After 11 years, 435 books read and 418 reviews I have deleted my goodreads account.
I loved it when I first began using it (before Amazon owned it), and it is still useful to obtain some information about a book or author; but my screen seems to be increasingly consumed by advertisements and banners; and I seem to get logged out about once a week for no apparent reason.
I wanted to keep a record of what I have read, what I thought about it at the time, and what I may want to read in future. Goodreads met that need for quite a while, but for the time being I’ll keep those records in a spreadsheet instead.
Something Bill Muehlenberg quoted on his site yesterday from CH Spurgeon has got me thinking.
Bill quotes Spurgeon as follows:
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be, ‘much not many’.
I most recently wrote about my Linux distro of choice and window managers a little over a year ago.
At that time I was running the i3 window manager on an Arch distro. That is still my setup of choice, but in the interim I did use both dwm and Qtile for quite a while (probably 9 months in dwm and two months using Qtile). dwm did take some fiddling with patches to install a systray, but it eventually came together.
For much of my adult life I would have described myself as centre-left on the political spectrum and with some concern for environmental issues (amongst a range of other issues).
When I was growing up the left-oriented party, the Labor (sic) party would stand up for workers rights and social justice whereas the right (the Liberals) were more interested in big business and sound economic management. It was said that one voted Labor to fix the country then voted Liberal to fix the economy.
In this last batch of holiday photographs we undertook the “Gould’s Circuit” walk in the Warrumbungle National Park. The walk is a 7 km circuit from Pincham carpark heading south to Febar Tor and Macha Tor. Both tors offer magnificent views into and across the valley containing the Breadknife, Belougery Spire and several other bluffs.
The views are fine from Febar Tor, but even better a bit further south from Macha Tor. You could just visit Macha Tor. Be prepared for a reasonable workout to ascend (and descend) both Tors!
Heading further north we spent a morning walking the Sandstone Caves track in the Pilliga Forest, and the afternoon between Coonabarabran and Barradine.
Continuing the holiday trip we spent some time in the botanical gardens in Dubbo. The gardens are divided into a number of areas incuding Japanese, Indigenous, and an Adventure playground area.
On our recent holiday we visited the Japanese Gardens in Cowra. There is something of a link between the Japanese and the people of Cowra as a result of the breakout from the Cowra POW camp in 1944. Here is a selection of photos from the gardens. Sunshine appeared about half way through!
This is a copy of the first sermon I preached. The year was around 1992. I have done some very light editing. Reading back over this sermon thirty years after its appearing, I would be happy to preach it today. That can’t be said for all of my sermons!
Exodus 3:1-20 “What’s in a Name?”
Introduction
Read through the newspaper…
Watch the television…
Listen to the radio…
Within a short time you’ll discover (if you haven’t already) that Australia is in a recession1 – the world is in a recession.
For the past nine months I’ve been the primary bread maker in the household. My standard recipe is a slightly modified version of Peter Reinhart’s light wheat bread from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. My up-scaled recipe makes two ‘one pound’ loaves.
Ingredients
667 grams breadmaking flour
333 grams wholemeal flour
40 grams sugar
20 grams salt
60 grams milk powder
10 grams instant yeast
60 grams melted butter or olive oil
540 grams/mls tepid water (around a quarter recently boiled water, and the balance cool tap or filtered water)
My Method
Use the KitchenAid on its slowest setting using the dough hook.
Mix the dry ingredients together.
Add the butter and water whilst mixing.
Mix for around 5 minutes until the dough forms a ball. Add more water or flour as necessary.
Continue to mix for another 5-10 minutes until the dough passes the ‘window pane’ test.1
Remove the dough ball from the bowl, add a small amount of olive oil to the bowl, return the dough to the bowl and spin it around to coat the ball in oil.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave to ferment (called the preferment) for around an hour or two until it has doubled in size. Time depends on the ambient temperature and the temperature of the water used in the mixing. Mine would be an hour and a half on average.
Degas the dough in the bowl by ‘punching it down’, remove the dough from the bowl, divide it into two roughly equal pieces and form into a rough rectangle shape. Fold it in thirds in both directions and form the dough into loaf shapes approximately 20cm long and 7cm in diameter.
Place these dough cylinders in two bread pans, again cover with plastic and allow to proof for an additional hour or two.
They again will double in shape and should crest the top of the pans by a centimetre or two.
Preheat the oven to 170 degrees centigrade (fan-forced oven here).
Remove the plastic!
I sprinkle the loaves with some water and ensure the tops are slightly moist all over.
I then score the tops of the dough loaves with a razor blade. This can be down with two or three diagonal slices across the top or some other patterns. This scoring allows the bread to rise into the scores during baking.
I bake them next to each other in the middle-to-bottom area of the oven for 25 minutes. I then switch and turn both loaves and bake for another 10 minutes until golden brown.
To test I turn out one loaf, flip it onto it’s top and tap the bottom to ensure there is a hollow sound. Turn out both loaves and cool on a cooling rack.
One loaf is kept for bread. The other is sliced (after waiting a couple of hours for it to cool) and put in the freezer.
The window pane test is performed by pulling a small piece of dough off the main body (around golfball size or smaller) and stretching it. The dough passes the test if it stretches out and becomes very thin such that you can see light through it before the dough starts to tear. ↩︎
