And one other thing

Can anyone explain to me wtf is going on when blogger randomly eats all the breaks out of your post? Like with the last one?

Also, why does crackebooke claim I have 43 friends on the front page, but then when I click says I only have 42??

Literature sucks

I love a good book. I read several books a week. Currently I'm savouring the last few pages of The forgotten arts and crafts, which is just too cool and I don't want it to end.

And I'm also reading (mostly on the train and in the bath, as the arts and crafts book is massive and heavy - too heavy for train or bath reading) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers, which is totally brilliant. We saw him speak last weekend with Zoe, which was also brilliant.

But Literature with a cap-L often gives me the shits. Being forced to read crap like David Malouf at school has quite possibly scarred me for life, and may be one of the reasons why I have joined a crackbook group for people who loathed my particular school. It was loatheworthy indeed. But I digress.

I was happy to be pointed to this article this morning, which (among other things) pokes fun at the rabidly over-written "prose" of Annie Proulx, which makes me feel better about not being able to get through the Shipping News, which was full of unnecessary words and really not very interesting.

The author of the article points out that passages such as:

In the long unfurling of his life, from
tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to
geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the
place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of
the Big Horns.

are actually completely uncalled for and not very good. And that mixing your metaphors, was, back in the day when people actually appreciated the beauty of the English language, considered bad form. Proulx's guilty of this heinous crime on many occasions. For ex:

"Furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens."

"An apron of sound lapped out of each dive."

"The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover."

I mean, puh-lease. As Buffy once said to Spike, need a few more metaphors for that little mix?

Don't even get me started on The Line of Beauty - good prose can only take you so far. You need a plot. And the plot can not consist entirely of gay sex in toilets.

Or the folly of paying writers by the word. I have one word to say to you, blog reader - Charles Dickens.

Things I have done to help the planet this week

I thought an occasional summary of things we've done to help the planet this week might (a) inspire me to do more and (b) perhaps offer some suggestions people hadn't thought of that they might want to do themselves.

So here's the first one.

This week:

• I did our main food shopping at the Vic Market, without using a single plastic bag (good!). I did use one new paper bag (bad!) because I forgot to take some reused ones from home. And the incredibly expensive but locally produced organic and non-heat-treated Jersey milk ($7.50 for two litres - ugh) does come in a plastic bottle. But at least this plastic is recyclable
• I wrote an e-mail to the Jersey cow milk people asking them if they couldn't use re-usable glass bottles like the further away Tasmanian Jersey cow farm does. No response as yet.
• I wrote an e-mail to Origin Energy asking them to offer a paperless billing option. No response as yet.
• I bought a six pack of CFLs (from Big W, for $19.95 - so only around $3.30 each, bargain). I picked the ones that came in a cardboard box (good) but all the CFLs seem to be made in China (bad). But so are all the other lightglobes, and at least these last longer.
• I did some research into CFLs that you can use with dimmers - GE apparently makes one, but I am going to have to go on an expedition to find them, as they seem only to be stocked by Beacon Lighting or Mitre 10. But this will be worth it, as then all the lights in our apartment will be CFLs.
• I persuaded H that using a handkerchief is not actually really really gross.
• I removed myself from a mailing list.
• I did some research into guerilla gardening and think I might plant a lemon tree in a spare bit of earth outside our house. There are also some spots under existing trees that could probably use some herbs. And there's a bit of a garden bed next to the West-facing wall where the visitor parking is, which could be used possibly for something. Must stop before I get too carried away and can't look after it all.
• Am planning a trip to St Kilda Farmers' market on Saturday to get some food for the weekend that's locally grown.
• I am wearing a work outfit that's almost entirely second-hand (at least the dress and the jumper are, which is most of it. And my boots have been resoled twice now).

And of course the things we always do - recycle, not buy takeaway food or drinks with ridiculous packaging, catch public transport, etc.

Things to blog about

I was going to blog about the new citizenship values, only to find that Mikey got in before me and did it better than I possibly could.

I particularly like
• freedom of association
Unless you're a unionist in which case we'd like you to fuck off from the workplace.

Check out his post. It is full of hilarious goodness.

I finally remembered this morning to check out where to get CFLs that will work/not explode when used with dimmer switches, as we have dimmers in the living room and dining room.

Turns out, GE makes them, and they are apparently available at Big W, which considering Big W is right downstairs may be handy. I say may be, because it's freaking impossible to find anything down there, and the customer service is largely non-existent. But I shall give it a go later. Then the only remaining non-CFL bulb we have will be the one at the top of the stairs, which is completely impossible to reach and I am frankly unsure that we'll ever be able to replace that one. Even with a normal bulb, if it blows. The house moves forward, slowly. We may or may not have everything done before the housewarming.

We had a fun weekend, too, but I am finished writing anything for now, so may have to describe the weekend later.

Gravity is just a theory

I've always wanted to ask one of those cwazy cweationists who claims "but evolution is just a theory" whether they think gravity is "just a theory" as well.

Tony Abbott has answered my question. He's as crazy as they come, frankly, and he now reckons the polls showing Labor are ahead (which according to my sources include all the internal party polling from both sides) are "gravity defying". Which presumably means if you dropped them off a tall building (the Rialto, say), they wouldn't fall at 9.8 m/s²

Ha. At least I amuse myself. Move along people, nothing to see here.

Open arse, remove own head

Could the increasingly irrelevant and unentertaining nitwits* at Crikey please stop quoting themselves?

Their constant references to previous columns, and now to the Crikey guide to stating the frigging obvious about the election**, are wearing thin. No wait, they were thin before they started wearing.

Quoting yourself constantly is extremely bad form. And I note that you never quote such predictions as 'Latham will win the 2004 Federal election'. What's with that, hmmm?

And it's one thing to refer back to a previous column, saying something like "I wrote about this in March and since then blahdeblahblah", it's quite another to say (as Kerr did today):

'"Wentworth is an inner city seat in Sydney’s east, taking in Darlinghurst, Kings Cross, Paddington, Woollahra, Double Bay, Vaucluse, Bondi, Waverley and Bronte," the Crikey Guide to the 2007 Federal Election explains' (with a link, but I'm not linking to their ads).

I mean, puh-lease. Not to mention (and I haven't read the Crikey guide to facile analysis of marginal seats, because I have no intention of shelling out any more money to those bastards, but they were wittering about it today) that the "analysis" (and I use the word in its loosest possible sense) that Wentworth is now a marginal requiring only a 2.5% swing to fall to Labor is freaking ridiculous.

Hello. What we have in Wentworth, as any fule kno, is a margin caused by a unique confluence of events that will not be repeated in 2007.

Firstly, the incumbent Liberal member, Peter King, ran as an independent against Turnbull, and preferenced Labor, being as he was pissed off about the whole pre-selection shenannigans. This (for those who require the obvious to be stated because they have somehow managed to miss the fact that it's been banging them over the head with a neon sign that reads "OBVIOUS!") has done two things - one is inflate the Labor vote, the other is (der) deflate the Liberal vote. The Libs lost over 10% off their primary vote last time. They previously won the seat on primaries. King got 18% of the vote, which when translated was a swing to Labor 2PP of 2.4% - in the face of the overall running of the Australian people in the opposite direction from a potential Latham government.

So yes, there has been a redistribution since then, which has nominally lowered the margin further, but it actually really hasn't, because the margin was never going to actually be at the 2004 levels again. Firstly Peter King won't run again (and even if he did, local sentiment wouldn't be with him as it was last time), and secondly Malcolm Turnbull is now the incumbent. And an incumbent who may well be leader of the Liberal Party at some stage soon (someone has apparently put a $40,000 bet on his being the next leader on Sportsbet in the last couple of days - I'm actually wondering if they know something we don't).

So the idea that Labor are going to win the seat, or that they'd only need a 2.5% swing to do so - rubbish. My prediction at this point is that (given that the real margin on the seat was probably 8.something% in the abscence of the weird factors last time, with the redistribution shaving off around 3%, and with it previously being a non-swinging seat, even with a small movement on top of the redistribution) Turnbull will hold the seat by 5%

So could everyone please stop predicting Labor are going to win it? Not.Fucking.Likely.


Addendum, added later (as I suppose addenda always are!) - Ninemsn are having a snark at Fairfax for the edits that Fairfax employees have made to Wikipedia. In particular they single out edits made to Stephen Mayne's wiki by someone from Fairfax:
"While Mayne pretends to be a journalist he spends a lot of his time in paid activity for people like Telstra, the phone company, and others with a barrow to push. He is a hopeless self-promoter and generally oblivious to what most people regard as ethical behaviour".

Arguably, rather than being a vandalism, this edit actually improved the encyclopaediac (is that a word?) accuracy of the entry.

Off to the hairdresser now, but remind me Monday to tell you about Mayne's behaviour last weekend.

*by which I am referring entirely to Christian Kerr and Stephen Mayne.
**except for any bits written by Charles Richardson, which are no doubt full of his usual insightful analysis. Although as I said, haven't read it.

Project management training

We have actual project management training next week, in preparation for which we are being made to do online project management training.

Unfortunately, the online project management training has been designed for retarded monkeys.

Fortunately, you can take the test at the end without completing the actual training.

Unfortunately, there about approximately eleventy-three different modules and you have to take tests for all of them. This utterly sucks.

Please can I has political job? kthx

Senator Fielding in no way resembles anyone with half a clue

Because I have what some might consider an unhealthy obsession with the minutae of politics, I get Family First Senator Steve Fielding's e-newsletter. It's usually good for a laff. Last month, the good Senator amply demonstrated that he has no idea how the interwebs work (after apparently doing quite some research on how easy it is to download porn from various computers around Parliament). This month, his newsletter amply demonstrates that he has bugger all idea about what causes inflation. Here's what he reckons does it - petrol prices:

3. INTEREST RATES - Family First explains how to put downward pressure on inflation
The Government's stubborn refusal to back Family First's plan to cut petrol tax has put upward pressure on interest rates. Cutting petrol tax takes pressure off inflation because high petrol prices feed into the price of everyday goods and services, putting upward pressure on inflation. A petrol tax cut reduces the likelihood of another interest rate hike, which is the last thing families want. Read more here …

Where do I even start with this?

First of all, inflation is caused by increasing the supply of money. Hello, Milton Freidman? Nobel Prize for economics? Ringing any bells? It is NOT caused by petrol prices or the price of everyday goods and services.

But if there *was* upward pressure on inflation caused by prices going up, cutting petrol tax wouldn't help. In fact, quite the opposite. A petrol tax cut, while it might be good old-fashioned populist pork, frees up money for consumers to spend. Consumers spend money, and according to the flawed and incorrect popular theory, consumer spending puts upward pressure on inflation. Of course it's not actually true, but either way Fielding is as wrong as a very wrong thing.

And the last statement, that cheaper petrol means another interest rate rise is less likely? Fielding is living in a bizarro world that does not resemble ours. Then again, we already knew that, didn't we? I mean, the man believes in virgin birth, people rising from the dead and that people shouldn't be allowed to look at porn on the interwebs. Truly, he is a long-term resident of the bizarro world.

Oh the slack sickness of me

I am just starting to feel like it might actually be possible to recover from this cold. Sorry for the lack of blogging but I have been utterly incoherent and useless, fit only to drink cups of tea and etc.

Anyway, sort of on the mend, as am now at work drinking cups of tea rather than at home drinking cups of tea. And can I just add that my work chair is actually far more ergomomic than sitting in bed with the laptop (which always seems like a good idea at the time, but which really isn't, if it's for longer than half an hour or so), and also that I bless the day I learned to type without looking at the keyboard (I only type with three fingers, but I am jolly fast and accurate with those three fingers!) I remember when I had to look at the keyboard rather than looking at the screen, and it's a lot less cool.

Wow I am boring. In my defence, my brain has either leaked out my nose or been killed by the highly toxic nasal spray I've been using so that I can keep breathing.

(Yes, the whole idea of everything being all-natural etc goes straight out the window when the cold virus comes in the door). Anyway, on to a slightly more interesting topic - dreams.

Had a very odd dream last night where I turned up to an ALP function with H, and H went to the bathroom and there was only one other person there, and lots and lots of empty chairs. I filled in the time by filling jugs with Coke. The jugs had "Don't panic!" in H2G2 writing on the sides and were purple. Then suddenly the place was full of people, and my PU#1 was telling me she was going to hold a street stall in support of the local candidate in her front garden, and I was trying to persuade her that her front garden was not the ideal place to hold it, as it didn't exactly have maximum visibility, due to the enormous hedge hiding it from the road, but she was being very insistent. I think this was all caused by the cold and flu tablets.

I used to thing dreams had quite a lot of significance, but I am now fairly much convinced that they are just the byproduct of your brain filing things into memory. I think the narrative flow is quite possibly superimposed over the random images etc caused by the neurons firing, just because our brains are extremely good at imposing patterns over randomness. This is a product of our past as hunters and gatherers - you track an animal by noticing the tiny clues in the environment that the animal has left; your brain turns that into a complete picture, a trail. I think this evolved tendency explains what Jung called synchronicity - the idea that everything that happens at a particular moment contains the essence of the moment. Our brains are quite simply designed to see patterns - or rather, to impose patterns over our observations. Our feelings of synchronicity, that everything is connected in some important way, are just a product of that. Destiny, shmestiny, I say.

Thus, the random weird shit that happens in our brains as we sleep and file stuff away to short-term or long-term memory gets a narrative imposed on it. And I reckon the reason my dreams are so rich and so memorable and so particularly weird is due to my extensive and wide-ranging reading (and yes, some of it due to Buffy-watching, since there are quite often vampires and etc in my dreams, and on one PARTICULARLY memorable occasion, there was Spike. Mmmm). La la la. Anyhoo. I'm back.

So because of our basic function of imposing patterns on stuff, and the whole memory-filing process, any stuff that's already in our memory will contribute to the pattern and thus the dream narrative.

So if you just have a boring, ordinary life, your dreams are going to be boring as batshit. But if you read, especially a ton of (mostly young adult) fantasy as I do, and religious texts, and fairy tales, and myths, then your brain is going to be filled with a plethora of amazing imagery that your dreams can draw on. And can I just say, it makes them quite entertaining.

Also, Spike is really very hot. We're just watching Season 6 at the mo, in which Spike is particularly full of hotness.

Still feeling crappy

For the moment, I am in bed. I am alternating between playing Scrabulous, reading Robin Hobb, making my latest rug, and venturing downstairs to lie on the couch and watch Buffy.

Normal transmission will resume shortly.

Dying of the plague

I have the plague* so I am at home in bed. Being, as a consequence, bored, I have turned to working on the rug I am making.

Whilst trying to work out wtf was going on with my sewing machine (which I have temporarily set up so I can use it from bed - as all I am doing is adding occasional strips to the fabric I am braiding, it doesn't need to be too ergonomic), which was doing the giant zigzag rather than the small zigzag, I came to the conculsion that the instructions have been translated from Swedish into Japanese, then into English, and were possibly written originally by dyslexic midgets who couldn't actually see the dials on the machine because it was on a high shelf.

Why else would it contain sentences** such as

Match the desired of the thread tension number with the setting mark

?
And if someone could kindly explain to me where I might find the setting mark, I'd be most grateful, as the diagram looks like someone has removed an alligator's teeth, and is trying to floss them using a bobbin of thread and something that resembles nothing so much as the handle of a wooden spoon.

And what is a bartack? AS IN The front bartack and left row first, then the back bartack and right row?

Now, simply step on the foot control sew an identical buttonhole.

Simply my butt.

Anyway, I worked out the zigzag, so back to the rug.


*or at least a very sore throat
**I use the word in the loosest possible sense.

A largely food-related post

Last night I made a pudding so good I am afraid I will never be able to top it.

It was a marmalade steamed pudding, with custard made by H (who has been re-named The King O' Custard, since he has now made custard three times in as many days). The marmalade was made by my lovely sister-in-law in 1998.

This may sound as though I don't appreciate marmalade, since it sat in the cupboard for so long, but actually I REALLY appreciate marmalade. I'm right there with the cow who told the dairy maid that it's nicer, if it's very thickly spread. But marmalade, like a fine wine, needs to be cellared. It gets better with age. Optimally, you don't want to eat a marmalade that's under five years old. And it goes without saying that you wouldn't bother with the stuff that comes from the supermarket. That's not marmalade, it's more like orange jam. Ick.

I'm planning to make some marmalade next weekend, from various fruit trees we have spied hanging over fences in our new neighbourhood (orange, cumquat and lemon, so far). It's not so much stealing as hunting and/or gathering. And anyway, if it hangs over the fence it belongs to anyone who wants to pick it. The Ancient Romans had a law to say so - I can't remember the Latin word though.

Anyway, the pudding was a magnificent triumph. The pudding steamer was a worthy investment. Goodness knows how I'm going to top it for next week's e.r. watching pudding extravaganza. I was thinking possibly souffle - that's always really impressive. I don't know why really - there's nothing to a souffle. Just eggs and air.

But I digress. The King, despite the wise words of the dairy cow, wanted butter for the royal slice of bread. And so did I, once I saw this magnificent butter at the Vic Market at lunch time. It's raw (unpasteurised), organic, and made by lovely Jersey cows. The dude from the organic dry goods stall told me it's so delicious he's been eating it on everything all week. We eat butter on everything anyway. So it might as well be top quality butter, I reckon. We will not, however, be eating it on a royal slice of bread, but actually on our organic vegetables. With some garlic, parsley from our garden, and rosemary hunted/gathered from a neighbour's hedge. And some lamb chops, gathered by me at the market.

Sorry this is so very food-related today - I haven't been to the market for weeks, as it was all too hard when we were in the midst of moving house, and then I was in Sydney, and la la la, so it was most exciting to get back amongst the lovely smells and tastes of the market today. Oh! And I got beautiful Victorian-grown blood oranges. If there's a nicer citrus fruit anywhere I have yet to find it. And perhaps I should try making blood orange marmalade - can you imagine the wonderful colour?

Anyway, here's the pudding recipe if anyone wants it.

6 heaped tbs marmalade

150 grams softened butter

3/4 cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder (on the generous side)

1/4 tsp salt

1 tbs Cointreau

1/2 cup milk

Butter your pudding steamer. If you don't have a pudding steamer, immediately go out and buy one, but if the shops are shut you could make do with a ceramic dish, and several layers of greaseproof paper and a layer of foil tied on with string. But really, go buy a pudding steamer. Then put the marmalade in the bottom of the buttered pudding steamer.

Then in your mixer, cream the butter and sugar. Then chuck in the remaining stuff, mix briefly by hand, switch on mixer and let it do its work. Scrape down the sides and mix again. But not for too long - you don't want it to go tough. Pour the mixture into the pudding steamer, on top of the marmalade. It's not *very* runny, you'll probably have to scrape it out with a scrapey thing and several spoons. Anyway. Put on lid, place pudding steamer in large basin of boiling water with a good, tight-fitting lid. The water should come about half way up the sides of the pudding steamer. Cover and steam for an hour.

Meanwhile, make custard.

4 cups milk (that's a litre, so you can just use a litre carton or bottle if that helps)

4 tbs sugar

6 tbs custard powder

Heat most of the milk to just below boiling point. While it heats, mix the rest of the milk with the sugar and custard powder into a paste. Then add the paste to the warm milk, and simmer, stirring constantly (unless you want to wreck your saucepan, in which case, don't stir it) until it thickens.

We like skin on our custard, so we leave it to sit for a few minutes when we take it off the heat to ensure lots of skinnnnnnny goodness. If you don't like skin and you need to leave it to sit, cover it with gladwrap so it sits on the surface of the custard - it stops the skin from forming.

Or else invite us around - we'll eat the skin for you.

Err, anyway. Serve pudding by turning it out onto a plate and chopping it up. Be careful not to burn yourself on the steamer - it's v hot. Eat with custard.

Public fuckwittery

I woke up this morning feeling distinctly like someone had very gently whittled away the outer layer of my brain and replaced it with medium-density foam.

Which I suspect is exactly how the people sitting at the other occupied table in our local Indian restaurant feel every day. While the PUs, H and I had an interesting discussion ranging from sexual double-standards to amusing self-depreciating ancedotes, the VERY LOUD MAN CALLED GRAHAM at the next table and his horse-like companions (in the overly-loud neighing and looking like Princess Anne way, not in the sleek and noble creature with a velvet nose and flowing mane way)

Looks like this (left) Not like this (right)

has VERY LOUD and EXTREMELY BORING conversations about the world's most boring topics; viz:

1) the difficulty of redeeming frequent flyer points

2) credit card fees (and why they don't have Diner's any more)

3) how much their houses are worth now that real estate has gone up so much

4) de capo - the difficulty of redeeming frequent flyer points

We're pretty sure they must have discussed the price of petrol, but this clearly happened before we got there. What was really bothering us was the volume - what on earth makes these people think that the utterly inane trivia of their existence would be of any interest whatsoever to anyone else who was being forced to listen to it?

In the end, we decided that they must have an over-inflated idea of their own importance (as indeed do many people) and then made fun of them for quite a while. Of course, they were being so loud that they missed all of it completely. But I think we kept the gentleman who owns the restaurant amused.

Hello, KITTEH!

Apparently, police who break the rules in Thailand are being forced to wear bright pink Hello Kitty armbands. That'll learn them. Who needs a permanent inquisition with the powers of a Royal Commission? No we! We have Hello Kitty armbands.

Frankly, I think it would be a highly effective measure. Let's introduce it here. Christine Nixon? Robert Cameron? Please to purchase Hello Kitty merchandise for all naughty police. I suggest a sliding scale of punishments:

• Drive too fast in police vehicle - must carry gun in Hello Kitty Messenger bag for one week
  
• Take bribe from someone who has committed petty misdemeanour - must wear Hello Kitty headband for one month (actually is not such a bad punishment; as website says "Headbands are so "in" right now and so are red polka dots. That makes this ultra cute Hello Kitty headband doubly hot! Score it for your summer wardrobe!" )

• Take bribe from actual criminal - must wear Hello Kitty lounge wear while on traffic duty for three weeks

• Joining organised crime gang - must wear pink Hello Kitty hat and Hello Kitty hooded gothic sweatshirt, in heinous non-matching fashion faux-pas, for at least six months, depending how naughty exactly the crime gang is:

Where the sky is blue

I am in Sydney, where it's 21 and sunny (and evidence of global warming, if you aks me, which I guess you does since you're reading my blog...)

The people's paper this morning was full of stuff about how we're getting fatter and living in bigger houses. It's not online, but stuff has a great summary - "Australia has become a country of fat, single gluttons who each generate two tonnes of waste a year and live in houses that are unnecessarily large".

Amen to that. I'm wondering, though, whether the deep-fried chicken or the egg and bacon sandwich came first... Perhaps we now need bigger houses because the smaller houses feel too small since we're fatter. Or perhaps we felt too small in our huge houses and stacked the weight on to compensate. Who can say? (said in Bubble-like tones). I can say, though, that the Herald-Sun said there were a whole lot of people living in houses with at least two more bedrooms than they actually need. Fat fuckers in their fat houses.

And TWO TONNES OF WASTE A YEAR? I'm assuming everything they eat comes wrapped in at least three layers of crap to generate that much waste. I think I have blogged before about the system I am in favour of - user pays waste disposal. If you had to pay per kilo for your garbage to be taken away, there'd be a much bigger incentive not to buy things with excess packaging, and much bigger incentives to recycle, reuse, and worm farm or compost.

Sorry, mind still boggled by the two tonnes. I'd be surprised if we generate more than a couple of kilos a week at the most in garbage - but this year our average would be hauled upwards by things like the carpet we ripped out and stuff. But even so. What the fuck are people buying and eating that generates that much crap?

That's 2000 kilograms of garbage. I am astounded.

Clearly. Since I can't stop rabbitting on about it.

In other news, we got our new policy document thingy for our new insurance policy. Unlike the last one, this one is actually in plain English (such as it is) and has headings like "What your policy doesn't cover" and "What your policy covers", which in the old booklet were hidden on page 836 and said things like "Heretoforthwith, if at the discretion of the Company the insurable event is deemed to be an unforseeable act of randomness, then henceforth shall the items covered at Page 3, paragraph 4 be deemed to be uninsured as to this specific event or events of a similar nature", to which the average person can but respond by a scratching of the head and a muttering of "Huh?"

This one, by way of contrast, actually tells me that although my stuff is not covered if it is destroyed by an act of war, a flood (other than if the flood is caused by a landslide), nuclear waste, or during a riot (we don't have riots at our place very often, which is lucky since the insurance doesn't cover it); it is covered if a space craft crashes into the house.

No shit. So if the place is flooded, too bad. But if a spaceship full of little green men comes crashing through the roof, we'll have all new furniture. Provided they're (a) friendly little green men who don't want to take us away to probe us (or who only want to take us away to probe us in a friendly fashion), and (b) we haven't actually been killed by a spacecraft crashing through the roof.

Oh, and I will post some photos next week once the house is a bit tidier, for those who asked :-)

Dead. Deaddeaddeaddeaddeaddeaddeaddeaddead.

I have just had the pleasure of editing a document about estate planning. Or, as I like to think of it, maximising the amount you can piss your family off, even after you're dead.

The document in question referred to the death of the person doing the estate planning as "when the unthinkable happens".

I would just like to take a moment to contemplate this term - "the unthinkable". First of all, if you're doing estate planning, your death is clearly not fucking unthinkable. You are THINKING ABOUT IT. Mind you, it's not quite as bad as a previous document I edited about business succession planning, which referred to death as "the departure of the shareholder".

Secondly, call a spade a spade people. Death is not:

• passing on
• passing (worse, even, than passing on, since it makes it sound like the person had or possibly was a kidney stone)
• being called to glory
• going to a better place/higher place
• going to meet your maker
• sleeping peacefully.

Death is just bloody well being dead. Have an existential crisis if you like. Plan your estate so that once you're DEAD your heirs and beneficiaries don't have to pay 31.5% tax on your estate, by all means. But don't try to claim death is "unthinkable" or even "unexpected". It's the absolutely expected end to all life.

Deal.With.It.

I'm back in teh blogosphere!

Wow, a week with no access to the interwebs makes interweb access all the more precious, and also means my brain is bursting with a week's worth of irrelevant thoughts that normally would have been blog posts before know.

Things you never knew about your parental units musing
PU#2 was kindly putting up hooks in the kitchen for me to hang mugs on near the kettle, and I was 'xplaining to him how I like to have everything handy and within reach in the kitchen (quite the opposite of the parental kitchen, in which (though the tops of the cupboards have not been cleaned since they were built in the 1980s) everything is IN A CUPBOARD). Thus, hooks, magnetic knife racks ($9 from Ikea - cor wot a bargain!), utensil jars, spice racks, pot thing that dangles from the ceiling (coming soon - Ikea had sold out of them)... etc. PU#2 looked at me somewhat mournfully (although that could just be the effects of having spent the majority of the day putting up my second-hand ebay curtains), and said "So do I!" - which was quite a mind-boggling comment as I never suspected for an instant that my father had an opinion on the organisation of the kitchen. Perhaps it explains why the closest he usually gets to cooking is peanut butter toast (and an occasional fried egg).

House stuff
We've moved in (clearly) to the new apartment. The floors look splendid. I went on an Ikea bookshelf-buying shopping spree and now have enough shelves to house my extensive library. Can I add, the Ikea instruction booklets have got a lot easier to follow since I last assembled a piece of Ikea furniture in approx 1998? They used to go from a diagram showing two pieces connected to a diagram showing 300 pieces connected, with no intervening stages. This resulted in much frustration when (just as an actual example which actually happened to me) you put together a desk and then discover once you have it entirely assembled that you have a whole lot of wooden peg things that were supposed to go in ALL the little holes. Much better now, and it only took me about half an hour to assemble one of the bookshelves.

Did I mention I have nine? I am very excited. I am going to arrange them, possibly using the Dewey decimal system, or else that crazy system called the alphabet. I will not attempt to arrange them in colour order - it didn't work last time I did it, and I'm fairly sure it won't work this time. And with the exception that all my books about ponies from when I was a kid will be hidden in the bedroom where guests are less likely to observe the secret shaminess of them. Also, then I can re-read such classics as Ponies all summer and National Velvet without having to leave the warmth of the bed to fetch another (I can read about seven pony books in a day - and yes, I am a freak).

We don't have a pantry yet, so all our food is on a bookshelf in the kitchen, which admittedly looks a bit odd, but is better than all our food being in boxes, as it was previously. And I realised this afternoon while I was walking down to Lush to get some solid bubblebath bars, an almost full bag of brown sugar went missing in the move (I was thinking about making a chocolate self-saucing pudding, and considering whether we had the ingredients). Clearly, the sugar was claimed by the moving gods.

Next on the agenda are getting some carpet on the stairs, a filing cabinet to put all our files in, the tiler, the cabinet maker and getting a skip to cart away all the junk in our courtyard, which is currently covered in ripped up carpet, ends of floor boards, bags of sawdust and assorted other junk.

The cat
Poor the kitty has not been happy about moving, although she was okay the first day or so, as she obviously recognised most of the furniture etc, so didn't feel too bad. But then she seemed to get a bit sick - she didn't eat for a couple of days, and she vomited (mostly water since she wasn't eating), and did nothing but hide under the blanket on the bed and meow grumpily if disturbed. She seems to be on the mend though - she ate last night's dinner and this morning's breakfast, and she does worship the new heating gods - as soon as we turn the heater on, she's lying in front of it. I've added a cushion for her convenience, and she reclines regally. I'm going to get her one of those mini couches you can get for kids. Or a pet divan from Ikea. Or a mousy cushion. Anyway, something so she can laze in style in front of the heating gods (Vulcan?)

Outsourcing to India
Has the whole thing gone a little too far??

The bath
Oh boy, do I love the new bath. I just went and bought four different sorts of bubble bath at lunch. One has sparkles in.

I know it's not so water saving, but given that I'm NOT getting in the shower until the tiles are replaced, it's just too bad. Although, must call tiler and also cabinet maker. Will be SO nice to have all shiny new bathroom (when I say new, the tiles are out of a skip, as previously blogged about, and the top of the vanity is going to be the top of a wood table I bought on ebay, and our taps were all second hand from ebay as well. We are keeping the existing bath. My most expensive purchase so far is the fan/heater/light, which is bloody well out of stock at IXL, and won't be back in til September - just in time for warmer weather when we won't need a bathroom heater. Gah. Still, we will be toasty warm next winter.

The life saving of Mum laundry
Our washing machine is not working yet. Just when I thought that if we don't drown in a sea of cardboard boxes, we may drown in a sea of dirty washing, PU#1 offered to come collect some and wash it for us. Thank goodness for PUs.

Ok, this is getting ridiculously long and I need to do some work.*



*or at least get back to playing scrabble.