Crappy and out of date

Wow I'm shit at this blogging thing. Here's what I've been up to in the 1.5 months since my last post:

- Got over shitty cold #1 and had less than a month of not resembling a huge mucus-trailing slug before being felled by another shitty cold. Am currently on 2nd week of slithering around feebly, trailing sputum in my slimy wake

- My tomatoes have blown up into a crazy tomato jungle and I don't really know what to do with them

- Periodically overfeeding a box of worms

- Started Spanish lessons (because failing at 2 languages is just not quite enough)

- Entered a Mario Kart 64 tournament and failed due to drunkenness

- Presented a poster at a conference, also going to another 2 conferences this month ('tis the season?)

- So much dentistry. I don't even want a mouth any more

Stir Crazy

I've had a pretty awful cold for the past 3 weeks or so, and haven't really left the house apart from to go to work and for various errands. I've only got the lingering tail-end of a cough left to fight off now, so hopefully I'll be able to go out and do something fun this long weekend. Meanwhile, here are some random things from inside my apartment.

The only vaguely active thing I've been doing is some gardening in the corner of our balcony which gets a bit of sun. I'm trying to be good with remembering to water things, but it's anyone's guess how long I'll be able to keep these little guys alive for. My negligence is notorious when it comes to things that don't vocally nag me to feed them. Thank goodness for flatmates who are less slack than I.

Beers at South Head

A couple of sunny Sundays ago, we ventured across the city to Watsons Bay/South Head. After a confusing start (in which we nearly trespassed on a navy base and then almost fell on a small child while climbing down a dirt track), we managed to work our way past the throngs of tourists taking pictures of middle-aged men's junk on the nudist beach and secure ourselves a secluded clifftop spot  (far from any pale buttocks cheerily quivering in the cold ocean breeze) in which to enjoy some afternoon beers (because day-drinking is the best*). There are a bunch of neat things at South Head, including the cute candy patterned Hornby Lighthouse (build after more than 100 people died in shipwrecks off the coast in the 1850s) and a bunch of old gun emplacements and tunnels, not to mention awesome views over Sydney Harbour on one side and east towards NZ on the other.

Watsons Bay is super easy to get to, only about 20 minutes by ferry from Circular Quay, and the South Head Heritage Trail is an easy walk which can take anywhere between 15 minutes and a whole afternoon depending on how strongly your inner meerkat urges you to play in the tunnels.

* Disclaimer: don't try this at home or elsewhere, kids. Climbing up and down cliffs to drink illegally in public is for stupid irresponsible adults like us, not sensible people who don't want to fall to their deaths and/or be fined^. 

^ Seriously though, if you insist on drinking in public, you'll probably be fine as long as you're not trying to get totally wasted and aren't making a dick of yourself and/or littering.

City Lights

I really am the most terrible blogger. Once I let one week slip by without a post, the others just sneak right along after and by the time I notice, it's already over a month since I last touched any photos! The worst part is, I have all these posts planned in my head but I never get around to setting fingers to keyboard or remembering to take my camera with me when I go out. I'll try to be better, but only time will tell if trying is enough.

Following on from the topic of my slackness, I finally got around to looking through my photos from Vivid several months ago. Vivid is a festival held annually in Sydney in May/June where the city is decked out in interactive light-based art displays. Most of the major landmark historical buildings are lit up, and the displays change every year.

This is the third Vivid I've been to, with the first being the week after I moved to Sydney - a great introduction to a new city!

They really outdid themselves withe the Customs House building this year, with vines breaking through the brickwork and bursting into an exuberant display of the magic of nature.

This year, they also extended the light displays to Chatswood, with a nautical theme incorporating one of my favourite creatures, the jellyfish!

Despite all my complaints about Sydney, stuff like this makes it a pretty interesting place to live in.

Drunken Restaurant Reviews #2: Kammadhenu

We headed out to Newtown one cold and rainy night in search of some delicious spice-laden food to assist our bottle of wine in warming us up, because there's nothing like a good curry to make you sweaty and disgusting and satisfied (three adjectives for which I aim in all things in life). King Street is dominated by Thai places, while Indian places are few and far between (I think there are like a total of three Indian/Nepalese/Malaysian-Indian places on the whole street). We chose Kammadhenu using the very rigorous scientific process of basically walking into the first Indian restaurant we came across, because we are very lazy. The extremely purple interiors exuded the kind of slight scunginess usually associated with cheap deliciousness and questionable service, both of which we received in plenty.

The waiter brought us wine glasses while I mentally gave praise to Dionysus that we brought our own wine instead of having to resort to their wine selection, which consisted solely of that awful one with the picture of birds on it that you can get for about $6 at any liquor store. I gulped back my first glass as I gazed in despair at the menu - so many delicious-sounding things! I look helplessly first at Jeremy, then at the super religious cow on the front of the menu, hoping that one of them will offer me some spiritual salvation. Or, you know, just help choosing what to eat, which is arguably more important. My stomach gurgled as the wine splashed in, and it sounded like "pooooorrrrrtttttteeeerrrrrttttttooooooo....." - the belly has spoken, so potato it is.

Masala Dosai - $9

Wow this thing was long. Like longer-than-Jeremy's-hairy-forearm-in-the-background long. I'd filled up with more wine in order to try and stave off my hunger (it didn't work, pretty sure my stomach lining had started dissolving by then). Thankfully, this delicious tube of soft soft lightly spiced potato wrapped in a paper-thin crepe arrived to save my gastric mucosa from dying a sad, lonely and wine-soaked death (much like the one which I will likely one day succumb to). All the best things in life somehow incorporate carbs and sauce, so carbs wrapped in carbs dipped in chutney ranked pretty highly in my list of "good things that happened to me today". This dosa was big enough to be a light meal for one, and I'll definitely be back for more next time I get a bit peckish while wandering around Newtown. Together, we polished this off in about 1.7 seconds.

Lamb Rogan Josh - $13.90

Average. Don't bother.

Manchurian Chicken - $12.90

This dish is pretty much why multiculturalism is awesome - great things happen when one culture puts their own spin on food from a different culture. A weird delicious hybrid creature with aspects from both, yet tasting like something unique gets created. Such is the oddness of the chimera that is Manchurian chicken. I'm not the biggest fan of sweet and sour, especially the way it's done outside of China (i.e. in order to accomodate for the weird-ass tastebuds of white people). However, the addition of spices and a more curry-ish texture, while cutting down on the sweetness makes this dish awesome. This was a pretty decent take on the Manchurian - the chicken was nice and vaguely crispy outside, and the sauce was very flavoursome. Jeremy's mind was blown by the existence of Indian-Chinese food. Or maybe he's just really easily impressed while drunk.

Overall, food not too bad for the price, service as average as what you'd expect, and we managed to get pretty drunk and may or may not have gotten sidetracked on our way home and had several more drinks at a pub and severely regretted it the next day. Next time, I may or may not just get 3 dosas instead.

Seriously though, eat a dosa.

Kammadhenu Newtown
171 King Street, Newtown
(02) 9550 2611

A walk

Although I have practically no inbuilt insulation, I tend to prefer cooler temperatures than the crazy heat that seems to engulf Sydney for half of the year. After 2 years, I think my heat-intolerant body is finally acclimatising to the Sydney weather a little, in that this winter has seemed as freezing (if not more so) than winters in Auckland. However, unlike the perpetual sogginess of Auckland, Sydney winters mean plenty of clear skies and gentle breezes. This creates fantastic opportunities for doing outdoorsy things at a temperature that doesn't make me want to melt into a puddle of goo.

We headed out to Manly (thank you, free Opal trips!) on Saturday to get some nature and such in us on the Manly Scenic Walkway, a panoramic track that winds past several nice beaches, through some bush and past a bunch of  beachside mansions where millionaires probably eat hookers or whatever it is that rich people do on the weekend.

The Council website lies - the stated 4-5 hour walk only took us 2.5 hours or so, including a detour where we decided to clamber over the exposed rocks at a couple of beaches during low tide rather than walk a track like sensible people. I can't deal with beaches easily accessible by public transport in the summertime (because of this), but maybe I need to reassess this situation next summer with beaches that require an hour's hike to get to. This was a relatively busy walk, as it's probably one of the more popular day walks in Sydney, but there were still many pockets of tranquility where the strange squawkings of the avian inhabitants were only interrupted by the humming of ferries from far across the harbour. On the whole, not a bad way to enjoy a lovely sunny winter's afternoon.

Photos taken in Sydney in July 2015.

Drunken Restaurant Reviews #1 - Izote Mexican, and an introduction

So a while back, I had the "genius" idea that I would attempt the monumental and hugely misguided task of eating at every single establishment on King Street in Newtown. Why? Well, why not. I like food, Newtown has lots of cheap food, and trying to eat at every single place is like attempting a collection. Jeremy suggested that I blog about it, which was a fantastic idea in theory, until we remembered three important facts: 

1. The majority of restaurants in Newtown have cheap or free BYO
2. We are boozehounds
3. I'm a lightweight, so half a bottle of wine moves me beyond the tipsy zone into the next-morning-regrets zone

As a result, these restaurant reviews will come in an extremely untimely fashion, as I tend to forget that I took pictures while I was drunk. Also, my drunken photography sucks even more than my normal photography (I can't aim straight and Jeremy's hairy arms keep sneaking into frame), and my memories of what things taste like are somewhat vague. HOWEVER I contend that these reviews are still valid, because despite lack of flavour memory, my drunken memory of emotions is pretty spot on, so if I remember being ecstatic about my food, chances are it was pretty damn good. Drunken reactions to food don't lie. Nevertheless, perhaps these so-called "reviews" should be read a more of a chronicle of my adventures in inebriated eating, rather than detailed analyses of cuisine. But hey, if you are ever in need of a drunken munch, this may serve as a decent guide.

So one Friday night a couple of months back, we grabbed a bottle and headed down to Izote Mexican, at number 6 on King Street, chosen partly because we'd  eyed it up previously while walking past on our way to other places, and partly because it was the first open restaurant we saw after walking from our place and we're very lazy. This is a cozy little restaurant which always seems pretty busy. As we cracked open our wine, a person at the table next to ours got super excited because she hadn't previous realised the place was BYO, and promptly took off to the bottle shop down the road, returning with more bottles than there were people at her table. We were impressed.

We crack open the wine and have our first glass while we peruse the menu. The interwebs suggests that this restaurant may be pretty authentic Mexican, but we're plebs who have never been to Mexico so you could probably serve me a cookie wrapped in a tortilla and I'd still 80% believe you if you said it was authentic (hence my ongoing life plan of eating in every country in the world so I know what everything is "supposed" to taste like). We're 2 glasses in and I'm tipsy by the time our entrée arrives. 

Queso Fundido al Chorizo - $13.90

"Holy shit this is huge and incredible", drunk KZ thinks to herself. This dish consisted of corn chips served with some kind of intensely cheesy mashed bean dip, with chunks of delicious chorizo and jalapeño. The dip is rich but not overwhelming and the soft beans contrast and compliment the super crispy chips. By the time we're down to the last few chips, I'm hissing at Jeremy like a bobcat over the last slice of chorizo. Always the gentleman, he lets me have it while I cackle gleefully.

The mains roll out fairly quickly, and even in our lightly-pickled state, we're aware enough that we have made a huge mistake in not reining back our eyes which were far far bigger than our stomachs.

Beef Enchilada Verdes - $22.90

Mole Poblano - $25.90

My mole poblano consists of an entire chicken's worth of breast coated in a smooth sauce which supposedly has chocolate in it. The sauce is tasty and only has the slightest of kicks to it (to my heat-resistant tongue tempered in the fires of hell), as the chocolate mainly serves to counteract the spice rather than provide any strong flavours itself. A pretty solid dish - not incredible, but definitely enjoyable. I'm only about halfway through my chicken and pretty much finished the wine when my stomach's decided that I've shoved a sufficient volume of food into it, and I'm internally having a drunken cry because I know that I'll have to surrender this poor tasty dish to the cold, cruel world instead of enveloping it in the welcoming embrace of my digestive tract. Word to the wise - share this between two people. I managed to force myself to eat about 60% of this before I died.

What Jeremy remembers of his enchilada (quoth he, about 20 minutes ago): "It was pretty fucking good". He finished his entire dish, but was too full to have more than a bite of my mole poblano. This is a man who habitually eats enough food to feed a family in one sitting. I kid you not, the portion sizes at Izote are huge. Be warned.

I sighed at my mole in defeat and we asked for the bill. It was a little bit more than we usually spend on a casual cbf cooking type of night, but we probably had enough food to comfortably feed 3 people, so I guess it's fair enough. We rolled out of the restaurant drunk and well satisfied, somewhere between pleased and painfully bloated.

Izote Mexican
6 King Street, Newtown
(02) 8084 9651

Yeah science, bitch!

WARNING: long post. Scroll down further for pics if your attention span is lacking.

There are 2 main ways people respond when I tell them I work in science:

1. Their eyes glaze over and they smile vaguely and quickly steer the conversation into a territory they're more familiar with.

2. They assume I'm some kind of genius and know everything about everything, and start asking me about how to fix their broken gadgets/bodies/sanity.

And no, contrary to what the title of today's post alludes to, I and 99.9% of other people working in science don't know how to make meth (and I'm not willing to try, based on my very average performance in undergrad chem).

Mainstream media is also prone to making science look way more exciting and/or insane than it actually it is, and I admit that sometimes I use this to my advantage and make my job sound way more gruesome and dramatic than it actually is (although admittedly I do get to play with highly toxic and flammable materials on a daily basis and routinely poke at bits of dead people). I thought I'd take the opportunity today to explain a little of what I actually do for a living and what my day at work kind of looks like to any curious friends and family (hi Mum). I'll try and use as much normal-person-speak as possible so that people who haven't lost their minds after years of science-ing can understand, so be warned that any science appearing here is a really really simplified version.

I work as a research assistant in a university research lab that works on motor neuron disease (that thing everyone was doing the ice bucket challenge for last year) and specifically, how people's genetics might help cause this disease. Because this really awful disease can run in families, our lab can "read" the DNA of people in these families and try to figure out if any of their genes has a mutation, or "spelling error", in them that's different from people who don't have the disease. Now how DNA works is that is "spells out" instructions for your cells to make proteins, which are like little cogs in the big super complicated machine that is a living being. Our lab also looks at the wrongly made proteins and what the effects of them being different from normal are in the cell, and ultimately in a person.

I mainly work on the cell/person side of things, and only occasionally help out in the "DNA reading" side, as the latter requires more knowledge of bioinformatics than I have. My days at work are extremely varied, as it all depends on what projects are currently being worked on. As a research assistant, I don't get to have my own projects like postdocs do. However, I do get to have intellectual input into other people's projects that I'm helping out on, plus I don't have to deal with shit like writing grants to keep myself funded, so my job is pretty sweet. Because my boss is awesome, I also get authorship on papers when I help with the experiments, unlike many other poor assistants in the world of science. By the way, I'll just mention now that when I say things like "help out", I don't mean in the way that a surgical assistant just stands to the side and hands the surgeon scalpels in surgeries on TV. I do pretty much all the hands-on stuff for an experiment, usually by myself, then hand on the results to whoever is working on the project, who will pull together a bunch of results from lots of different experiments and write them up coherently into a paper. Besides experimental work, I also do a tonne of housekeeping (labkeeping?) stuff, like making sure that everyone has all the equipment and reagents they need for their experiments, keeping everything in the lab clean and tidy and in good working order, making sure that students aren't burning down the lab, harassing salespeople of scientific goods for better prices, etc.

I work an extremely flexible 9-to-5 day, as demanded by how long different experiments take and the hours of whoever I'm working with that day. My boss is a really nice chilled out guy and very into maintaining a good work/life balance, so he doesn't mind people coming and going whenever, as long as they've put in the hours they need to. I work with a bunch of awesome ladies and we probably spend too much time talking about non-science things at work  like Game of Thrones, shoes, and cute fluffy animals. Our group works pretty closely with a few other groups working on different aspects of motor neuron disease (some looking more closely at specific bits of cells or proteins, some looking at what biochemical reactions are happening in the disease, some making fish with the disease so we can test potential treatments on them), so there is a bunch of people at work to get drunk and complain about how hard it all is with.

Anyway, to better illustrate (quite literally) what I do all day, I took one photo every hour last Thursday at work. This isn't my everyday routine, because there's no such thing, but it does show a few of the things that I get up to when I reply "yeah it was alright, pretty normal" when I get asked about my day at work.

9 am: Oops running late today, so I'm still on the train. All hell breaks loose on Sydney public transport when it rains. I'm wearing sensible shoes because that's rule number 2 of working in a lab, after "don't put anything from the lab in your mouth". I've pretty much stopped buying footwear that I can't wear to work.

10 am: having done some other random stuff, I'm getting ready to do some cell culture work in the lab. We grow cells from both animals and people in this pretty pink liquid that had food for the cells in it, and changes to a gross yellow colour when your cells get unhappy. I keep a bunch of cells growing almost all the time in case we need them for experiments, and change their food and housing maybe twice a week or so. We wear gross gown thingies instead of proper lab coats because we're not cool enough.

11 am: working on some cells that I preserved yesterday and now I'm dyeing them funky fluorescent colours so we can look at where different proteins are inside them using a microscope. You can't see them, but these cells are taken from the skin of a person with motor neuron disease and another person without the disease, and we're comparing whether the two act differently when you put icky toxic chemicals on them, as the last experiment for a paper we're hoping to publish soon.

12 am: I've just finished cleaning this water bath and putting a cell incubator to steam sterilise. Cells from mammals grow best at 37 degrees Celsius, but the warmth makes gross things like bacteria grow fast as well, so we have to keep everything very very clean all the time, or else the bacteria take over our cells and make them die off. I do like 70% of the cleaning of everything in the lab, so I put extra effort into being a messy slob at home to make up for it.

1 pm: Not too much lab work today, so I'm back in the office doing random admin stuff, like laminating signs to put up in the lab. Using my last to-do list as a mousepad. My new to do list has grown to twice the size shown here *cries softly*.

2pm: Late lunch today! Ok I cheated and took this photo 10 minutes early, otherwise this would be an empty box. This is my default lunch for when I can't be bothered thinking too hard about what I want to eat.

3pm: helping edit the paper that the cells from the 11 am pic are going into. I've just made a pot of editing tea to help me along. Cue mad dash to bathroom in 20 minutes when I've finished the whole pot.

4pm: oops got distracted and took this pic 15 minutes late, because the boss came round and distracted me with cake. Cake and 2 pots of tea later, having a quick look at some pretty pictures I took with a microscope a few days ago. This is what I meant by dyeing things fluorescent colours. This is for a different project, where someone from my lab found what might be a new gene mutation, so we shoved the mutated gene into some cells and are now looking to see if the protein that gets made gets put into a different place in the cell compared to the not mutated one.

5pm: oh god how is this day not ever yet?! Sugar crashing from the cake and the fact that I did some reading which made me realise how little I know about what the hell I'm doing. Can has home time nao plz? 

Anyway, that's a day in the life of a biomedical research assistant! As much as I may bitch and moan, my job is pretty damn sweet (and they pay's not too bad either!). How does one obtain such a job? Well I have a Master of Science in biomedical science, which only cost me my soul, sanity and $10000+. Increasingly, people are hiring PhD graduates for my job, which is fucking ridiculous and makes me really think twice (or thrice, or a hundred times) about doing a PhD. I just got super lucky (and may have made promises to bring baking in my interview) with this job! And now, I must plot ways to hang on to this job forever! *fade out with evil laughter*

Cigar box blues

There's a neat little bar around the corner to my place that's slowly turning into my "local" due to their decent rotating tap beer selection, decent taste in music and the fact that people bring their dogs in on nice weekends. The usual fare for a Thursday night is the relentless dancing and laser shooting of a mohawked DJ in bright undies worn over a white morph suit while playing terrible 80s music. Thankfully, this pattern is occasionally disrupted to make space for less Bee Geestastic acts. We ventured out last Thursday to enjoy the musical stylings of these two fine gentlemen and their finer guitars.

The guy on the right makes his own instruments, including a vegetable steamer banjo, a cigar box guitar (which makes some sweeeeet noises), accompanied by a bucket drum. I can't remember the guy on the left's name because I fail at life and had far too much beer.

Winter in the South makes the heart beat slow

This guy. Marlon Williams. His music is good, but holy shit his live performance is incredible. Went out to see him at the Newtown Social Club last night and was suitably blown away (so blown away that I only managed to snap this one shitty picture of him and his band). His voice is operatic-level good, but he's also got a way of subtly tweaking it to add more grit and occasional humor to make his songs more textured and interesting. I'm of the opinion that country/folk songs sound like wankery unless there's something a little bit dark in them, and Mr Williams brings plenty of darkness in songs like "The Ballad of Minnie Dean", which tells the story of Minnie Dean, the only woman to receive the death penalty in New Zealand:

Highlight of the evening: closing with a rendition of the Screamin' Jay Hawkins song "Portrait of a Man". It's not often someone can pull off a Screamin' Jay cover, and Marlon and his band The Yarra Benders do a great take. Through my badass searching skills, I have managed to find someone's dodgy recording of this phenomenon occurring at a different gig:

I also managed to catch one of the acts that opened, a kind of cheesy but really fun bluegrass band from Sydney which I can't for the life of me remember the name of (but I do remember important details like their mandolin and washboard players being fucking fantastic and that exactly half of the band were wearing flannel XD). I will work on hunting them down and possibly stalking them across the city, because I need to work on getting more familiar with the music scene in Sydney.