Salt and corrosion

I went to buy this morning's paper at ten o'clock-ish and the customer ahead of me was wearing pink flannelette pyjamas and a grubby white chenille dressing gown. I can't imagine doing that. I prefer to get dressed as soon as I get up, and even on days when I might have breakfast before showering, I can't imagine leaving the house and going to the shop undressed. Then again, to get the shop, I have to walk down a short street and cross a service road, both lanes of the highway and another service road; this woman drove, so she probably didn't feel so exposed.



Day 310. Keys, Day 311. Moon, Day 312. Storm from my office window, Day 313. Sheep bags, Day 313a. What a coincidence, Day 313b. Spiky, Day 314. Quite a grand staircase for a door that has no handle, Day 315. Inside my bedside lamp, Day 316. The split rock plant splits

The last couple of mornings have been brisk enough to warrant getting my coat out and this morning I threw caution to the winds and put my gloves on too. At last, my kind of weather.

The office manager was in a quandary this afternoon: where to buy her lunch? She has been buying a salad roll at a little sandwich bar down the street for the last year, but it sounds as though things aren't going well. It's one of those places where you can pick your ingredients: roll, spread and toppings. It changed hands last months and, straight away, the new owners stopped offering avocado as a spread, saying it was too expensive. Now they have also stopped offering beetroot as a topping. 'What's a salad roll without beetroot?' asked the office manager today. Less prone to staining things bright pink, I would have thought, but still, just because it's not a topping I would pick doesn't mean it shouldn't be offered. Anyway, after venting about this, the office manager decided to try the student cafeteria in the TAFE college across the road. She came back beaming, because not only do they offer both beetroot and avocado, it also costs several dollars less and is much closer. So, wins all round, except for the sandwich bar people.

Did you know that proper nouns have now been approved for use in Scrabble? That happened months ago, it seems, but news of it has only just reached me. The reason it came up was an article I read today about a new list of officially approved Scrabble words. You can now play FACEBOOK and MYSPACE if you have the tiles. Also BLOOK (an online book, apparently, but it's new to me), THANG, VLOG, GRRL, WIKI and BLINGY. Or you could just make your own words up and keep them if you can justify them to the other players. I have fond memories of a family game in which SMURF became SMURFETTE then SMURFETTETANK, which is what Smurfette drives into battle. So much more fun.

I have a wall calendar, like so. You know those little stickers that are on pieces of fruit? I have recently started putting them on my calendar. No reason other than to do something with the little stickers. Anyway, some days the fruit I eat doesn't have a sticker on it, which makes it look as though I didn't eat a piece of fruit that day. Other days, I might have two pieces of fruit and get two stickers. Would it be wrong to stick one of these excess stickers on the days I didn't get a sticker? Such a knotty problem.

The blurb of the book I am soon to begin reading:

After eloping with the son of her repulsive guardian, a beautiful young woman is terrorized by an evil presence in her remote country house--and then the situation worsens...

Hard to see how it could worsen, really, but I suppose I'll soon find out.

Yesterday was the last day of the year and the first really hot day of summer: window-rattling north winds and the feeling of walking into a furnace as soon the door opens. There was a small (three trucks needed) fire in the paddocks near where my mother lives, not that she knew until she went home late in the day. She spent the day taking the sea breeze in town, or, rather, flopped on my sofa watching afternoon TV. Neither of us watches TV during the day as a rule, and it feels sinful and decadent when we do.

We watched an episode of Charlie's Angels. They were trapped on an island by a mad hunter who was going to track them and shoot them for sport. As you do. One Angel was wearing the classic linen shirt and safari shorts combo, along with a pair of white knee socks. She looked like an old man, but was more appropriately dressed for the adventure than the other two, who were wearing (a) a blue velour hotpant jumpsuit and (b) a blue tracksuit top and crimson satin flares with wedge-heeled espadrilles. Needless to say, they all lived happily ever after, except for the bad guy who was eaten by tigers. On an island in Mexico.

Today we did the Daisy family New Year tradition of a visit to the City by the Sea's botanical gardens. It was nice. Amongst all the ducks on the lake, there was a peahen and some chicks and one of them, a tiny black ball of fluff, had got itself separated from the others. It stood cheeping on a lily pad for ages until it finally plucked up the courage to jump in, at which point it zipped off and quickly found its family. That seemed like a lot of fuss about nothing.

Here is a top way to start the new year: muppets with human eyes.

And because I feel bad for inflicting that on you, this is one of my very most favourite feeds, littledoodles, illustrations of fat little birds. It makes my day.

I forgot to say the other day that among the second-hand book sale tables, I found a book called Scouts in Bondage, which turned out not to be about scouts in bondage at all. It was a book about misleading book titles, which suggests that there is another book called Scouts in Bondage that is also not about scouts in bondage for it to be included in the book I saw. So that was something.

We had something of a storm on Saturday night. We hit 11 on the Beaufort scale, which Wikipedia helpfully illustrates like so. That is indeed what it looked (and felt) like. I do enjoy the Beaufort scale.

I surveyed the damage on Sunday morning: my potted yucca had fallen over and squashed some sweet peas, one manky old fence paling had come off, and I slipped over on the wet tiles and pulled an abdominal muscle (which is better today). Not what you'd call incalculable loss. I went out to buy the paper later and found that I had been quite lucky, passing neighbours looking at the remains of their fences and trees and in one case, half a caravan. I also went down to have a look at the river, which was well stirred and covered with murky sea foam, like froth on a dishwater cappuccino. The little town where my mother and John live was without electricity for 24 hours (my mother and John themselves weren't without electricity for that long, because they came in and used mine spent the day with me). Their neighbour had to chainsaw his way out of his front door because it was blocked by a fallen tree.

Then again, places that aren't the City by the Sea are in flood and partly evacuated, so we're all quite lucky. It's hard to enjoy a good grizzle about a partly flooded car-park when the news is covering the Christchurch earthquake.

What is this strange feeling? I'm... I'm cold. This is delightful. I had to put a pair of socks on this evening, for the first time in ages.
 
Waiting at the hairdresser's today, I read an issue of Gourmet Traveller magazine, which claimed that the party pie is one of Australia's contributions to global food culture. Is this right? Has no-one else ever thought of making tiny meat pies to give to children at parties? I can't really believe that. But the first two pages of results on Google have .au domains, so it must be true. Fancy that.

I was about to have a rant about what ever happened to nibble pies, as we called them when I was little. Who changed the name to party pies? But subsequent investigation revealed that the name 'nibble pie' is unique to the City by the Sea. So that was the end of that.

Happy day. I've finally fixed* my weather station thingie, just in time for a 43C day. I love having a number to put on my misery.

After the Black Saturday bushfires last year, whoever is in charge of these things developed a new fire danger barometer. Today, the region above mine has become the first to hit the top level of fire danger, CATASTROPHIC CODE RED, which means that people living in particularly dangerous areas were meant to evacuate last night. Here in the City by the Sea, we, like the rest of the state, are at the second highest level of fire danger, EXTREME, meaning that people in dangerous areas should either evacuate to somewhere safer or put into action their bushfire survival plans (I don't live in a dangerous area, by the way, and my bushfire survival plan is 'get in the river at the end of the street'). So today's weather forecast, as well as saying it will be hot and windy, also says that today is a total fire ban day, gives a fire weather warning and says that the fire danger rating is extreme. No-one wants to see a repeat of last year's fires, but I do find this just a teeny bit of overkill. I'm not sure we need another warning system so much as advice on what to do with the old ones. Not to mention that making people evacuate runs the risk of crying wolf and makes them less likely to go next time.

At any rate, today isn't like Black Saturday. Black Saturday was at the end of summer and at the end of a week or more of days like this, over 40C temperatures and terrible, hot, north winds, and everyone was tired and sweaty, and Melbourne's trains were melting (or something. They weren't working, at any rate) and the media were busy saying 'perfect day for a bushfire, any arsonist who's watching'. That's catastrophic. Today is just... unpleasant.

Friday night I couldn't be bothered thinking or doing anything productive and useful, so I plonked myself in front of the TV and watched the movie. You know how sometimes a film sticks with you? Days afterwards, you're still thinking about its beauty or profundity. That's what this was like. All weekend I kept stopping whatever I was doing to think, that didn't make a lick of sense. The film was Flight Plan, starring Jodie Foster. I like Jodie Foster, but I can only think she needed the money to pay off a gambling debt because Flight Plan is a terrible film. Jodie plays a widowed aeronautical engineer, who is taking her husband's body back to the US for burial, and whose daughter goes missing on the plane while she (Jodie) is asleep. And it turns out (spoiler!) that Jodie's husband was murdered by the plane's air marshal in an absurd plan to fill his casket with explosives and frame Jodie for hijacking the plane. I mean, obviously, if you're going to hijack a plane and ransom the passengers, you need a good plan, and I'm not convinced that a plan that involves the on-board kidnapping of the child of the one passenger who knows all the hiding places in a plane fits the bill.

Also, according to the film, one of the toilet cubicles has a manhole in the ceiling, which gives access to the inner workings of the plane. That information will come in handy if I ever decide to cause havoc on an international flight.

Finally, apparently children with unusual names are more likely to need hospital medical treatment. Yet another reason not to use Jyrus as a name.



* By 'fixed', I mean I put some new batteries in it.

The weekly weather forecast: Monday, showers; Tuesday, showers; Wednesday, showers; Thursday, possible shower; Friday, showers; Saturday, showers; Sunday, showers. I love that 'possible shower' on Thursday, just to maintain a bit of mystery.

My new-ish jeans have got diamantés stuck on the back pockets, but they're not applied terribly well. Every time I get up I leave some on the chair. I feel a bit like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of little sparkly things to find my way home.

We pay our office phone bill by cheque at the post office. Telstra (the phone company) sent me (and presumably all its other customers) a letter today:

This letter is to let you know that on and from 14 September 2009 the following changes are being made to bill payment fees:

A new $2.20 payment administration fee will apply for each bill payment sent through the mail or made in person...

Avoid the $2.20 payment administration fee by paying your Telstra bill using one of the following options: direct debit, pay by phone using your credit card*, or online via telstra.com using your credit card*.

* Payments made by credit card will incur the payment processing fee.

I mean, it's no great hardship to pay it electronically, but still, levying a fee for paying cash is a bit cheeky, isn't it?

After rashly opining (apropos Earth Hour) that dining by candlelight was quite nice, I was forced to do just that again last night when the power went off. It turns out that dining by candlelight is slightly less nice when you're listening to unprecedented cyclone-force winds outside.

I went outside this morning and thought that the world - well, the garden at least - seemed unexpectedly greener than normal... and then I realised I was looking at the neighbours' lawn rather than my back fence. On the whole, though, now that it's abated somewhat, I think losing one evening's electricity and one already dodgy paling fence means I escaped the Big Wind quite lightly.

When the electricity came back on last night, I watched Dragonwyck and I must urge everyone to do the same. It's awesomely preposterous in the way that only black and white films from 1946 can be. It's not quite as brilliant as The Wicked Lady (1945), in which a noblewoman secretly takes up highway robbery; but it does have a scene in which Vincent Price announces, "I have become... a Drug Addict!", and that counts for a lot.

As I'm typing, I am surrounded by the balmy scent of seaweed being wafted up from the beach. There's something about the muggy weather and gathering black anvil cloud that suggests a storm is on its way.

I'm currently waiting for two red leather sofas to be delivered, replacing my ratty old sofa and two equally ratty armchairs. I've been thinking, too, that I need a new mattress and another bookshelf, and then this morning my bedroom curtain fell off its hooks. Sigh. I really must look at getting light fittings too; I'm sick of living with bare bulbs. It's surprising what you get used to or forget about if you put up with it for long enough.

I have begun a Procrastination Project, meaning that whenever I'm in the mood to put off doing something, I'll always have something to do instead; namely, putting tags on all my old LJ entries. So far I'm up to July 2004, so I think this promises to be a long-term project. I don't normally go back and look at my old entries; I remember a few of them, but certainly not all. One thing that surprised, reading April, May and June 2004, was that I rarely mention books unless it's to say I didn't like them. Lest I be mistaken for some sort of book curmudgeon, today I'm going to write about the book I've just finished reading and that I enjoyed tremendously, and that book is The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

This is a non-fiction, popular science book (about clouds, oddly enough). Before reading it, I knew enough about clouds to tell a cumulus from a cumulonimbus, but now! Well, now I know my cumulus humilis from my cumulus mediocris radiatus, and what a sundog is, and why children should be punished if they draw teardrop-shaped rain, and that's just for starters. So, it's a fascinating book, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and just a little bit disturbing, both in the chapters about global warming and weather manipulation and also for just how enthusiastic Pretor-Pinney is about clouds (he has even gone so far as to start a Cloud Appreciation Society).

Anyway, I highly recommend it.