Salt and corrosion

Finally, I am boosted! I was a little worried because, unlike last week, they hadn't sent me any reminders, but they had me on the list and happily jabbed me, so all's well.

Six more zucchini today.


January

24. If you could switch two movie/book/TV characters, what switch would lead to the most inappropriate movie/book/TV show?
Well, this is just asking for two wildly disparate characters, isn't it? How about Winnie the Pooh and Pennywise the Clown? Sauron and the man covered in saucepans from the Faraway Tree books? Dracula and Anne of Green Gables?

Late-breaking news on Friday, as all of Victoria went into a snap Stage 4 lockdown for five days, Saturday to Wednesday. I had to go to the supermarket on Friday afternoon and there were already signs up about limited purchases of certain items: toilet paper, pasta, hand sanitiser. The usual suspects. But there wasn't panic buying. Everyone probably has enough toilet paper in storage from last time.

Before that it was an odd sort of week, as I'd had to go into the office a few times. I'd been thinking that everyone was getting slightly blasé about it all - there used to be bottles of hand sanitiser on every desk and spare surface, for example, which have all disappeared now. Perhaps this snap lockdown will kick everything back into action. I'm supposed to be back there on Tuesday for a two hour meeting about fringe benefits tax, but I don't think that will come under the definition of "essential work" to meet in person. I hope not, at any rate.

At home, there was (extremely) minor excitement on two fronts. First, I bought a label maker and made tiny labels for the top of all my spice jars, so now when I open the spice drawer I can read the top of the lid without having to lift them up. What a time saver. While at the stationery shop, I found mailing labels, just regular sheets of Avery labels, but on clear frosted paper instead of white. So I bought some of that too, and made slightly fancy labels for all the plain jars in the pantry.

Second excitement: the first of my Christmas subscription cheese boxes arrived. Camembert, chèvre rolled in ash, a semi-hard cow's milk cheese with wildflowers pressed into it, and manchego-style cheese aged in wine. I've tried the first two so far, and they've both been good.



Last year, for a New Year's resolution, I did two of the challenges from The Conqueror (it was a New Year two-for-the-price-of-one special), where you log your exercise as a distance and get virtual postcards of your trip and an actual medal at the end. Last year I did the New Zealand Alps to Ocean and the US Grand Canyon distances. I signed up again this year, same deal. I'm currently halfway up Mount Fuji. Not sure what the second one will be yet. Maybe the set your own distance one and make it long enough for the rest of the year. I suspect that will be the only way I travel anywhere for the foreseeable future.

No new bright flowers this week. Instead, a photo of the dangers that lurk when picking vegetables: someone playing Tiger in the Grass among the bean plants.

Hello, f-list. New job is going well. I think. Seems to be. I haven't accidentally set fire to the building or anything, so let's call it positive. It involves a lot more looking at a computer screen than my previous jobs, so I'm doing less of that at home to give the old eyes a rest. Which means I have a month's worth of words jotted down that should have been entries. Let's do this.

Chester
One night a few weeks ago there was a knock on the door just before midnight. That's never good, is it? I opened it to Brian Next Door, who said, "You haven't seen Chester, have you? Someone opened the gate and he got out." Chester is Next Door's little terrier, very old now, mostly blind and arthritic. He's run over here other times he's escaped, so I helped Brian search the garden, but we didn't find anything. I felt terrible thinking about him lost and lonely in the night; Next Doors would feel worse.

The next morning as I was heading off to work, Next Door's car pulled into their driveway. Brian got out of the passenger side and waved to me, holding up Chester so I could see his wagging tail. Kim got out of the driver's seat and came over to the fence. "He found his way home then?" I said.

"No, we had a call from the vet on the highway at half-past seven. Someone picked him up on the highway last night and dropped him to the vet this morning and they got our number off his chip."

So that ended a lot better than it could have.

Extra day
It's a leap year, and there was a lot of fuss about 29 February, the extra day. What did I do with my extra day? I had two naps. I had a cold, you see. An actual cold, which has been going around the City by the Sea, and not the novel coronavirus. (Although it could be *A* coronavirus, said my mother helpfully, there's lots of them.) It was all over quickly, but I do feel robbed of my extra day.

The unwanted guest
Mister Alistair Cat was sitting outside in the potted bay tree when I shut up the house last night. I turned off all the lights and went to bed. Five minutes later I heard PADPADPADPADPAD as he trotted up the passage. So far, so normal... but something wasn't right. He normally meows, I thought, and turned the light on to find out why he was being uncharacteristically quiet, just in time to see him come through the doorway with a mouthful of mouse. I said, "No!" and he dropped the mouse, which turned out to be still alive. It ran into one of my slippers; he jumped on it; it ran behind the open door; he sat at the end of the door and settled down to watch. The mouse ran under the door, down the passage and into my mother's room. Alistair stayed where he was, convinced the mouse was still behind the door.

I woke my mother and we searched her room unsuccessfully for the mouse. No help at all from Alistair, who was still staring behind the door when I finally went to bed.

That will do for today. Tomorrow (or whenever): updates on flowers, soaps and knitting.

February books read

* Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor (1971) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Provence - Katrina Nannestad (2018) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Lucerne - Katrina Nannestad (2019) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* With a Bare Bodkin - Cyril Hare (1946) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Death Walks the Woods - Cyril Hare (1954) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Wind Blows Death - Cyril Hare (1949) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Tenant for Death - Cyril Hare (1937) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

LiveJournal sent out that ten year challenge notice last week, reminding me that ten years ago I was (wait for it) complaining about the heat. So... not much has changed. Today's paper reminded me I had good cause to be complaining about the heat ten years ago, this being the tenth anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires, the most fatal fires in Australian history. Ten years. Kevin Rudd was still Prime Minister then, so that's five Prime Ministers ago. And now I'm second on the list at the library for a book about them.

The fires were much further north and east than the City by the Sea, but a local couple — actually a woman my mother used to work with — had family in that area and lost their son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. Kevin Rudd made a secret visit to the City by the Sea to meet them in private afterwards. My mother's friend described him as really lovely, which is not something you often hear about Kevin, so good for him.

Late last year, I read an interview with an executive from Amazon, wondering why Australians hadn't taken up their Black Friday sales in the sort of numbers they expected. Well, one, we don't celebrate American Thanksgiving, so Black Friday sales have no historical meaning for us; and two, days labelled as Black tend to signify to us that something terrible happened occurred on it. Disaster, not bargains. I mean, learn your local market, dude.

This week I watched an episode of Grand Designs New Zealand while I was making dinner. The couple was attempting to recreate some historic 1800s homestead the wife had admired as a child. Well, that's what the wife was doing. Her husband was just going along with it. Anyway, they recreated this house and filled it with period furniture and did it all well under budget. And it was nice. Not to my taste, but it looked exactly like the house they were copying and it was what they wanted, so good on them, right? No. Not at all. The host asked them if they were happy with it, and the husband was, but the wife... not so much. What's the problem?, asked the host. She was unhappy with the local building restrictions that meant her ceilings weren't as high as the ones in the original house, and the left wing of the house had to be several metres shorter, and she wasn't allowed to use the heritage-listed wood that the original was built out of. So they had bought another block of land and were going to build the same design all over again. That's when I added her to my mental list of "irritating people on Grand Designs whose houses I hope fall down". And they live in New Zealand, so that actually might happen next time there's an earthquake.

This weekend I have been struck with some sort of minor bug. A sniffly nose and heavy eyes that just won't stay open. Not sick exactly but aware that's something's not quite right, and I can't remember what it's like not to feel like this. I feel like I'm going to be mildly peaky forever.

Some sort of coating is coming off my glasses, making both lenses scratched. In the middle of the lens, right where I see out of, as if I'm wearing something specifically designed to show me what macular degeneration is like. So I need new glasses. My eye appointment is on Friday, but I've been entertaining myself by looking at new frames. There are so many things I'm not allowed to have — no little nose pads, not rimless, not too big — so I hope I find something nice. I am leaning towards a cat's eye shape, away from the rectangular ones I have chosen the last few times. I like this sort of thing a lot, although they might be a bit too red for my pink, pink skin, and the black version might make me look like a fly. I like these too, as a more low-key, sensible version of the shape, which is more me.

Also: Ooh! Or could I pull off pale tortoiseshell?

Oh, decisions.

It is officially the first day of summer and I have a scratchy throat, precursor to my second cold in two months. Grrr.

( Tojo )

November books read

I made it to fifty books for the year. And what a bland lot they were this month.

* Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy - Lindsay Tanner (2011) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Wakestone Hall - Judith Rossell (2018) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Café by the Sea - Jenny Colgan (2016) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Snap - Belinda Bauer (2018) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

This week:
1. I worked my last day on Monday, so I am unemployed again. Having two months back in the office has really given me food for thought about what went wrong last year, so that's been useful. The last thing I had to do was a handover meeting with Passive-Aggressive Lady. It was all very polite, but she clearly wasn't going to like a lot of the improvements that New Me and I had set in place. Ah well. That's for them to argue about now.

2. So I was a little unsettled and down about that. I was surprised how much it affected me, actually. And then I slept through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so I suspect the real problem was some sort of mild bug.

This week on Masterchef:
1. Too much habanero, too much vinegar and your pumpkin was... undercooked.
2. Sadly, your kingfish... let you down.
3. You promised us the flavour of roasted rice in that ice-cream, but it just... wasn't strong enough.
4. The puddle of runny liver is... distinctly unattractive.

Also, one of them made something he called "lettuce water".

This week in knitting: No photo today as all I've done this week is pick up the stitches for the second band. Still not finished, but surely it won't be long now.

In lieu of a knitting photo, here's a meme:

Either/or meme
Cacti or succulents
Butterflies or honeybees
Typewritten or handwritten letters
Flower crowns or oversized sun hats
Polaroids or film
( And more in the same vein )

What I like about the Olympics are those moments when they have a wall of screens showing people paddling and running and fencing and playing volleyball. Or when they finish a race, then go straight to the action in the table tennis or the judo. Just the idea of all those people doing things in a relatively small area, and none of them me.

No knitting photo again this week. My cast on row from last week remains on the needle, untouched.

What have I done this week instead of knitting? First, I had a cold. Not a bad cold, but a lengthy one. I didn't have a sandpaper throat, for example, but I had a slightly dry throat for about four days. My nose hasn't been particularly blocked, but it's been sniffly for days on end. It's an irritating sort of illness.

Second, this week my decision to resign was made public. That's been quite draining. I feel a bit like the proverbial frog that can jump out of hot water water but doesn't notice cold water coming to a slow boil; I am good at identifying sudden onsets of the glooms, but this time they have been descending so gradually I didn't realise. It's only now I look around and find I'm shrouded in clouds. Anyway, my boss asked me to give it a week to really think about it, which I did and came to the same conclusion. So he sent the email out. It began with "I am deeply saddened" and ended with "she will be much missed". I was tempted to Reply All with "I'm not actually dead!"

After that, I received many kind emails. My favourite was from Doctor E, our very posh English doctor, aged 72. He is a leading light in his town's amateur dramatic society and he is lovely. He sent me the first verse of Byron's "She Walks In Beauty" with the subject line "I am distraught !" I will miss Doctor E.

Since there is no knitting photo this week, here is a selection from the garden. ( Colour! )

Despite having a large area fenced in for his own use, Alistair insists, at volume, on being taken out to the front garden once a day. He has discovered that the cat from across the road sometimes sleeps under the rosemary bush, and he has to make sure that it's not there. I put on his little red harness and off we go.

Anyway, there we were yesterday afternoon, investigating the skinks under the paving stones, when a wallaby casually hopped by on the footpath. And Alistair was so shocked he had to sit down and watch it go all the way up the hill. You could almost hear his brain cogs whirring. Poor lamb. It must be surprising to find out there are more animals than Cats and Dogs and Things I Could Eat.

In other news: My finger is not puffy!

I have just received an email with a link to 75 Apps That Will Save You Time As A Busy Person. Seventy-five! I would suggest that if you stopped messing around with 75 apps, that would save you even more time.

This weekend I went to the pet supply shop. I was there to stock up on Alistair's favourite flavours of cat food. The same brand is also available more conveniently at the supermarket, but he prefers the flavours exclusive to the pet shop. Irritating creature. I'm sure each successive generation of cat is getting more demanding.

The pet supply shop had animals visiting from the RSPCA shelter for a special adoption day. There were dogs. There were rabbits. There was a white Staffy pup with a green kerchief round its neck. What would Alistair make of that, I wondered. Dinner, probably.

Unrelated to the RSPCA, there was a woman and her son with their new dachshund pup. He was tiny. He still had milky eyes and was draped over the boy's shoulder. They had come to buy a bone-shaped tag for his collar, engraved with his name. The boy spelled it out to the pet shop lady working the engraving device. M-I-S-T-E-R space Z-E-U-S. I have never seen a more unlikely Mister Zeus in my life.

Alistair is a declutterer. He is particularly fond of decluttering the kitchen windowsill. There is to be nothing on that windowsill. Nothing at all. Whatever I put on it, I find knocked off the next morning. I knew this once, because I stopped putting things on that windowsill for a while. Last week, I forgot, and put my box of antibiotics there; I found it in the sink when I got up.

That night, I put the little plastic jug that fills the iron there; I found it in the sink the next day.

That night, I put a couple of tomatoes that my mother had picked there; I found them in the sink the next day.

That night, I put a rogue zucchini the size of a cat there; it was still there the next day. Obviously too big for him. It's good to know he has his limits.

( How is my finger? )