All I can say is that Giant Bicycles Australia is one awesome, generous and benevolent company! A few days ago, I posted a message on their facebook page asking for other giant users to keep a look out for my husband’s stolen Giant Cypress and that it was his main mode of local transport as he suffers from MS. Later that day, I received an email from the brand manager of Giant Australia, asking to give the head sales manager a call, which I did the next day. To my absolute amazement, Giant offered to replace my husband’s stolen bike and all accessories for free because they acknowledged his difficulties with his MS. Isn’t that just fantastic? Unbelievable generosity to which we are both extremely grateful!

I already loved my Giant bike (which thankfully wasn’t stolen), but now I love them even more. Such wonderful kindness from a big company restores my faith in the world.

If you’re thinking about buying a bike in the future, I can’t recommend a Giant bicycle highly enough, for quality and service.

http://www.giant-bicycles.com/en-AU/

http://www.facebook.com/GiantBicyclesAustralia

Anne-Lise

As I prepare for my gig with Machiniso this evening (at the Whitehorse Hotel cnr Crystal St & Parramatta Rd, Petersham) I have found myself on a web meander. After watching a doco on ABC last week on Roxy Music, I heard one of the interviewees say that Bryan Ferry was Britain’s greatest lyricist. or words/claim to that effect. It’s something I’ve thought ever since discovering Roxy Music in my impressionable teens. Bryan has a unique gift at weaving words into beautiful and powerful emotive imagery. I just stumbled across this now. Not having heard it for a while, I decided to find the lyrics and read them as I listened. I got goosebumps.

Before I die I’ll write this letter
Here are the secrets you must know
Until the cloak of evening shadow
Changes to mantle of the dawn
Will it be sunny then I wonder’
Rolling and turning
How can I sleep’
Hold on till morning
What if I fall’
Over the hills and down the valleys
Soaring aloft and far below
Lying on stony ground the fragments
Truth is the seed we tried to sow
Marking the time spent on our journey
There isn’t much we have to show
Counting the cost in money only
Strikes me as funny don’t you know’
Tongue tied the thread of conversation
Weighing the words one tries to use
Nevertheless communication
This is the gift you must not lose
Hauling me always are the voices
Tell us are you ready now’
Sometimes I wonder if they’re real
We’re ready to receive you now
Or is it my own imagination’
Have you any more to say’
Guilt is a wound that’s hard to heal
It’s a cross you have to bear
Could it be evil thoughts become me
Tell us what you’re thinking now
Some things are better left unsaid
Magical moment
The spell it is breaking
There is no light here
Is there no key’

Maybe it’s because I live a quiet life and I never really have anything interesting to blog about, or maybe it’s because my English teacher once said to me “Anne-Lise, your gift is music”, that I balk at the idea of creative writing. Blogging for me is so difficult!

Uh-huh. Someone’s just called me Anne again. Not that there’s anything wrong with the name Anne, it’s a perfectly fine name, if your name is Anne. The point being that mine is not. There is another whole section attached by a little punctuation mark called a hyphen. Here’s a dictionary definition of a hyphen:

hyphen
n hyphen [?haif?n]
a short stroke (-) which is used to join two parts of a word or phrase, as in co-exist; a sleeping-bag; a well-thought-out plan.

Fascinating, no? Well, not really, but I do wish some folk would realise that my name *IS* hyphenated and never the twixt shall be separated.

I had seriously thought of changing my name to accommodate the world’s decline in the comprehension of hyphens, but it’s really quite a ludicrous action to take. I only wish my parents had given some more thought before giving me a Danish name with tricky spelling in a society which shortens everything!

Saying goodbye to our friend Kirsty today who passed away last Thursday after a short but very hard battle with cancer. I can’t believe she’s gone. Kirsty was such a burning fire, full of love, savvy, intelligence, integrity, wit and with a love of life that meant she always had fun. She was a joy to be around, swore like a trooper and was one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met. I’m not sure how I’ll cope at her funeral today, but my thoughts will be with her darling husband Boots. Boots is also of the same ilk; a country man, a man of men, the way men are supposed to be made. One thing Kirsty’s struggle has taught me is that I really must try to make the most of every day, and I am. All we have is the here and now. Oh how I am going to miss her. Here’s a link to her blog, which she wrote up until two weeks before her death. It’s candid, confronting and inspiring. http://www.hmmcancer.blogspot.com/

For most of my life I have suffered with pain in my right foot and ankle, due to a congenital deformity in the workings of my foot. I used to wear a built up heel from school age, which didn’t help to correct it, but did give me some sort of support. It was a constant source of embarrassment for me too. In fact, it’s only really now that I’m admitting to people that I have this problem. Maybe it’s because children made fun of me, maybe it’s my vanity, or maybe a combination of the two.

When I was just a young girl, it was like I had a sprained ankle every few months to deal with, but I had a bit of respite in between, apart from weakness and fatigue of the ankle joint and arch from which I’d recover overnight, to start it all again the next day. Over the years, the problem has worsened to the point where I had my first cortisteroid injection under ultrasound at Kogarah hospital this year in March. The condition treated by the injection is called sinus tarsi synovitis. The lead up was one of trepidation and excitement. I was very skeptical that anything would fix my debilitating pain, but I had reached the point where I really had to give it a go as I couldn’t see how I could go on much longer the way it was. There was no respite from the pain. The only relief I could find was if I tucked my foot so far under itself it was almost turned inside out! However, then I was under the great risk of putting my stupid knee joint out (or in technical terms, fibula subluxation). Yes, that’s another joy in life for which I have to contend – inherited from my father. He has also suffered this his whole life. So far, I haven’t met a doctor who can help me with that. Sigh. Any doctors out there willing to give that a shot?

The result of the injection was nothing short of miraculous. There’s no other way I can describe it. As soon as the local anaesthetic began to work, the pain was gone. I expected it to return the next day, but it didn’t. Where once there had been this never ending pain, there was now just a big old foot ready to take on the world’s challenges. I couldn’t believe it.

It was a joyous time. There hadn’t been a day in my life that I could remember without hurting. In a word, it was fantastic.

Of course, I knew it would be too good to last like this, as mine wasn’t an injury from which I could recover. It was an ongoing bone structure thing. Inoperable. Unfixable. As days went by, then weeks, I could feel the hints of pain returning in the morning as I lied in bed. Then again, at night while relaxing. It wasn’t too much of a concern as I knew I’d be able to go back and get a top-up injection. So, the appointment was made and I had my second injection a couple of weeks ago.

It was nothing like the first. It hurt while it was injected. I could feel pain as I was leaving. The next three days I suffered pain even worse than the original pain. It was so bad I actually thought of tearing my hair out (thankfully vanity saved me again). Almost unbearable. This intense pain began easing, but I didn’t feel the same relief as the first injection had given me. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. The injection hadn’t worked, well, at least not to the extent I would have liked. It’s an odd thing. At times, I feel like it is working as there are moments of relief, but then, at times like now, I can feel it throbbing and aching all the way into my ankle joint front and back and up the back of my leg.

Despite the disappointing result this time, I’m grateful that I had a couple of months of pain free existence. Even though the pain seems to want to hang around now, there are worse things to live with and maybe having that break makes it a bit easier to deal with mentally and physically now. My specialist said it would be acceptable to have one of these as needed, but I’m a bit hesitant to go back for a third. I might wait and see how it goes…

I’m a fan of cake in general, but the queen of all cakes for me is the mud cake. It’s just not a birthday celebration unless I have a mud cake, and so it was, this birthday too.

The difference was, that this year, I decided to make myself a mud cake. How hard could it be?

Despite having eaten mud cake for the past 20+ years of my life, I really wasn’t exactly sure how it was made. You have to be very careful when you’re buying a mud cake, that the cake maker knows what a mud cake is. It’s supposed to be heavy, thick, chocolatey and decadent. Many bought mud cakes are too oily, too spongy and have a weird taste. Horror of horrors is, when I ask the waiter at a restaurant if the dessert mud cake is truly a mud cake, and I’m served a plain chocolate cake! Sacre bleu! The best mud cake I’ve ever found is from The Cheesecake Shop. They really make outstanding cakes all around. However, I digress from my own cake making adventure. Well, after some searching on the net, I settled on a simple recipe, that didn’t use ganache or chopped chocolate. It was simply flour, cocoa, sugar, butter and eggs. My first attempt wasn’t as muddy as I’d like as I had a few oven issues and had to cook it a little longer than I would have liked. It was still nice, but could have been a lot better. Anyway, I’ve modified that original recipe slightly, made it again this weekend and it was fabulous! This is a cake you probably shouldn’t eat very often… here’s the recipe… While there is no reprieve from the badness of cakes, you can make them slightly healthier by using wholemeal flour and raw sugars. CSR make a raw caster sugar now, which means it’s less processed and while not exactly good for you, it’s not as bad as the bleached white stuff.

The Queen of Cakes, a rich chocolate mud cake

The cake:
1 cup butter – room temperature (1 x 125 gm stick of butter)
2 cups raw caster sugar (egads! it’s a lot!)
4 eggs (free range of course! – poor little chickens who aren’t free range lead terrible lives)
1 1/2 cups of wholemeal plain flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Icing:
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (or more, depending on your chocolate tooth)
3 cups icing sugar (not the mix, but plain old icing sugar)
1/2 cup melted butter (half a 125gm stick of butter)
4-5 tablsepoons skim milk (ha ha!)

Cake directions:
Preheat oven to 180 degrees.
Line a 26cm or 10 inch tin with greased paper in preparation for your cake batter. Sift the flour and cocoa together into a bowl.
In another larger bowl, mix the butter and sugar together so it’s all combined and like a buttery sugary spread.
Add each egg separately, making sure you mix one in before adding the next.
Grab your flour and cocoa mix and fold it in with the butter, sugar and egg mixture (add the flour/cocoa to the butter bowl mix).
You can be quite rough with mixing as it’s a mud cake, and you don’t have to worry about its light texture being spoiled from too much working of the batter. Make sure you mix it thoroughly so it forms a smooth, even chocolatey batter.
Place the batter into your lined tin and spread it out evenly. Use your fingers if you have to as it might be a bit thick.
Cookin in a medium oven (180 deg Celcius or 350 F) for 25-35 minutes. Cake will be cooked when a cake tester, pin, fork, or skewer comes out clean. Be careful in the last 10 minutes and check your cake often. The line between a raw cake and overcooked cake is sometimes only a matter of seconds.

Icing directions:
Sift/combine the cocoa and icing sugar ensuring no lumps.
Stir in melted butter.
Add milk as necessary (try a spoon, stir it in, then try another one etc) to make a thick but spreadable consistency.

Once your cake is cooked, let it sit in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a cooling rack, removing the paper. Let it cool for another 5 or so minutes. The icing is meant to go on a warm cake, so that it melts slightly. I find that this recipe gives you plenty of icing, so you can go for lashings of it. Make sure your cake isn’t too warm, or the icing will melt completely and separate. Do a small test patch.

Using this recipe and cake tin size will make a cake about 4-5 cm tall.

First gig last night with my dream band, Machiniso. Here we are at the Bald Faced Stag, in Sydney’s Leichhardt, singing Lil Lethal Blues. Loved it! I love this band!

Well, I never thought I’d see the day when Shannon Tweed, of Gene Simmons happily unmarried fame, would go public about her spouse’s philandering ways. Shannon has spent much of her life, particularly recently, denying that the rumours were true, and that there had been no other women since she was in Gene’s life. This made me question whether Shannon may have been of the same ilk as Gene, in that perhaps they had an open relationship. Having attended a few Australian KISS shows, I’ve been privy to all sorts of goings on. I couldn’t understand why Shannon denied. Now I realise it was to protect her children. The sad thing is, the children probably knew a lot more about what was going on than she did.

I’ve always liked Shannon. From her days as Savannah Wilder on Days Of Our Lives, and having read her biography, she comes across as a strong and intelligent woman. I hope she realises that men like Gene do not change. He’s a narcissist. Even now, Gene is manipulating everything so that he appears the victim. Incredible. Good luck Shannon in your new enlightened life, no matter what it brings.