New Vegemite, now with even more Fail

Now, let it be known I'm a big fan of Vegemite.

It might be owned by Kraft, which is owned by Philip Morris, a disgusting multinational tobacco company, a fact that makes me ashamed to spend my money on the product, but Vegemite is almost as much of a necessity as air as far as I'm concerned. I don't get through jars of the stuff, but when I have a craving I have a craving... it's part of being Australian.

So I was sceptical about 'New Vegemite', which allegedly consisted of a mixture of Vegemite and cream cheese.

On the face of it, it doesn't sound so bad. Cream cheese has its place (in a good baked cheesecake is my preference- and not on any goddamn pizza like in those godawful ads), and I'm sure it wouldn't be too bad with Vegemite. Allegedly it's a combination a lot of Vegemite consumers create themselves at home. But in that case, I reasoned, what's so bloody hard about spreading cream cheese and Vegemite on toast that would lead people to want a mixture of the two?

When the 'New Vegemite' was released, in a jar with an all-over label that was carefully designed to hide the poo-coloured product from view, my suspicion was heightened further. Coupled with the fact that Kraft's own crack team of marketers had been unable to come up with a name that could sell the product to consumers and they had instead resorted to a lame 'name this product' competition, I became convinced the product was going to fail.

However, I was still open-minded enough about its properties to give the stuff a try. I just wasn't going to pay for it. I like my Vegemite and I know how I like my Vegemite, and so I had no need for some prefab crap. But at the 5km Rotary Fun Run I did a while back, we were given some samples of 'New Vegemite' in a little le-snack type pack, with some biscuits for dipping. It looked even more like poo when I dipped the biscuit in it, but I suppose Vegemite itself could well look like axl grease and I still like the stuff, so I didn't let that bother me (besides, my dad once made chocolate biscuits shaped like dog poo for fun when I was a kid and I thought that was just awesome). New Vegemite was categorically not awesome. It was disgusting. The flavour was barely remniscent of Vegemite and didn't taste at all like cream cheese. It was just gross. I tried a second time just to be sure it wasn't an intial nasty taste... nope. It didn't just look like crap. Now, given that my teensy little le snack-style packet didn't have an ingredients list I can't say whether the product contains only Vegemite and cream cheese, but from the taste I have to say that's doubtful- otherwise how could they have screwed it up so badly?

Anyway, a couple of months later and Kraft unveil the name of this new VegeCrap (I'm quite sure they got a flood of obscene entries... Faecemite, Crappymite and Pooeymite had to have been among them) to howls of derision. Less than 48 hours later and they can the name. Honestly though, like the product, this name had to have gone past a committee of supposedly savvy marketing types. With a product as shit as this, you want to come up with a damn good name. Obviously a name so lame was never going to pass muster. How could they have missed that? And some douchebag got his face all over the media as being the guy who won the naming competition and was responsible for naming this shit product the lamest name evah. Oh the shame. For his sake I hope he didn't give his real name.

Maybe the Kraft people just really really wanted an excuse to kill off what was obviously a dud product so they named it something so incredibly stupid that people would be begging for it to be taken off the shelves?

Clive Palmer, anti-racism campaigner

LOL.

Honestly, the billionaire who owns the pathetic remnants of what used to be the party of Joh Bjelke Petersen, suddenly crying about 'racism' because someone is hindering his business interests with a bunch of companies that just happen to be Chinese (and thus tied up with a despicable, repressive anti-democratic regime that routinely commits human rights abuses and screws over its own population)... what can you say? It's fucking transparent, Palmer. I only wish the media had the balls to say so instead of sucking up to this fatcat.

Where Gam and Sarah potentially produce a sprog...

Ahhh... I've been procrastinating about blogging. Mostly because lately it takes all the energy I can muster just to read things. I've been sleeping a good solid 8 hours every night plus a 1-2 hour 'power nap' during the day when I'm not stuck at work during the afternoon, and it's still not enough.

Why? I'm pregnant. And let me tell you it has rendered me utterly useless. Useless. I need to eat all the time, and when I'm not eating I feel like I need to sleep!

While I'm on the big news, we had an offer accepted on a house nearly two weeks ago. Only to discover at the building & pest inspection this week that the house had a recent history of termite damage (possibly localised- meaning we'd only have to tear down a quarter of the house... good news!). So now we're in the position of making a very severe reduction in the amount of money we're prepared to offer and seeing whether the vendor accepts... it's in a fantastic location and on a nice big block, so we're still keen as long as we can reduce our offer by the large amount of money it's going to cost to rectify the damage done. We're going to miss that first home buyer's grant, but the amount of money we're reducing the offer by would mean that we wouldn't pay stamp duty anyway so I suppose it kind of cancels out.

We started the house hunting long before we knew I was pregnant (I was on the pill- more on that one day when it becomes an issue again!), so when we found out we weren't exactly pleased about the prospect of throwing ourselves into a nearly-half-million dollar mortgage and parenthood at the same time (please don't take this the wrong way, Gam/Sarah Jr-to-be!). Still, we figured we'd manage somehow (i.e. with 12 weeks paid maternity leave and parental financial assistance... sigh... I bet they never figured on their kids being 25 and still costing them money. And we never figured that we'd be lumped with paying Gam's brother's university fees, which maxed out our credit card and will eat up a massive chunk of our savings unless Mummy & Daddy are able to pay us back in time before the credit card bill comes due. The global financial crisis has hit Daddy's engineering business a lot harder than it has most Australian businesses. And, growing up, I never figured on a reality where half-million dollar houses were for normal people, not rich people, and half a million dollars would only get you an 80-year-old unrenovated hovels in a suburb 9 train-stations from the city (i.e. Oxley)!

Yeah... so I'll be 13 weeks this Sunday. We had a scan to confirm/date the pregnancy at 8-and-a-bit weeks and told our parents at 10 weeks. I would've blogged about it earlier but first I wanted to wait til we'd told all our parents and then... I was just too buggered to muster the energy to write a post.

I missed running the Bridge to Brisbane at the end of August... two weeks prior my legs just started to feel like they were made of lead and I even had trouble walking for exercise. I was feeling sick all the time too... not just in the mornings or maybe I would have figured out earlier that I was pregnant. It was a couple of days prior to the event that it was confirmed. Going from running 5km with no trouble at all (10km would have been an effort) to not even being able to walk 5km- and I mean not able. My legs felt like they were made of lead! I was seriously pathetic! Still am, just not that bad. I can walk normally now, but I've pretty much lost all my stamina. Oh and I've grown out of my sports bra anyway. Like I needed another two cup sizes (and still growing... there really is such a thing as too big... I'm finally starting to see how people get uncomfortable having large boobs!).

I needed new clothes and new bras a couple of weeks ago because almost everything has stopped fitting up top... or just looks obscene when I try and squeeze into it. Gam bought me some nice dresses- I got them a size too big and had the straps adjusted to fit, thinking at time that the bonus would be that everything that fitted me up top then left me with room at the stomach. Only the nice new dresses are now on the verge of becoming too tight up top while still leaving a fair bit of room at the stomach. I suppose now that I'm at 13 weeks I can expect my stomach to start growing more noticeably, I just hope my boobs don't outpace it and render my new clothes obsolete sooner rather than later... We really don't need to be spending more money on clothes for me right about now.

Oh and how I have learned from my pregnancy experience so far... Being a nutritionist and knowing a fair bit about diet stuff, I used to actually believe what the authoratitive sources said about not needing to increase one's food intake in early pregnancy. Sounds fair enough- the baby/foetus is only a few cm long, right? Ha! It's rubbish. Rubbish! I've even been eating meat or fish at two meals on some days, and there's no way I could have handled that before. My iron levels are apparently borderline, erring on the side of deficiency, so I suppose I need it, but still... we were eating pretty cheaply before this all happened (because we were doing our best to save for a house) but now I'm eating twice as much and it's not all rice and cheap stuff either... plus for ages I found I couldn't stomach the same thing two days in a row (except fruit), which meant no big cheap cook-ups with lots of leftovers. Blah. I managed to cook a nice chickpea and potato curry the other day, which has served me well as leftovers without giving me indigestion on every occasion, so maybe I'm almost back to normal.

The worst thing about it all, though, is not being able to take hayfever drugs. Oh my goodness. I never realised how much I need the damn things. I was always careful not to take them ALL the time (and for a few weeks before we found out I was pregnant I felt sick taking any tablets, so I avoided them) but now I can't even take them when I really need them. So it's hayfever keeping me awake at night, it's hayfever keeping me from being able to concentrate on my work during the day... hayfever HELL. I always wondered just how effective those antihistamines actually were, and now I can't have them and my hayfever is so much worse I actually know they were working well before! Needless to say that that dust storm yesterday didn't exactly do me a world of good, hayfever-wise... my nasal passages are so irritated by the dust still in the air that I've been forced to breathe through my mouth for the past 36 hours or so. I think the only time I've wished for rain so badly was during the heatwave 5 or so years ago.

As for uni, I've been working with my PhD supervisors to figure out how I'm going to finish this damn thing- they've been very good about it, incidentally, though I know it's inconvenienced them horribly because a bunch of kids we need to follow up for some valuable longitudinal data at 6 years of age actually start turning 6 in April, right when the baby's due. Yay for timing. They're going to try to get someone else to obtain the data (for a different set of analyses) and then we can share it. I've been so horribly unproductive though.

Despite everything BAD about being pregnant (it seems to be getting better), I'm really starting to look forward to meeting this baby. Or at least finding out whether it's a boy or a girl (Gam's hunch is that it's a girl and mine is that it's a boy... chances are one of us is right!). I think the fact our parents were all so incredibly excited helped a lot, too... telling them was a really nice experience even though Gam and I were both so nervous about it. It's like they've found a new purpose in life... and to be honest I am really glad that, barring some horrible disaster, our kid is going to have four top-notch grandparents to dote on it.

We have a nuchal translucency scan tomorrow, so we'll hopefully find out whether everything is plodding along as it should as well as the (hopefully minimal) chances of any scary chromosomal abnormalities.

Learning disability no excuse for Fielding's lack of moral fibre.

The federal senate's most ostentatious christian, Steve Fielding, yesterday voted with the Liberals and Nationals against the Rudd government's move to abolish the barbaric practice of billing refugees at a rate of $125 a day for their involuntary incarceration at the hands of the government. It's a long time since I've been to church... maybe Jesus really would want to persecute refugees and bill them hundreds of thousands of dollars for being locked up in the desert behind razor wire against their will... I'm sure Fielding would know better than I would, being one of the more rabidly evangelical varieties of christian.

Thankfully one person on the opposing side of politics (let's put aside the ongoing pretence that Fielding is not in fact a Liberal), senator Judith Troeth, had enough moral fibre to cross the floor and help ensure the legislation passed.

Not five minutes later, we have Fielding showering himself in self-pity over his 'lifelong learning disability' that he blames for causing several verbal gaffes. Nice try at a distraction, Fielding, but no learning disability is going to excuse your lack of backbone and overwhelming moral failing on this issue, you despicable, hypocritical prick.

Spirit House 'Spice Cream'- more powdered milk than ice cream

I've been eyeing off the prettily-packaged Spice Cream by food brand Spirit House since they appeared in a few local stores and delis. Finally, a couple of days ago, I bought one. I was tossing up between the equally yummy-sounding vanilla and candied ginger and the coconut and lime flavours. I wound up buying coconut and lime, but I wish I'd saved my $10 (for half a litre!) and got Gam to take me to Gelateria Cremona in Rosalie instead.

This was massively disappointing. The overwhelming texture and taste of the ice-cream is of powdered milk. It's really noticeable and dominates what would otherwise be a fairly pleasant flavour combination. It tastes cheap and nasty, but funnily enough has a fair proportion of fresh milk and cream- the fat content is 15%, which is pretty standard for a premium ice cream.

I won't be buying it again. Better to stick with Connoisseur, which is less than half the price ($8-9 for 1L), or the Maggie Beer ice-cream (which I wouldn't rave about but is roughly the same price for half a litre and was miles better than the Spice Cream). Waah. One more reason I want to buy an ice-cream maker, so I'm never disappointed by crappy-yet-overpriced ice cream. Big thumbs down.