Still going on...

Another little earthquake just gone by. 3.69, epicentred at Halswell, weight 5 tonnes, but I think the magnitude might get upgraded, it felt like more to me. Repeated quakes have left citizens of Canterbury finely calibrated; we can now guess within .5 of what the force was. We'll be able to rent ourselves out to third world countries who can't afford a seismologist, sort of bare-foot seismology, para-seismologists. (God, I do talk rubbish sometimes).
    Isn't it amazing how quickly all this data is collected now. Once upon a time there would be no way of knowing, just have to judge it by how much fell down. I use a website called Christchurch Quake Live, it's almost instant with good maps.
  So it's Halloween tonight. Such a silly idea, like Guy Fawkes Night, but even less relevant to New Zealanders. It's never been part of our culture here, but like all things American it has infiltrated through American TV and films. The kids see it and think its cool, and the merchandisers see that they can make money in a traditionally dead time retail-wise (if you'll excuse the pun). When I was in France many years ago, I was amazed at how the French really went for the Halloween thing, it doesn't seem at all chic, but I guess because it's American it's the thing to do. Dress your kids up as ghouls and send them door to door to beg from strangers - it's meaningless. And potentially dangerous too. I don't understand.

I've been thinking....

Yes, about you, you mysterious USA person. I have come to the conclusion that you are a CIA metacrawler, looking for certain words in  a certain order, so that you can alert the authorities in my home town that I might be planning something. Do you do this for all 11,319,732 blogs on the web? What a bomb, ooo sorry bore. Freudian slip there. Bet that's got your synapses and diodes racing - alarm bells ringing all the way to the Pentagon. By the way, how's that weather bomb going? And the bombe surprise you took to your grandma's bat mitzvah last week? I got to go now - the SIS are banging on my door.

Hello, you in the USA

Every time I post a new post, within minutes someone in the US looks at it. Is it the same person, who has my posts "pinging "?  Or are you a robot, or a spook from the CIA? Are you male or female? Young or old? You must love Blades of Glory and Monty Python, good jazz and gardening. Who are you? Come on sweetie. Send me a comment. Go on. Or perhaps you want to leave me wondering? Perhaps you are my muse, perhaps you laugh at me, perhaps you despise me. Perhaps I'd rather not know. If you send me a comment I'll send you a story, about the Power of Not Knowing.

R.I.P.

Had to say goodbye to an old friend today. My lovely lemon bush has carked it, probably because of the very cold temperatures this winter, plus the broken guttering dumping cold water on it repeatedly. So here is whats left, and the ultimate destination of us all; the rubbish bin. And the stump is still there. It might come up again, but I doubt it. The soil there is very wet. I've planted a little lavandula dentata there but it may be too wet for this too at the moment, until I get the guttering fixed. Lemons are so useful, for sweet dishes and savoury, drinks and sauces and cakes. I will get another one, but don't really have a sunny enough place now. Perhaps pot one, and then transfer it once the guttering is fixed and the shade from the pear tree has been trimmed away.

 

Here's one of the first roses, Mme. Pierre Ogier, a Bourbon rose with a real attar of rose fragrance. With my little bit of Carlton ware and a church fair doily.

 

Pumpkin 'Baby bear' planted on top of one of Thomas' rats. I also planted Minibelle tomatoes and two courgettes and a pepper 

 

Another nice iris, don't know what it's called.

Greetings

Hello to viewers in Ireland and Mali.

Piccys - garden mainly

 

Clematis paniculata. This is a NZ native,  a variety bred in Akaroa. I was going to plant it around the back against the neighbours trellis but  never got around to it;  I left it in its growbag under the plum tree and it just took off. Now festoons the plum tree, most prettily.

The vegetable garden, somewhat overtaken with flowers and herbs.

 

 

The plant stall at St Marks School Fair. I bought sweetcorn, pumpkin, eggplant and marigold plants. Beautiful day, also bought some magazines and CDs - lovely Tony Bennett who's singing as I write this. So much pleasure for so little money.

The irises. Also note how the blue delphinium is the same colour as the window sill

 

 

 

Aquilegia

 

Iris bed from the other direction

 

Nice pale foxglove

 

Magnificent 'Red rooster' cabbage and mahogany pansies

 

Aquilegia - the old-fashioned granny bonnets. I think these look like clusters of white swans performing a synchronised swim.

The High Line

http://www.thehighline.org/about/park-information

This is the link to a website about an extraordinary public park in New York City. Built on an old elevated railway line, it shows how something that was an ugly industrial feature can be recycled into something fascinating. Parks come in many shapes and sizes, but this must be one of the most unusual anywhere.
    Our rebuild of the city continues, the pace seems to be getting faster now. But as usual, the political issues of control and power are to the fore.  Consortia of the wealthy are busily plotting how they can become even wealthier.  Some of the new buildings, are, quite frankly, a disappointment. More of the same old dreary box-like stuff.  The architects complain that the new building strictures and codes (earthquake-safe) make it impossible to design anything that is not a functional box. I would have thought that only mediocre architects would claim this. I would have thought that a good architect will take limits and boundaries and find a way to use them to create something wonderful.  The strictness of the sonnet form didn't faze Shakespeare or Donne or Petrarch, just gave them walls to build against. But then, these men were geniuses; there seems to be a lack of genius in these days when everyone, no matter how pathetic, enjoys their few minutes of fame on youTube.

And have you read about the new Facebook and their promote programme? You won't see so much on your wall. Facebook have "broken" themselves but will fix it if you pay for more coverage. I don't quite get it but it's going to be death to non-profits and small businesses. It also means that you will see more stuff from big companies you 'like' and less from community groups and friends. So, for example, I still get all the posts from Canon cameras, but less from the High-Street Precinct or New Christchurch, both non-profits. Had to happen, I guess. The minute Facebook became a listed company was the minute they had to 'monetarize' the site (although no doubt this had been planned for a long time).  Read:
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friends_back
The question is of course, have Facebook just cut their own throat?  Is it so good that people will pay for it, or was its value only in its freeness?  Time will tell.

Dreams are free

Spent a good part of yesterday (yes, it rained all day again) looking at Italian real estate, mainly cheap old ruins that need major restoration. And I mean ruins. It's a bit cheeky really, selling off houses that aren't even liveable while you do them up,but I guess the agents are trading on the dream of that "little place" in Italy. Tuscany and Umbria are pretty much out of reach price-wise, but there's bargains in the less popular provinces - the south and east of the country. Judging by the condition of the farmland, these are properties that people have literally walked away from, now drowned in nettles and vines and self-seeded trees. Sad, really. Places in need of love and care. There's some beautiful places to be had, but you need the dosh to do them up, plus the chutzpah to enter the Italian property market and the balls to do a total house renovation in another language.
      What's good about Italy is that the ancient tradition of small peasant farms has meant that there are lots of small rural properties; here in NZ trying to find a small rural property is very difficult. We tend to run to large farms, and laws about subdividing these are strict. We have "lifestyle blocks" but these tend to be for wealthy people, who want somewhere for the daughters' ponies. They cost an arm and a leg. (The properties, the ponies and the daughters).
      I could sell everything and go and live in Italy, but I'd still need an income. I could sell something NZ in Italy, something they don't have over there, perhaps? Run a B&B? But I don't like people much. The idea is to avoid people as much as possible; I could be a hermit, the crazy straniera lurking in her ruin halfway up the Gran Sasso with her goats and cats. But it would be a long commute if I was hoping to keep my job here.
     So if anyone knows some cheap land with an acceptable ruin within commuting distance of Christchurch, let me know.

Trivial rant

Things I'm tired of on the Internet:
     - that 53 year-old Mom who discovered how to get rid of wrinkles and who has angered dermatologists worldwide. She pops up everywhere. And soon she'll be 54.
     - teenagers presenting their opinions on youTube as if they had a lifetime of experience to draw upon and know everything (especially if it's about black people or gay people or Muslim people)
     - people who neither sing nor play an instrument covering my favourite songs on youTube
     - people who post adverts for diets on Pinterest, pretending they are 'real' people not business touts
     - "cute" clips of babies having tantrums or worse being provoked into crying by adults who should know better
     - "cute" clips of kittens being terrified/angry/fighting with other cats, or imprisoned in crates
     - poor white trash showing how trashy they are - drunk, drugged, spitting chewing tobacco into a jug, girl-fighting, and getting it all on video so they'll get their fifteen seconds of fame
     - people who post stuff as "funniest ever..." and there's nothing remotely humorous about it
     - sites that offer 'free' stuff, if you have to give them your email address, street address, date of birth, marital status, bust size, inside leg measurement and how often you have a bowel motion
     - anything that moves, blinks, flashes or pops-up. (Notice that there isn't one that says "Don't go here! Don't go here!")

Isn't it odd how no-one ever phones you up offering to give you money? They always want you to give it to them.

Read my horoscope the other day. It told me that love was coming my way, and could be as close as the boy/girl/man/woman next door. So my choices are: (excluding the married/partnered)
  1. The special needs guy next door. He has a mental age of two, has Tourettes and is in a wheelchair
  2.  The old guy at the back of my place who used to attack his wife (now blessedly deceased, lucky her) with a knife
  3.  The odd woman over the road, but since I'm not gay and she always looks at me in a smilingly malevolent way, (probably muttering the Lord's prayer backwards) I don't think this is going to get off the ground either.
     Horoscope or horrorscape? You choose.

A grand day out

Took the day off today (day off listening to machinery that is) and went over to Orton Bradley Park at Charteris Bay. I particularly went to look at the rhododendrons. Orton Bradley holds the Canterbury Rhododendron Society's collection of plants, planted in an ideal site, shaded by conifers to give an acid soil, on sloping gravelly land for perfect drainage with a mill-stream running through it to keep the site cool in the summer (not that we get hot summers any more).

Orange dwarf iris outside the old house

The Society have also underplanted the area with cool-loving perennials - hostas, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots, ferns and the giant Lillium cardiocrinum, so its a good place to go and see what to do if you're thinking of a shade garden.

Morning light catches hosta leaves

The 'pole' at right is the old cardiocrinum stalk

Beautiful 'blue'

Cardiocrinum stalks tower into the "Himalayan mist"

Cardiocrinum seed pod

'Katherine Fortescue' - a delicious lemon sorbet

The light glows through 'Sunspray'

After enjoying the rhododendrons, I walked up to Big Rock, further up the valley.

View of Mt Bradley from lowland

Gnarly old manuka polished by many hands - handhold up on the Big Rock

Panorama from near the Big Rock - stopped to have a breather here.

The original farmhouse - now the Visitor Centre, back down near the entrance

Another rant about Mr Machinery and other jerks

    Had to leave the house today, Mr Machinery is having a real good go. What a moronic bastard. He's putting a lawn down, presumably with irrigation, so his way of doing this is to plough the area up at least fifty times. I swear, it's just not necessary. Unless he's drilling for oil or gold or thinks the remains of Pompeii are down there somewhere.  Even if he's thinking of cropping it with mangelwurzels or cannabis there's no excuse. There is absolutely no necessity for what he is doing; he just likes playing with machinery. On an eighth-of-an-acre section. If he wants to take up ploughing as a hobby, why does he not buy a lifestyle block? God knows he must have the money. Of course if anyone complains to the authorities, he has the perfect excuse ; he's completing a project. Oh yes, good bloke, it's DIY, so he's exempt from any semblance of cognitive thought. This could go on for years, in fact it has gone on for about three years, but on a much more irregular basis. He has either 1) a mental problem 2) more time and money than he knows what to do with or 3) an extremely small penis, in fact a microscopic penis. Wife and kids are conspicuous by their absence; no doubt they are living it up in some swanky apartment while he does this.
    Also had two hours of jungle music from the dreadheads over the road yesterday. Fine sunny day, I'd like to sit outside, well, yes I can, but only if I can block out boom, boom, booomph with my earplugs. Which I can't. Memo to self: buy new stereo so that I can blast the whole neighbourhood with Mahler's Fifth, or even better Wagnerian opera - almost no-one likes that. "The ride of the Valkyries" at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Yeah!
  Read a news piece yesterday that Christchurch people are getting angrier; people with no former records of violence are being done for assaults, etc. It's just the level of frustration is climbing. You go out for a drive or to go to work in the morning and the road is closed for fixing. Or you're detoured to a part of town you didn't want to go to. The few restaurants that are open are swindling their customers with high prices and poor food; went to a place the other day where the food was basically takeaway standard, it was as if just having it plated up and served by a waiter justified charging three times the price of a meal I would get at a fast-food outlet. Had some tourists in the shop the other day, and some scumbag had given them old currency for change; my colleague who is English said this happened to her when she first arrived in NZ. Shopkeepers hear a foreign accent and try it on. How petty. I suppose said shopkeeper goes home at night rubbing his hands, thinking "I really put one over on those dumb tourists! How smart am I! Got rid of fifty cents of old money!" Of course the earthquake was heaven-sent for fraudsters and crims, all sorts of opportunities presented themselves. Even our right-wing government's got in on the act, suspending democracy so it can push through its own little plans for privatization of everything; water, earth, air, you name it, they've Got A Plan. "Promise anything, but deliver nowt" has become their motto. And we've always thought that we were such nice people, governed by such nice people. New Zealand, I fear for you.
  Does anyone else feel that the world is rapidly filling up with jerks?
  I read today that the end of the Mayan calendar is just weeks away, so consequently is the end of the world. I'm afraid that my first reaction was "Can't come soon enough".

Pictures

Well, we're having what the meterologists call a weather bomb today - howling winds and sleety rain. Temperate climate, my foot. Might as well be in Iceland.
    Went outside briefly to get the mail and find Thomas, and saw that the beautiful iris 'Come again' (so named because it's supposed to rebloom in the autumn - never has in my garden) had opened overnight. It's iris season now in NZ. I bought quite a lot last year, so now I can enjoy them.

 

 

Bluebells under the pear tree

 

 

Dwarf iris taken on a sunnier day - don't know what these are called

 

 

Emma enjoys the woolly rug

 

 

 

 

 

Monty Python | Most Awful Family in Britain 1974 (part 2)

Thought I'd seen all of MP, but this is new to me and wonderfully bizarre.

The fun of growing older

Now I don't mean this in a sarcastic way. There is fun in growing older, particularly in terms of one's mind being more subtle than as a young thing, more able to appreciate nuance and things that are truly grown up. I'm reading Le Carre again, this time The Russia house, and it is so good. When I was younger I couldn't appreciate Le Carre, I wondered why people banged on about him so much, but now.... reading a clever writer is like being in the arms of the perfect lover; you trust him (or her) and he trusts that you trust him. I love the way Le Carre never panders to the reader, he doesn't always connect the dots; he trusts that you are clever too, and that he doesn't have to tell you things; you are clever enough to work things out for yourself.
  Other things that I've enjoyed as a grown up - the poetry of Emily Dickinson, which was completely opaque to me at eighteen. Cubism, jazz, and country music. The appeal of Audrey Hepburn. The blatant and open corruptness of politicians - this used to make me angry, which was quite pointless and merely gave me indigestion but now just makes me laugh, bitterly. One can gain enjoyment from the sheer ghastliness of others, it's sad but true. Yours, philosophically.

I laughed so much I cried

Very Funny Banned Commercial

Bad weather again

Yes, I'm getting sick of writing about it. We have the crappiest weather at the moment, I haven't done any gardening of significance since I don't know when. Stuck inside all day with two bratty cats and a load of ironing, not a fun day. I'd almost rather be at work, at least I'd be achieving something. I did find this nice advert on youTube though.

Indian advertising at its best

Rain, rain

I was going to go on a walk this afternoon, along the Avon River, with a group looking at where the new river park might be. This is the area which received some of the worst shaking/liquefaction during the quake, and where many houses have been or will be demolished. The group, Avon-Otakaro Network, are pushing for this area to be made into a public park, as a way of preserving the many heritage trees and gardens there.  But it's not very good weather-wise; a southwesterly front has just blown in. Typical spring weather, raining one minute, brilliant sunshine the next, "tears and smiles" weather, like a toddler having a tantrum then forgetting about it five minutes later. I've taken the day off to do the walk (normally this would be a work day), but it's too cold for me; I'm such a wimp. But fear not, no doubt I'll spend the rest of the day lacerating myself with guilt for being such a milquetoast-pantywaist-poor spirit. I'll have to find a particularly obnoxious chore to expiate the guilt. I must have been a Catholic nun in another life.

O Brother Where Art Though - The Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am A

Posted this before but deleted it by mistake. Love the blind guy, don't know who the actor is, he's just damn good. "Whooee, that was a mighty fine a-picking and a-singin'!". And the Pappy O'Dannel Flour Hour - I'm too young to remember those company-sponsored programmes on the radio, but that ol'timey stuff sure was good. Songs of salvation to soothe the soul.

Nigella Lawson: Chocolate Pear Pudding: Express

This is probably delicious. I know a lot of people adore Nigella, but I find her terribly smug and just a little patronizing, as in; "I know this is really simple but even you should be able to do it".

Pin it!

Been wasting time on Pinterest. Lots of people pinning stuff that turns out to be commercials touting for business, most notably in the weight-loss field. Pictures of buffed and muscly women in scanty clothing showing before and after pictures, with the same captioning on each pin. Click on to these and you'll get some commercial rubbish about a particular weight-loss programme or food, which then won't let you close the screen without shouting at you to keep reading. Pinterest needs to crack down on this or their whole thing will become totally commercial and totally worthless.
    The odd aspect is that these "personal testimonies" are often pinned cheek-by-flabby-jowl with recipes for fattening food, usually cakes or desserts. It's the same with women's magazines - a weight-loss article will be followed with a cooking special on chocolate cakes! Are we getting mixed messages, or is this some fiendish manipulation of our psyches? We'll get guilty about how much weight we're putting on, so we'll join some cockamamy 'programme', (and pay bucks for it - that's the important bit) but the cake recipes will keep us craving bad food so we can continue to feel guilty about our lack of self-control, our "badness". Never were so many manipulated by so few, so effectively.