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