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Not much to report on the past 24 hours, because my evening last night was mostly dedicated to meal prep for our dinner guests tomorrow night. Shobhit doesn't fuck around when people are coming over for dinner: in one way or another, we've done some kind of prep every day since Sunday, if you count the shopping we did both Sunday and Monday, anyway. And Shobhit was already started on some of the vegetable chopping as far back as Monday.
Last night, he did work on samosa filling, shahi paneer base, eggplant, and even a little for a garbanzo bean dish. We did have to take a quick walk over to Trader Joe's to get some canned garbanzo beans because the raw, dry garbanzo beans we had in a large plastic jar had been found by little tiny insects that ate little holes into them. Ew.
I did a
lot of vegetable chopping. Celery, green onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, you name it. Virtually everything went into every pot or pan he was using, just in different proportions, which then got different spices depending on the dish. The samosa filling, of course, was the only one that got the potatoes. Shobhit did a lot of chopping too. He's always the cook in these scenarios, but I did think about how much longer it would have taken him to do all this without me there to assist. By far the most work got done on the samosa and shahi paneer bases; I
took a picture for posterity. This was before we started on blending the shahi paneer base in the blender, which he does several times, mixing it with milk, before it's at the consistency he feels is ideal.
Both those dishes will get paneer added to them later, but probably not until tomorrow. We now have three containers of food being kept in the refrigerator, which we had to rearrange a lot of to accommodate. I really didn't want pots of food sitting on the stove for two days, which Shobhit sometimes does as a matter of course, when it was going to be fed to guests. The shahi paneer was absolutely going to need to be put into the fridge regardless, since it now has milk mixed in.
More food prep will happen tonight, although a lot of my time will need to be spent doing housework. I need to vacuum, get the large amount of clutter out of the living room and kitchen, and pull out the dining table so there is space for six people to sit. The table has only four chairs, but we can use the two desk chairs from the bedroom too, even if one is my white swivel chair I inherited from Ivan after he moved out the first time in very early 2015. So, the chairs will looks sort of awkward, but I don't think anyone will really give a shit.
They're all set to arrive tomorrow around 6:30: Cathryn and her husband Christian; Lynne and her best friend Darcie. Shobhit had suggested I tell them they could come as early as 5:30, which I tried to do with Cathryn over work email today, but she said she's coming into work late so she can leave late, then go meet Christian at the ferry before they head up to our place. They'll arrive at 6:30 regardless, so I'm not going to suggest Lynne come earlier than that either. Besides, I really think it will be better on Shobhit and me if we have about ninety minutes for last-minute preparing after I get home from work anyway.
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In other news, more of Australia has been booked! I finally heard back from both Uncle David and Mary Ann, in separate emails, last night (Mary Ann at 9:28, then 1:01 this morning from Uncle David . . . that’s my local time though, so it would have been 1:58 pm and 5:31 pm Adelaide time, respectively).
After a couple of emails back and forth, we agreed to stay one night at a hotel right by the ferry dock in Penneshaw, South Australia on the east end of Kangaroo Island the night of Monday, February 27; then at a place called Western KI Caravan Park for the evening of Tuesday, February 28, which is super close and right outside Flinders Chase National Park. The "Caravan Park" was their suggestion, and it looked great to us; we got what amounts to a two-bedroom little cottage, complete with a full kitchen.
They warned us more than once that we won't be near any restaurants by the park and will need to bring our own food. I have assured them that works out splendidly for us, actually, as given that our flight bookings thus far have been about 25% more than all flights combined had been in 2020, and we still haven't even booked the Sydney-Adelaide flights, we're happy to save money whenever it's easy to do so, and this would be one such opportunity. It's quite convenient to have a full kitchen handy, and Shobhit loves to cook anyway. This actually works great for all of us.
Even better, Western KI Caravan Park
and the hotel in Penneshaw were on Hotels.com, which allowed me to book there and add to the "stamps" I need to collect to get another 10 nights that yield a free night. We don't get the stamp until the date of the stay arrives, but I've already collected another 3 stamps from one of the nights in Victoria in June and then the two nights in Vancouver at the end of July; we'll get another four for our nights in Brisbane; the next three we stay in Sydney will alone get us to our next free night. Those two nights on Kangaroo Island will get us that far into the
next ten; another three in Adelaide; then a further three back in Sydney will get us eight nights closer to the
next ten by the time the entire trip to Australia is over. We have a pending free night yet to redeem on Hotels.com right now, which we can probably use either in Adelaide or our second stay in Sydney. We probably don't get a stamp for that, so I suppose I should adjust the expectation that we'll be seven nights closer rather than ten once we're back home in Seattle again.
Anyway, I emailed them this morning that we went ahead and booked these two nights in Kangaroo Island. I suggested they book the ferry to and from, which is actually significantly more expensive (by about half) than the two hotel bookings combined, so we can pay them back for that balance. They are concerned about not driving at night, because kangaroos don't understand road rules and easily get hit at night, which is also a big reason I want to leave booking to them, so they can more comfortably choose which sailing times work best for them. All we need is to make sure that we have ample time between our flight landing in Adelaide that Monday at 12:35 and getting to Cape Jervis to catch the ferry. We'll need to stop off at their house to drop off some of our luggage as it won't all fit in their car with us, and that's also fine. In any case, I booked a hotel the first night that is all of a third of a mile from the ferry dock, so realistically we could catch the very last ferry (at 7pm) and not have to worry about driving at night after we arrive, as the hotel is right there.
Anyway. It's in the middle of the night there as I write this, so we will likely see another email from them this evening. All we have left to book now is our flight from Sydney to Adelaide and back; and the hotel for our second stay in Sydney. The Sydney hotel we booked is the same one we stayed at in 2020, because it was by a fair amount the least expensive. We've already been there so we know it's nice enough; in fact when we stayed there before, it had an in-unit washer and dryer for laundry, which means we don't even necessarily need to pack as many clothes as we did last time, especially with our first stay being about halfway through the entire vacation.
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[posted 12:18 pm]
