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.