Maxwell Ezra Kemp: December 20th, 2008.

Supposedly, a picture is worth a thousand words. And I have no words. So, pictures should do just fine for now. Perhaps later the words will come.

Pink Lady Cake

All the nesting has been done. We have a mountain of stockpiled diapers/nappies in a spare room, next to a tower of stockpiled baby wipes. If nuclear war breaks out, our baby will have a clean bottom. Emeline has too much time on her hands now. When no position is comfortable any more, you tend to move around a lot, so she's keeping herself busy cooking. We've had delicious soups, wonderful lasagne, chocolate chip cookies, and green tea cupcakes, with green tea-flavored icing.

To the non-pregnant come the spoils.

I've probably gained twenty pounds or so in the last few months. Hopefully, sleep deprivation is a good weight loss tool. Only time will tell.

Most recently, a good friend of ours celebrated a birthday. Even though she won't tell me which birthday she's celebrating, Emeline baked her an extravagant, gargantuan Pink Lady cake. Pounds of sugar, and butter, cupfuls of egg whites. Once made, it probably weighed about the same amount as my total weight gain so far. It was not an inconsequential cake: one piece would feed a family for three or four days. I had a piece all to myself, like a giant pink wedge. I felt like a mouse, gorging on pink cheese.

And I had the simple sensual pleasure of watching it being made, by a delicious pregnant lady who can't sit still on the couch long enough to be lazy. And so, even though I've gained weight, I won't turn down something that I might not get to see for a long long time once our new human arrives.

Stubborn.

I've been telling myself that I'll get used to it all. Somehow and someday just "get it". But the frustrated scientist in me says that I should stop being so damn stubborn and start to learn it instead. I'm talking about putting a stop to walking around aimlessly at the grocery store wondering just how many kilos of peppers I need to buy. Or taking a step outside and thinking "yes, this is what 18 degrees Celsius feels like." I've just been deferring to Chris to do my converting for me or saying to people "that means nothing to me." I'm so obnoxious.

I just need to learn my conversions.

So, this blog entry is more for me than for any of you standard measurement readers. But if you ever visit us and need to answer or decipher the following questions:

Doctor: "How tall are you? How much do you weigh?"
Police: "Do you know how fast you were driving?"
Baker: "This cake is delicious! How much butter did you use?"
Midwife: "Congratulations! You're baby weighs --kilos!" Whaaaa??

you're good as gold, mate. (ETK)

MASS and VOLUME
1 gram(g) = .035 ounce (oz)
100 grams = 3.5 ounces
500 grams = 1.10 pounds (lbs)
1 kilogram (kg) = 2.205 pounds
1 kilogram = 35 oz
1 gallon (gal) = ~3.8 liters (L)
1 ounce (oz) = ~30 grams (g)

TEMPERATURE
degree Celsius (C) = 1.8C + 32 degrees Fahrenheit (F)

LENGTH
1 meter (m) = 3 feet (ft) = 1 yard (yd)
1 kilometer (km) = 0.621 miles (mi)
1 hectare (ha) = 2.47 acres (ac)

COOKING
1 teaspoon = 5 ml
1 tablespoon = 15 ml
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon
1 fluid oz. = 30 ml
1/5 cup = 50 ml
1 cup = 240 ml
2 cups (1 pint) = 470 ml
4 cups (1 quart) = .95 liter
4 quarts (1 gal.) = 3.8 liters

Just in case ...
ILLUMINATION
1 foot-candle (fc) = 10.76 lux (lx)

More Dunedin Graffiti

Heathers

Last weekend, the city of Dunedin proudly observed its heritage with its annual Scottish Festival. Och aye, wee laddies and lassies. One thing we've really noticed here in New Zealand is that festivals and parades are very poorly organized, not well advertised, and subject to sudden and unexpected changes. You might walk out of a shop on George Street and find yourself in the middle of a parade no one has told you about, swept up by marchers and drummers and parade floats. At other times, you might go somewhere to attend an event advertised in the newspaper only to find that the times were changed and it already happened. Or it will happen three hours later. Or that it happened last week.

We're not sure why this is.

New Zealand?

The griping is only relevant because I turned up a full week late for the unveiling of the Queen o' the Heather contestants at the local mall. Queen o' the Heather: an annual beauty contest that takes place during the Scottish Festival. I found the idea of unveiling beauty contestants in a mall on a Saturday afternoon quite an intriguing mixture of the shiny and the tawdry -- sort of lowbrow and, well, lower brow. So, I was disappointed when I found out that when the newspaper (which comes out on Thursday) stated the unveiling was on Saturday, it meant the previous Saturday, as in, before the newspaper was printed.

Useful.

Fortunately, a week later, on the final day of the Scottish Festival, which was poorly advertized, and therefore poorly attended, Emeline and I watched the more important half of the beauty contest equation: the crowning of Queen o' the Heather.

There the contestants stood, expectant on the dais, under a gray Scottish sky, with the mayor of Dunedin -- Peter Chin, a Chinese man wearing a traditional Scottish tartan kilt -- waiting to find out who was the prettiest of them all. In the distance, Scottish games were being played. Piper bands were competing noisily in the arena. (Emeline might even write a post about my caber tossing adventures later.) Back on the dais. The tension. The girls. White knuckles. To one side, Queen o' the Heather 2007 waiting graciously. Trophies. The skirl of the pipes. The crown. The cabers. The mayor.

And the announcement: Yes, one of them won! We couldn't hear anything, but, indeed, one of them won.

And gracious was she, Queen o' the Heather.

The Weigh-In

When you're nearly 38-weeks pregnant, there's an urge to weigh yourself even though your belly is now too large to see the bathroom scales. The other night, Emeline decided to answer her urges. But I'm not going to tell her how much she weighs, because she doesn't need to know. With about 2-weeks or so left though, Kemp 2.0 still has time to gain another pound.

Happy Thanksgiving - Revisited!

Ah, half a week has passed since Thanksgiving and we're probably still digesting our dinner. Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. There are no gifts, or obligations, or expectations. It is simply a time to spend within the warm fold of family, whose members are willing to travel astonishing distances and weather systems (to an Englishman) to be together for just a few days. Even so, asking family to travel to New Zealand for Thanksgiving would have been asking a little too much and, at 35-weeks and change pregnant, Emeline and Kemp 2.0 weren't going anywhere farther than from the kitchen to the bathroom and back again.

And so we had to rely on ourselves. We are officially a family now, even though one of us is in utero and doesn't get to vote on what we have for dinner.

So we took the day off work, and we cooked for hours, preparing roasted potatoes and asparagus, gravy, and sage and onion stuffing with sausagemeat. Emeline made wonderful fresh cranberry sauce, and I oversaw slowly roasted pork shoulder, rubbed with a sage, olive oil and citrus zest concoction of my own making. For hours, our kitchen steadily grew steamier, and warmer, and better smelling. Emeline made a maple syrup pudding, which was ultra-delicious and should be made weekly from now on: imagine egg nog in a crust, unfortunately without the rum (this time anyway) and you'll have an idea of the sweet eggy taste of it. Even the weather complied and, despite it being early summer here, wet blustery winds shook all the TV aerials, and great dark thunderheads marched across the valley, coming in from the sea, hiding the hill behind our house, and drenching the city in cold wintry rain.

It was no substitute for time spent with family, and loud voices in the kitchen, but the three of us enjoyed our warm food-filled day together very very much. This is how traditions are begun. (ck)

Below: Chris making his lemon, orange, thyme, and sage marinade for the roast pork; roast pork being dressed by Chris; cranberry sauce on the boil; nutmeg and maple cream pie in the making; a pre-prandial Chris with our Thanksgiving lot (hasselback potatoes, sage and sausage stuffing, gravy, asparagus also shown).