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Today's haul:

3 (1).jpeg

I have plans for a curried zucchini slice and zucchini brownies, and my mother is thinking of zucchini soup. And by then, the next ones will be ready to harvest.

While I'm doing photos, last year, while people were doing sourdough in lockdown, I had a crack at croissants. How did that go? )


January

22. How often do you check your phone?
Rarely. In the Beforetimes I hardly ever turned it on. These days, it's on most of the time because my work phone diverts to it when I work from home, and because of checking in everywhere, but I try to ignore it as much as possible. I really do resent its constant demands for attention.
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I work on the first floor (which, for clarity, because I know this is a term with different meanings depending on where you live, is one floor up, above the ground floor). I sit next to a window, which looks out on a tall tree in front of the building. And what only I and Colleague S, who shares the same window, know is that the tree top is full of orange butterflies. It's very soothing to look out on when thinking on a knotty accounting issue.


January

21. Do you like classical music? If yes, name your favourite composer(s).
I'm going to assume this is asking about what my flute teacher called chamber music in general, not just music of the classical period. I'm currently on a Mussorgsky jag, and I always like a bit of Satie.
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It's so easy to do a daily update when there's the ongoing saga of my booster shot to report. Not that there is much to report today, just that I found out the "unforeseen circumstances" that made them cancel today's appointment. Apparently Thursday is meant to be for children, but they somehow managed to mix up who was eligible to book an appointment on which day. A whole lot of parents and children turned up for their appointments yesterday to find there were no children's doses, and had to come back today.

I received a text from the Department of Health this morning saying they would call me soon to arrange a new appointment. I wonder if they'll realise I've already done that?

I was quite lucky to get a new appointment at the mass vaccination centre next Monday. Payroll Lady at work was trying to make an appointment this morning, and couldn't get in there until April. She tried her GP, and couldn't get in until March. So she rang around the pharmacies, and managed to get an appointment on 1 February.


January

20. How fast do you read?
I'm a fast reader. Not speed reading fast, but in primary school the teacher didn't believe I was reading books so quickly until she tested me on them and realised that I did know what was in them. And if we ever had to share a book in class for some reason, I would find myself with time to wait at the end of the page.

Having said that, I don't always have a lot of time available for reading, so I can take a while to read a book. I slowly read a book quickly.
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All week I have been receiving reminders about my booster shot tomorrow, both an email and a text, Monday morning, Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning. Then this afternoon, another text: my appointment has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. So that's what I've been doing this evening, booking a new appointment, and I'm sure you will be shocked and surprised to hear that it didn't go smoothly. This time I had a password and the verification emails worked, but the captcha wouldn't accept my answer, even though I entered it exactly as it was in the box. Three tries later, I finally got in; I reviewed the page with my personal details; I clicked on all the questions about allergies and which vaccines I've had and when; I entered my postcode and selected my nearest vaccination site; then... the page timed out with a message to try again later. So I went away and had dinner and tried again later and finally got an appointment for 3:30pm on Monday.

The only reaction I had to my first two shots was extreme tiredness; this time round, I'm exhausted before I even get there.

January

19. Do you like reality/competition TV shows? Why or why not? If so, which ones?
I don't enjoy people plotting and shouting and eating cockroaches, but I am very interested in talented people being nice to each other. So the Bake Off, the Sewing Bee, the pottery one. Masterchef sometimes.
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Something I learnt today: sharks have the same sort of reflective layer in their eyes as cats do. As the book I read that in said, if they walked on land, you'd see them at night when your headlights picked up their glowing eyes. So there's a free idea for your nightmares tonight.


January

18. In 40 years, what will people be nostalgic for?
Forty years ago was 1982, and the 1980s are having a moment now. So does that mean forty years in the future, people will be nostalgic about this year? Keep your masks, f-list: all the cool kids will be wearing them again.
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Nothing of interest happened today. So here's something to do:draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

January

17. Where do you get most of your news?
From the ABC (the Australian one), the Guardian, the online newspaper Crikey, a handful of email newsletters like International Intrigue.
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Already I have discovered something using dog breeds as my titles: the Akita and the Akita (Japanese) (or Akita Inu) are not the same thing. Always learning.

It is zucchini time again in the garden. There were five little green fingers on the plants yesterday morning; by this afternoon they were like forearms. I picked them so they didn't get any bigger, and immediately grated two of them to make a zucchini-and-other-vegetable slice for this week's work lunches.

For my birthday last year I was given a Lego bonsai. I made it up with the green leaves and have it on my chest of drawers. While I was waiting for the zucchini slice to bake today, I finally got around to swapping them out for the pink blossoms. A bit of variety.

January

16. What's the most creative use of emojis you've ever seen?

My mother and her friends send the most bizarre emojis to each other. She'll send a text to say Happy birthday and add cake, cake, cake, balloon, champagne, chicken, chicken, chicken, duck, duck, chicken, smiley face. "What does that mean?" I'll ask, and she'll just say, "Who doesn't want a chicken?" Fair enough.

Akita

Jan. 15th, 2022 08:07 pm
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A trip to the independent supermarket today for items on it stocks. (But no Chicken Feast! And me with only 18 more days' supply! What will Mr Cat eat for breakfast then? So next week, a trip to the other shop that stocks it.)

Back to today, though. The independent supermarket has a shelf of... oddments. Like they buy a box of random stuff and put it out just in case it sells. Last month, the shelf was full of cheap jigsaws - which sold quickly, I have to say, probably as stocking stuffers. Today: boxes of coffee jars. Twenty cents per jar. Twenty cents! They were out of date, obviously; as a sign clearly noted, they expired last September.

There was a very old lady leaning over, stacking several jars in her trolley. "Twenty cents!" she said to me as I passed by. "Five for a dollar!" She was the happiest person I've seen in weeks.

January

15. What social stigma does society need to get over?
All of them? Let's stop judging people for stuff.

Or let's get rid of all of them, but also create a new one of shunning the idiots (as declared by me).
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Yesterday's storm turned into last night's storm and I woke this morning to a freshly washed world and a flock of rainbow lorikeets.

My mother had her Covid booster today. Mine is next week. And that leads me to today's story from... [imagine that wavy thing TV shows do for a flashback]... way, way back in December last year. Three weeks ago.

Day one
The government sent me a text to say it was time for my third vax. So I went to the local hospital's vaccine registration site, which is how I set up my first two doses. There, I clicked the big blue button to set up an appointment, exactly as I did for the first two doses. But instead of giving me appointment times, that link has now changed to a state-wide registration site, which I had to set up a user name for. So I did that. The site said they would email me a temporary registration number to enter in order to create a password. The email did not arrive. I clicked the link that said it would re-send the number. That email didn't arrive. I decided I'd try again the following day.

How did that go? )

So that was a bit of fun.

January

14. What movie would be greatly improved if made into a musical?
Black Hawk Down.
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Grey clouds and full to bursting warm air when I left the house this morning, then storms and steam all day.

I made a terrible, terrible mistake today. Alistair's favourite food is Fancy Feast, particularly their CLASSIC PATE range, and particularly a type of Fancy Feast CLASSIC PATE called CHICKEN FEAST. It is hard to come by. I've never seen it sold as individual tins; only in packs of twelve, and only at two local shops. Even the online pet food supplier doesn't have it. I have to make a special trip each month to one of the two shops to buy a couple of boxes, so he can have one tin for breakfast.

So imagine my excitement when I saw something called Fancy Feast Creamy Delights CHICKEN FEAST with a Touch of Real Milk IN A CREAMY SAUCE! (On a side note, the Fancy Feast people could really work on their naming and capitalisations.) I focused on the CHICKEN FEAST part of the label and bought up a few tins. I missed the CREAMY SAUCE part, and the lack of CLASSIC PATE.

I opened a tin of it this morning and found to my great horror that it wasn't CLASSIC PATE. It was chunks in a horrible white sauce. Oh well. Maybe Alistair would eat it.

Well, he sniffed it. He looked at it. He walked around the bowl and looked at it again. He sat back and looked at me with such sadness in his eyes. I thought we were friends, his eyes said, why would you give me this poison? And he walked away.

(I put the CREAMY SAUCE out for the birds and they didn't eat it for ages either.)

January

13. Would you rather have all illicit drugs be legalized, or duelling between consenting adults be legalized?
I'm generally in favour of decriminalising drugs and I don't think there's any societal need for duelling, so let's go with the first one. Slapping each other with gloves might be fun, though.
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A bit of excitement today: my bi-monthly cheese box arrived. This month:
- a semi-matured ashed goat's milk cheese
- a Persian feta infused with chilli and garlic
- a semi-hard cow's milk cheese made using leftover liquid from a gin still
- a fresh goat's milk cheese

And I bought a lovely red leicester just the other day, so I am totally cheesed up.

January

12. What's your favourite number? Why?
e, the base of the natural logarithm. Because I am whimsical.
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Working from home again didn't last for long. For various reasons, I am now back in the office. One of three, rattling around our floor.

I continue my New Year clean out. Over the weekend, I did a quick cull of my wardrobe. Today: podcasts. Working from home, I've been listening to podcasts during the day. I can still do that in the office, but for less time. And I feel anxious when I have too many unlisted to podcasts, like I'll never catch up. So: some of them are gone. Next, I think, will be unfinished craft projects.

January

11. What do you think are three things that are pretty great or interesting about you?
Three? I struggle to think of one. I am neither great nor interesting.

No, I lie. I can think of one thing, which is relevant to my return to the office today. A few years ago, when I left Old Job then went back for a few months to help them out of a spot, one of my colleagues said something to me. She'd only started there a little while before I left, so I didn't know her very well. She said, "I thought you should know, when it was announced that you were coming back for a few months, everyone was so pleased. One of them said, 'No matter how bad things are, when you go and get Alicia, you just know everything's going to be all right.'" So there we go. I am apparently a calming influence.
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I've just been looking at books, planning the next few things that I'm going to read. Apparently I'm very into non-fiction books about sea creatures at the moment. Am I moving on from last year's Golden Age detective novel binge, or is this just a blip?

January

10. What Olympic (or other) sport would be the funniest to add a mandatory amount of alcohol to?

Pretty much the entire Winter Olympics. Alcohol and ice: dangerous and funny. Drunk figure skating! Drunk slalom! Drunk skeleton! The fun would never stop.
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I only have a couple more left on this list of questions that I use for my titles. What will I do next? Will I have to think of things? Heaven forbid.

The old vegetable patch has been left empty and overgrown for a year, so I've been working on clearing and digging it over. I gave it a final dig this morning, then planted out some sunflower seedlings and scattered a "bee mix" of flowering seeds, then covered it all with sugar cane mulch.

Last night I discovered that I've been using the wrong green in the cross stitch I'm doing. Fortunately I hadn't done much of it, but enough that it took me a while to unpick resentfully this morning.

January

9. Would you rather lose the ability to read, or the ability to speak?
Assuming the ability to read also includes the ability to write, I'd still be able to communicate, so that one. But neither, ideally.
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A slow day, so here is a story from last year:

I.
When my mother was a little girl, her best friend was called Noelene. Noelene's family lived on the next farm over, both farms being big tranches of land outside a tiny town called Purnim. My mother will wax lyrical about the idyllic days she and Noelene spent riding their horses to each other's houses, or to the shop, or to the tennis court, or around the paddock. Eventually Noelene's family moved to a farm further east, and they lost touch.

II.
In January last year, my work employed a new accountant called Brooke. She's nice. We've both been working from home for most of the year, but for the last month or so we've been back in our newly-renovated office, where we have adjoining desks. Brooke isn't from the City by the Sea; she lives in the shire to the east.

III.
In late December, one of our colleagues stopped by for a chat, saying she had to go and pick someone up from hospital and she didn't know what she would have to do. Would she be allowed in? My mother had been in hospital for a day procedure (nothing serious) a couple of weeks earlier, so I told her my experience: there was a separate desk in the foyer for picking up people, where I had to go in and say I was there to pick up Pauline Daisyname, then wait until she came out, quite separate from the waiting area for people going in.

When our colleague left, Brooke turned to me and said, "Did you say your mother's name was Pauline Daisyname? Like, is that a married name?"

"No," I said, "that's her maiden name."

"How old is she?"

"Seventy-one," I said, and I thought I knew where this was going. My mother was a midwife and district nurse for a long time, so she probably delivered Brooke or visited her ailing relatives or some such, but her next question surprised me.

"Where did she grow up?"

"On a farm near Purnim. Why?"

Brooke blinked. "My mum's Noelene."

IV.
It is a small world.


January
8. Would you rather be able to see 10 minutes into your own future, or 10 minutes into the future of anyone but yourself?

I think ten minutes into my own future is very likely to be ten minutes further into me doing whatever I'm doing at any given point. I mean, ten minutes from now, I will probably still be sitting on this sofa, just with an empty cup rather than one full of tea. But ten minutes into anyone else's future, well, that's bound to be more interesting, isn't it? Even if they're sitting on a sofa with a cup of tea, it will at least be a different sofa and a different cup.
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Grocery morning. We've gone back in time, back to two years ago, looking at the empty shelves and product limits. Then back to the spare room for my usual half day of work on Friday. Lunch, then to my great-aunt's funeral. No masks required at funerals now, but we all wore them. A quiet funeral, as half the great-aunt's children and their families live interstate, so they were there by livestream. It was sunny when we went into the funeral, but we came out to a sudden sea mist. Solid grey air.

January

7. Have you ever saved an animal's life? How about a person's life?

I have rescued several birds from our bird bath. Small birds out of their depth, having slipped off the pebble in the middle. A lot of flap and splash and panic, fixed by me putting my hand under them and scooping them out.

I have administered the Heimlich manoeuvre to a choking person, which was fairly traumatic for both of us. Apparently it's frowned on now, but it seemed to do the job at the time.
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I am home again. Working from home, that is. I've been back in the office since mid-December. I've only just started getting used to it again, but word came from on high this afternoon, so I packed up my desk at the end of the day and here I am. It did seem a bit silly that I've spent the last two years working from home when there was only twenty cases in town, but had to come back to the office now Covid is out and about.

Speaking of work, in December I heard from Old Boss, at the not-for-profit job I left in 2016. They've finally lost their government funding and will wind up in December 2022. Which is grim, but given that this was first threatened in December 2005, they've had a good run. At the back of my mind I've always thought of it as my actual job, one I just happen to be not working at and would happily(-ish) go back to when enough time had passed. Time to recalibrate my ideas about that.

January

6. How often do you binge-watch TV shows?
So much for questions I could give interesting answers to. I don't binge-watch TV shows. I like to let my thoughts simmer.

I forgot to post all the questions last time, in case anyone else wants to do it. The full list of 365 questions is posted here.
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I found a year-long question meme with some tolerable questions. I can't say I'll do them all or every day, but it will be an ongoing project.

January

1. After roughly two years now of living with various changes and restrictions brought about by the Covid pandemic, which, if any, measures do you think you will continue to do all the time?
I'd like to think I was always good at washing my hands and keeping my distance, so nothing has changed or will change there. Masks were a new thing to me, and I can't say I like them, but I can see using them longterm if needed.

2. When you are old(er), what do you think children will ask you to tell stories about?
I can't imagine any children, present or future, would be terribly interested in my ramblings. But they'd be missing out on some thrilling horror stories about dealing with officialdom. "Gather round, children, and I'll tell you about the most terrifying email subject line in the world. [Puts torch under my chin and puts on a spooky voice] You have a message in your inbox from MyGov."

3. January 3 is Fruitcake Toss Day. Do you like fruitcake? Why does it get such a bad rap?
What is Fruitcake Toss Day? I've never heard of it. It sounds like some sort of American nonsense. Also the idea that fruitcake gets a bad rap is laughable in an Australian context, where it is a much beloved Christmas tradition. Except by me, because I do not care for squishy fruit in cakes. (I also do not care for Christmas pudding or mince pies.)

4. iOs or Android?
I have a Samsung Galaxy, so Android. But I also have an old iPod Touch for when I want to listen to something without being contactable, so also iOs. I am an equal opportunity operating system user.

5. What do you do to get rid of stress?
I let it gnaw away at me until it's overtaken by a new problem.
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Today I had to carry an office chair up a flight of stairs. Who knew that the seat isn't actually attached to the leg? Not me. I hoisted that chair by the back rest and watched as the leg fell out and rolled down the three stairs I'd just dragged the whole thing up. Still, easier to carry in two parts.
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Today we cleaned out the second half of the kitchen cabinet.

Things thrown in the bin:
A shiny purple teacup (cracked), given to my mother as a Christmas gift in the late 1950s by an aunt
A wooden pestle that no longer has a mortar

Things put in the box to take to the charity shop, on the grounds someone might want them:
A plastic lemon keeper shaped like half a lemon (purchased by me, never used)
A teapot shaped like a tree stump with a nesting owl, two matching stump mugs (belonged to my mother's late partner, who went through an owl phase)
A wooden beefeater and bobby pair (a gift from my mother's late partner's family in England to him)
Ceramic money box with a Victorian lady on one side and "Chocolate Fund" on the other (my mother thinks this was a work Kris Kringle gift)
Green plastic photo frame shaped like a flower on a metal stem (neither of us know how we obtained this)
One round red serving dish with a Christmas tree on it (source unknown)
Three glasses with cartoon characters on them (probably "collectible" jam jars that my grandmother kept)
Three small wooden ducks (used to sit on the kitchen windowsill at my mother's late partner's house)
Tin money box with an Australian $100 note design, completely sealed and needing to be opened with a tin opener, containing one coin, probably a 20c or 50c judging from the sound (this was a work Kris Kringle gift to me)
Two mugs with legs like Humpty Dumpty that overbalance when filled with liquid (source unknown)
Two small (10cm) pewter jugs (Christmas gift from a relative who had just come back from Singapore)
Two square white ceramic dishes that you'd put dip or nuts in (source unknown)

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