Tweetable?

Is anything in my life tweetable?
Do I really need another on-line forum for airing my opinions and brain farts?
The only way to know is to give it a go.

Hey, that would make a good T-Shirt!
The only way to know is to give it a go.

Maybe done in some bubbly hippy font and a smiley face at the end.

Gee, you can tell I've had a few days off and wound right down. Anyway, I'm on the Twitter, it is part of the interwebs. If anyone can tell me how to drive it, that would be swell. I think my phone needs a different thingo to be able to talk to it. As usual, look for me as orbitaltorch and say hai, I love that.

We had a GIGANTIC storm a few days ago - sheet lightening, Thor stamping about the place, rumbly thunder to move the foundations, flooding rains, wind to tear the atmo off. It was brilliant. Went for hours and took the power intermittently. I live on top of a hill and my street flooded to about knee height (so just above most people's ankles-ish) so there was a lot of water around. I loved it, and I loved that it cooled everything down by at least 10 degrees for the next few days and we've been back to mid 20s temps, and now everything is green and growing manically to catch up. There's even cool breezes! Oh how pleasant life can be when the physical world is not trying to scald you off the face of the planet.

I stood outside for a while after the bulk of the terrifying bit had passed and took some video on my phone so I would have a sound file of the rain and the frogs going all poly rhythmic gamelan style. Later in the summer if it goes all dry again I will have 45 precious seconds of proof that water can and does sometimes fall freely from the sky. Folk wisdom says that we'll have a wet season this summer. Why? I've heard everything from the large number of flies, ants in the house, 3 dust storms equals a wet season ahead, and my favourite of all, my mother's trick foot. Yes, her barometrically sensitive foot has been aching. It is accurate slightly more often than the meteorologists, but I'm not going to buy another lemon tree just yet!

The weather aside, I baked a banana cake* last night as a house warming gift for Sister2 and her partner who have moved into their dream(ish) home this weekend. I doubled the recipe, thinking that would make for a nice generously sized cake. Kindof an innocent thing to do but the outcome is a monster. I did not think through the fact that getting the larger sized spring based pan and then doubling recipes would result in a cake too large to fit on any plate, serving platter or tray that I have. If I could handle it safely, I would weigh it just to satisfy my curiosity but I am loathe to put it under any further structural strain than just sitting there, being a presentation problem. Hmmm. At least I know it fits on the base of the pan it was cooked in. That will be my back-up position. It is tall too, nearly 7 cm by what I can judge. Holy giant cakes Batman!

I was hoping that it would be a short-lived problem, that we'd be tucking into the moist banana-ry deliciousness of it for morning tea today. But no. They are inconveniently busy with cleaning the old house. I will have to wait the endless hours until afternoon tea. The cake is implacable. It knows it must be gifted whole. My mouth is uncontrollably watering in anticipation. Oh Caped Crusader, if only I had made a little muffin from just some of it!

BTW, while I've been telling you about the cake, twitter has told me about the new Cory Doctorow novel 'Makers' that's out. Happy Happy!

Make cakes people, and be happy.
The only way to know is to give it a go.


*I used the recipe from "Women's Weekly: Old - Fashioned Favourites" which I can recommend heartily to anyone with a sweet tooth and a preference for simple classic dishes. Easily found in good newsagents and occasionally even in the supermarket.

Footprints & Bananas

This week my one year anniversary in the job ticked over. The day started well, the banana I peeled for my muesli was a double-yolker! A good omen in Qld.
One year anniversaries are celebrated with 'paper', I just printed out some emails. Then I felt bad. I did a carbon footprint quiz and learnt that if everyone lived like me, we'd need 2.9 planets. Crap. I was pretty embarrassed by that. It's the flying, and the car, oh, and that I live in a house all on my own. I mean really, that's just not fair. How do I know how far the veggies in Woolies have travelled? They keep pretty quiet about that kind of thing! I don't want to whinge too much, I think it was pretty lenient really. After all, the quiz didn't ask me if I have pets or not (add at least a half a planet for them, maybe more), if I take regular medication (that's gotta be a half-planet's worth, just on the packaging!) or if I buy stuff over the internet. Actually maybe that's good. I don't know. I don't think I can handle knowing at the moment. Still, 2.9 planets.

And that's not any old planet either, it's not like a twentieth of Neptune is going to sort out this problem. No, it's Earth or it's nothing. I wonder what the carbon (and remember, we haven't started really measuring any other kind of footprint yet!?) footprint for the colonisation of Mars would look like? Something like 486 planets probably. Then when we get there, we have to do terraforming!

Anyway, I was a bit bummed by the footprint report, so I clicked on the "Things you can do!" sidebar. Wow - I could put energy efficient lightbulbs in! I wouldn't have thought of that on my own... oh wait, I could reduce the packaging on things I buy and then recycle more. HHmmm. I think this is written for my neighbours.

You know what, I'd love to see one of these sidebars that suggests useful things like:
Five Great Tips to Help Save the Earth
1. Stop breeding! The Earth is overpopulated, especially with rich fat fucks like you!
2. Stop eating twice or three times the amount you need!
3. Walking is not a criminal behaviour!
4. Shopping will not fill the hollow place where your heart should be!
5. Stay where you are! Please don't travel to gawp at our problems - sort out your own back yard. Then you could plant some parsley in it.

Fine. So. Anyway.

Paper anniversary. I recycled all the paper I could this week, and have been spreading mulch around some parts of the yard. I'm not convinced of the science of the mulch anymore for water preservation (read this book if you'd like to know more) but it gave me something to do and I'm hoping it will keep some of the weeds down a bit. Or at least make them a little easier to dig up later. Presuming I can ever feel motivated again. All I wanted to do this week was sleep, and sometimes I seemed to achieve it while I was walking around. I have been a zombie this week, only the finger on the tv remote seems to have any energy.

So my double-yolker banana was a great moment in breakfast, and pretty much the highlight of the week, but didn't herald any wonderful abundances.... oh, *except*, now that I put it all together - I'm new in the job, so for the first 3 years I get a pay rise for each year that I'm there (separate to the CPI rise) and that (wait for it!) ticks over on the anniversary! Woot!! I would have got a pay rise on that day!! How terribly civilised!! It will be virtually indiscernible in terms of cash I'm sure, but the principal of the thing is simply marvellous!

And technically, money is still a paper-based currency, so The Banana didn't lie, the double-yolker really was a good omen!

You couldn't write fiction like that!