mr cough cough bang bang June 23, 2006  

There are few meditation techniques more calming than watching your toddler floating on her back in the bath, eyes closed, hands gently crossed on tummy, completely relaxed, her hair floating out from her head in a golden aurora.

Genius business idea: 'Faux-made' (to rhyme with 'home made') - a range of biscuits and cakes professionally baked to look home made (uneven icing, irregular biscuit shapes, etc) for occasions where you're expected to make the effort of making somethng (family get-togethers, office shouts, etc) but can't be arsed.

Blimey! Only a week to go until the grand depart! Here's my predictions for this year's tour: GC will go to Basso, with Ullrich second and Vinokourov third; Boonen will win green; and I've got no idea who'll pull in the King of the Mountains. It'll all be a good one to watch, though (assuming I can find some way of watching it, of course).

One of the reasons that I write a fair bit about cycling is that I do a lot of thinking when I'm on the bike. It's actually a very contemplative activity (or at least, road cycling is, mountain biking is an entire other kettle of fish). It leaves a lot of time and brain space free to think about stuff and come up with various musings. Unfortunately, it doesn't leave much in the way of free arms to write stuff down with. So I'm pedalling along, ruminating away, and I come up with a genius idea for comedy gold that is guaranteed to make me a legend in my own lunchtime. And I have to spend the rest of the ride repeating it to myself so I don't forget it while dodging busses.

Watched Mirrormask last night. Excellent stuff. They preserved Dave McKean's art look & feel very well, primarily by having him direct it. The bloke at the video store reckoned it was a modern take on the Alice in Wonderland fable - I think it was more a direct descendant of Labyrinth's sulky teenage girl stepping up to adulthood. Excellent stuff nonetheless. If you've not seen it, seek it out and give it some wellie. Particularly liked the cameo by Andy Hamilton as Small Hairy.

zippedoo dah dee dah dah dee dah June 19, 2006  

Had a pretty good weekend, actually. My mum looked after Rebecca on Saturday night, enabling us to pop out to Maire's birthday gig and have a few quiet sherries with a convivial crowd. Said convivial crowd including a number of people that we haven't seen for quite a while, and a generally good vibe all around. We had an excellent time, caught up with a number of people, talked a fair amount of bollocks, and had minor allergic reactions. What more do you ask of a Saturday night?

Rebecca's chicken pox is getting better. I think she's passed the stage where all the spots have appeared, and is now just healing up the ones she already has. Fingers crossed. She still tires easily, and it'll probably be a few more days before we can take her out to play with other kids (if nothing else, there's the tell-tale scabs on her face to give the game away), but we're on the way up.

Shortest Day coming up on Wednesday. We should get something like a whopping nine hours of daylight. Hooray. Actually, at that, it's much better here for this sort of thing than the UK - even at shortest day, sunrise is still only a bit before 5pm. In the UK, which is somewhat further from the equator, it gets to full dark by 4:30pm in midwinter.

The weather has been extremely lumpy of late. Today we were woken at 4am by huge gusts of wind, cacophonies of rain on the roof, and intermittant hail. Notwithstanding, by 8am the sky was clear so I rode in to work. I should have remembered that you can't see wind. At one point, riding down the gorge, as 100kg of rider+bike weight, on an 8% gradient, I had to pedal to maintain a speed of 25kph (roughly half the speed I would normally go down there while freewheeling and occasionally braking). Astonishing stuff. The head winds meant that on the flat I averaged slightly over half my normal speed. Of course, my standard comment about wind applies: head winds knock a bit of speed off, tail winds put a bit on, but gusting side winds can be terrifying. Rather a number of high-volume expletive moments on the way in, particularly whenever moving out of the shelter of a row of buildings, etc, when I suddenly found myself 20° off vertical. Disconcerting. Of course, the ride home was (pretty much literally) a breeze: 35kph without particular effort. Although nothing is going to make climbing the gorge a box of ducks.

This article annoys me. Very much. Probably for non-typical reasons: tarantulas are venomous, not poisonous (you can eat them with no ill-effects at all); they've misspelled (and improperly capitalised) Brachypelma smithii; and they didn't make much mention of the fact that an adult B. smithii is about as dangerous as a bee: the venom is painful but nothing near fatal unless you have an allergic reaction. Tch! We demand clarity in our zany oddstuff articles!

quick, put him in the ambient hutch! June 16, 2006  

Rebecca has chicken pox. As a result, she's miserable, tired, sore, and itchy. The rest of us are just frazzled and sleep-deprived. She's on a care regime of pinetarsal baths, infant paracetamol, aloe vera gel, gentle back rubs and the Wiggles. Poor wee thing. She's gone all Bottomley Potts (covered in spots), including some blisters on her tongue. She's obviously in a lot of discomfort, and it's very hard to get her to eat anything. So everyone's just a little bit fraught at the moment, but hopefully most of the spots have appeared by now and it should just be a matter of waiting until the varicels recede.

Everyone says that same thing when you say your child has chicken pox: "Oh, it's good to get it out of the way, isn't it?" Infectious diseases as speed bumps on the road of life. I'm sure it is good that she's getting this over with now, while she's too young to remmeber it, but it's quite hard trying to make her understand that she shouldn't scratch the itches, or they'll only get worse. And there's no consoling a worked-up toddler. Mind you, we're doing someething right in our quest to raise a polite, middle-class child: last night, as she sat emitting sobbing cries at our inability to feed her anything that didn't cause her pain, I asked her if she'd like some yogurt. "No!" she screamed at full volume, sobbing and shrieking, in a frenzy of pain and frustration, "no yogurt, thank you!"

At least the weather is cooperating: if it was the middle of summer, brilliant sunshine, etc it'd be quite problematic being stuck inside so much. As is, it's been hosing down, there's lots of wind and rain (gale force winds again today!), so being stuck inside watching telly isn't too bad. Though I'm starting to know every word in Wiggle Bay by heart.

Listening to: screaming, mostly. In the off hours, the Rough Trade Electronic 01 compilation. Excellent survey of electronic music, emphasis on the history and experimental stuff. Brian Eno, Throbbing Gristle, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Autechre, New Order, Apex Twin, Kraftwerk, John Cage, Can, The Human League, the Normal, Coil... Basically, anyone who ever had the idea to record the death-rattle of a crab, loop it backwards, and play it out through a shoe for added timbre. It's all good stuff.

off sick June 12, 2006  

I've had some sort of annoying virus for the last five or six days. It's annoying because I'm not feeling particularly 'sick' in the classic sense of sneezing, coughing, producing mucus, feeling really debilitated, etc. In fact, I set a PB riding up the gorge on Friday. I do, however, have bad headaches, my tongue feels like it's on fire, a sore throat, and severe soreness in most of my muscles. Funnily enough, I'm off work today. Given that the weather is near-biblical (storm force winds for Wellington, 150 kph according to the Met Service) I'm probably on the best end of the deal.

Saw Cars on Saturday. The plot isn't anything you've not seen before (basically, it's a retread of Doc Hollywood) - you can tell pretty much how it's all going to pan out from fairly early in the movie. But it's still fundamentally a kids' movie, so that's not a particular problem. It's a lot of fun. I guess I was always going to find a movie full of anthropomorphic cars a bit annoying (I can't stand car culture and the tacit equation of people with their cars that already happens in western society, so having a movie full of literal talking cars was slightly annoying), but it was a good fun bit of movie. Particularly worth seeing for the crazy credits (including the bit right at the end) - I laughed loudly and immoderately.

It's all heating up. Levi Leipheimer, riding for Gerolsteiner, has won the Dauphine Libere. The DL is generallly considered to be the best indication of form for the Tour. Leipheimer took it quite convincingly (just under two minutes ahead of Christophe Moreau); of course, Ivan Basso didn't ride it. My money's still on Basso for the Tour, but it looks like Leipheimer will ensure that there is still a convincing American challenger.

but now my legs are full of itchy June 08, 2006  

Idea to make me a millionaire: triplex printing. Like duplex, but on three sides of the paper!

This may come as a shock to some people, but occasionally I don't cycle in to work. Sometimes - ready with the sharp intakes of breath, there! - sometimes I drive in. Today, for instance. Heather was working from home, so I drove Rebecca to nursery, dropped her off, and then drove in. Riding isn't really an option in these cases because it takes me a while to get back up the hill, so I would have had serious problems making it back to the nursery after work before they close for the evening. And it's got nothing to do with the fact that we'd been told that there was no hot water at work today, so I'd have faced a cold shower first thing. No, really, it doesn't. So I ended up driving in. With traffic, it took around 30 minutes (for a journey of 9k, 6 miles). In comparison, I would normally ride in to work in about 20 minutes, plus another five minutes at the other end for a swift shower before starting work. And I'd be happier (having ridden full bore at around 30kph for most of the ride) as opposed to frustrated (having crawled along at around 20kph for most of the drive). OK, so I drove home significantly faster than I could have ridden it, but that's another matter. That's just one reason why I ride in, kids: sometimes it's actually quicker.

Anyway, riding home up the Ngauranga Gorge is a matter of pride. And a surprisingly effective weight-loss program.

decumbent foliage June 07, 2006  

My favorite plants. You can be reasonably sure that wherever I go, I'll try to get these in cultivation. These are the things that just make me happy when I have them around the place. In no particular order:

• Phyllostachys nigra - black bamboo. Bamboo has a particular resonance for me - when I was a child, the neighbour across our back fence had a huge grove of it, and I was really fascinated with the tall, thin stems. Then I spent a fair bit of time knocking around Japan and China, which didn't hurt. P. nigra is a particular favorite, with beautiful jet-black culms and lovely green foliage. To be honest, I can think of worse dream jobs than running a nursery specialising in bamboo. Maybe when I hit my mid-life crisis.
• Dicksonia fibrosa - ponga. Or at least, tree ferns in general, whether it's D. fibrosa, D. squarrosa (wheki), D. antarctica (often also called ponga and certainly sold as such in a number of places), or Cyathea dealbata (silver fern). Tree ferns are a New Zealand icon, they're a striking architectural plant, and they're just great. Hairy, scruffy trunks and shoots, with the shoots slowly uncoiling out to produce huge, graceful umbrella-like fronds: lovely. Particularly evocative of the bush: I love the way you can look out across a gully full of relatively short native trees and see the tree ferns protruding above the canopy, reaching up like verdant umbrellas.
• Sarracenia purpurea - purple pitcher plant. I'm really into carnivorous plants per se, and S. purpurea just has a very satisfying look. It's a north American pitcher plant (the provincial flower of Newfoundland and Labrador, I'll have you know), has quite a wide geographic range, and is pretty much at home in temperate climates. I just love the colours and the fat, bulbous shape of the pitchers.
• Drosera binata - tuning-fork sundew. Found natively around the world, including in NZ, this is a beauty. A tall, upright sundew, beautiful red foliage, relatively tough and easy to grow - what's not to like?

While I'm fond of a lot of other plants (hebes, maples, kowhai, clematis, tulips....), those are the plants that I tend to make a serious effort to get into cultivation wherever I am. Unfortunately, I've only got the tree ferns going at the moment - but it's only a matter of time before I can find the S. purpurea and D. binata (for one thing, that's a native that is notorious for growing by the side of the road - how hard can it be to find?).

So yeah, I'm on a bit of a gardening tip at the moment. This is complicated by it being winter, but I'm merrily sorting out grandiose plans for our remaining herbaceous borders. It's all good fun. Now all I need is a half-dozen old bathtubs.

And I've just bought an Astophytum ornatum cactus for my desk at work. It will be my friend.

Plan for if I become a millionaire: buy a decent-sized bach up at Tokaanu and put a couple of greenhouses in, using the geothermic heat to heat the greenhouses and grow tropical plants. Lowland Nepenethes, ho!

Top parenting tip #57 How to get a toddler to eat beef stew: tell her it's chicken. She doesn't know the difference.

archives