Sometimes weird things just stay in your mind...

Talking to a friend yesterday, who told me that there is a kind of fungus which parasitizes ants. This fungus takes over the brain of the ant and makes it travel to areas where the fungus is found, presumably to act as some kind of vector for the propagation of the fungus. There's so much in the world about which we just don't know.
    Together we went on to extend this into the human realm. Just supposing you have a fungus, athletes' foot for example. The athletes foot could invade your mind and direct you to hang around at shoe stores or public swimming pools, anyplace that your athletes' foot could propagate itself to other feet. I really hope that no one grafts the ant-mind fungus DNA onto human DNA or this could be the situation we will be faced with, an athletes' foot epidemic. I also bet that no one has thought of this for a sci-fi movie. It would be a kind of like a zombie movie, with people dragged unwillingly by their feet into shoe stores to try on as many shoes as possible.
   This topic stayed in my mind last night, I don't know why. I don't even know why I've wittered on about it. Weird.

Books, etc.

I've just added a sidebar with titles of books I'm reading/have read recently. The 'etc.' means I'll include anything else like CDs or DVDs that I found enjoyable as well. Tried once again in several ways to get a revolver map, but unsuccessful. I keep getting a message that my script has illegal characters when I paste it. ("Illegal characters" makes me think of shady dudes in  hoodies selling drugs and knock-off goods.) Silly that I can get tacky pictures of nude women and quotes of world-shattering wisdom from Justin Bieber quite easily, but not something that I want. Even quotes from the Dalai Lama come with adverts. Ho hum, such is life.

Nothing much

 

Nothing much to write about. The weather has been really cold, and we had a cracking frost yesterday, minus 4 degrees. I went out in the garden today to start cleaning up the hydrangeas (is there anything drearier than old hydrangea heads?) but it was just a bit too cold. Really have to get started on the roses as well. Just a few early jonquils poking their heads up, but no way is it anywhere near spring yet.

 I went to a friend's place on Sunday to see the Hobbit movie. I love, love, love Bilbo's house! It looks so cosy and liveable, but I bet all that circular woodwork would be very expensive in real life. Love the dwarves, especially the gorgeous Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield. And James Nesbitt's wonderful accent. And Brett Mackenzie, one of the Flight of the Conchords, is unrecognisable as an elf. (The elves sort of annoy me, they're so very superior, and just a tad effete, I think).  It was great to see dear old Gollum again, too. He almost feels like an old friend. A toxic one.

PS. The picture is  a café in Vicenza, looking from the grounds of the Teatro Olimpico. I chose it just because it makes me think of warmth.

Scones and rain

 

In my latter years, I've become an ace scone maker. These are sultana scones fresh out of the oven. I've been making a lot of scones lately, because there's not much else to do. After the snow we have had rain. And rain. And rain.

 

The lawn is flooded and there is an attractive pond running the length of the garden. I'm hoping for ducks.

 

 

                Another pond has formed behind the garage. The garden looks bleak and drear.

 

Emma toasts her tummy

 

Going to have afternoon tea now, and watch a DVD of Jeeves and Wooster (the Fry and Laurie version) Love those deco interiors and costumes, and the theme tune is great. Very cheering on a dull arvo.
   Pip-pip, old things!

Snow

 

 

Well, at last it's snowing. The weather mavens have been predicting it for days, people have been rushing out buying up stocks of food (not me, I'm always prepared - raised by a Mum who was a girl guide). Work is cancelled today, as my Friday job is casual I can decide not to go. Last year I went in to work on a snow day, and it was scary. I have no real experience of snow driving, so it was just good luck that nothing happened. Thomas is fascinated by the snow, the way it comes down and disappears is magical. Emma is more pragmatic; it's just something to be dashed through on the way to the toilet plot, and got out of as soon as possible. So I'll probably stay in bed for a while, its cheaper than heating the living room all day. I've got an interesting book, The Little book by Selden Edwards, about time travel and fin-de-siècle Vienna, in which the protagonist meets Freud, Mark Twain and the child Hitler, plus his own father, grandfather and grandmother, but there's a few more twists in the tale as well. Plus I might start looking at all my art books again, and continuing to sort and chuck extraneous stuff, in the quest for a decluttered house.  Wish it was so easy to declutter the mind; I really think we should come with an off switch at the backs of our necks.

Today's pics

 

Here's a pretty primula that I bought the other day

 

 

Thomas and Emma brace themselves for the snowstorm

 

 

 

 

Line Ém Up - James Taylor LIVE!

Here's some lovin' man JT. Lyric and melody just perfect -enjoy.

Waiting

Ever thought how much time we spend waiting? There are those statistics that tell us we spend half our lives asleep, or 15 years eating, etc. but they don't estimate how much time is spent waiting.   
    Waiting for Godot or waiting for Google. Waiting for snow, or fine weather, or summer or Christmas. Or holidays, or home time. Waiting for buses and planes and taxis.
   Waiting to be born, waiting to die. Waiting for beginnings, waiting for endings. Waiting for the movie to start, waiting for it to finish. Waiting for someone to arrive, waiting for someone to leave, waiting for someone to notice us. We wait for inspiration, for revelation, for the Second Coming, for others to realise the truths that seem so self-evident to us. We wait collectively in queues and in worried hushed groups or as jubilant crowds waiting for the victors to march past. As individuals we wait at home alone or in the secret places of our own minds.
  And we wait to recover the profound thought that we had just before the cat walked across the keypad.

Summer and sewage

We're supposed to get heavy snow any day now, so I thought I'd post this nice summer picture of the teepee and vegetable garden at Okuti Valley Ecostay.  Heaven on earth.
http://www.okuti.co.nz/

I'm thinking of changing the blog's appearance a bit, perhaps a different background colour, and try again to get a map showing where you all are in the world, plus some more links to other websites.

They've been relining our sewage pipes today. Started at 7.00 this morning and still working now. I guess I'll have to go back to using a bucket like I did during the earthquakes, as we're not allowed to flush until all is fixed. At least it's not snowing yet, so I can go and dig a hole for the solids. There's a very interesting book called The Humanure book, that goes into the whole question of what to do with poo. Last time I looked it had been digitised so is available full text on the Internet. Some rather controversial ideas about human waste; it's not the totally toxic stuff that we've been raised to believe. During the earthquakes, a doctor at the local Department of Health wrote an article in The Press newspaper, saying that the way to dispose of poo was to bury it in shallow holes, not more that 10cm deep, and in a variety of sites. This is because microorganisms that will decompose the poo are most active in this depth, and will quickly render harmless any bacteria; if you bury it deeply it will not decompose and greebies will eventually leach into the water table if concentrated in one area.
  There you are. Lynwaho, a source of information on everything.

Celebrity

The celebrity magazines are really a no-go area for me, but some kind soul donates them to my workplace so I sometimes find myself flicking through them against my better judgement. They are like snack food for the mind (or junk food more like), tempting but lacking in substance and nutritive value. Unfortunately, I'm the sort of person who reads the back of the cereal packet at breakfast; show me a line of print and I'll read it. So now it's a race between Kim Kardashian and the Duchess of Cambridge. Which one's baby will attract the most attention? No doubt every pang and groan and drop of blood will be wrung from Kim's parturition experience, whereas the Duchess' childbirth will be more discreet; we will get to see the finished product not the gory process. And that's how it should be.

    Just imagine if we had a magazine that celebritised the great thinkers of our age? It would be called "Thought!" and would have headlines "Wrong! admits Dawkins"  "Space/time a human construct! says Stevo" "Are you a Neanderthal or a Cro-Magnon? Do our quiz". Hmmm.

   Had an amazing nightmare this morning, something along the lines of being trapped in the World Trade Center, rescued by a flying tank, dropped into the sea, rescued again, then finally buried alive in the basement of a collapsing building while being given a commentary by a shonky builder as to why the building was collapsing (because his shonky mate had used sub-standard lumber). Whew! All in full colour, surround-sound 3D state of the art CGI.  Have our dreams and nightmares been invaded by cinematographic technology? Mine certainly have. What a trip! Who needs drugs?

The Poke

 

 

Here's a nice picture that I took some time ago. It's Anemone nemorosa in the rock gardens at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. The light was perfect that afternoon, just slanting through the flowers, not possible to take a bad shot.
  I've been laughing my head off tonight over some things on a site called The Poke (subtitled "time well wasted"). A Facebook friend posted "25 things we miss about Scotland" - who said the Scots were dour? Very, very funny, if you have the same sense of humour as moi. I prefer to cry laughing than just to cry, so this is wonderful medicine for what ails you. It does help if you have a couple+ glasses of wine. I have a nice Waipara Springs Pinot noir at the moment, not expensive but pleasant, and I have paired it (as they say) with a supermarket pizza, properly crisped on a pizza plate, and a homemade green salad. I am beginning to see why people get so carried away with food. I've never been a real dilettante, but am starting to care more about it now there are so few other pleasures available to me. I've come to enjoy my own cooking and take more time over getting it right; it's such a waste of time to cook something that is bland or substandard. Home cooking is far better than restaurant cooking, at least the sort of restaurants that I can afford to go to, so why not make the effort and really enjoy it. The next step will be to invite persons to dinner, but that is a bit of a challenge for me, because it has a social aspect too. And I can bet that the first time I invite someone will be the time I cook a truly awful meal.

Can't be bothered

In a moment of idiocy I signed up for 14 days free access to Ancestry.com.
     Like a lot of people, I'm curious about my forebears, particularly my father's father's side of whom I know nothing. I soon realised how utterly time-consuming researching my ancestry would be. Going through thousands of files looking for a particular person is like searching for a needle in a haystack. And my forebears were ordinary people; they didn't do anything wonderful except survive long enough to have descendants. I saw the BBC series "Who do you think you are?" which was fascinating and sometimes sad or funny. (Julian Clary's parents exhorted him not to find any German ancestors, and, lo and behold, one of his great-grandmothers was German; the olds were not very pleased), but unlike the celebrities on that programme, I don't have an army of highly skilled genealogical researchers at hand. So I've flagged it away.  
     The discouraging thing is that the records don't go back far enough. I would love to go back through my maternal line, right back to the Ice Age, but of course this is impossible. What did my cavewoman ancestress look like? Saxon me? Medieval me? Tudor me? And all one can find out from the records that do exist is names, marriage partners, habitations, occupations and offspring. Unless you are fortunate enough to have letters or diaries you can never find out the interesting stuff - how did they feel about their lives, and what sort of people were they? How did they adapt to the things that happened to them? It's just not possible to know.
     

I don't know how she did it

 

I've just finished this book about the Women's Institute's wartime endeavours in Britain. I was drawn to it firstly by the title, and then by the photo of the women in their flowered dresses and pinnies, but it's proved to be a fascinating insight into the work of country women during the war. Far from being only 'jam and Jerusalem" they were a force to be reckoned with. Allied to the Land Army and the Ministry of Food they were an integral part of the Dig for Victory campaign. They did manufacture an astonishing 12 million pounds (that's lb not sterling) of jam, using up fruit that would otherwise have gone to waste. As so many 'non-essential' industries closed during the war, the WI stepped up and produced all sorts of consumer items, many to be sent to the troops, but also for domestic use. Potato baskets, camouflage nets and knitwear by the ton. But the WI was also a great comfort to women during the hard time of war, offering sisterhood and support to women isolated on country farms, left to cope with men's work as well as their own. Those women worked HARD. Most farms had no fridges and often no running water in the house. Everything, everything, had to be done by hand; they couldn' t just pop out to the supermarket or down to the café for a coffee and croissant.

And the book offered what I consider to be the final comment on the Second World War. One woman wrote of her thoughts: "All this, because a handful of men wanted world domination".

Thankful the day is over

Day from Hell at work today. One person sick and a mountain of work, plus every passive-aggressive female lunatic out in force. Perhaps the local asylum has had a clear-out. I wondered if it was full moon but it's the dark of the moon so perhaps this is just as bad. I'm fed up with having to be the little saint and hold my temper whenever the fuckwits who call themselves ratepayers come in and demand to be treated like royalty just because they pay me 0.00008 cents a year. I thought my frame of mind was improving but after a month back at the old workplace, I'm back to hating people again and popping antidepressants like Smarties. And it's not helped by well-meaning people who say things like "well, you're lucky to have a job'.... blah, blah. Yes, but I'm unlucky not to be a lotto winner, or a very rich person who has a life of doing as they please, so it's all a matter of perspective, in't it? I hate people who 'look on the bright side'; I want sympathy not censure!

Bad back and random musings

Oh dear. I'm paying for yesterday's mad gardening rush today. Literally paying, because the job I do on Fridays is only casual, so no paid sick leave. Yesterday I tried to dig out an old fern clump that's been growing too close to the path. Boy was it tough. The roots are fibrous, so the spade just hits them and bounces off. I bought a grubber, but that only worked slightly better. So now I have a sore back, a sore knee and a strained shoulder. I'll have to "get a man in" to do some of the heavier work now I'm an ancient 54. All washed up at 54, how depressing. I also know now not to let those fern seedlings grow.

    I wanted to follow a blog, Orvieto or bust, that appeals to me. However, when I went to 'follow' a message came up that Networkblogs (the agency doing the linking) wanted to know my Facebook address, my email, my email list and my friends. How bloody nosy! And I don't think my friends would appreciate being rung in on something I had done; I'd have to ask each one to give permission for me to pass on the information.
    Apropos of this, I read in The Guardian last night that the US government has done a deal with one of the major telcos there to provide them with logs of customers' calls, etc. etc. all in the name of "Homeland Security". A huge facility is being built where computers can 'link up' the information to provide 'patterns of concern'. They won't know what you're talking about, but will know who you are talking to. The analogy was made to those who objected, that it was like reading the envelopes of a person's mail; it was already "public domain" information anyway. But as one of those who objected pointed out, if someone stood at your mailbox and read all your addressed envelopes, wouldn't you call the police? That would be stalking, right? They couldn't be charged with a crime, but it's questionable behaviour. And would terrorists be so naïve as to contact each other through the phone? They'll go back to the 'drop box' method of hiding messages in real places. Remember The prisoner, that old TV series. "We want information".
    It's just like Minority report or 1984. We're all guilty now.

Setsugekka

 

Finally, all the tulip bulbs are in! And I discovered one bloom on my 'Setsugekka' camellia. This is the first flower in eight years. Clearly I am doing something wrong.

Marmalade

Today I made marmalade with feijoas and limes. Thought these would go together well and they do ..Delicious! I cheated and used jam-setting sugar, as I've done marmalade before and ended up with syrup, still useful for putting over steamed puddings, but not much use for spreading on bread. Also included the peel from my one and only grapefruit, which I ate for breakfast.
    Funny though. I had a daft thought of using the meat grinder to grind the peel up. It seemed like a good idea. Well, the grinder got stopped up, and juice trickled out through the back of the grinder to pool on the stove, so I had to dismantle the grinder and clear it out. I accidently tipped the bowl with the ground fruit onto the floor, so what had started as a good idea left the kitchen in a total mess, with globs of ground fruit all over the place looking horribly like vomit! Of course, right at that moment, my hands covered in 'vomit', the door bell rings. It's two young guys wanting to pour dyed water down my gulley trap to check the sewers. (We're getting more infrastructural work done). "This stuff on my hands is not what you think it is" I say as I open the door. "Um, okay, but I've come to check your gulley-trap?" the bloke says. "Do you know where it is?" I didn't know I had one, I say. Dohh... Turns out it's somewhere by the kitchen sink outlet. He had a bucket with yellow dyed water in it that looked like really strong urine. Wouldn't you think they'd use bright pink or blue?
  In spite of the drama, the marmalade turned out fine; it's set and tastes great.

Chocolate honey cake recipe

This is the cake I made with Mum's scales. It's in Imperial measures, a nice simple recipe that requires no special or expensive ingredients.

4 +1/2 oz. sugar                                 
2 oz. butter
1 tablespoon honey
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon cocoa
3/4 cup of milk
1/2 teaspoon bi-carb. of soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg

Cream butter and sugar, add egg, honey and cocoa. Beat well, mix flour and baking powder together and add to butter, sugar etc. Lastly add milk with the soda added.
Bake middle of the oven at 350F for 30 minutes approx. (I've found this cooks best in a ring tin.). Ice with chocolate icing when cool. Yum.
Next time I might add a little orange peel and ice with choc/orange juice icing for a honey jaffa cake.

Please Captain, not in front of the Klingons

The new movie is also about the bromance of Kirk and Spock.

To boldly go....

..to the latest Star Trek movie. Went last night to the 3D version. I've never seen anything in 3D before (a 3D virgin), but it's quite good. The only things that don't really work are closeups where you're looking past someone at someone else; the effect is of two flat planes, one behind the other. But the big stuff is great. Bits of debris from explosions hurtle past you, you look down impossibly big vistas, and watch while people get sucked into space through gaping holes. (Question: do bodies putrefy in a vacuum? I guess they dry out over time like a mummy). Anyway, there's a great fight scene near the end with Zachary Quinto (Spock) and Benedict Cumberpatch (Khan) smashing each other around on moving platform thingies. It's odd that of all the wonderful special effects, the thing that is most memorable is a good old-fashioned punch-up.