Salt and corrosion

Having unsubscribed to those Notes from the Universe I used to get, I then went and subscribed to a different thought of the day newsletter, one that doesn't annoy me nearly as much as the Universe. I had quite a few waiting for me when I got back to work this morning; two in particular, I liked.

Scalpel. Flame-thrower. Hoe. Which of these will you use today?

I think it was the hoe I used today, doing sturdy yeoman's work ploughing the fields, but, yes, some days you just need that flame-thrower.

Aethelred the Unready. Conan the Crooked. Charles the Lame. All great kingly names from times past. What might your title be?

I'd be Alicia the Bemused. What about you?

December 2012 books read

* Cotillion - Georgette Heyer
* Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell
* A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin
* Phantom - Jo Nesbo
* I, Coriander - Sally Gardner
* A Clash of Kings - George RR Martin
* A Storm of Swords - George RR Martin
* The Secret Life of Musical Notation: Defying Interpretive Traditions - Roberto Poli
* The Musician's Way - Gerald Klickstein

Cotillion may be the most darling book ever written, f-list. It is raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens. That's how delightful it is. It is the story of Kitty, an orphan whose guardian gathers all his great-nephews together and promises to leave Kitty his fortune only if she marries one of them. That sounds terrible, I know, but bear with me; the guardian revokes this silly will by the end, so it's really just a way to get the plot moving. The only one of the great-nephews Kitty wants to marry is Jack, who has, and here I quote, 'powerful thighs', but he doesn't turn up, so she instead talks another great-nephew, Freddie, into pretending to be engaged to her to make Jack jealous. And hi-jinks ensue.

In one chapter Kitty makes Freddie take her on a tour of London's attractions, where he is unimpressed by the Elgin Marbles. ('Dash it, they've got no heads!' he protested.) He also expresses the opinion that someone might have sustained a hit on the head by saying that person has been 'dicked in the nob'. Five times he says that over the course of the book, and it never gets any less funny. Also, people are maced of their blount by hell-kites. I thoroughly and unironically recommend it.

( And the rest of them )

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.

Today I learnt that the Roman emperor Elagabalus (aka Heliogabalus) once killed all the guests at a dinner party by smothering them with violets dropped from a false ceiling.

Look! Here is an eyewitness painting of the event, using rose petals instead of violets:



According to Wikipedia, though, this may only be a rumour or exaggeration, or it may have been done by Nero instead. Whoever was responsible, I am sort of impressed just because of the number of flowers that this would take (and, frankly, I'm not convinced that the amount of petals in the painting would do the job). I mean, I imagine Elagabalus/Nero had people to do the hard work for him, but it takes a special sort of mind to think of it.

My mother has just three shifts to work before retirement. Three shifts before retirement is, of course, a dangerous time for workers, when they are most likely to be shot while trying to save their partner, Mel Gibson, from investigating something that's bigger than both of them. But my mother doesn't live in an 80s action film, so her co-workers will probably just make her a cake instead.

I know she is looking forward to retiring, but I think she will miss it. She says she won't, but I think she will. Buildings get in your bones, and she has worked at the City by the Sea's public hospital since she was 17: she did her training there, back when student nurses actually lived in the hospital, and worked as a theatre nurse. Then she travelled for a few years, working in hospitals around Australia, before coming back when she was 27 or 28. She's just turned 60, so that's about 33 consecutive years of working in the same building, longer if the training years are included. I can't imagine that. I've worked in my job for five years and my feet are getting itchy. Then again, my job will always be the same, where she's worked in different wards over the years, so that probably keeps things interesting.

Anyway, she says she is not going to do anything for a month and then she will find out about becoming a volunteer at Flagstaff Hill, which is a colonial village/museum. Her friend wants her to help at the tea shop there. So that should keep her off the streets and (I hope) dressed in colonial costume. I have been saying she should take up lawn bowls or Bingo or playing the pokies*, like proper old people, and she has instructed me to euthanase her if it comes to that. Got it. From there, she said, it is a short step to Hoy or Come And Do, two mysterious things which occupied my grandmother in the later years of her life.

( Hoy! )


What else? Oh, I love the illustration for this news story. A giant whale with teeth chomping on another whale! The artist must have been so excited to get that commission.


I forgot to say yesterday that while I was reading the magazine headlines in the supermarket queue, I picked up Girlfriend magazine (for the tweens) and took a quiz to find out if I have OBD, Obsessive Beiber Disorder. Turns out I don't. Phew. That can be fatal.




* Poker machines

It sounds a bit sad, but the most interesting thing I did yesterday was stick labels on pieces of paper. The office move unearthed a cache of half-used sheets of mailing labels that I decided to use up on a research project we are doing, sticking codes onto surveys. The interesting bit was finding out that different labels have different levels of stickiness: some peeled off their backing sheets easily, while others had much more grip. I even ended up with a favourite: labels that had a heavy backing sheet and quite a lot of grip, but still peeled off evenly without curling up and catching themselves. Then I wondered if preferred optimum label stickiness differed among individuals, like tennis racquet tension. Then I decided that developing theories on the optimum level of stickiness for mailing labels meant I should find something else to do for a bit.

I have been following Australia's major art prizes this year. I think this is because I haven't seen any films eligible for the Oscars and such (the local cinema burnt down last year and has not yet been rebuilt). Apparently I need an annual awards fix to get me through the year. Anyway, I'm sure you will be shocked - shocked! - to hear that there is controversy - controversy! - over the winner of the Wynne Prize for Australian landscapes. It turns out that the winning landscape has the same composition as a 17th century painting. Which is all well and good, being homage and referencing and intertextuality and so forth, but the artist didn't acknowledge the original painting at the time of entry, making it look like his own composition. And that's not on, clearly. (Also, there is another controversy in that it won an Australian landscape prize despite not being an Australian landscape.) Anyway, here are the two paintings side by side: what do you think? Homage or plagiarism?

[Poll #1551287]

A magazine headline I saw yesterday: A head cold erased my memory. But how would you know if that happened? It could have been anything.

I read something once about houses having descendants, because people tend to set up house like their parents. I was thinking today that this is sometimes true and sometimes not. True, because my cutlery drawer is arranged the way my mother arranges hers, which is the way her mother arranged hers and so on, I suspect, back up the family tree. Knives on the right, the way nature intended it. Also, my toilet paper hangs facing out, the way it always did when I was growing up. Someone at work hangs the roll so it faces the wall, which is clearly wrong. How are you supposed to admire the quilting and the pictures on it if you can't see them?

Where my house differs from its ancestors - and what started me on this train of thought - is in the clocks. My mother puts all her clocks forward, so she is never late. But! - and this is the bit I don't get - she puts them all forward by different, random amounts and then forgets which is which, so her bedroom clock might be fourteen minutes fast and her car clock might be twenty minutes fast and her watch might be about ten minutes fast, and one of them might still be on pre-daylight savings time, or is it the other way around? Because of the confusion this generated when I was a child, all my clocks tell the right time. I might occasionally be late, but I'm never confused about it.

I have locked up my hats after reading this headline yesterday: PROBATION FOR HAT THIEF. No wonder the paper is always complaining about our magistrate being soft on crime.

Yesterday there was a bright orange ute* parked in the street in front of the office. It had stickers all over the sides, including the ever-popular lament of the angry angler, I FISH AND I VOTE. At the same time? Well done. I SEE AND I MOCK. That's what I'd put if I had one of those stickers. Or I KNIT AND I VOTE or I HOP AND I SKIP or I DON'T FISH AND I THINK YOUR STICKER IS STUPID. They're all pretty catchy, I think.

One of the other stickers on the ute said: If you think this ute is dirty, you should spend a night with the owner. Which, sigh, is typical of these things. But the funny thing was is that the ute wasn't dirty at all. It was pristine. Not a spot on it. So I'm not quite sure what message the owner was trying to send.




* Do people know what a ute is? It's a type of vehicle, with a front half like a car and a tray at the back. (Incidentally, that website – Holden's - claims that SS are the two most famous letters in Australian performance motoring, which shows how behind the Australian performance motoring times I am. I would have said they had something to do with the Nazis.)

This year I have decided that I will cycle up the east coast of Australia. Not for real, obviously, because I wouldn't be able to get far without needing to turn around and come back to work the next day. Also, I am too lazy to do anything that would require that much effort to plan. No, I will be cycling up the east coast on my stationary exercise bike. So far I have left my house and ridden for 22.7 km, which puts me, metaphorically speaking, in Terang*. At this rate I should reach Melbourne by the end of January.

January and February will be fairly full on. These are the last two months of the health economics course I am doing, which has been hard work. More work than I expected, to be honest, and I am counting down the weeks until it ends and I can have my days off to myself again. And there will not be as many of them as last year: in the middle of January, I will start working four days a week instead of three. That will be good, I think, particularly with the extra work being created by the merger, and I will use the extra pay to build up my emergency bail-out fund. Our jobs have been guaranteed for a year only, so it might come in handy by this time next year.

Once this course is over and I have time to footle about, I hope to get started on my Brownie Badge Project, in which I will undertake the tasks necessary to earn badges that I never got when I was a Brownie. So... an imaginary trip around Australia and earning my Scientist badge. That's 2010 sorted.



* That's TEE-rang if you're from there, T'rang if you're not.

Somewhere my love (ding ding ding ding)... I found the pink musical doll, wedged behind my desk, cobweb-covered, blue ribbon bow undone, and neck cocked in a near-fatal rictus. A Christmas gift from a cousin years ago, I've kept her out of guilt; I've never liked her much.

I thought I'd play her once more before I threw her out. I held her in my palm and wound the key, and listened as she played her music-box tune, the first two lines of that song, rolling her head slowly to the music.

She was begging for her life.

Her french-knot eyes were pleading and the heart-shaped felt appliqué of her mouth spoke mute volumes. I saw her little cloth hand resting on my thumb and felt a jolt of recognition. I put her on the desk instead, uprighting her as she overbalanced, and I stood still, sole judge of this appeal.

She was dusty and bedraggled, playing those same two lines of tinkly music, and she radiated sadness. She was pleading, but all she could do was play a song and roll her neck, and only that as long as she was wound. The music slowed and in the silence between notes the sadness grew so loud I wanted to scream to drown it out. Finally she wound down, powerless at last, eloquent unto her final, weary ding. She sat, unable to move, head drooped, one woollen curl unravelled, exhausted.

She has been reprieved, and sits there still.

( In which I am traumatised )

Fellow Letters to the Editor fans! There was an interview in the paper yesterday with one of the most prolific letter writers in Australia, to commemorate the fact that he'd recently managed to get letters (on different topics) in three papers in two cities on the same day. Take a bow, Kevin Rugg from Beaumaris. He said that was exciting, but his favourite thing to do was wait until a friend went somewhere on holiday and then send letters to the holiday destination's local paper. 'Imagine,' he said, 'going on holiday to Townsville, opening up the Townsville Examiner and finding a letter from Kevin Rugg from Beaumaris.' That is brilliant. I like to think he finished with an evil cackle.

Busy being amused by that, I stopped cold when I opened the local rag. The death notices included a girl - well, a woman, I suppose - I went to school with. Obviously we weren't close (or I wouldn't be finding out about it in the paper), but she was always nice and I'd run into her a couple of times over the years: she and her husband once had their taxes done at the accounting firm where I used to work, then a couple of years later she popped up, newly divorced, as a receptionist at the radio station where I also used to work. She's not the first person of my own age that I've known who's died, but as far as I know she's the first of our class. So it's a downhill slide from here.

School classes are like successful bands, aren't they? No matter what you do afterwards, and even if you never look back, you're always associated with this one particular group of people.