Back again

So I've had my little posting holiday, and now I'm nearly off to a real holiday. I'm going to Golden Bay and Nelson Lakes National Park soon, as long as Thomas stays well. Caught him licking his bits today, so I hope this was just grooming and not "I'm licking this because it's sore and blocked". I feel like a pervert, gawping at his bits to see if I can see anything inflamed down there. Not that I could see anyway because it's mostly covered in fur. And cats hate you examining their bodies, such private creatures as they be.
  Horrible experience yesterday. Went to buy a new swimming-costume. This is when a person discovers quite how fat she has become over the years. The overhead lighting doesn't help; harsh flourescents show up every little bobble and ripple of cellulite, and that blobby bit there, what the hell is that!? The back boobs are nearly as big as the front boobs now, it's like something from People of Walmart. Wonder if it's occured to the merchants that they'd sell a lot more if the dressing rooms were candlelit?

Holiday 2

Wrote the previous post while feeling a bit down. I'm going to take a two-week holiday from posting from today 16/11/12 and will be back after that. I'm taking some nice rose pictures so will put these up then. The roses are really good this year, perhaps because of our super-cold winter.

Holiday

Going to take a holiday from posting for a while. I've reached the stage where the internet bores me, knew it would happen. Sick of all the trash and bad news and just unrealness of it all. I'll try and do real stuff instead. Instead of writing about it. Might come back or kick the whole thing in the guts forever. Oorooo.

FLUTD

Thomas has been away at the vet's for a few nights. I noticed on Monday night that he was having difficulty peeing, so it's off to the emergency vet, who diagnosed Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease. Oh good. A blocked urethra, in spasms. They had to catheterise the poor mite. And now he's come home, with a special diet, which he doesn't think much of. So I have to have two separate menus for each cat, and try to make sure that he doesn't eat any of Emma's. This new diet makes his pee alkaline, so that he doesn't form urethra-blocking crystals.
  He's a bit miffed that I've taken him away from his adoring public. He's totally charmed everyone he's met, the nurses, the vets, what a flirt! So now he only has one woman to adore him, and of course, typical male, it's not enough. It's like when you send your child to hospital and they come back thoroughly spoiled.
  So now I have two cats with chronic illness. (Emma has recurrent rhinotracheitis). I'd better find that rich hubby real fast. Or better yet, a vet.

My favourite men

Looking at my pinterest board of favourite men always cheers me up. Funny to think how many men have given me pleasure over the years, far more than I've ever slept with. From Tim Curry to the Dalai Lama, Ewen McGregor to Oscar Wilde.  They're my stable of wonderful stallions, talented, sexy, sensitive and intelligent. The pick of the crop, the creme de la creme. Luvly boys, all.

Lyrics for Envy of angels

Thought I'd transcribe these; they seem oddly appropriate to this city at this time.

Look over there, you used to say
The shape of the land beneath the street
Ridges and valleys and underground streams
You have to know what's under your feet

So you can make things strong enough
To take the weight
The weight of all the people
That haven't been born.

That's what you said to me
It's the envy of angels

Listen to that, you used to say
Can you hear someone drawing plans
Can you hear someone cutting wood
Can you hear someone walking the land

And all the time I wanted to be
Somewhere that wasn't so new
Where you didn't have to dig yourself out
A place to stand

Far away
From the envy of angels

Driving to your place after dark
The lights of the town behind these hills
I'm wanting so much to see you again
I can almost touch the new tarseal
In front of my wheels
They're painting the signs
Measuring the land
Marking the lines

Pouring foundations
Making it strong
For all of those people
That haven't been born

Just like you said
It's the envy of angels

Mutton Birds - Envy Of Angels - Envy Of Angels

One of the bargains I bought at the school fair was this Muttonbirds CD from 1996 'Envy of Angels'.
The title track is one of my faves, and I've been playing it a lot lately. youTube doesn't have a video but does have the song. The photograph is "Angel at Ahipara" by NZ photographer Robin Morrison (now sadly deceased) from his book called (I think) "From the road", which to me gets under the skin of NZ like no other photogaphy book before or since. The song reflects this too; the sense of movement, of newness, of emptiness, of building something 'for all those people who haven't been born'. That minor, soaring note on the word 'angels' gives me goosebumps everytime. Beautiful.

Bad stuff

Had a lovely long lie in this morning, after staying up till 1.30 watching 'Enchanted April' on youTube. Lovely movie, a bit twee, but pleasant (poor Miranda Richardson has to kiss Jim Broadbent, acting one of his most oafish roles). I must be getting old... once upon a time I would have thrown up at the sound of the word 'heart-warming", but now I'm getting like the old ladies who come into the library in search of 'a nice story, dear'. They've had a lifetime of sorrow and personal difficulty, and now just want to read a nice story, no sex, no violence, no dysfunction. (I think at one time we even had a booklist called "Nice novels" or somesuch.)
   You certainly don't get nice stories in the newspapers. Reading the Guardian yesterday about the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989. It now appears that police stood over witnesses to make them change their statements so that the police would look better. Eighty ambulances arrived but were not allowed into the ground, because police wanted to make the situation look like a riot gone wrong. An ambulance driver who removed part of the hoarding round the field to carry a victim to his ambulance was told by a policeman that he 'couldn't just vandalise stadium property'. It all makes horrific reading. Survivors suffered years of  post-traumatic stress; some killed themselves rather than live with the memories.
  And there's the ongoing saga about the paederasty of Jimmy Saville and the Beeb's atempt at a cover-up. And there's revelations that systematic child abuse took place in Welsh orphanages during the '70s, involving a highly-placed Tory politician, as yet unnamed. Two boys, 8 and 10, have been convicted for abducting and torturing two other boys, in eerie echoes of the James Bulger case - it just goes on and on.
   Is it any wonder that a person might want to read a nice story for a change?

Exploration Fawcett

I've just finished reading a book called "The Lost city of Z" by David Grann, about Colonel Percy Fawcett's search for a city reputed to be in the heart of the Amazon jungle. Fawcett was called the last of the Victorian explorers although he was active during the early years of last century. He was  physically tough, morally upright and totally obsessed with finding the truth of the many stories and legends about the existence of a large city/civilisation in the Amazon basin. He made several expeditions to the Amazon jungle, but disappeared in 1925, on an expedition with his eldest son Jack. Over the years there have been many searchers and many theories about what happened to Fawcett and his son, but the ultimate truth will probably never be known. His second son, Brian, searched for them in 1953, without success, and wrote a compilation of his father's papers, publishing them under the title "Exploration Fawcett" which was something of a sensation at the time. I read it when I was probably about 12 or 13; it was in a load of old Book Club books that someone gave to my Dad (along with "Seven years in Tibet" and "The long walk", both great adventure books). I was fascinated; it was very Indiana Jones, a combination of archaeology and exploration that greatly appealed to me.
    Grann's book doesn't really add much to what is already known, and wanders about a bit, but it's readable. The only really interesting part is at the very end, where the prevalent idea that the Amazon basin could not have supported a large civilisation is firmly knocked on the head.  What interested me was the idea that archaeologists were looking for the wrong things when they searched for a 'civilisation", envisaging monolithic built structures of stone, pyramids, temples and such, similar to the civilisations of Central America and Peru. They looked for vertical structures. But the Amazonian cities were horizontal in emphasis; plazas, roadways, bridges and moats. And of course, there's very little stone in the area. It's all alluvial and covered in forest, so structures were made of wood, which doesn't last. So what you're looking for might be there all the time, but is not recognized by you because your mindset tells you you're looking for something else.
PS. The archaeologist whose work is rewriting the story of civilisation in the Amazon is Michael Heckenberger. Google him, he's interesting.