never stops. The routine is mind-numbing, the work is mostly only one step above sheer drudgery; and if you're not careful, the care-giver's whole life (and brain) will slow down to the pace of the patient. You can find yourself literally crawling along at the speed of the disabled 86-year-old. If you happen to harbor any secret dream of "getting your life back afterwards,"  it's a killer.

I haven't chucked the towel in yet; not 100%, anyway. I do want to have a life after caring, and one of the things I desperately need to do now is CHALLENGE MY BRAIN. Wake it up, Get it into gear. Make it work properly again. Lately, I've been wondering seriously about (don't laugh) writing. I used to write a lot, but it's been years. How's about if I just put the hands on the keyboard and started to write stories? See what it'll do for this old brain, which is -- seriously -- idling along in neutral with infrequent, brief, difficult kicks-up into bottom gear!

Writing, then. O...kay. Actually, blogging helps. Makes me focus on a thought for long enough to finish it and get something "down on paper." Is it just me, or is blogging become something of a lost art lately, since facebook ran away with everyone?

AWOL ... and I didn't go fishing!

I've been gone from this blog for a few days, and I wish I could relate that I've been on a fantastic holiday ... Dave and I went to Fiji, lay on the beach drinking coconut punch, chartered a sailboat and cruised the outer islands, worked on our tan while we took an indescribable bus into the hills and fossicked through the local markets, trying their traditional food and listening to bands nobody ever heard of...

Well, I could write all that. It would certainly make for a great post -- and people would be wondering why I didn't share the pictures.

And the reason would be, because we didn't go to Fiji. I had a Very Major Migraine. People too often dismiss migraine as just a really bad headache, but the fact is, it's a lot more. It is a really bad headache ...  plus nausea, and the shivers of hypothermia while sweat pours out of you; plus dizziness, tachycardia, disorientation, light- and sound- sensitivity. Basically, you sit in the dark for twelve hours, eyes closed, nursing a whole suite of symptoms and wondering if you're even going to survive. The next day, you contend with the after-effects of the pills, which have some nasty side effects.

On the positive side, I think I might have tracked down at least one of the triggers -- and it's not as simple as saying, "Coffee gives me a migraine," or "chocolate gives me migraine." Both of those statements would be untrue: I can drink a cup of coffee once a week and get no hint of migraine. I can eat a little chocolate now and then and, again, get no hint of migraine...

But what happens when you hitch up a fantastic cup of coffee and some fabulous chocolate cake, eaten at the same time? Uh huh.

And it was fantastic coffee, and fabulous chocolate cake...

...as Dave's phone pic, from his facebook page, demonstrates. We shared the cake, about 70/30, and mine was the small, regular cappuccino; we shared the neat little caramel slice sitting behind the cake there. Dave never has a problem with migraine or even indigestion, but me?

Well, I'd be lying if I didn't admit, I had wondered about the combination -- but I don't remember ever having the chance to put this to the test. So: call this the test, right? Right.

Uh huh. The rest is history. So I guess the best thing to do from here on is to NOT have chocolate and coffee at the same time.

People report all kinds of things as migraine triggers: blue cheese, oranges, jalapeños, balsamic, alcohol, peanuts, onions ... even apples. One could live happily without the majority of items on that list, but, well -- coffee and chocolate is where it starts to smart. Sob.

Or, maybe it was also about the increasing barometric pressure plus coffee and chocolate. So the rule would be: don't eat coffee and chocolate when there's a storm coming in! 

Guess I'll have to experiment a little more.

Monday, right no cue, the screen door was fixed and is now rolling smoothly and silently. Wonderful. The company is Sliderfix, from Panorama, and that's all they do -- fix aberrant sliding glass doors. The job took about 90mins and cost under A$300, all up. Fantastic. So I can't grumble about the door anymore.

Meanwhile, Mom is slowly recovering. I think she's just about over the pneumonia now, and we just have to get her up and moving, get some mobility back, strength in the legs and so on. And get her switched to this liquid codeine we were told about at the pharmacy. Hmm. Turns out, you don't have to choke on horse pills after all -- which is a mercy, because she has swallowing problems, and choking many times per day on pills is how she got the aspirant pneumonia in the first place.

Life trundles on, while the next bank of rainy weather comes up out of the southwest. This morning's blue sky is gone, alas. Dave posted a phone pic from the Onkaparinga River mouth about an hour ago, but when I look out the front windows it's GRAY. It looks like RAIN.

Looks like an afternoon for curling up with a good book (or any kind of book), and wondering when this winter will end. Two warm days last week had us speculating about the probability of an early spring and a hot summer, but all that seems to have gone by --

What we need is a prognosticating groundhog. But, since this is Australia, of course it would have to be a marsupial groundhog, and he'd have to come out of his burrow on August 2nd, look around and see if he can see his shadow. Then he can tell us we're in for four more weeks of crap till spring actually gets here on September 1.