Wishing our hordes of loyal readers a very Merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year.

You’re the best!

Well it is a long story that goes something like this….One sunny day I was sitting at my desk wondering what on earth I was going to do with my Thursday night and Eleus rang and demanded that I attend with her.

Now some people might be put off by demands but as I am not in the habit of passing up a good time out of spite, no matter how awful her attitude, I agreed to go.

Thus I joined Scottish County Dancing.

Things I love about SCD: the music.

There is a very regular pattern to my existence on a Thursday night.

1) Leave work feeling frazzled and grumpy from having to deal with so many silly people (how many stories about oddly-shaped kumara do we need in one paper anyway?).

2) Arrive home feeling even more frazzled and grumpy because I’ve just remembered I was meant to pick up sewing thread/printer paper/kumara for tea (what is it with kumara anyway?) and forgot.

3) Help get tea on feeling grazzled and frumpy because I’ve burnt the kumara (argh!!!).

4) Leave for SCD feeling grumpled and frizzy beacause I actually love kumara but my kumara was burnt.

5) Arrive at SCD freeling frumpled and grizzy – just in general.

6) Leave SCD at the end of the night feeling super-dooper-extra-chextra-woopdie-doodie great!

A major part of this turnaround is the music. You know they’ve done studies (at least I’ve read it somewhere on the interwebs so it must be true) that show the music we dance to actually helps to negate the effects of clinical depression? No wonder it works on me even on a bad kumara day!

I love the perkiness of jigs and the jollity of reels and the romance of strathspeys. Sometimes I just sit and listen to dance music (anyone heard that fantastic CD that was recorded at the Opotiki Queen’s Bday Weekend? Brilliant), and it always makes me feel better.

So, bloggers: what’s your favourite kind of music? SCD or otherwise? Does it affect you the same way it does me? Or am I on my own out here?

Hello?

Hello…..?

A few weeks ago our club, opotiki, had its final class for the year and so to celebrate we had a supper. 

To begin with I should say that we has a delightful evening with contributions of dances from a few different people, and the gleeful ”Mr J” played santa for the evening, after we had danced our feet off we enjoyed a delicious  supper.

Some of the best things that I remember from  that supper are the mini pecan pies which were excellent, also there were some Florentine style  which looked very nice.

But I would have to say the star of the evening were the expertly decorated cupcakes that were served on a gorgeous stand. There was chocolate with orange butter cream , vanilla with lemon butter cream and almond with something else(??).

Incase you guys cant tell by this post made at 7.54 I don’t sleep very well. So well infact I went to bed at 12.45 last night, woke my mother up at 2 and proceeded to do so practically every hour until 7.15. Poor mammy, she’s an angel she is.

Anyway I digress with the life story, the point of that was that despite having a grand total of about 2 hours sleep I am still determined to be stylish and happy-coining the phrase Insomunista!

So what am I up to right now? Well I’m rewatching last nights Strictly come dancing, I blogged last night that Ali deserved to win and I feel I jinxed the poor thing. Seriously how did she go out?

The point of this post though was to introduce my new feature, as its the beginning of the 12 days of christmas today I’m going to start Rachy’s 12 days of christmas.  Each day I’ll have a little treat, a new treasure or just a lovely picture to get you feeling all festive. The next post shall be the first so keep your eyes peeled!

I’m going to finish the post now before I tell you about something that I may have coming up that I’m very excited about and don’t want to jinx. Don’t ask me about it! We do love a secret project don’t we?

It was my job to make the stuffing this year, so I experimented with SCD bread. The greatest part is that no one knew the difference, and once I told them what it was made of, they went back for seconds!

Ingredients

For the Bread Loaf (recipe adapted from the Lois Lang Bread recipe)

• 2 1/2 cups almond flour
• 1 cup farmer’s cheese
• 1/4 cup butter (melted)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup water
• fresh chopped rosemary

For the stuffing

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 celery stalks, thinly sliced
• 2 medium onions, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced in half-moons
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 2 Fuji apples (skin on, chopped)
• 1 lb SCD legal sausage (sweet Italian preferable)
• 1/2 cup sliced Cremini mushrooms
• 3 eggs (beaten)
• 1 1/2 cups turkey stock (or SCD legal chicken broth)
• 3 tbsp coarsely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 3 1/2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh sage
• 2 tsp finely chopped fresh thyme
• 2 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary

Directions

1. Combine all bread ingredients (except for the flower and water) in a mixer and blend until smooth.  Alternate adding the flour and the water until dough is combined. Dough will be a very sticky consistency.
2. Grease a loaf pan and put a rectangular piece of parchment paper at the bottom. This will help the loaf come out easily. Spray more oil on top of the parchment piece.
3. Fold the dough into the loaf pan with a spoon.
4. Bake at 325° for about 45 minutes. Careful to not let the top burn
5. While the bread is baking, saute in oil the celery, onions, garlic, sausage, apples and mushrooms until tender or about 15 minutes. Set aside until loaf has baked and cooled.
6. Sliced the bread into cubes and coat with 4 tbsp melted butter. Place on a cookie sheet and toast in the oven for 15 minutes on 400° or until golden brown and slightly dry.
7. Toss the bread crumbs with the sauteed mixture, eggs, turkey stock and herbs.
8. Transfer stuffing to a well buttered baking dish and bake at 350° covered for 35 minutes. Uncover and bake 15 minutes until top is golden.

The opening bars of Mairi’s Wedding rang out across the ballroom once more as the Prince and his new Princess took to the floor.

“Happy, my darling?” the Prince asked, flashing his dark eyes at the beautiful bride.

“Happy!” cried Katarina ecstatically.

THE END

THE WEDDING  (R4×32)  4C set    T Bolt  Another Newcastle Coll
1-12    1s dance down to 4th place & all circle 8H round & back
13-16    1s dance up to top under arches made by 2s+3s+4s
17-24    1s dance Fig of 8 round 2s
25-32    1s set, cast to 4th place, all turn partners RH

This was the final instalment of our SCD romance “Dancing Hearts” (just in case the whole “THE END” thing didn’t clue you in). We used this Mills-and-Boon-style story as the focus for our attempt at leading our SCD class (thanks guys!) and it was orrrrsome!

Scroll down for earlier chapters or check out the Dancing Hearts category to the right of your screen—>

Things I love about SCD….. unexpected twirls

An unexpected twirls is when your partner gives you and extra “flick” during a dance causing you to twirl when the dance doesn’t call for one. Sometimes an unexpected twirl can be when your partner decides to turn you faster so as to turn more times than necessary.

Every time I’m on the receiving end of an unexpected twirl it makes me giggle, often uncontrollably. Some dancers in our club seem to be ever improving their technic for delivering these twirls.

My favorite dance for twirling is waltz country dance, which I had the delight in doing for the first time at the Cambridge ball with a very nice partner who would twirl me at every opportunity.

The only downside of all these extra twirls is that sometimes you get a little dizzy but aslong as you can remain upright and in your set then its okay.

Handling updates in SQL Server Integration Services isn’t straight forward. If you have developed an ETL (Extract Transform Load) process for a Data Warehouse, then you may have faced a situation where you needed to update existing records. This could be the case when you are implementing Type 1 SCDs. The situation isn’t particular for a Data Warehouse ETL; in routine SSIS tasks, there can be situations when you want to insert a record if it does not exist, or else update the existing record. The problem is that SQL Server Integration Services does not provide direct support for updating records based on some criteria. This post will have a brief look over various solutions:

Ole DB Command

The most basic solution could be to use an Ole DB Command transformation for every input row. For this, our dataflow may look something like.

The most annoying thing in this approach is that Ole DB Command does not support named parameters and we need to write our update queries using “?” like this:

Update Dim_myDimTable
 Set Property1 = ?,
 Property2 = ?
 ....
 Where BusinessKey = ?

This could get tedious to maintain if we have lot of columns in our table since we need to map the ? parameters in the exact order they appeared in the update query.

Also, this method uses a single update query for every matched record and so is not a good choice if the records to be updated are higher in number. Also, when using this approach, we need to make sure that we only update the rows that are changed (the sample dataflow above does not depict this).

Slowly Changing Dimension transformation

This is a nice built-in method that starts a wizard and finally generates a dataflow similar to the one we saw in the first approach if we choose options in the wizard that represent Type 1 SCD with changing attributes. So this option could be regarded as a more maintainable way of approach 1 since it generates all the related data flow components automatically. However, since this approach also updates the records one by one so the performance may degrade if we have a lot of rows to update. To use this option, we need to drag a Slowly Changing Dimension transformation to our data flow and follow the wizard accordingly.

Staging Update Table

This approach gives greater scalablity, maintainablity and flexibility. This option requires us to create a staging table in the database and fill that table with the rows that that already exist in the target table. After that, we can simply write an update query with a join condition to update all the records in one-go. Here’s the dataflow sketch for this option:

After the above dataflow, we will need to create an SQL Script control flow component to write our query and clears the staging update table. This can be done using an sql command like this:

--update dimension rows
 Update D
  Set
   Property1=U.Property1,
   Property2=U.Property2
   ...
  From Dim_myDimTable D
  Inner Join Temp_myDimUpdateTable U
   on D.BusinessKey = U.BusinessKey

  --empty update table
  Truncate table Temp_myDimUpdateTable

Of course, this solution is an overhead if the records to be updated are small in number since it requires an staging table and is a two-pass solution.

Merge Statement

SQL Server 2008 came up with a new Merge command that can automatically insert or update records in the destination table in a single statement. This option is more described in this MSDN BOL article: Using MERGE in Integration Services Packages

That’s all I learned when I wrote an ETL for a data warehouse. I hope that post helps others that are going to write SSIS packages as well. Please have your thoughts propagated using the comments section below.

“A poet?” said a clear voice, ringing across the operating theatre. The Prince looked around and saw his darling Katarina, every bit as stunning as he had remembered. “You would even become a poet?”

“Yes, my lady, even thus would I sink into a pit of degradation, only to forget you,” the Prince cried. “But how can I forget you, when you are here in Siberia, in a hospital catering specifically to Ethiopian lepers with cancerous tumours, heart disease and halitosis?”
“I wish you would forget me,” Katarina said. “Even though a strange but totally plausible coincidence has resulted in me turning up here in a remote corner of the world, in the same operating theatre as you are conducting surgery. Why did you not tell me you had a cold but beautiful wife?”

The Prince looked astounded and rushed up to her side. “I am not married, my darling,”

“Then why did the doctor tell me you are?”
“Ah the good Doctor Freusenbowenlogardjung. I believe his English is not too good. Perhaps he was referring to my sister?” the Prince said, indicating the surgical nurse.

Katarina recognised the icy blond hair and the icy countenance. “Why then, you’re not married!” she gasped.

“No indeed, I am not,” the Prince said, taking her in his arms. “Although it sounds like a good idea to me! There’s only one proper way to get married in a hurry. We must make a trip to Gretna Green!”
TRIP TO GRETNA GREEN  (J8×32)  3C (4C Set)
1- 8    1s cross RH, cast 1 place, 2s+1s+3s Adv+Ret
9-16    1s cross LH & 1L casts up to end between 2s while 1M casts down to end between 3s & 2s+1s+3s Adv+Ret
17-24    1s dance reels of 3 across (RSh to person on right) & end facing 1st corners
25-32    1s turn 1st corners RH, passing RSh turn 2nd corner RH & pass RSh to 2nd places own sides

Missed the first instalments of this fantastic SCD romance? Scroll down to catch up on earlier chapters or choose “Dancing Hearts” in the list of categories to the right

Or more specifically asparagus rolls.

These have been out of food fashion for some time but one of the nice things about old people (40+) from country backwaters (e.g. Hamilton) is that they don’t give two hoots about culinary fads and have probably been producing these dull looking squishy Hors d’œuvres since time began – which by my calculations was march 5^th 1957*.

Back then the can opener had only just been invented so they were finally able to open the tins of asparagus that some Italian twit had canned just before the great flood.  They were so excited by this because they finally had something to go with their soft white bread (pre sliced in a pretty plastic bag) and the new fangled dairy substitute – margarine**.

They were an instant hit across the world right up until December 26^th 1957***. Sadly the world moved on and these delicacies were left to history, except for this one small nation in the pacific where time pretty much stood still until February 6^th 2003****.  

This is something I am thankful for because:

            They are delicious

            They are the only savoury party food in NZ that does not contain meat

            And I love them

Amazingly enough there is also a variation that is just as tasty which contains grated cheddar cheese which is then grilled until golden. I would like to thank the Cambridge Ball organisers for introducing this new***** snack.

*possible but most likely just something I made up

**  Paragraph contains slight literary exaggerations

*** Blatant lie

**** Highly likely

***** According to my Gran this isn’t ‘new”

“Reporter eleus,” said SCDancer “Mr J” with heartfelt enthusiasm. “Please come and take some photos for the paper of the lovely dance we are having this Saturday!”

“Okay!!!” I said, with heartfelt rabidly-faked enthusiasm.

Little did I know what heavy consequences lay in store as I turned up at the hall, took a few photos, and headed back to the office.

On Monday “Mr J” came in to identify faces for photo captions and give me a brief story to go with them.

“Did you enjoy the dance?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” I said – truthfully, even. “Only it was difficult to get the photos because people just wouldn’t stay in straight lines!”

“Mr J” gasped and I became aware from the haunted expression on his face that I had said something very shocking indeed.

“Er, that is, I, um er… well,” I floundered.

“Perhaps you should come and join in and show us how to do it properly then,” “Mr J” chided me.

I don’t know who was more surprised – “Mr J” or me – when I turned up for the SCD class that Thursday.

And a year or two later I’m still here!

Several months later Prince Reginald Delacour De Courcy Montgomery Darcy looked up from the latest surgical operation he was performing on an Ethiopian leper and sighed. For weeks he had tried to forget Katarina, but her memory came back to him with every moment. He had tried to forget her by rescuing orphaned polar bears from the wild Arctic ice, he had tried to forget her by immersing himself in music, recording his own solo album, he had even tried tying himself to the trunk of a threatened tree in the Amazonian rainforest.

Now even using his surgical skills to help a Siberian hospital that catered specifically for Ethiopian lepers with cancerous tumours, heart disease and halitosis was not doing the job.

The Prince put down his scalpel and turned to the surgical nurse.

“I think I will have to become…a poet,” he said.

THE POET AND HIS LASS  (S3×32)  3C set     J Drewry  Stoneywood Coll
1- 8    1s dance down middle & cast back to place, 3s dance up middle & cast back to place
9-16    2s dance RH across (L with 2s & M with 3s), pass RSh & dance LH across with other couple
17-24    2s dance reels of 3 across  (L with 2s & M with 3s),
25-32    3s cross RH, cast up to 2nd place, cross RH & cast to top

Lemon Meringue Pie! My mom and I made this for Thanksgiving! It was so good!

Makes one 9-inch pie

Ingredients:

Crust:

• 1 ½ cups almond flour
• 3 tbsp butter, cold and cut into pieces
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1/8 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt

Filling:

• 6 egg yolks
• ½ cup honey
• ½ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• ½ cup butter, cold and cut into pieces
• 2 egg whites
• Pinch of salt

Meringue:

• 4 egg whites
• Pinch of salt
• ¼ cup honey

Instructions

Crust

1. Heat the oven to 300ºF
2. Place all crust ingredients in food processor and process until it starts to form a ball.
3. Flatten the dough into a round disk between two pieces of plastic wrap and gently roll out the crust into an 11-inch circle. Put the dough, still between the plastic wrap on a baking sheet and refrigerate until firm, about 10 minutes.
4. Remove the pastry from the fridge. Peel off one side of plastic wrap and place it in the pie pan and remove the other plastic wrap.
5. Bake for 10 minutes until light brown in color. Set aside to cool.

Filling

1. In a double boiler (or in glass bowl sitting above a pot of boiling water) whisk together the egg yolks, honey, and lemon juice.
2. Slowly add the butter, a couple of pieces at a time, whisking the entire time. Add more pieces as the previous ones melt.
3. After all the ingredients are melted and well-blended, cook for an additional 10-15 minutes, stirring only occasionally, until it thickens.
4. Cool the lemon curd in the fridge.
5. Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks, but are not dry.
6. Gently fold the egg whites into the chilled lemon curd mixture.
7. Pour the mixture into the cooled pie crust.

Meringue

1. Heat the oven to 400ºF
2. Beat the 4 egg whites with a pinch of salt until soft peaks form.
3. Add the honey and beat a little longer until shiny and stiff.
4. Plop the meringue on top of the lemon filling, making sure it touches the crust. Form peaks and mounds as you go.
5. Bake for 3-5 minutes until the peaks are golden brown.
6. Cool and keep refrigerated until ready to serve.