Trade me

I've just joined Trademe (an online auction website we have in NZ, a bit like Craigslist for those of you USAns). I need another compost bin, and after some ringing around had the brilliant idea that Trademe might have some on offer. I was horrified at the price of new compost bins. This is just a standard square bin made of recycled plastic, and turned out by the thousands in some factory somewhere. $80 to $110! For recycled plastic! Mass-produced! I could understand it if it was handmade by skilled artisans, but no. (The weird thing is it that it's cheaper to buy a raised bed made of seasoned macrocarpa, made by an actual person with skills than a hunk of black plastic.) Anyway, I've entered a bid, so now have to wait till Sunday 4th August to see if I'm the winner. It's quite exciting, I can see why people get addicted to it. Some people prop up their income by buying and selling on line; the only problem is that your house and garage get stuffed with stuff waiting to be on-sold or picked up. And there's the usual problem with people. They say they'll pick stuff up but don't, quibble when they get to your place, or send you rubbish when you're buying.

Went to an interesting workshop on Friday about dealing with challenging customers. The first part of the course was identifying what sort of person we are, and why this has an effect on our interactions with others.  I am a Thinker, so this means that I believe if I explain things in a rational way to a customer who's spitting tacks, they will calm down and all will be solved. No. People are not rational.  This also explains why I prefer Spock to Kirk; Kirk is a Socialiser, a people-person, a type that I find hard to understand and rather annoying.

And another participant at the workshop gave us a nice acronym. FIGJAM. It's applied to one of those people who think that THEY ARE VERY IMPORTANT. It means "Fuck, I'm good, just ask me". A colleague at work also contributed UBF. This is Unintentional Bitch Face, which is what older women wear when they are thinking about something, or doing something that they find disagreeable. It's a habitual look among librarians. UBF; face it.

First day of spring???

Today has been so warm and pleasant it's like the first day of spring, or rather as the first day of spring should be. I can't help but think that it's all a trick, though; once the flowers and the birds and the sheep get underway, there'll be a vicious cold snap that leaves the land strewn with pathetic little lamb corpses and frost-bitten flowers. Usually the first week of August presents us with the worst winter weather, so we'll just wait and see. Keep the thermals and the woolly socks handy.
    I've even succumbed to the general cheerfulness and optimism enough to sow some seeds. I planted some broad beans today, and sowed lettuces, chicory and corn salad under the ex-umbrella cloche. The camellias are starting to come out, I saw a spectacular red one outside the vets' yesterday. There's been no frost in the last few weeks so the flowers are in beautiful condition. Some Earlicheer jonquils are out, and the snowdrops and snowflakes. I found this nice little blue iris under the foxglove leaves in a warm corner by the conservatory. I can't think of an iris that I don't like; even the gladwin or stinking iris that pops up everywhere in old gardens like mine has a simple charm.
  The wood pigeon has been back to the holly tree. I was afraid that he/she had been nabbed by a cat, because there were a lot of white fluffy feathers on the footpath outside my house, but these must be someone else's feathers. The daft bird flies so low sometimes, it would be easy for a cat to catch.
  
Vis a vis Prince George. Poor child, George is such a dull name. I know it was his great grandfathers name, but for me it conjures up the horrible Hanoverians, none of whom were very clever or distinguished themselves in  good ways. One lost America and one was mad. Not a name bright with promise, perhaps.

Gerd time

Gerd=girl nerd.

Watching a Star Trek movie, one of the Captain Picard ones, called Insurrection. Not one of the great Star Trek movies, because although I like Patrick Stewart, the other characters seem a bit diffuse. The storyline is very basic and a bit daft, and it's all like a New Age wet dream really, with a peaceful tribe of eternal-youth possessing hippies facing forceful relocation by nefarious villains. The dialogue has some gems though:

"The metaphasic radiation of the rings is in a state of flux"

"Send them a wide-band co-variance signal"

"A tachion burst may force him to reset his shield harmonizers"

"There was an error in his positronic phase matrix that we were unable to repair"

All these in the first ten minutes! Imagine being paid to write this stuff - wicked! Still, they don't beat my favourite of all time:

"Dammit, Jim! I can't seem to stop the heterocyclic declination!" (Dr McCoy, trying to fix someone's heart-attack).

Older

I seem to be reading a lot of articles about ageing lately. The Boomers (talkin' 'bout my generation) are becoming elderly or nearly so, and we are starting to think about retirement and associated questions. Apparently one of the things we shouldn't do is make statements like "I'm too old to..." (fill in sentence of your choice - cycle to China, take up skydiving, etc.) or say "My mind isn't what it used to be". These statements, made often enough, will turn out to be true, apparently. Which seems fairly like woolly, magical thinking to me, but I'll let that pass.
    What worries me is that it will no longer be acceptable to slow down as you age. All those bloody people who do take up crocodile-hunting in their nineties will be held up as some kind of model to emulate; those of us who want to take it a bit easier will be named and shamed as letting the side down. Good old Baby Boomers, competitive to the last. If you don't have an all-terrain walker frame or a four-wheel drive mobility scooter, you will just be so socially dead, my dear. Is this all part of a cunning plan to get us to forgo retirement completely, so governments don't have to spend money to keep us in idleness? We can slave away till we drop, and this will be held up as something praiseworthy.
    And have you noticed that it's not acceptable for anyone to relax anymore? We have to be busy, busy, busy all the time, keeping fit, being competitive, being creative...etc, etc. I notice this especially on Sunday mornings as I drive to work. (Yes, I work Sundays, a victim of the 7-day a week society). In the good old days, people used to have a lie-in on Sunday mornings; now they're up jogging, walking, base-jumping, cycling, going out for brunch, and yes, going to the library. A human perpetual motion machine of purposeless activity for the sake of activity. I've just read an article in a women's magazine about a family deciding to get Wi-Fi and Sky at their beach house, because they're "bored" with all that nature and peace and quiet. So why not sell the place and stay home? I despair of humans, I really do. Guess I'm just getting old.

Light up the leafy night

"Light up the leafy night" is one of the events celebrating 150 years of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. I went tonight because it was a nice warmish night. Loads of children because it was also part of Kidsfest, a yearly festival for the children's winter holidays. Took some pics but my camera is not very good at night time stuff.

 

Fire dancer in front of Muegano sculpture.

 

The man with the light sabre is John Clemens, the Curator.

 

Pretty box balls in the rose garden

 

Stained glass window in the tree, sort of hobbitty or elvish.

 

The Peace Bell

 

130 year old Macrocarpa

 

Sculpture in the pond. This is called Muegano and is somewhat controversial; some people hate it with a passion, some have thought it left over wreckage from the earthquake. This is a nice shot of it.

 

 

The Hobbit - Stone Giants Epic Battle Scene Part I - 1080p Full HD

This is what working at the library feels like during the school holidays.

Not much happening again; Detroit now bankrupt

Boy, life sure does get tedious sometimes. Today was cold and dreary, and I woke up depressed and have stayed depressed all day. Bleh. Did a bit of tidying-up type gardening, but it was really too cold. Removing dead plants in the freezing wind is not calculated to cheer anyone up.
  The people over the road are moving and Thomas is very happy. Puss-puss will be going with them, so Thom no longer has to fear being jumped on every time he goes outside, so he's been outside quite a lot today. Puss-puss was amusing as a kitten, but as he's got bigger he's become more aggressive, although Thom whupped his hide a far few times too. Thomas is a lover not a fighter though, and he'd really rather not scrap with other cats.
  Reading in the Guardian about Detroit city declaring bankruptcy. Pictures of the city remind me of areas of Christchurch, derelict and decaying, or Chernobyl, deserted by its people. Detroit's disaster is an economic one, man-made, created by political decisions way back in the seventies when cheap cars from Japan were allowed to be imported into the USA.  What a waste; schools, homes, hospitals all now standing empty, falling into ruin. Anyone who could afford to leave has; only the poor, the old and the crazy are left. Strange that it should have been let go, but I suppose it's just those wonderful 'market forces' that we're always hearing about. Sad, sad.

People of Walmart

Here's a documentary that I've just watched. It's called "Walmart: the high cost of low price", and was pretty much as I expected, an expose of the HUGE corporation that is Walmart. I've read about Walmart's woeful labour relations (no unions) before but there were some new things that I hadn't heard before. They call their employees "associates" which gives a sort of warm collegial feel, so that employees think that they are part of the business and will donate time to  Walmart's profit drive. There is no overtime pay; you stay until the job is done or you lose the job. Walmart's pay rates are so poor that a lot of their workers are on state-subsidised income top-ups; in fact Walmart encourages workers to enrol with state assistance so that it doesn't have to pay for medical insurance or child-support. Walmart's wages bill is therefore being propped up by the taxpayers in each state. Walmart is racist and sexist. When a woman asked (on not being promoted yet again) whether she was being discriminated against because she was black or because she was a woman, her supervisor told her that "Two out of two ain't bad". And the other end of the operation, in China, is even more exploitative.
    The worst statistic was one that undermined Walmart's claim that it supported charities. The Walton family (no, not those Waltons, or boy, have they forgotten their roots) are collectively worth about $80 billion dollars, yet the maximum yearly amount they have ever personally donated to charity is $6,000 dollars. Between them. (Bill Gates, on the other hand, has given away 58% of his money, and still has plenty to provide him with an excellent standard of living).
     We have a very similar set-up here. It's called The Warehouse, and they have just won the dubious distinction of being the company that heads the field in false advertising.
      What I would have liked to see in the Walmart documentary was some investigation about the shareholders of Walmart, the people of Walmart who are screwing the people of Walmart. How do they sleep at night? Pretty well, I guess, in expensive bedding in luxury apartments.
     Makes you wish for a revolution.

We're on a break

I'm just going to have a little break from blogging. There's not much happening at the moment really. Spent the day going over my maps of the Euganean Hills, that I walked through in 2011. I loved it so much I'm thinking about going back there next May. Here's a few pics:

 

View from Il Fuedo guesthouse

 

Public gardens at Este

 

View of Monte Santo with Galzignano.

 

The bell tower of Castelnuovo from the valley road to Teolo

 

Rocca Pendice

 

The Oratorio of San Antonio, on Monte della Madonna

 

View from Monte della Madonna track

 

The church on Monte della Madonna

 

 

Arqua Petrarcha, where Petrarch lived for the last 26 years of his life

 

View from Monte Gemola

 

Red-letter day

 

Welcomed a very special guest into the garden today. This is a native wood pigeon, kereru, feeding on the holly berries on my tree. I have never, ever seen one in my suburb before, although there are about twenty living in the Botanic Gardens in the middle of town. I thought I heard him the other day, they have a very distinctive wing-sound, a soft whooshing noise, but couldn't see him (or her) anywhere. Today I went out in the garden, and there he was, on top of the telegraph pole outside. I went in to get my camera, knowing the bird would have flown by the time I got back, and yes, it had, but much to my surprise and delight he had gone around the back of the house to feast on the holly berries. Thomas was as awestruck as I; I don't think he's ever seen such a large bird before. Usually these birds are not seen here at all, preferring areas forested in native trees. They play an important role in dispersing the seeds;  some seeds of native species will not germinate unless they've been passed through the gut of a kereru first.

Reading Joy Larckom's book of memoirs and newspaper articles 'Just vegetating' at the moment. Joy was one of the people who changed our way of vegetable growing. In 1976-77, she went on a round-Europe tour in a caravan with her husband and two small children, visiting vegetable growers who were still saving the traditional seeds and gardening in a traditional manner. She was responsible for widening the 'seed vocabulary' of the English vegetable garden, introducing all kinds of new vegetables and varieties that hadn't been used in English gardens before, and advocating an organic approach and the adoption of closer cultivation methods, intercropping and companion planting. She has a very engaging writing style, and you share with her the sense of excitement at discovering new plants and techniques. It's one of those books you can dip into, reading just one article or several that take your interest as you please. Inspirational and recommended for re-energising winter gardening reading.

Spy bot

Notice I've still got that spybot on my tail. Every time I post a new post, within seconds someone or something in the good ol' US of A reads it. It's so fast it has to be a machine. No doubt my support of organic food has now put me on the World Trade Organisation's blacklist. Must be a commie radical, right? I love you, Mr Snowden, xxx.

Why?

Time for a little rant. It's about something trivial, but I find that trivial things are often the most annoying.

Why do 'They' stick those little bits of plastic on each and every apple that you buy at the supermarket? What evil genius decided that it would be a good idea to individually brand every apple in the store? I suppose it was someone at the Apple Marketing Board or some such, but it must cost thousands to do this, and they just get thrown away. Is it done by hand, by underpaid persons, or automatically? I hope the latter, because sticking labels on apples would be the next most boring job to being a chicken-sexer. And the labels are so annoying; they always seem to end up in the compost, in spite of every care I take not to put them in the compostable rubbish. It's like those bread-bag tags. In defiance of all laws of physics, there they are in the compost, even though I know I throw them in the rubbish-to-be-collected bin. You'd think there would be such a thing as biodegradeable labels and bag tags by now, but not here, not yet. This is the great thing about buying organic from the markets; you get a brown paper bag if you get anything at all, which can be totally composted in a very short time. I'm a big fan of my local, https://www.facebook.com/pages/OpawaSt-Martins-Farmers-Market/147939998595296 but now I start work on Sundays at 10.00 so I usually don't go, unless its summertime and I feel really energetic.
  There, all done, rant over.
 

Not guilty

Much better day today. Did lots of tidying in the garden, removed the last of the dead leaves and mowed the lawn. Took some pictures too.

Here's my latest creative idea. This is the top half of an umbrella; I broke the handle last year using it to clear snow off my car. True to form I didn't throw it away but dumped it in the garage. Cleaning the garage one day recently, I thought this would make a nice cloche. I'll let the soil warm up a bit then plant some lettuces or spinach under it. It looks nice and neat, unlike some protective stuff (frost cloth, are you listening?) which just looks messy.

 

Little puss-face pansy

 

Camellia 'Barbara Clark"

 

Helleborus corsicus

 

Primula

 

The first Earlicheer - note my grubby hands. I did real gardening.

 

Lemons in the conservatory. I love lemons, they are so useful, both for sweet and savoury dishes. My lemon tree died last year in the snow, so this new one is going to live inside in this winter. When the holly tree gets removed I'll put it over by the north-facing fence.

 

So now for a glass of wine and a nice deep bath.

Guilty

It was a beautiful day today, even though it's winter we had 19 degrees here (Celsius), mild and fine. Unfortunately I slept through most of it. I did my grocery shopping early, then came home and felt totally exhausted so I went back to bed at 11.00. And slept till about three. Feeling guilty because I didn't do the washing or mow the lawn or prune the roses, just too tired. I think my job wears me out and I need a day to physically recover from it. Oh well, perhaps I'll do more stuff tomorrow. I really envy those people who have everything in their lives controlled and programmed out, and who achieve heaps of things, but I've never been like that. And never will. So I'll just have to cope with the guilt of being a lazybones.

Heavenly hellebores

What would a winter garden be without hellebores? A few of mine have come out in the last few days, in spite of the rain and frost. Helleborus corsicus is the most prominent of these with its delicious apple-green flowers. At the Botanic Gardens there are several areas dedicated to these plants, notably as under-planting in the Japanese Maple border.
  The garden is really too cold to work at the moment, but apparently we are about to have a week of fine weather, so I hope to get out and prune the roses some time this week. The general drabness of things is depressing; there are only single flowers out, not the big drifts of colour that I so enjoy in the early summer and autumn. Winter is dreary. I'm not a person who goes skiing so there's really few compensations for me. After a while I get SAD, and just want to stay in bed all day, safe and warm. It's all very well for people to say stay active to stave off depression, but really, walking around in the cold deadness of a Christchurch winter is not really a cheering activity.
   Fortunately I have the Internet and a strong imagination, so I just try to imagine myself in Rome, staying in my favourite street, planning to  go exploring all the wonderful things and places that I didn't see on my first visit. I discovered that there is a synagogue and a kosher hotel just down the street from where I stayed last time; I must have passed it several times without knowing, but I guess the Jews have learned from sad experience to keep a low profile.
   We have a synagogue here in Christchurch, which was destroyed in the earthquake. One of my favourite memories of the 'quake was that one of the search and rescue people (not Jewish) went into the synagogue at great risk to himself, and rescued the Torah. Selfless behaviour on behalf of others seems a rarity nowadays, but perhaps it's just our nihilist media, who like to concentrate on the negative. Well done, that man.