Settling In

 What a crazy month for me.  Today I handed back my keys to the house that was my former residence.  I spent all morning cleaning it and mowing the grass, well mostly weeds but they look like grass, let's call them grass, it's the ;pretty green stuff next to the house. I reckon the house is in better condition now than when I moved in. 

Then at work, I took a break from cleaning and got cooking.  Oh wait, why am I still cleaning stuff? Well what they don't tell you about professional cookery is that cleaning is a large part of the job.  Anyway today I pretty much cooked 5 out of 6 dishes on the menu. I'm pretty proud of that, granted one of the dishes was plain rice.  

I got home and there was a pile of dishes from my brekkie and lunch before I had to rush to work. Morning Michael had deferred the task to Evening Michael who is already tired from a full day of, yes I realised it, fucking cleaning.

I am most grateful to my best friend Lindy for helping me move.  Between the two of us we shifted 90% of my possessions over 5 or 6 car trips on the same day that I got the keys to the new place.  In fact, our cars were already loaded when we drove to the agent to collect  the keys. I'm very lucky to have such a friend. Thank you Lindy.

I looked at the refrigerator and thought hmm I think I am capable of moving this by myself. With the help of the trolley. After I had cleaned it first. That left the sofa bed as the last and most awkward piece of furniture. Again I am blessed with generous people around me, David from work offered to help me move the sofa with his muscles and his ute. I considered maybe I could transport it on the roof of my Subaru Outback, I'm glad I didn't try. It was hard enough with two men lifting it onto the back of a ute because of it's sheer size and weight,  It was no picnic either when we got to the new place, unsuccessfully we tried a few different ways to get it through the front door, In the end, we were able to get it in via the back door. But fuck that was hard. Thank you David. 

And here I am now. In my new home. A new start.  Oh what new memories can we make.

Moving Again!?

 Just when I thought I'm settled im, just like that I am not.  The house I'm renting has been sold and the new owners want to move in, so I'm out house hunting again. Such a hassle, I moved in with a few items and over the last eleven months I have accumulated extra furniture and other objects.

I took a couple of days to process it when I received the notice of termination of lease. I made a 3 part plan:

1. hunt for a house

2. pack this house

3/ move to the new house

That weekend I went to a couple of advertised property inspections.  I nearly applied for the first one but I thought better of it. Somehow my mathematical brain thinks choosing the first one is sub-optimal, I mean who's to say that the next ones aren't going to be better than this first one.  So I considered it as a baseline and moved on. After  the second inspection, I realised that ease of moving was also going to be a factor, so narrow passages, steep hills, stairs, etc. are going to be a problem. 

Two properties in one weekend, This is not good. I have 25 days to secure a new domicile and at this rate I may not find anything suitable in time. So the next morning, before my shift, I made a list of 10 properties that I will look at from the street and gather as much info as I can. This is also handy as I can get a feel for the neighbourhood by actually standing there.

I covered 50 kms up and down the mountain.  I got to 8 properties on my list before I had to disengage and go to work.  I was starting to feel panicky about my choices. The ones I really liked were significantly more expensive than my current place. It would be an extra 100 or so dollars  week, I'm almost sorry I quit smoking years ago, because if I was smoking a couple of packs a week, I would just quit and voila  I have an extra 100 bucks from the cigs I stopped buying.

I did find a place, I'm moving in a week's time. It's 40 bucks a week dearer, but hey it could have been worse.

Now time to work on the next 2 steps of the plan.  Wish me luck, or even better, help me fucking move if you're free.

It's been a year, well nearly

 About a year ago I started envisioning my new life in my new job in the mountains. It was a crazy dream back then, but do mind, at that time I was in the middle of my dark trifecta (jobless, homeless, and broke).  When this job opportunity came up, it was too good to be true. I had to talk myself into dreaming this new life. If I get the job my life would be so much better, When I get this dream job, it would be amazing. B-but what if I don't get the job? I'll worry about that after it happens, but I should just allow myself to dream.

A lot's happened in a year. This year 2020 akk! Bushfires, floods, the COVID-19 pandemic, and as I type this -the world awaits what kind of America will we have for the next 4 years.

At Hogwarts, we've come a long way back from the days of lockdown. Students have a buffet breakfast, lunch, and dinner -take away or dine in (social distanced of course). Fine dining has returned for restricted sittings Wednesday and Thursday evenings.  Cafe is also now opening week nights as well as the bar.

It's as close to normal as we have ever been since the pandemic broke out. I am so grateful we are in this position. 

Practical Yoga

 Eleven years ago while on a massage retreat in Queensland I was told we would also do practical yoga. At first I thought yeah bonus!  Then they handed me a broom.  Practical yoga was housekeeping chores. I thought it was hilarious,  And I still chuckle to myself as I go about my present day household chores. Somehow works better when I re-frame drudgery as mindfulness.  The job gets done and I get to stroke my spirituality cock.

Today my attention came to the pile of dust and dust-bunnies I have swept from all over the house.  In my culture throwing out the sweepings is superstitiously viewed as throwing luck out the door.  What I haven't considered until now is that the word used is discarding one's "suerte" which means luck in spanish. In my native Tagalog, suerte is implied good luck; malas is the word for bad luck -which is a truncation of the spanish mala suerte (bad luck).  

Hmmm, what I have inferred is that the superstition was not specific about what sort of luck I will be throwing out. So I'm a gonna bet on the side that I am throwing out all the bad luck from my home. 

This is my life. I get to write (and rewrite) as I wish. 

All that from a sesh of practical yoga.

Listening to music then and now

 I have been listening to Spotify for over six months now, paid a subscription to skip the damn ads.  I love that I can search any track from my own memory and being able to track down that elusive obscure song and hear it again. Nostalgia high right there.

The way I experience music is that it is a soundtrack of my memories. Specific hits on continuous airplay for say the summer of 1978 creates an imprint for me. When something significant was happening to me that summer I can get a montage of those memories just by hearing a song from that period.

Unfortunately sometimes a song becomes too much of a crowd pleaser  and so it never really goes away. For me that song is True by Spandau Ballet. It was my favourite tune of my favourite band at the time. So now if I want a hit of nostalgia from that song, the montage now includes the other times over the decades when that song was playing too. 

My earliest musical memories are of The Beatles and Petula Clark.  I later realised that I must have heard it over the radio which was very popular and available to more consumers as transistor technology superseded vacuum tube technology making them more affordable and portable.

There was also the vinyl record player. I remember we had a 'portable record player' which meant that it could be easily relocated or brought along to a friend's house to 'play records'. Records that one buys because, one likes to be able to hear that song on demand because some day the radio will cease playing that track in favour of newer and trendier music. 

About 1974, my dad bought a Radio Cassette player.  Earliest albums I can remember are obviously my dad's cassette collection: Lobo, John Denver, and The Carpenters {kill, fuck, marry). But obviously I was still using it as a radio to tune in to favourite stations and hear more of that sweet sweet soundtrack that everyone else seems to like too, more or less.  Also I was at the mercy of grown ups  to decide if they like what I tuned the dial to.  So aside from the musical tastes of the grown ups around me, I am also exposed ro what I stumble into in the city or on public transport (jeepney drivers loved :Led Zeppellin and Black Sabbath).  The first time I heard Chinese music was while walking past a house in Tondo..  

Then I discovered that the Radio Cassette could also record voices. The first time we played back and heard everyone's recorded voices we laughed, until one hears one's own voice and realise that was what everyone else hears when one speaks.  And it could also record what was playing on the radio.

So how did I make mix tapes? I didn't even know they were mix tapes when I was making them. Start with a blank cassette loaded and hit record + play together, then hit pause just when you think the recording head has spooled past the clear tape header. Then listen to the radio and wait for that track, when it comes on, hit un-pause to resume recording. Sometimes the announcer talks over the track and that's annoying, maybe I just rewind and re-record over it hoping for a better recording next try. Sometimes I would get two songs that I liked cross-faded into each other by the DJ and that is sweet. Sometimes DJ just chops the ending of the song. Aaaaghhh!

In my teens my dad bought a Panasonic stereo with high fidelity speakers, AM/FM/MW radio, a cassette deck, a turntable, and the sweetener, a headphone jack and matching headphones. It had comfortable soft ear seals and it looked the part of a serious audiophile.  My dad started collecting some vinyl as well as cassette albums now. 

I remember taking a pocket transistor radio with earphone to school once. Just so I can listen to music on radio. A few years later, the trendy kids at my high school started showing off their new Sony Walkman.  I thought how brilliant is that? I was the chump that brought monaural earphones.

I realised they had a point. Listening on the Panasonic headphones in stereo was an interesting discovery of acoustics and sound engineering. By this time I could scrape up enough savings to buy my own music in cassette or LP every month or so. I didn't think 45rpm singles were a worthy investment.  Cassettes were cheaper but at the time I didn't have the means to record cassette to cassette, so I bought LPs that I can then record on to cassette, The cassette that I can listen to in the car or on my Walkman. 

After moving to Australia, we had no money to buy music, so we borrowed music from the public library and recording it using a dual tape deck  to keep a copy. 

First cassettes.

Then ripping CDs. 

Then Napster and briefly Limewire.

Then iTunes and the iPod,

When I listen to Spotify, sometimes it plays me a track I had forgotten I liked. And that's my instant unpolluted flashback heaven,

Vegan Drill

 So it's Friday, my last service for the week. The menu was designed to be easy to execute with minimal staff.  And much to my own astonishment I got the buffet up on time.  Looks like it's just going to be a 2 hour service and then pack down and clean up and wahoo! I'm on my weekend! YEAH!

And then exec Chef comes along, looks at the buffet and asked "What can a vegan eat from here?"

The sad answer was steamed cauliflower and zucchini with harissa roasted brocolli. So we raided the fridge for leftover vegan tagine, and I had to come up with a soup. It was pretty close but I managed to get the two extra dishes up in time. Whew.  

When advised front of house to update the menu, they asked "But why? There are no vegans on campus."*

Vegan drill.

Just because there are no vegans is no excuse not to cater for them anyway.

  

Cogito Ego Sum

That's not a typo, I meant to use ego as in I just discovered I have an ego issue. One of the chefs made a remark about "What? Big egos in the kitchen? Really?"  the irony clear. Oh but wait, that includes me? Who me? I don't have a big ego.  I mean, I write a blog in the naive hope that someday others would be interested in my unfolding auto-biography. Ok. Message received.

So what do I do about it? How do I express this ego in the kitchen? I have been taking great pride in always trying to put the best menu I am capable of. I take ownership of it. And there it is, the limiting belief.

Under the guise of taking ownership, I avoid burdening the other chefs with prep for my menu. I'm happy to help my fellow chefs but I am fain to ask let alone rely on them to do my prep for me. I've been utterly selfish and prideful. I made it about me.

SO how do I get out of this? Well, I need to trust the team and comfortably lean on each other for support because the more we synchronise as a team, the better and braver our menus will be. And that is how we achieve 40% of our collective objective - to uplift our students' dining experience.  There is no star chef because we are all star chefs.

What was that about ego again?

Living the Dream

That is the catch phrase of  Chef O, every time someone asks him how he is doing. I must admit that in the middle of all this upheaval (or maybe we should refer to it as a downheaval) I find myself  subscribing to that catch phrase.  I'm living my dream of working as a chef. Not only that but also starting to enjoy work and everyone I work with.  I can actually now look forward to working with these guys with anticipation and not so much anxiety. Anxiety born of my insecurity at not having as much experience as all of my colleagues even though I'm older than all of them. I'm so used to being the youngest in a group when I was teaching seniors, that it feels conflicting that I can be the most inexperienced and yet the oldest in the kitchen department.

I have been trying to taste all of the food that all the other chefs knock up mostly to learn what it is that they think the students enjoy, but also to understand the standard that I must deliver to. Last year I experienced a brief honeymoon with the students, where some would go out of their way to thank me for the tasty food. I modestly put that down as due to being the new chef, they just got used to all the other chefs that it was great to try something new.

I was also modestly disappointed that I did not experience that positive feedback the following term. Perhaps, it really was just a new chef honeymoon and the honeymoon was over. What if I am an impostor trying to pass myself off as a chef?

Well tonight was crazy. Fridays are traditionally slow easy nights as not many bother to come out to buffet. Instead we got hammered. We had plenty of food but we were struggling just to keep up with the continuous flow of diners for the entire 60 minutes of service.  Wait what?  Who gets slammed on a Friday night? Nobody.  Except maybe the impostor mwahahahaha.

Easter Memories

Just for the record, Easter of 2020 was strange the world over and for all of us deeply personally strange. Some of us have built traditions around Easter eg. going away, attending religious ceremonies,music, festivals camping, BBQs, egg hunts, etc.  And for the first time, an annual excuse to get together with loved ones had been banned. Social distancing has become social isolation.

My Picasa on Google keeps remionding me of "this time two years ago (or five) and of course it was always one of the above.  I felt sadness for all the people who have been hanging out for the Easter break, only to have their plans cancelled on account of it being deemed non-essential travel. It has come to this, if I am stopped on the road, I have to provide a legitimate reason for being out and about. Just out for a drive doesn't cut it. Buying medicine and groceries is legit. Excercise is legit, leisure is not.

I look back on my camera roll and realised that I had missed the point of the Easter celebrations. For Christians, it is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, however this has even deeper roots where earlier religions have celebrated the time of spring as a rebirth, a return to life after the barren winter, also a celebration of fertility and growth. 

Spring signals a renewal of the environment.  I kind of missed that because we are at the opposite of spring right now. The leaves are turning and the days are shortening. Mother nature is making ready for her winter break.  The woods are beautiful, and my damn girls are complaining and asking if it was time to turn around and walk home.

End of the World

In every apocalypse movie there is always this montage of news footage of growing panic and unravelling of civil control. I seem to be watching this montage now in real time.  I feel a growing sense of panic that our government is not acting boldly enough and timely enough to save our lives. When we all come through this at the other end, we will remember the leaders that have put the value of the economy over human lives.

Please, save people first, we can fix the economy afterwards.

I am fortunate that I am still working as a chef, over at Hogwarts.  We still have over 200 students in residence and they have to be nourished through this crisis. Our student's  dining experience has changed so much in only seven days.

This time last week, they can wake up, walk over to the Hotel Buffet and eat a leisurely breakfast of everything from fresh fruit, smoothies, bacon, eggs, sausages, hash browns, congee, noodles, miso, etc. For lunch and dinner they have the choice of the Campus Buffet or the Fine Dining (must book in).

By Monday, no longer were students allowed at the Hotel Buffet to reduce their risk of contact with travelling hotel guests. Instead they get a 'breakfast ration'  consisting of milk, cereal, fruit cup, chocolate powder mix, coffe, tea, sugar, disposable utensils. Later we added bread, jams, vegemite, peanut butter, muesli bars, cheese and crackers. We kinda got reminded how much teenagers really eat.  I remember being one and raising one so yeah I get it.

Also the Campus Buffet dining area was expanded to include classrooms upstairs and seating was designed to encourage social distancing. The Fine Dining seating was reduced to 2 pax per table for the same reason.

By Wednesday evening, all food was being served on take-away containers to be taken back to their rooms. Fine Dining is closed.  The queue for the food is marked out on X's on the floor to ensure compliance with social distancing. On the plus side, the staff have posted 'suggested dance moves' along the queue, and it provides a welcome distraction from how far off the normal life has become in the time of COVID-19.

I am grateful to be working at a place where the leadership's response to this emergency is both decisive and swift. Why can't our political leaders do that?