At Home

I staked up the rogue tomato plants this morning and discovered that they're not just flowering but have set fruit, in June! That was a cute surprise adding to the fact they they're growing over the top of the sweet potatoes. I've got one square meter of garden where every thing's happening. The cauliflowers I tried are all dead and gone. Apart from that one very cold morning last week (about -3⁰ I think it was here, which I thought would kill off the tommies) it is a mild winter so far.

I'm back in touch with the yard because this month I've borrowed a half-remembered part of an English tradition and have decided I am "at home" for my weekends this month. Which means to me that I am by default at home or that I won't be going anywhere simply because of obligation, habit or to fill in time. I've reclaimed the sleep-in! (and the afternoon nap!)

Two weekends in and I'm caught up with myself a little. I have realised how many projects of every kind I've started over the last year or so but left scattered around the house. I'm a full set behind in my subscriptions reading, but that now is back to feeling like a treat in store rather than a task to be completed. I went to two stores today and found it easy to zip in and grab the items on the list and nip back out with just the things I needed and not another armful of stuff. I got some drill bits to put holes in my button blanks and some elastic and batting to make a night-cap (my head is cold when I go to bed. How Dickensian I shall look!).

Yesterday I finished a book (Thursday's Child by Sonya Hartnett. The play is coming to the client's venue in August and as I'll be promoting it heavily, thought is would be good to have a clue what I'm talking about as the material the touring company sent us is heavy on how awesome they are and very light on plot/character details. As usual. It's great too, so I can happily throw my shoulder to the harness for this one.) and then read Twilight (by Stephanie Meyer). I'm possibly in the last 20% of the human population to read this, so I won't say much about it. I think it's more a thriller style than a romance, and that's about as much as I'll venture for now, and yes I'll read the next one.

So with some sleep back behind my eyes and clean sheets on the bed my sense of goodwill-toward-human-kind-O-meter has drifted back into the realm of the positive and I can bid my fellows a good morrow with nary a sneer nor a sardonic riposte in my mind. Hoo-Ray!

Also, Kerryn gifted me owl patterned flannelet jammies! All is right in the world!

Flopping around on the couch like a pale moonworm

I had this fleeting idea for a good post the other day, and I didn't write it down, so guess what? Yeah, I totally forgot it.
So I've been sick. Let's not talk about it. It's very boring to to talk about being ill, particularly when it's not a new or exotic thing - just the same round of stuff.

I've read a few books lately - the two Vampire Academy books (Vampire Academy and Frostbite) and two "Mortal Instruments" (City of Bones & City of Ashes by Clare) these are good fun. Particularly if you like stories about vampires. If you don't like stories about vampires, well you won't really like these, and you've got other issues anyway. I'm currently reading the new Monthly and a dodgy e-book called "Palace of Paradise" or something. It sounds like it might be a saucy romance, but actually it's really an edited listserv doc for a type of therapy called Emotional Freedom Therapy. As you can tell by the name, there's not a lot of science to this therapy! It's only 140 pages but it's taking me ages to read it. I got recommended it, so I'm staying the distance... In more exciting reading news I've have started the new Neal Stephenson (Anathem) and have only got about 50 pages in and decided to draw it out, so have put it down until the weekend. ooooohhh - delicious fiction! It's way clever, and I expect it will get quite complicated. I've just ordered 'Babylon Babies' by Maurice Dantec (a French author, so it's in translation) as Sister and I went to the movies last weekend to see the movie that's been loosely based on it - Babylon AD and we enjoyed it. I'm not necessarily recommending it mind you, just saying that as huge Riddick fans, we were fanging for some butch-camp sci-fi, and this was just the ticket! I was very upset this week to realise that the new Riddick "film" I thought I saw listing on IMDB was actually just a video game. D'oH!!

While I was ill, all of my seedlings died. The backyard is so overgrown that I will only walk on the concrete paths because I am afraid of snakes. This is hurting the fig and lemon trees, as they're not currently getting the laundry water on the weekends. It feels terribly wasteful to let all of that water just go down the drain, but even if I could walk to the trees, I wasn't in a fit state to carry the buckets. That's ok, we'll start again next weekend. Maybe.

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!