Ann from Oz

Nudge, nudge

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:01:25 GMT

Awww, this is cute, I got a 'nudge' from sidherian to let me know that it's been 18 weeks since I posted.

Argh. It feels like it too. Thing is, when L was made redundant 2.5 years ago he had a business thing happening on the side so he decided to make it the main earner, if he could. And he took over the family pc with the internet access and it was hard to argue given my continued desire to eat and keep the kids in shoes and socks.

After 6 months I mentioned that I missed Journaling and could we perhaps, think of a way of letting me have some access before 8pm??? So he got a laptop with some kind of blue tooth connection and ran into the same problems with it that we have with mobile phones up here in the middle of nowhere. The reception doesn't.

Which means that I just cannot get at what used to be my machine at any time that suits me. The double whammy came when work installed a new improved filiter that wouldn't let LJ through on account of the porny underbelly and the disgraceful language contained in some of the most delightful entries and suddenly I can't even catch up on my FL over morning coffee.

That's the bad news, the good is that L has finally realised that survival is not success and a cash flow is not a profit. He's looking for contract work where you get paid the old fashioned way. By someone else.

I'm posting now 'cos he's off being interviewed.

May the Force be with him.

We're running out of shoes and socks.

Spam me no spam

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:44:52 GMT

Walked out Thursday morning to discover that the hot water service had become a Water Feature overnight. Water flowing out of the top and in a graceful waterful working its way out of the shedlet, which some past person installed to keep the thing warm, out across the concrete path and into the herb garden.

Doug the plumber has been the source of much material in this journal but he came up trumps this time, turned up when he said he would and had a unit delivered by COB Thursday, Friday at 9am - colour me stunned - it was installed and heating.

Unh, and bye-bye $1800.

I was saving up for some Noro silk garden,(For a visual click here, and select Noro) wonderful, multi-coloured luxury yarn with a bit of crunch, ach well. This is why knitters and quilters have stashes: to tide us over the sad times when frugality bites.

And I'm getting a bit jack of those modern day versions of the chain letter that have been landing in my inbox. I don't care how good the joke is or how deep and meaningful the message the minute they end with some version of: ‘send this to 10 of your friends within the next 30 seconds and you will receive Good Luck between 4.00 and 4.10 pm next Wednesday, fail to do this and BAD LUCK will haunt you through the Hills of All Eternity. Do not break this chain, those who did have died nasty deaths', I'm done.

I refuse to participate in this kind of crap.

I always break the chain.

Probably accounts for the hot water service karking it.

(Or maybe it had more to do with it being 15 years old?)

Yours in raging cynicism...

No Lotto tickets for me

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:58:32 GMT

Hmm, well, I had the best birthday I've had in a few years and mind you, I haven't had any bad ones that stand out. It was just that this weekend was particularly good and get this, it was good despite the fact that this year if fell on Saturday and I worked 9.30-5.

Work, for the first time in a long time was devoid of the requisite fruitcakes that add spice to the Librarians' lot. No angry folks complaining vociferously about their .40c late fines, no rude people insisting that they needed computer time NOW even though they had not booked and clearly every pc in the place a body before the screen, the computers themselves managed to stay on line all day with nary a hiccup and the automated booking system refrained form crashing. Plus all the staff who were rostered on believed in getting the job done - as apposed to avoiding as much work as possible given that it is the weekend - which spread the load and made the day zip by.

I came home to a dinner cooked by L and the company of the friends who gave us Eddie and Milo. There was much conversation, good food and an overabundance of wine. Dinner was followed by the best laugh any of us have had in a long while thanks to vrya. My friend the 'Blue Collar Comedy Tour' was a riot. We were all wiping away tears, for local colour it travelled really well. 'The glass house' is going to seem amateurish and puerile by comparison (but the accents alone are probably worth 10 minutes of your time).

I did extremely well in the loot department too. Not so much the what was given as the thought behind it. Alex gave me a miniature rose the blooms of which are so small I have never seen the like before. Ellen chose four different shades of novelty yarn (Feathers) in complementary hues and L was springing for the Western boots that I have been lusting after since 5 minutes after I walked into McDonald's Saddlery 6 years ago.

(The Saddlery is an amazing place to find in the Marsh. Not because they have more horse doodads than you could point a stick at but because when you get past the bits, halters, leads and the $4,000 Saddle that looks like it's worth 4K on account of all the tooled silver and leatherwork they have a roomful of Rodeo gear, much of it imported from the US. Fringed jackets, sparkly shirts and boots straight out of Midnight Cowboy.

Although my heart runs to the genuine red and black leather with a mountain of decorative stitchery at $450, our pocket ran to the more practical uni-coloured, lightly stitched 'Made in India' copies at $195.)

So I knew what was coming from my spouse and was very happy with it, then he surprised me by 1. filling the house with flowers (three bunches is my idea of filling, this isn't the movies and where do they find all the vases?) and 2. producing bottles of my favourite perfume and liqeur as a surprise.

Dad gave me garnet stud earrings (my suggestion when he was jonesing for ideas) and a fine chain with a peridot in a dangling doodad. Wasn't expecting this kind of spoilage.

Am very happy woman.

Sunday we took Dad out to lunch at the Myrniong Pub. An interesting old building that's changed hands - and clearly Chefs - recently. The building is all bluestone and history and the food was much the same. Wouldn't eat there again in a hurry and certainly not until someone I trust tells me the food's good. Still the lunch was pleasant and the company happy.

Currently reading: Incurable by John Marsden (Book 2 of The Ellie Chronicles, his follow up to the Tomorrow series.)

For the record

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 05:11:24 GMT

Not my usual style so I'll immortalise the moment: January 10th and I have the Kris Kringle for my Knitterly Group, the fabric for half the KK for my Quilting Group and the makings of the other 50% of the Quilting Kringle ready to go.

Colour me stunned.

It' s my birthday this Saturday and I'm working 9.30-5 so today I celebrated in advance at the Hairdressers (or partook of the preliminary stages of my mid-life crisis, take your pick) by having my tired blonde with the 2 inches of even tireder looking re-growth re-coloured in three shades of red with a hot pink 'chunk' behind my left ear, just for interest.

Hot pink hair! My mother's doing a 360 in her grave and my friends will get a good laugh at my expense.

(Gotta do some serious frugalling for the rest of the month now, hot pink comes at a price.)

Hee.

Curently reading: Talk to the hand by Lynne Truss

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:41:11 GMT

(I have dropped the ball in the journalling department since the boy destroyed the hd. When I said to L that I missed writing, he asked why I'd stopped and it's just that I can't seem to find the time I had before the crash. Part of this is that he's nearly always around these days, running his business from home, and we haven't quite re-negotiated who does what when. Part of this also, is that age old truth that men see women's time as interruptable: When a man works you must leave them alone if they ask, but whatever a woman is doing is, by definition, able to be stopped so that conversation, coffee or the meeting of the needs of others may take place.

Having finally woken up to this truth I am going to attempt to force some private time out of the day. If I succeed in this for more than a day at a time, a ticket in Tattslotto will be in the offing.)

Ahem, holidays away are such wonderful things, a break from routine, new places, new faces and no interruptions from work, appointments or the rush of the daily trivia.

And then you come home.

Ten days away at Phillip Island: seals, Little Penguins (their name, which is also a reflection on their size. Clearly they were named by someone lacking imagination and gifted with a talent for the obvious), beaches of all kinds and qualities, and fire works on New Years Eve.

Lovely.

And then we came home and the garden is 50% dead, Ralph.

And our waterer tells us he was here every second day and that there must have been a killer wind but the thing here is, he was also collecting the mail. The mail gets dropped in the box with a thick elastic band around around the daily dose. There were four thusly banded bundles in said box on our return. Four days with no water? One garden pretty much gone. L is heartbroken and peeved off. I am equally sad, there is not a rose in this place that was casually purchased: I studied books, guides, talked to Rosarians and made my choices carefully as those of us with limited funding do.

The weather wasn't very co-operative on PI, 42C one day, a full day of pouring rain 48 hours later. I just sat on the couch and watched it through the fly screen, rain, rain, don't go away. A steady, soft, pitter patter all the beautiful day.

So coming home to fried leaves and wilted, struggling bushes that had been, if not rocketing with growth when we left at least steadily getting stronger.

So, and I didn't expect to be saying this before I got too old and doddery to manage the place, now we are seriously discussing moving.

I don't know where or when but one of the key criterion is going to be rainfall.

There has to be some.

Happy New Year!

Work worries about four letter words

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 23:11:58 GMT

I used to like catching up on the reading of LJ at work. I would never post from work 'cos that would be risking my privacy but reading my FL over coffee was a pleasure.

Note I said was.

Alas Brimbank Library has switched from the faithful Content Keeper to the more vigilant Mail Marshall who tells me that LJ is full of 'Adult content', innapropriate language and that my attempt to access such filth has been logged.

It doesn't like Yarn Harlot (a pure as the driven snow knitting blog) either, but at least it's obvious where the problem there is.

Currently reading: Thud by Terry Pratchett

Be careful what you wish for

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 22:29:47 GMT

And it rained.

Oh my, my, did it rain. Wonderful pounding on the colourbond as I woke at 2 am to wonder why the front verandah light was on and shining in the bedroom window. (We close the curtains only on winter nights, to keep in the heat, as privacy is not an issue.) Thinking muzzily that I must somehow have turned on the outside house lights when turning off the gatepost light after L got home from the CFA around 9 I staggered out into the kitchen and found him checking for incipient flooding.

Our home has flooded in the past thanks to the 1" of fall between the front and back of the property. This being one of the many cases in life when a mere inch is an amazing thing. Hence the dry creek bed, installed as a matter of some urgency, to divert the water along the side of the house and away towards the back of our little patch of paradise. You can see pics of this in the last entry, the ducks are walking along it and the puddlet where they began their swim is the current terminus after which the water finds its own level: and aims for the garage.

Just behind the garage is the temporary sanctuary for the hen and her 8 little cuties.

Which is why I was to be found standing in the rain, at 2.11am, pointing my torch into their cage and checking to see if any fluff balls were in danger of being swept away by the flow.

(We do have plans to extend the dry creek to the back of the property but the Wild Child's orthodontist beat us to our shekels.)

Currently reading: Nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Currently listening to: Country of the blind by Christopher Brookmyre (Funny man, clever, biting, equisite turn of phrase. The Pratchett of thrillers.)

More natural wonders

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 04:07:11 GMT

I'm going to go back to faffling on again really soon, I promise.

In the meantime, last Thursday, (yup, still catching up) I phoned home during my coffee break at work (as you do, 4-8pm, wanted to say Hi to the offspring as well as the spouse) and he says:

L: Guess what? Guess what's happening here and it's bewdiful...

Me: Rain?!?

L: Well, yeah, but that's not what's bewdiful!

M: It's not?

L: Well, it is, but that's not the point! We have ducks! Wild ducks on the back pond.

M: The back puddle?

L: Yeah and then they walked up the side of the house, through your geraniums,

and then kinda wandered off. And I have pictures to prove it.

And here they are.

Magic

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 01:42:34 GMT

We see one of these in our yard maybe once in 18 months, they rarely come down from the trees during daylight and we've never gotton close enough for a pic like this before:

And continuing the theme:

The Old English game bird was sitting on 8 eggs and ALL of them hatched! So we moved the new family from her clever little hidey hole behind the colorbond and into quarters we can secure at night:

She has two black, two brown, three yellow, and a white-ish one with a black stripe running down its head and back as if a child had used a paintbrush on the feathers - you can see it over on the right - and here is a brown that wasn't quick enough to run and hide:

The mother is such a little hen for so many chicks, can't wait 'til she braves the yard with them in tow. That'll be a picture to share!

Currently reading: Nickled and dimed: On (not) getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

How green was that valley, or, what a time did we have

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 22:52:50 GMT

The paperwork says Champagne Set which is so much kinder than Obsessive Knitters and Yarn Hounds and we meet once a month at each other's homes. The husband of one of our number had the good fortune to be off overseas and she invited us all to a sleepover in their weekender in the Otway Ranges the weekend before last. And I came home so relaxed I'm still catching up.

This is the view from the veranda:

Very different from Long Forest Rd on account of the green.

Bacchus Marsh is market gardening territory, sure there are cattle farms at both ends of my street and you pass by a small herd of sheep as you drive down the Avenue of Honour on your way into town but these are the exceptions. Orchards and acres of lettuce are the most common sight around here. Although pick-your-own strawberries are becoming a big deal I notice, where there used to be one farm running this as a summer sideline, now there are three.

The Otways are dairy country, lest the term 'ranges' give you delusions of mountain tops it would be fairer to say they are chubby little hills. However The Otway Chubby Little Hills lacks cachet and would take up too much room on a map.

Take a walk down the slope beyond the veranda and that's water down there. Water. Amazing!

Turn around and look back:

to the homestead.

Walk around past the Billabong and really get the flavour of the place:

it's so pretty.

And the scuffling noise under the tree?

an echidna trying to hide.

The plan went something like this: Saturday: arrive, knit, eat lunch, knit, visit the Studio at Tarwandcort and lust over Wendy Dennis' hand dyed multi-coloured yarns, part with many shekels, return with an empty wallets and too much yarn to knit in a month of Sundays, knit, eat dinner, knit. Sunday, knit, breakfast, knit, go into Colac (the nearby township) for lunch at Duffs, say goodbye to those who had to leave, return, knit, dinner, knit.

A person should have finished a jumper after all that, no? NO. Too much talking, too much drinking of our namesake, and too much perusing of people's latest purchases from Artisan Books, Borders and the lovely Marsha over at the Needlearts bookshop and far, far, too much time oggling the beautiful scenery.

Lots of wildflowers:

A native violet.

White, er, things.

Georgeous yellow, ah, flower.

Pinkish thingos.

Brown and yellow watzits.

And just for perspective, that's my size 7, all of these gorgeous little wildflowers were exactly that: little.

And a parrot in a gum tree.

Currently reading: E is for evidence by Sue Grafton

Chick pic

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 23:44:13 GMT

I remember a while back vrya suggesting that what we need is a mind to LJ dumping process when I was saying that I'd written an entry every day for the last week: in my head.

This week qualifies as much the same. It is one of journaling's ironies that the times when you have the most interesting things to write about are the times when you don't have five minutes to fire up the pc and log on, let alone wax lyrical about events. Naturally when nothing is happening and life is toddling along in pleasant routine one has hours to find the most perfect turn of phrase to describe how much nothing much is happening.

Anyway. Here he or she is,

our first and so far only chick at one day old. (S/he's not cute and fluffy like this anymore, mind, a week is long time in the life of a chook.)

This weekend I worked 9-5 on Saturday, and cooked a roast in 30C heat on Sunday (I'd promised Dad a roast - he's not eating right - and a promise is a promise). But last weekend, last weekend was special and I'll cover that tomorrow, by which time I hope to have emptied my email and caught up on my FL.

Currently reading: Why we buy: the science of shopping by Paco Underhill

Awwwwww....Spring is sprung

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:33:57 GMT

Our first:

Not fluffy yet 'cos it's so close to hatch time the feathers are still wet.

There are four more eggs under her and we recently discovered:

that the Old English Game hen has gone broody and cleverly managed to keep her nest hidden from us long enough to amass eight eggs. Alas the Old English Game rooster left this mortal perch for the Great Chookhouse in the Sky last year and Mars has been jumping her ever since, ergo the eggs will be fertile but the offspring will be of no particular breed.

Given that about half seem to hatch successfully we're in for an interesting time when the yard is full of chiclets and the trees are full of hawks.

Currently reading: Blood trail by Tanya Huff

My place in space...

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 03:13:47 GMT

Picture the scene, no, here let me help, courtesy of Ellen the Happy Snapper:

This is my spot in the lounge room, my corner of the couch, pooled in the light of the standard lamp so that I may knit in the evenings without disturbing (overly) our family viewing. The little table is cluttered with knitting books, craft magazines and vids of things of interest only to me (4 eps of The Canterbury Tales at the moment) that I don't want 'accidentally' erased. There is just enough room left on this table for the placing of a coffee cup or wine glass, depending on the hour of the day. The basket on the floor holds my works in progress.

Ahem, so here's a picture of the scene.

Now join us: it's Saturday night, we are watching The terminal and my peripheral vision picks up movement. I eye the small black shape perambulating towards my ankles, and to the amusement of all, leap up, whip off my whiffy, aged, mocassin and proceed to belt it dementedly at the carpet until the tiny, but agressive, bull ant, that was marching at me with intent, is a pulverized scaterring of its component parts. ('Cos those bastards bite.)

Twenty-five minutes later, more action in the shadows of the lounge. This time it's a small spider suiciding by seeking the light. A whitetail. You know, the ones that can cause necrosis of the skin with the poison of their bite? Up I jump, mouldering mocassin in hand and much whacking and thumping later there's another exoskelton scattered around to vac up when the mood to aquire housewifely points makes a rare appearance.

Flash forward, the movie is reaching its heartrending climax - and a millipede goes from one side of my field of vision to the other. Another poisonous little visitor.

This time I lift my feet to the ottoman, shriek like a banshee, and get my husband moving.

I draw the line when we get past 8 legs.

Yair, Orstrayliyah. Wonderful country.

Currently reading: Blood trail by Tanya Huff

Killer Korma

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 05:58:01 GMT

Whew.

We text messaged the Lady of the House on Tuesday to ask if she'd recovered from the after effects of Saturday's wicked curry and heard nothing.

Unusual.

Thursday she 'phones us to say that she'd just been released from Hospital...

Where she'd been residing since Sunday arvo.

That curry burnt the lining of her stomach.

I didn't know such a thing was even possible.

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:38:54 GMT

We spent the weekend at Buninyong, a place I would have described as a small township outside of Ballarat but which L informs me is a suburb of Ballarat so I stand corrected, (yet again), with friends on their 17 acres of farmlet.

I took the camera along planning to bounce, or maybe crawl depending on the amount of Merlot consumed with dinner, out of bed and go a-wandering to take happy snaps of an area that is green and fertile and therefore of interest to me, surrounded as I am by spiniflex, succulents and scrubby bush.

Alas when we rose the Lady of the house was ill with what she was hoping was indigestion rather than something less curable. Now while I felt fine when horizontal, admiring the view through the bedroom window

after 10 minutes of vertical perambulation I was joining her in the aches and pains department. Now that's what you call a killer curry, a violent vindaloot indeed, and typically neither of the menfolk were bothered by it.

Their property is not bush, and populated by horses,

assorted dogs and cats,

and donkeys, lying down in the lower paddock.

I did manage a sad llittle wander around the house garden by the time they were standing up.

Our friends have recently returned from participating in the annual HOG riders run to Uluru and as we've never travelled to Australia's heartland we were very much interested in their pics. It looked fantastic, all that red dirt, all that nothing as far as the eye can see and the camera can record, those incredible skies. The colours defy description. And Coober Pedy with the hotel hacked out of the rock? Fascinating.

Gotta say though, you wouldn't get me to go all that way on a bike, I don't care how good the bike and how padded the seat. (heh!)

We came home avoiding the Western Freeway by looping around through the tiny towns of Elaine and Meredith, places that make Bacchus Marsh look positively cosmopolitan by comparison.

Spent the rest of Sunday groaning and recovering - yes it was the curry, no it wasn't a hangover, dammit I do know the difference - and thus lost Monday to all those things I was supposed to do on Sunday arvo. Such is life.

Currently reading: Death masks by Jim Butcher

Balmy days of spring

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 02:16:26 GMT

Spring, and the days are warming, the breeze is soothing, and the Sussex Light hen has gone broody:

She has 5 eggs under her huffy little behind!

Paid employment consumed the better part of this week and housework the rest, today is so gloriously sunny I feel gulty for sitting here and answering my outstanding mail.

Soooo, here's hoping your weekend is as good as mine!

Currently reading: C is for corpse by Sue Grafton

Continuing the gardening theme.

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:21:47 GMT

Round the corner from the pond re-construction,

lies the bed of cheap and cheerful colour:

little stalks and cuttings of geraniums and pelargoniums begged, cajoled, conned and purloined from friends and strangers,

That are not little stalks anymore.

Although Mischief the cat is stalking something on the left there...

(Notice how dry it is here, there's no green just a gazillion shades of parched brown. We watched the Pilot Guide to Ireland three nights ago and I'm still bedazzled by all that glorious green. No sunshine in the whole hour of viewing, mind, grey skies and rain abounding. I remember rain....)

Currently reading: Dirt cheap: life at the wrong end of the job market by Elizabeth Wynhausen

Just finished: Medium by Alison Dubois

Comes the summer

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 04:06:07 GMT

And the first rose of the season is the lovely Cymbeline:

A fragrant David Austin Rose that is thriving despite being Eddie's first piddling place when he exits the house at Warp 10 first thing each morning, with no regard for the limbs of the person foolish enough to open the door for him.

Speaking of Eddie,

here he lies before the window, while through the window is a native duck:

inspecting our pond improvements

We decided it would be more attractive to look through the window and see water rather than dry, sandy, brown earth.

So the lower shallow beachy level that feeds into the dry stream is slowly being dug into a pool capable of holding water and goldfish.

Water features are soothing things. (L disagrees. After a week of hoofing and hacking away at the concrete consistency clay to deepen the pool, he's not feeling soothed. Stiff and achey and possessed of twinges in places he'd forgotten he owned, and far from soothed.)

(Heh.)

Stash reduction

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 01:24:30 GMT

Ftp Success!

What does a woman do when she loses her online connections and has time that would have been frittered away happily wandering through LJ land?

Why she attacks those UFO’s, that’s what! And now I have my ftp to Ozemail re-established, here for your amusement are my efforts.

Started this last year as veggie knitting, Sally Melville’s Where’s the opaque? sweater from her book The knit stitch.

Easy, mindless knitting that looks better on:

and is incredibly comfortable to wear.

I bought this angora 9 years ago to make one of those fluffy puffy late ‘80’s designs, got sidetracked and pulled out the half back – which was the sum total of my progress – two years ago. Pebble beach from Interweave Knits seemed like an attractive use of the yarn but halfway through shaping the armhole I realized that I had committed the greatest knitting faux pas of all: not checking the gauge.

(That would be the finished back on the left, the partially complete front look odd because it has a pouch pocket under construction and Mischief-the-boy's-birthday-moggie is investigating.)

Alas I ought to be knitting the next size up. Or dieting.

Seriously considered living with sausage skin tight armholes but had an attack of conscience and frogged to the start of the armholes, adjusted the rate of decrease and it might fit me, if not, Ellen is a growing gal.

This:

this is my nemesis. Have been nibbling away at this for no less than 6 years. The yarn is Rowan denim and it is just like knitting shredded jeans. There is no pleasure in the doing of it at all y’all. This is a novelty yarn inasmuch as you must knit it oversize and wash it in very hot water before sewing up as, like old fashioned denim, it will shrink.

Looking at the size of it – and yes I am knitting this to gauge – it will need to do a mind boggling amount of shrinking to be anything less than a dress for me.

Fortunately this is a fisherman’s gansey style of pattern and therefore by definition unisex. And the boy’s favourite colour is blue. And at 13 he’s starting to sprout.

Unfortunately after cheerfully casting off the collar I reached in to the yarn basket with sleevage in mind only to realize that the remaining 4 balls of yarn will not cut it. I knew I wouldn’t get the same dye lot after 8 years (yeah, I had it in the stash for two years and on reflection sincerely wish I’d left it there) but if the dyes don’t even out in the wash the sleeves will exhibit a rather unique striping amongst the patterns at the top.

And the scarf

was just fun, fun, fun. One ball of Noro something or other and the pattern a freebie Wendyknits.

Tomorrow pond pics. And the first rose of the season.

Ahhhhhh.

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 06:08:00 GMT

Short and Sweet

Telstra fixed the phone line
The pc was rebuilt
My spouse replaced the modem
My son exhibits guilt.

We had the triple whammy there, hard problem to solve when there are so many factors gone buggy at once. Have lost my address book. (We did save it before the rebuild but alas and alack, the virus appears to have corrupted our ability to open the disc.) Ditto my Favourites.

Annoyances abound: have spent the last two hours downloading CoffeCup's free ftp program only to find it hardly recognisable as the same fine free idiot proof tool that won my heart all those years ago, nope, upgrades have taken place. Can I get the thing to upload pics to Ozemail? Can I get the damn thing to connect to anything for that matter? Not on your nelly.

::sigh::

And Semagic? Got me to the edge of tears, it's easy enough to install once you find the download: finding the download, that was the challenge.

Enough with the whinging has everyone seen this by now?

Gakked from Anj's blog via Norma

another type of MEME

1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, liposuction and air conditioning.

2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still llegal.

5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Brittany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans...

Re-post this if you believe in legalizing gay marriage

Long story short: a heartfelt lament

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 03:08:31 GMT

(To the tune of Money for nothing)

I have no
I have no
I have no internet

My son is
So lucky
He’s not been throttled yet…

Yair!

It ain’t working
So much for Tel-stra
Took a month just to re-a-lise

“It ain’t working!?!”
We needed linesmen
To rebuild the whole street’s R. C. M.

But it still ain’t working
Now the line’s fixed
Took us three weeks just to track down why

It still ain’t working:
Boy’s been to a porn site
Picked up a bonus with the boobs ‘n’ bits

Chorus:

We gotta fix our infected hard drive
We can’t down load a fix ‘cos we’re offline
Our poor pc is completely cac-tus
As the virus eats up all that’s mine

Whoo!

It ain’t working.
Clever. Hidden
We’ve got no option but to rebuild now

It ain’t working
The boy is sorry
(Not as sorry as he’s gonna be!)

(Repeat chorus)

It ain’t working
- I miss Live Journal -
Getting bored now with repeat TV

It ain’t working
See you later
When the rebuild is our history

(Repeat and fade)

I miss my
I miss my
I miss my internet…

365 days and counting down.

Sun, 29 May 2005 02:40:30 GMT

Catch up 1: Milo

L wanted to get the same excavator who dug out the septic system 4 years ago, hunting through the local directory looking for "his first name begins with ‘D’’ didn’t seem promising but he lucked out and Dean arrived with his bulldozer at 2.40pm.

A kind man, he asked where, I said there, but knowing very little about the maneuvering capabilities of such large machinery, offered a couple of other spots less tree-shaded in Milo’s paddock.

I know how pathetic this sounds but he then dug out a beautiful hole in exactly the spot we wanted. Straight sided, flat bottomed. He did not need to take such care, but he did. And then he very gently nudged Milo in and he wound up resting as he would have if we’d been able to place him in ourselves.

Dean is missing several teeth, oozes blokey-ness, and could not have been more compassionate if he’d been the Dalai Lama.

Catch up 2: Work

Life moves in mysterious ways, but the one consistent thing about working for BLIS is that they are so disorganized when it comes to staffing. I think it’s because they have to go through the Council departments and maybe there’s a swag of committee meetings, forms and procedures.

Anyway, long story short. I will be working 5/7 for the next four months plus 1/4 Saturdays. Not looking forward to what this is going to do to our family life and routines. Certainly the craft group were gratifyingly sorry that I won’t be around. (It’s my chocolate cake, I know it, but leave me to my fantasies that it’s me not that moist, rich, flourless wonder that they were sorrowing over. We all need our fantasies.)

I had two days notice to wrap my mind around this offer, but they’re - as always - stuck for someone with the skills, so there I am, at the bottom of the barrel being scraped up yet again. This was proposed on Thursday and I’ll be starting this Tuesday. They’ve offered me the hours of the desperate-to-please: 9.45-3 for four days and 2-8 on Thursdays.

I’ll be on contract, which is a first. This switches me from casual rates to the flat rates of the employee so I need to read the fine print. I checked with payroll and I’ll get about a week’s paid leave at the end of it and will be entitled and I do quote here ‘to a small amount of paid sick leave’. Wow. Luxury.

Perversely I’ll have more time to catch up on LJ during coffee breaks at work than I have had for the past two weeks where home has been a bit of a revolving door, but would be loathe to post from work and suspect that my evenings are about to become a morass of domestic trivia.

I’ll certainly be stopping the moussakas and serving up more supermarket chooks.

Catch up 3: Garden.

We planted 95 bulbs this morning. 75 daffs and 20 hyacinths. We planted the 50 Iris bulbs last week (thank you so very much Dad) across from the dry creek bed that swings around past the family room. There’s the remains of a garden bed there that still holds a cotoneaster and some tough-as-old-boots succulents. Now there will be colour. And the kind that will naturalise and go forth and multiply as the years pass. We hope.

A mystery package turned up on the front doormat 6 weeks ago, stuffed with bulbs and a receipt. I knew I wasn’t responsible, I knew L would have used the credit card and the receipt told me cash, so it was either Dad or some kind of glitch at Bulb Express causing the pc to spit out a generous error in our favour. The odds of the later? Infinitesimal. The odds of the former? Especially since I had been looking at his catalogue while we had had morning tea at his kitchen table two weeks previous?

Very kind and generous. We have 25 Dutch Iris in blue and 25 in mixed colours. The hyacinths are mixed and in the ground around the chestnut tree (stalk, it’s a stalk that will one day be a magnificent tree I’ll grant you but to refer to it as a tree at present beggars the imagination) because hyacinths need to be lifted over summer so we wanted them in a confined space where we couldn’t forget they’d been planted.

The daffs have all been planted in the centre of the circular drive. 20 came labeled as a bag of yellow which we’ve kept together for a splash of sunshine; 15 Palmares - these are those incredible pink ones - which we’ve planted along with the 25 mixed doubles to keep the exotics together, and the 25 mixed are further around the circle.

We wet the ground in order to dig it, wet it after we’d dug it and still the earth was rock solid and dry 3 inches down. Here’s hoping daffs are tough. We know these will naturalise ‘cos about three years ago Dad gave me several pots of flowering daffs to brighten things up around here and when they died down we planted them in the centre, which is why I was rabbiting on to Dad about adding more colour to it all those weeks back.

Catch up 4: Psychics

Last Friday L had his cards read and has cheerfully informed me that we will choose to leave here during the next 12 months. Please note ‘choose’, she said that things will be going well and we will want to move.

I stood up from planting our 95 bulbs this morning, eyed the rose garden that is just getting past the struggling stage, eyed the rose under which Mum’s ashes lie, and the three new Alister Clarke roses in pots patiently waiting for the nearby piles of chook poo to lose their bite and provide a flower bed and said, "it’d have to be something amazing to make me want to move, I want to watch these roses grow, I want to see these bulbs take over the centre here in a sea of sunny colour."

So there we have it on record.

The psychic said.

365 days and counting down.

::snorfle::

Catch up 5: Friends lists.

Oy, I cannot catch up. Please understand that I have faithfully read every post by everyone I friended since day 1. I’d come back from holidays and spend a week catching up. Well this time around I’m a fortnight behind and compromising.

I’m going to backtrack through the folks who comment regularly, probably make some wildly out of date comments myself, skip the rest and start regular reading from today.

Currently reading:
A stroke of midnight by Laurell K Hamilton
Low-Carb made easy by John Ratcliffe

(Not much of a contrast there. Hah!)

Finished after three weeks of sneaking in a page here, a paragraph there and a chapter sitting in waiting rooms: With no one as witness by Elizabeth George.

Aching to open:

One shot by Lee Child. (Reacher rides again!)

Milo

Mon, 23 May 2005 01:24:45 GMT

Was such a gift, such a pleasure to have around. Rather like an oversized puppy, albeit a puppy who thought he was a stallion.

Yesterday morning he had colic which is never an easy thing for an equine to recover from. The Vet was called and came post haste, administered painkiller, sedative and a stomach full of glop designed to get his impacted bowel moving again.

The she came back two hours later, and for the final visit at 6 when he was put to sleep to stop him suffering anymore.

He was such a feisty, affectionate beast and his passing leaves a hole in our lives.

Also the guilt.

It doesn’t matter how much you know that he couldn’t be saved and that the choice to give him a peaceful, painless ending was the right one.

You still have to live with it.

Mon, 09 May 2005 02:51:41 GMT

I am on the mend. L is on penicillin. Alex is back at school but not 100%, and Ellen is beside herself that she never gets sick and has days off school.

Attempts to convince her that this is a good thing have failed. So we resorted to pointing out that when she had her tonsils and adenoids removed, haemorrhaged, and got a ride in an ambulance, well this was much more dramatic than four days off with a virus.

The little joys of parenting are without number.

Um, and Mother's Day was very pleasant and restful. Ellen presented me with a beautifully embroidered pillow she'd made at craft, and Alex gave me a most peculiar wooden plaque - made in woodwork class, except it's called Technology these days - that has half my initials carved out and stuck on it.

After that they inflicted breakfast in bed on me.

And then the day just slid by with me avoiding all the housework that I've now caught up on today.

Then I was breathalysed at 11am on my way in to the Marsh. I can understand running a booze bus at 11am on a Sunday morning, to catch those who partied harder than they realised on Saturday night and who are still driving around under the affluence of incohol but to be still squiffy at 11 am on a Monday would seem to me to be a task of heculean fortitude. There was a marked lack of forlorn looking sinners being booked when they ran me through and no more were in evidence when I made the return trip an hour later.

Good news for the sinners, I guess.

Currently reading: Heavenly pleasures by Kerry Greenwood

Feeling like history

Fri, 06 May 2005 07:21:08 GMT

I’ve had one of those virusy/sinusy things for the past week and a half, except that for the first three days I just took panadeine for the pain when my head threatened to split and didn’t realize that the headache was entirely in the area of the face where Doctors kind of press with their fingers before muttering ‘ah, sinusitis’. When the penny dropped - after some personal face pressing - I ratted through the medicine cabinet and found an antique packet of Sudafed.

Monday I went to the Chemist for a refill and my, my, how old was my packet?

Sudafed now comes in four different blends:

1. Pseudoephedrine + paracetamol, (paracetamol really takes the edge of things for me, the whole world becomes a fuzzy, friendly place: paracetamol makes me understand why people take drugs),

2. Pseudoephedrine + antihistamine (doesn’t matter what they packet says the antihistamine that doesn’t put me to sleep has yet to be invented),

3. Pseudoephedrine + paracetamol AND antihistamine (now pseudoephedrine alone reduces my mind to fog, so this would be a triple whammy: foggy, dozy and flying), and

4. A day and night combination of the above cocktail.

I took the day and night and arrived home to realize that my new packet, although twice the size of the old variety, has a mere four day supply. The old packet? 7.5 days.

Progress.

Tuesday I surrendered, the boy had joined me on the sicklist and since I was taking him to the Dr, I double booked us. Now he’s on bed rest and I’m on penicillin.

Reading Report:

Finally finished: The wire in the blood by Val McDermid
Nearly finished: Hide and seek by Ian Rankin
Part way through: Heavenly pleasures by Kerry Greenwood.

And up to skip 160 on FL.