Salt and corrosion

I have just spent half an hour trying to find out why I couldn't log in to Evernote, where my list of titles is kept. It was something to do with it doing an update and then thinking my laptop was already logged in. It was a simple fix in the end, but it took a stupidly long time to work it out. I spent longer than that this afternoon trying to work out how to fix something simple in our payroll software, so all up I've spent way longer than desirable battling with software today.

Anyway, it was another quiet and not particularly newsworthy day, fortunately enlivened when I got home and read the local paper. There was a court report of a young man who was charged with doing something naughty, ending with this sentence:

His criminal history includes an aggravated burglary and trespassing in Portland with no pants on and painted blue.

So that's... both quite an image and a very awkward sentence.

I'm so glad this week is nearly over, f-list. It's been one thing after another. Which is how things normally happen, I suppose, but there does seem to have been a lot of them this week and all of varying degrees of stressfulness.

Monday to Wednesday we had a storm. Three days of bone-slicing wind and pounding hail, just to give everything an apocalyptic air.

Alistair had his annual vaccination last Friday, which always knocks him flat. He's all right now, I should say, but he spent four days sleeping, not eating or drinking, and generally looking sorry for himself. He's such a chatterbox, it's just not right to have him silent for four days. "I never thought I'd miss that racket," said my mother, "but the quiet is unnerving." I'm now expecting his whiskers to fall out, which is what happens whenever he gets stressed.

Monday afternoon my boss, who is in a different state to me, called to say he and the powers that be had decided not to renew the contract of one of my accounts officers when it finishes at the end of June. Nothing to do with his work, but restructuring. My boss said he'd do the deed, but I said i thought I should be there. So I had a sleepless night on Monday and felt sick all Tuesday until it finally happened. Not to make it all about me — it was far worse for the accounts assistant — but it was upsetting on a number of levels, from having to let go someone who does good work and whom I really like, to feeling let down by the powers that be. (I would have more to say about this, but in light of my company's policy on not talking about work on social media, just imagine me making a Marge Simpson grumble at the situation.)

I've spent all week trying to track down an EFTPOS banking terminal that was supposed to be delivered to a new shop that my work is opening in a town in another state. I called the bank to ask why it hadn't been delivered by the due date, and the guy said, "Oh, our system shows the courier tried to deliver it at seven a.m. on the day, but left as there was no-one there." Well, of course there wasn't. And what had they done with it then? Well... no-one could tell me. For four days! This one little EFTPOS machine was being driven around rural New South Wales and no-one knew where it was. Anyway, it turned up at the shop at ten this morning, which, as I said to shop manager when she rang to tell me, was legitimately the best news I had all week.

At home, I received an email on Wednesday that a parcel I was expecting had been delivered and "left in a safe space". Not my letterbox. Not the electricity meter box. Not at the back door. Even in the most idyllic weather, my front step couldn't be described as a safe space for a parcel, but this week, if any courier had been silly enough to leave it there, it would have been blown five streets away. So I looked online to see what to do about missing parcels and found Australia Post's definitions page, which defines "delivered" as: Great news, your parcel has been 'delivered'! I mean, yes. It was "delivered".

And my favourite work shoes have worn inners, so this afternoon I went and bought some new ones. They're quite cheerful, I suppose, so maybe things are looking up — but I think I've earned a lie-in tomorrow morning.

Around this time last year — actually it was Australia Day, 26 January — I went to a party. A man there revealed he was a manager at Woolworths, in charge of a number of branches across Melbourne. A woman said to him, "Why are you selling hot cross buns in January? It's too early!" People piled on to agree with her. January is much too early for hot cross buns. The manager got quite defensive, saying, "People buy them, so why shouldn't we sell them if people will buy them? We'd like to sell them earlier, but we don't want the criticism." I mean, I see what he's saying, but... they're not special if they're always available, are they?

Anyway, I saw Cadbury Creme Eggs on sale on 31 December.

Do Not Call
The phone rang last night. The woman said, "Oh, hello, Miss Daisyname. I'm just calling from the Do Not Call register, and I want to know if you are receive many nuisance callers?"

I said, "I think you might be the nuisance caller. It's ten o'clock at night." As I put the receiver down, I could hear her saying, "Oh, at night?"

Anyway, I didn't really think it was the Do Not Call register, so I googled to see what sort of scam that call was. Apparently if I'd said yes, I receive nuisance calls, she would have asked for my credit card details so she could deduct a fee to put me on the Do Not Call register. Cheeky.

A conversational u-turn
The painters were hard at work earlier in the week. The head painter talks in a theatrical boom, and his offsider is a quietly spoken man called Kel. On Friday, they were looking forward to the car race at Bathurst over the weekend. On Tuesday, they talked of nothing else. Well, almost nothing else.

Painter: Bathurst, Bathurst, Bathurst.
Kel: Bathurst, Bathurst, Bathurst.
Painter: Car race, car race, car race.
Kel: Car race, car race, car race.
Painter: Car race, car race, car race. [pause] So, tell me Kel... what do you think about Kim Jong-Un?

That... took a turn.

A win (nearly)
After many, many weeks of coming third, the quiz team made it up to second this week. Woo.

This week's knitting update is half a week late, which is to say that I've had no time for knitting. This last week I have been writing an essay about What Is Strategic Project Management And Why It Is A Good Thing. But knitting weather is coming. I now need to put on a cardigan on to go outside in the evenings. Chilly!

Rest of the week update: Mostly essay writing, to be honest.

* * * * *
Here is a list of recipe titles generated by a computer. Completely Meat Chocolate Pie. Yum.

* * * * *
Around this time last year, my mother called the tree man to come and trim the trees. He's been her go-to tree man for a few years, both for this house and when she was out of town, and has been reliable. He said he'd be here in a week.

He was not.

It turned wet quite early last year, so my mother put the matter aside and said she'd forget about until spring. She called him again last September. He'd be there in a week, he said.

He was not.

That put my mother into procrastination mode, because she didn't want to call him again, but she nor did she want to go the hassle of finding a new tree man. Still, after a year, some of the trees are getting out of hand so she had to do something. She tried another tree man. He said he'd be round that afternoon to do a quote.

He was not.

That was last Thursday. She rang again on Monday, and left a message. He hasn't got back to her, so that's him crossed off the list. She's just called the next name in the phone listing and had to leave a message there too. You wouldn't think it would be so hard to get trees trimmed.

* * * * *
And this is also late: March books read

* The Fox and the Star - Coralie Bickford-Smith (2015) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science - Glen Whitman & James Dow (eds) (2014) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Next Pandemic: On the Frontlines against Humanity's Gravest Dangers - Ali S. Khan (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

I hate myself for clicking on click bait. I am impervious to What the Cast of [Insert Show] Looks Like Now Will Amaze You, but I saw one today promising to tell me The Unconventional Appliance Housewives Love. Ooh! What could it be? ( Click here to replicate my experience of disappointment )

Tuesday's random reviews:

10:25 – Buying fresh fish – ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
( And other thrill-a-minute activities )

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow I have actual plans, so that should throw up something more interesting.

We're supposed to be able to see an aurora tonight. Fingers crossed.

Life is full of minor irritants at the moment. Cardigans without buttons. Having to put the international dialling code on the phone number on my email signature and business card, when no-one has ever called me from overseas in the eleven years I've been here. Having to put my work's logo in the email signature, when it comes through as a box with a cross in it. The word "wicking", as in "wicking away sweat".

I always think I should do something special for the leap year day (leap day?), but I can never think of what.

February books read

In which I continue my goal to start the year by reading at least ten books I already own before I buy any new ones. Two more down; four to go.

* The Alexiad - Anna Komnene (c.1150) (translation by ERA Sewter, 1969 ) ★★★
( Read more... )

* Angelmonster - Veronica Bennett (2005) ★★★★
( Read more... )

I thought on Sunday I should try to post every day this week to get myself back in the habit. That hasn't happened. Twice in a week, though. That's an improvement. Let's see if I can do a summary of what I would have been talking about.

Work is, let's say, interesting now. We won't know the results of the tender for next year until September, so work goes on as normal. We also have to prepare for the new company just in case it does happen. This week, I have been doing my current job and also starting to do the job I may have next year. Also this week, the employment lawyers released their redundancy advice, which was fun. No, it wasn't. But that's an entry for another day.

I am playing phone tag with my hairdresser at the moment. I go to this hairdresser because her salon is a two-minute walk from my house. Also because she is nice, but mostly because she is nearby. Unfortunately, she is sick of being a hairdresser and is studying nursing. She will eventually close her salon, but in the meantime she is keeping it open at odd hours in between nursing placements, which makes it hard to get appointments. Hard to catch her to make an appointment in the first place, and then hard to get in. Last time I made an appointment, I had to wait three weeks. This time, I am starting now, hoping for an appointment in August. I suppose I could just find a different hairdresser, but, oh, that's going to be such a hassle. I'll have to psyche myself up for that. I miss Mischief, my last long-term hairdresser (he moved to Melbourne). For the first time I understood those stories about movie stars flying their favourite hairdresser on location. He was that good.

My mother has been feeling sorry for the birds in her garden now that it's winter. She's always put out bread or seeds or whatever for them, but this year she has been experimenting with making seed balls. 'I think I've cracked it,' she told me the other day, and gave me one of the balls for my garden. She has indeed cracked it. I think she's made bird crack. I've never seen so many sparrows and honey eaters trying to land on one branch. So much angry twittering and flapping and hopping up and down. If you want to try it yourself, the recipe is to melt together a couple of tablespoons of dripping and honey/golden syrup, then stir in enough bird seed to make a solid block; put in paper cups with a wick of kitchen string; set in the fridge.

I recently bought a new box of Glad Wrap (plastic wrap/cling film). There's no cutting strip on it, or so I thought. How can a person be expected to use plastic wrap with no toothed strip to cut it? Only when I was complaining about this to my mother, she looked at it and determined that there was a cutting strip; it was now in the lid so you have to rip upwards, rather than downwards. She was right, of course (and irritatingly). But it's so hard to do! And it turns out that I am not the only one with problems: Glad has had to revert to their original packaging after a consumer revolt. So that's good. Only that article is from January, so obviously they haven't rushed to change the box.

I am going to have a jacket potato for my dinner, and, excitingly, it's a black potato. Well, purple. A Purple Bliss. I imagine it's going to taste just like a regular potato, but I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about seeing black potato flesh.

Tomorrow I am going to the Melbourne Craft Fair, which is being held in the same venue as the Labor Party's national conference. That will be an interesting crowd mix in the foyer.

Last week I reported that a half-tonne rock had been stolen from the National Rock Gallery, which would require a certain degree of dedication on the part of the robbers. Today I was going to report that Queensland's Big Mango has been stolen! Absconding with a ten-metre tall mango would also require organisation and planning by the thieves, and I was really taken with the idea that perhaps they were going to drive all the way along the Queensland coast stealing any Big Fruit they passed (there's a Big Banana and a Big Pineapple, I know; there's also a Big Orange, but I think that's in New South Wales). Perhaps they could take them all to a small town that doesn't have a Big Thing of its own, and make a Big Fruit Salad. Who wouldn't want to see that?

Sadly, that little fantasy isn't going to come true. The Big Mango has been found, cunningly camouflaged by blankets and branches, and it was all a publicity stunt by Nando's. Boo. My idea was better.

In other news, this weekend is the annual visit from the Detox Your Home mobile van, where you can take paint tins and batteries and suchlike for disposal. I don't have that many hazardous chemicals around the place, but I've been saving my batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs all year. So I went to their website and registered to drop my stuff off between 12 and 1 on Saturday afternoon, to which they sent a confirmation email listing all the things they accept. Please note, it said, we can no longer accept batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs. I checked their website, which said the same thing, adding that they could now be taken to one of their permanent disposals sites. I checked the list; the nearest one of them is two hours away. I'm not taking two light bulbs and a few batteries on a day-trip! Then I downloaded their PDF list of things you can take to the mobile van, which said you *can* take batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs. Mixed messages, what.

At this point, I handed matters to my mother, as we were going to take stuff from her house too, and she has ample free time during the day to ring businesses for clarification. She rang the Detox Your Home people and got a USELESS man (her word and emphasis). She told him about the contradictory advice on their website, and he said, no, you can't take batteries and bulbs, no indeed, you've got to take them to a permanent site. She explained that that was neither practical nor environmentally-friendly, and he didn't really have a solution. To be fair, what was he going to say? Oh, right, we'll open one in your town right away!

Then she rang the local council, who is responsible for bring the van down here, to say that we've always taken batteries and bulbs to the mobile van and now they're saying we can't and so she's going to have to put them in the bin and they'll go to landfill and the planet will die and it will be the council's fault, and the nice lady said, 'Oh, take them anyway, I'm taking mine.' So we're taking them.

This is the third time in about six months that my mother has rung the council. The first time was in winter, after I mentioned that I had slipped over on some grass clippings left on the footpath after the council had mown a nearby lawn. The second time was to ask them to remove a dead fox from the same footpath at the height of summer. Both times, the offending items were removed the following day. She's doing good work, but I think she needs a hobby.

January books read

* A Feast for Crows - George RR Martin
* A Dance with Dragons - George RR Martin
* Riches, cruels et fardés - Hervé Claude
* The Monster in the Box - Ruth Rendell

I am up to date with A Song of Ice and Fire, and that's all I have to say about that. Well, no, I'll also say that Stannis Baratheon has joined the long list of emotionally unavailable fictional men to whom I have lost my heart. I really do have a fictional type.

emma2403 sent me Riches, cruels et fardés (Rich, cruel and disguised) for Christmas a couple of years ago, and it finally worked its way to the top of my reading pile. It is a thriller written by a French author, set in Australia. It could be retitled Ways your Australian holiday will end badly: Tropical edition, featuring as it does a holiday resort cut off from civilisation by a cyclone and people dying there in the following ways:

1. Left at sea during a trip to the barrier reef
2. Stung by a jellyfish
3. Bitten by a snake
4. Taken by a crocodile
5. Hanged from a palm tree

The crocodile attack was particularly delightful, in that it came out of nowhere and happened during a funeral.

It amused me to come up with Ways your Australian holiday will end badly: Southern edition, should anyone wish to relocate the novel to my part of the world. Obviously the resort would be cut off by fire rather than a cyclone, and people would die as follows: falling off the Great Ocean Road, stung by a blue-ringed octopus, bitten by a red-back spider, taken by a shark, hanged from a Norfolk Island pine. Feel free to come up with your own local equivalents.

Also, should you be planning a snorkelling holiday, I have learnt that that the French word for the boat that will take you out to sea is 'le cabin-cruiser'. Thanks for letting us do the hard work there, France.

The Ruth Rendell, good lord. I've always found Inspector Wexford vaguely irritating and his sidekick, Mike Burden, even more so, but in The Monster in the Box Wexford and another sidekick and Burden's wife seem to be competing in an irritating competition, leading me to spend most of the novel wondering what Burden was up to, because it had to be better than what I was reading, even if he was just thinking about buying some new socks. That's what wrong with this book: not enough Burden. I never thought I'd say that.

There are two strands to this novel. In the first, Wexford sees a man he first suspected of a murder thirty-six years ago, and becomes convinced that he is still murdering people. When I say 'first suspected of murder thirty-six years ago', I mean 'he saw this man walking his dog in the vicinity of a murder thirty-six years ago, and believes the man has been stalking him ever since'. So that's unlikely, but, annoyingly, it all turns out to be true. I actually thought Wexford might die in this book, because he's very melancholy and nostalgic, and eventually comes across everybody he remembers from all those years ago, old girlfriends and all, so it's all very wistful, but nothing came of it. He's still alive.

Annoying as Wexford's thirty-six year hunch is, it pales in comparison to the second strand of the story. Burden's wife, Jenny, is a teacher, and she is concerned about one of her students, a Muslim girl called Tamima Rahman. Tamima is a clever girl and Jenny thinks she should go on to university, but as soon as Tamima is old enough, she drops out and gets a job in a supermarket. Jenny goes to see Tamima's family to see if they can talk her out of it. Concerned teacher, talking to the family. I'm fine with that. And the Rahmans are fine with that too. They're all university-educated, so they're disappointed about Tamima; but Mr Rahman is a social worker who knows about troubled teens, and he tells Jenny that they support Tamima to do what's best for her. So that's okay, right?

No, that's not okay with Jenny. Not at all. She reports it to Burden, who tells her it's not police business. She then goes to Wexford, who doesn't tell her the same thing, instead fobbing her off to a detective sergeant called Hannah, a self-appointed ethnic affairs 'expert'. So Hannah goes blundering in, upsetting the Rahmans, who quite rightly point out that it's nothing to do with her. Then Hannah finds out that Tamima and her mother are going to Pakistan for a holiday, so she assumes it's for an arranged marriage, despite everyone, including Tamima, telling her not to be so stupid. Then Tamima comes back from her holiday, conspicuously unmarried, and returns to her job in the supermarket. Hannah finds out Tamima has a white boyfriend and assumes that the Rahmans would not be happy about that; Tamima goes to live with her cousin in London, and Hannah decides that that is just a cover story for the Rahmans killing her for going out with a white boy. So Jenny and Hannah track down the Rahman's relatives in London and go to see them. Tamima's aunt politely but firmly tells them to back off and leave poor Tamima alone. Tamima sends Hannah an email saying she's fine and please stop bothering everyone. Hannah finds out what supermarket Tamima is meant to be working for in London and contacts them to check she really is working there. Finally, the aunt admits that Tamima has left London, and no-one knows where she is. In the meantime, Tamima's white boyfriend has gone camping, so Hannah assumes that he and Tamima have run away together. But it turns out that he really was camping, and he's a Bosnian Muslim called Rashid to whom Tamima's family have no objection, but that's all pointless because he's never been Tamima's boyfriend anyway and doesn't know where she is.

I was willing the Rahmans to make a complaint about Hannah, but they didn't, because it turned out that they were covering up a completely different crime instead. ( Oh, what the hell )

Basically: don't bother with this book.