My daughter in Glencoe

My daughter did this walk in Glencoe, Scotland just before visiting me. Doesn't it look lovely?

Cat complaint

We have a cat .. well technically it's not our cat. We are baby-sitting the cat for df's daughter It's been more than 2 years now! The cat isn't too much trouble, she's very sweet tempered BUT she does have long hair that drops out on to the carpet, rubs off on to the chairs and generally makes quite a mess.

If it were up to me she would be banned from coming indoors ... animals definitely don't belong in houses ... Unfortunately, a few years ago, the poor creature had a lung infection that almost killed her. She was operated upon and survived. The result however is that she is vulnerable to cold ... and it's getting cold now so she, at the very least, has to be allowed to sleep indoors. She has her own cat couch but, being a cat, she prefers by far the human couch! Would you believe it? We now have to cover the human couch with a cat rug just to avoid cat hairs all over the cushions!

Worse, to remove cat hair from carpets I've just had to spend a large chunk of my Sunday vacuuming all the rooms in the house. Would it be too cruel to shave the creature and have her wear a coat? Maybe not .... I'm tempted though, yes, I'm tempted!

Blog thought

It's kind if strange. I've been a bit busy and not posting as often as I might have done. Yes, my daughter is visiting from Scotland .. and also I have been out of my usual routine attending a St John course on First Aid. This turned out to be not only very informative but also a very humbling experience. These amazing people are so skilled and yet they work for not very high salaries to help other people.

Anyway, my blog thought was this; since I haven't been posting regularly, more people seem to have visited and read older posts that, had I posted regularly, would have disappeared down into the blog graveyard .... that's it! Not exactly earth-shattering but kind of interesting .. so I thought.

Imaginings

Our imagination is a funny thing! My daughter lives in Scotland. I speak to her, maybe once a week or so, by phone. I rarely worry about her at other times. Now she is here with me. On Sunday she went to visit some friends on the South Island. I didn't hear from her for a day and I started to worry that she might not be OK.

Two of my favourite quotes are "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine" from J.B.S. Haldane and"Truth is stranger than fiction" attributed to Mark Twain. I agree. But for all our so-called creativity we're surprisingly unimaginative! Just look at the science fiction movies. They are mostly inhabited by creatures that are easily recognisable as modified versions of life on earth. When we do finally meet up with another life form from a distant planet, wouldn't it be disappointing if they turned out to be just like us?

She's here ..

My daughter has come over for a visit .. all the way from Scotland where she is living at the moment. I'm one happy mommy!

Last night we went out to see a very well acted and very funny Kiwi version of the play,The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). It was great, although we did have to struggle a bit with the chaotic parking that is Auckland city!

Busy, busy .....

It's only words

Sometimes the unfairness of it all is overwhelming. I don't know what it was that got me thinking this time. Maybe the 700 lost lives inUzbekistan or maybe the reports of the latest atrocities in Iraq or maybe something else. When it happens phrases like; pale at the heart with dread; the public will say, 'How sad.' and even God does not see the hypocrisy and the shame of it all, come into my mind. The words are from a poem by Joe Corrie, a Scotsman who started working in the pits at the age of 14 to help support his family, which I first read in the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse in the early 1970s. These phrases have stayed with me and often reflect how I feel when the media goes into overdrive over the latest disaster or the other.

I wonder! Is the media only pandering to our tendency to rubberneck like human vultures who wants to witness another's distress or are we just gaping for the sake of gaping without taking any particular pleasure from it? It's similar to the behaviour we exhibit at road accidents. What are all the people who slow down thinking? Are they checking to see whether anyone needs urgent first-aid while waiting for the ambulance? Are they driving slower because they perceive the accident site as a hazard? Are they rubbernecking or just simply gaping? If we can understand this behaviour then maybe we can understand the way the media responds in reporting the misfortunes of others in faraway parts of the world. Maybe ....

Anyway, I'd like to share the poem.

WOMEN ARE WAITING TONIGHT
- Joe Corrie (1894-1968)
Women are waiting tonight on the pit-bank,
Pale at the heart with dread,
Watching the dead-still wheels
That loom in the mirky sky,
The silent wheels of Fate,
Which is the system under which they slave.
They stand together in groups,
As sheep shelter in storm,
Silent, passive, dumb.
For in the caverns under their feet,
The coffin seams of coal
'Twixt the rock and the rock,
The gas has burst into flame,
And has scattered the hail of Death.
Cold the night is, and dark,
And the rain falls in a mist.
Their shawls and their rags are sodden,
And their thin, starved cheeks are blue,
But they will not go home to their fires,
Tho' the news has been broken to them
That a miracle is their only hope.
They will wait and watch till the dawn,
Till the wheels begin to revolve,
And the men whom they loved so well,
The strong, kind, loving men,
Are brought up in canvas sheets,
To be identified by a watch,
Or a button,
Or, perhaps, only a wish.
And three days from now,
They will be buried together,
In one big hole in the earth.
And the King will send his sympathy,
And the Member of Parliament will be there,
Who voted that the military be used
When last these miners came on strike
To win a living wage.
His shining black hat will glisten over a sorrowful face,
And his elegantly shod feet will go slowly behind the bier.
And the director of the company will be there,
Who had vowed many a time
That he would make the miner eat grass.
And the parson, who sits on the Parish Council,
Starving the children and saving the rates,
Will pray in a mournful voice,
And tear the very hearts of the bereaved.
He will emphasize in godly phrase,
The danger of the mine,
And the bravery and valour of the minor.
And the Press
That has spilled oceans of ink
Poisoning the public against the 'destroyers of industry',
Will tell the sad tale,
And the public will say, 'How sad.'
But a week today all will be forgotten,
And the Member of Parliament,
The coalowner,
The parson,
The Press,
And the public,
Will keep storing up their venom and their hatred,
For the next big miners' strike.
Women are waiting tonight at the pit-bank,
But even God does not see
The hypocrisy and the shame of it all.

It only takes a few

Some deranged person(s) has got us all in a tizzy! A few days ago a two-page letter that claimed foot-and-mouth disease had been released onWaiheke Island in Auckland was sent to the Prime Minister. Apparently,whoever sent the letter is demanding a change in tax policy and a large sum of money. Everyone who got in to the act became famous overnight by appearing on prime time TV news and current affairs programmes avows that they believe it is a hoax. Let's hope they are right about that.

At one stage the students at Massey University were on the suspect list although the Assistant Police Commissioner admitted there was 'nothing in the letter to suggest this.' Why bring it up then?

All news channels, while reporting 'the scare' showed emotive pictures of burning carcasses of animals presumably pulled out from their archives. It was never clearly stated that what we were watching was (most probably) archival film taken during the foot and mouth outbreak in UK a few years ago. All in all the media have had yet another heyday filling up news programmes with all manner of irrelevant nonsense.

Today the Herald reports that Government's response to the foot and mouth scare is costing the country about $1 million a day! It just shows how reliant we all are on people (that's us) behaving reasonably!

We all obey the traffic signals; red for stop and green for go. It would only take a handful of people to declare the opposite; green for stop, red for go to send the whole system into chaos. No one could tell who was red/green and who a green/red! Then Marcello, the Italian casanova in Under the Tuscan Sun, who declared his approach to traffic signals to be; green - Avanti, avanti; amber - a decoration; and red- a suggestion, would be boringly normal!

Broken tooth

I don't even know how it happened! I was quietly watching a not very interesting Fair Go programme on TV about the cost of getting your wheels clamped, when my tongue happened upon a suspiciously rough surface on a bottom left molar. It didn't take me long to realise that the tooth was broken.

How on earth did that happen? Thinking back, I did have a bit of a chew at a chicken bone that was a part of the remains of the roast chicken that had formed part of my evening meal.

I'm just back from an emergency visit to the dentist. Half my face is frozen and I'm dribbling like a baby as I try to drink a cup of green tea. I have the probably misplaced hope that the warm tea will neutralise the frozen lip!

The visit went something like this.

"What can we do for you?"

"I've broken a tooth!"

"Again?"

As I nod sadly, "OK then, let's have a look."

I sit gingerly on the edge of the chair and somehow wriggle my way in. I am unceremoniously tipped back so that all the fluid in my body rushes to my head. A few "Hmm"s and "Haaa"s later I feel a tapping on the damaged tooth.

"Is this the one?"

I try to nod. If anyone has found a way of talking to a dentist with a mouth filled with all the steely instruments that are apparently tools of the trade I'd like to know about it. Please. A few excruciating squirts of cold water, cold air and some interminable poking around later, I'm tipped upright again to confront the verdict!

"The tooth can be saved, but ..."

There's always the "but". I hold my breath and wait.

"..but, it has already been filled, there's not much of the tooth left,it needs to be capped, etc, etc ..."

"How much is that going to cost me?"

"$900"

So there it is. The bottom line! My absentminded chewing on the chicken bone is going to cost me $900! And in future I'm going to watch what I say about the fairies ... they're not as benign as they make out!

Fairies ...

I just got home and after having opened the garage door, I took a stroll out to the gate to check the mail box. My neighbour's young son ran towards me with a big shoe box in his hand.

"Look!" he said, opening the box and thrusting it towards me.

I look inside. All I can see is a $5 note.

"Where did you get that?" I ask him, hoping he hasn't robbed anyone.

"The tooth fairy", says the little chap grinning.

I take a closer look and notice that the box also contains a tooth. It's a sign of the changing times! Not only did the fairy give the princely sum of $5 (my tooth fairy always left a sixpence) but the fairy didn't even remove the tooth!

Telling this story at lunch time today triggered a whole lot of childhood memories from my fellow-lunch-eaters. Sarah tells us that when she was in school one of her friends got two crunchie bars and a $5 note from the tooth fairy. When Sarah lost her next tooth, she wrote, "Dear tooth fairy, my friend Sue got two crunchies and a $5 note for her tooth from the tooth fairy and I think I should get the same." Next morning she woke up to find 20 cents under the pillow and a note from the tooth fairy saying, "In this house the tooth fairy only gives 20 cents." Oh dear!

I remember, as a child, reading that the reason why cows lie down in the field when it rains is to keep a patch of the grass dry for the fairies. I was quite shocked to learn later (much later) that it's not true! Maybe that's why slightly dodgy tales are called fairy stories ... maybe ....

Cleaning and curry

It's getting into winter, the sun is low in the sky and you know what that means don't you? The citrus fruit is starting to ripen, the satsumas are showing a little orange, the lemons are decidedly less green, the tamarillo (otherwise known as tree tomato) are ripe ... but it's not that. It's the sun! It's shining on to the windows and showing up all the dirt and dust. Nothing for it then! We were out yesterday morning with a hose pipe and a long handled broom giving the windows a good old wash down. That's when we tried ignoring it .. but it was no good! We couldn't help noticing that the insides of the windows were in need of a little attention too.

All hungry work. What was needed was a quick curry. I swung in to action- egg curry al la me.

Recipe for egg curry
Select eggs and hard boil them. Chop an onion, some garlic, green chilli and tomato. Put all of them in a blender and blend till they form a paste. Heat some oil in a pan. Add curry leaves (optional), mustard and cummin seeds. They will splutter a little. Add the paste from the blender and fry till golden brown. Add water, salt, sugar bring to the boil and add the eggs. You must, of course, take the shells off the eggs. You could score the eggs lightly with a knife to help the curry juices infuse into their hearts .. but that's an optional sophistication. Add a handful of fresh coriander leaves. Delicious! We ate our curry with rice but it's equally good with chapatti.

We ate our lunch while admiring the view over the park through the clean glass of the windows. All in all a pretty successful morning!

Do you believe in nutrition?

I had to go to the shops on the way home yesterday. I had been listening to Solid Gold - music of the 50's and 60's on the radio and was still humming the old Beatles track, You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello,hello, hello". I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Hello, hello,hello". Etc ....., when I was accosted in the car park by an earnest looking man waving a lot of leaflets.

"Do you believe in nutrition?" he asked.

"Pardon!" I thought I must have heard him wrong. Maybe he really meant to ask, Do you believe in god? No, he was definitely asking about nutrition.

"Nutrition", I repeat stupidly.

"Yes", says he.

"Well, yes, of course. If I didn't believe in nutrition, I would be dead", say I trying to be funny. This guy doesn't do funny. He is dumbfounded, silent. I come to his rescue.

"Why"?

Silence.

"Are you selling something?" He nods.

Silence.

"What?" I ask. "What are you selling?"

"Supplements", he says.

"I believe in nutrition so I don't use supplements", I say.

"Oh!" says the man.

Not much of a salesman really. I guess I was lucky he didn't turn out to be a Jehovah's Witness or a telesales person trying to make a few extra bucks. They wouldn't have been so easily put off!

Bad face day

I looked in the mirror this morning and realised that I was having a bad face day. It's one of those days when something just doesn't look right. It's not the hair. Clothes seem OK. I feel fine. No, there's no getting away from the fact, it's my face!

Maybe I should have worn my red lacy knickers. That might have put a sparkle in my eye. Oh well! It's too late now. I'm at my desk, having gulped down the second cup of coffee. I'll try humming, when you're smiling, when you're smiling ....... maybe nobody will notice my bad face.

Nearly not normal!

How normal are you? is the title of a new TV programme on channel one. The show asks an audience of potentially normal people all manner of searching questions to find how normal they are socially, financially, in work and relationships. There's even an online questionnaire which, according to the blurb, has been 'developed with expert help from internationally renowned psychologists and which has provided some very interesting new statistics'. If you believe the spin then all this has stimulated 'thought provoking debate between the panellists and viewers at home'. Yeah right!

I took the personality test. I got a bit stuck on question 11 that asked 'If you say something bad behind a friend's back, how long do you feel guilty?' I don't normally say bad things about my friends so I had to think hard for an answer. I decided on, A. I don't feel guilty. There was no box to explain that I don't feel guilty because I don't do it. It would have been a lie to choose any of the other possible answers, B. For a couple of minutes afterwards, C. All day or D. I feel guilty for weeks. The statistcs show that it is normal to feel guilty for weeks. I don't believe this result. People who talk behind other's backs (especially friend's backs) are unlikely to be the type who lie awake at night feeling guilty about it, or am I just being cynical here? I'm told by the computer 'You answered A, I don't feel guilty which is not normal for this question'. To the question 'Do you like your own company?' I answered 'Yes' which is 'nearly not normal' for this question. Nearly not normal! Is this a standard expression used by all those internationally renowned physiologists who helped develop the test or is it, as I suspect, a load of gobbledegook?

Finally I'm assured that overall in the area of Personality since I scored 30 out of 64, I have a nearly normal personality. That's all right then, I guess. Normal is boring, nearly normal has to be a whole lot more interesting.