Le tour

Three armchairs; three knee rugs; three personal electronic devices; one crackling fire; one TV tuned to SBS. Welcome to a living room somewhere in Camberwell. Sleep is a luxury and watching the Tour de France a necessity on these cold winter nights.

We are watching out for our favourite bike (Pinarello), our favourite team (BMC) and our favourite rider (Cadel). The travelogue of the French countryside and historic sites adds to the magic.

First we watch the previous day's highlights. Next, Gabriel Gaté's Taste le tour inspires us to use even more butter in our crêpes. And then the stage begins.

Now we are learning the history of a 12th century church; next we see a close-up of the breakaway group at 'la tête de course'. Oops, a crash - but this is what happens on these nasty little roads in Brittany, according to Phil and Paul. Some of the riders enjoy a natural break. The team car hares up the left-hand verge and overtakes the peloton. We see an aerial view of a chateau which has been turned into a town hall - cut to Mark Cavendish flexing his legs, followed by the most tattooed man in Le tour.

Le tour - we love it.

A perfect day

I couldn't have asked for a better last day of June. A day off work; a lovely clear blue Melbourne day; a visit from some very dear friends (you know who you are, Lif and Russ); and a trip to Brunswick to see my cousin sing with Chiliad. Perfect.

Tale of a journeyman

Today I discovered that my official title at Ancora Press is 'journeyman'. This means I'm trusted to do routine tasks such as setting, distributing and sorting type, but must follow the direction of the master for more complex tasks including actual printing.

We are now engaged on setting the introduction and notes for Jack Lindsay's D.H. Lawrence poem. I predict that this is going to take a long time. Meanwhile Morgan Bach is expected back from the binders any day now. We are planning a very special launch of our Welsh masterpiece.

Purple

After the raging success* of yesterday's blog post about the colour scheme of my living room, today I will introduce the study.

The same red walls flank the other side of the double doors between the study and the living room, but the remaining walls are painted a dark purple up to the picture rail, with a tasteful cream above. The woodwork, ceiling and cornices are white. The paintwork of both rooms was conceived and executed by #1 son, who is rightly appalled that I haven't yet organised proper window furnishings for both rooms.

The angles manifest themselves again in this room, with a right-angled section off the front porch featuring opaque glass panels with an art deco gazelle design. These panels are 'temporarily' covered in cast-off purple cotton curtains, waiting for me to organise something more suitable.

The other two windows are diamond leadlight casements, again at right angles to each other, which sound terribly romantic but are horrible to clean. So they're not.

I can't show you a photo of the windows until I fix the curtain situation, but here is a picture of another part of the room.

A corner of the study

*Two comments via blog/twitter so far! And counting!

Green

My living room is painted a lovely apple green colour. The house is an early Californian bungalow style built in the 1920s. The original rooms and the hallway are all very small and have odd angles. The living room walls angle into the fireplace. The wall above the fireplace is painted a sandy colour which contrasts nicely with the green of the other walls. A couple of other bits of wall are dark red, and between them are some white sliding doors leading into the study. For such a small room it has quite a range of colour, but it is a very restful space.

Bircher muesli

This week I've had Bircher muesli for breakfast every day. Here is my version of the famous recipe.

In the evening, grate one small or half a large beautiful pink lady apple from the farmers market. Dr Bircher-Benner says to leave in the seeds, but I usually pick them out. Put the grated apple into a container with a lid, suitable for carrying to work the next day.

Squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the apple.

Scatter a couple of tablespoons of natural muesli on top of the apple. If you don't have any muesli on hand, you could use plain rolled oats instead.

Spread a couple of tablespoons of natural yogurt over the muesli. Use plain natural yogurt, not the 'Greek' variety which often has all sorts of additives. Keep it simple.

Scatter over some craisins. If by some unfortunate chance you don't have any of these, blueberries would probably be even better.

Cover the container and leave in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, just before you rush out the door to catch the train, break up a few walnuts over the top of the mixture, replace the lid of the container and pop it into your bag.

Once you're safely at work, grab a spoon from the kitchen, stir your muesli up a bit and eat it at your desk while catching up on your twitter and/or email.

Past vs future

This evening I had to make the difficult decision whether to help out as usual at the Ancora Press, or go to a VALA meeting on web scale library services. The VALA meeting won out and I was pleased I attended for two reasons. Chris Thewlis gave a very interesting presentation on OCLC's transition to cloud computing services - lots of implications to consider, particularly for school libraries who are used to having their libraries operate in a relatively closed and controlled environment.

The other highlight of the evening was meeting one of my twitter friends in person for the first time - a kindred spirit who is also a librarian and Geelong supporter!

Navigating to the Leigh Scott room at the Baillieu Library was also rather fun. The ground floor is completely inaccessible at present so you have to enter through what was once the Economics building, go up three floors, walk through the Giblin Library (formerly a completely separate branch of the university libraries but now physically connected), go down two floors and there you are. Simple!