rollin rollin rollin September 29, 2007  

Life temporarily without Rebecca, day eight: the shakes have stopped, but I can't get rid of the feeling that the house is terribly empty in the evenings. It's not that she'd be running around the place. Rebecca goes to bed around 7pm each night, and the bedroom door is firmly shut. So we're used to having quiet dinners by ourselves. It's just a bit odd not having the constant rumble of suspicious thuds, loud singing, teddy bear-based psychodramas and requests to go to the toilet while we do so. Nearly there. Must be strong. Tell you what, though, we're going to make good time up from Rotorua on Tuesday morning.

So daylight saving kicks in early tomorrow. And lo, the cries of woe! Nothing will work! Mini Y2K! Oh noes! etc. Personally, I favour the compromise position: daylight saving starts early, but we all agree to do everything an hour later for a week. Since we'll be on holiday, this is in effect what we'll be doing anyway. Mmm hmm - lovely long evenings as of Sunday. Assuming, that is, that it ever stops raining.

Last year, I decided in September to book accomodation for the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge. I thought it'd be ridiculously hard to get a room; I got a room at the first place I rang. This year, I've decided in September to book accomodation for the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge. I thought I'd get a room at the first place I ring; it's ridiculously hard to get a room. I've spent two evenings being laughed at by moteliers. "You want a room for the cycle race?", comes the refrain, "then you should have booked it as you left last year!" Seriously: apparantly motel bookings for Taupo are treated as precious heirlooms, handed down through the years and jealously husbanded. Fortunately, the people running the challenge maintain a list of local B&Bs and baches for rent, so we might be able to sort something out that way. Fingers crossed!

Today's shameful confession of a secret passion: I really like lolcats.

planetary gears, go September 21, 2007  

So this morning, we dropped Rebecca off with her gran at the airport and waved goodbye. She's off up to Auckland to stay with her grandparents for a week and a half, after which we drive up and pick her up. Rebecca was understandably a bit upset at the airport - "But I'll miss it!" she kept saying. Finally we persuaded her that yes, she would see her car seat again (!), and she calmed down. She was completely unphased at the thought of not seeing us (or Maggie) again for a week and a half, but the prospect of having her car seat go into the luggage hold had her wibbling out. Fortunately, we're pretty sanguine about how much she loves us. We're pretty sure that, on balance, she loves us more than her car seat. Though I wouldn't want to bring it to a question of whether she loves us more than the worms.

To test this, we rang her at 6:30pm to see how she was. My conversation with her went as follows:

Rebecca: Hi Daddy, I’ve got a new tricycle!
Me: Wow! That sounds great. We’ll have to see it when we come up.
Rebecca: OK. I’m working here now, so I have to go. Bye!

I’m guessing that she’s not pining.

So Rebecca's off helping her grandparents get prepared for the early daylight saving by being rousted from bed at 6am, and we're left at home. She'll be fine; I predict that we'll be nervous wrecks by Wednesday. I'm gonna be jonesing for my little girl. The longest we've been away for her is a long weekend; ten days is a bit of a jump. Mind you, she's ready for it, we're ready for it, and you've just got to grasp the nettle sometimes. Roll on October...

Listening to: DJ Food and Paul Morley's excellent history of electronic music, mash-ups, musique concrete, and the evolution of contemporary music, Raiding the 20th Century. Go! Download it! Marvel!

And it gets bonus points for giving big ups to my favorite pop music moment of the last decade; Kylie singing "Can't get you out of my head" live at the Brit awards to "Blue Monday" as a backing track. It is indeed very hard to top that as a moment of insane pop genius.

And Hot Chip. I can't get enough of these fuckers at the moment.

Had a good moment the other night when the announcer at the end of the TV news referred to a specific All Black as "Carter the Unstoppable Machine". Ah, I thought, someone on the teleprompter has good taste.

So the Density Church is trying to resurrect the notion of a "Christian" (read, right-wing fundamentalist) political party. At least it'll get all the bigots in one place. Problem: if there's enough bigots to get them over the 5% threshold for MMP. Fortunately, National are still appealing to the moderate nutcase vote, so it should split the demographic and hopefully keep this new party under the line. The only worry is if they do sign up Taito Philip Field, and if he isn't jailed for those pernicious bribery and corruption charges, he could well take Mangere again and thus potentially introduce a couple of list MPs into parliament. But then again, maybe this isn't all that much to worry about after all. OK, Gordon Coupland is a coattaill-clinging parasite who would only be bringing vague legitimacy to the party, but it's symptomatic of there being a few too many egos involved to keep things coherent. The result won't be so much a new political party as a resurrection of Destiny New Zealand with a slightly different name, and it should hopefully die the same death. Fingers crossed!

Every once in a while you see something that just makes a warm glow in the bottom of your stomach. The other day, as I was riding home, I watched a boy racer pull out of the panelbeaters by Kaiwharawhara. Standard crappy wee boy racer hatchback, obviously a work in progress (primer paint on several panels, spoiler didn’t match the other bits), but he’d had time to chop the springs. So much so, in fact, that as he pulled out, the car was so lowered that as he turned right out of the entrance to the panelbeaters, the slight rise in the road meant that one of the car’s rear wheels was off the ground. It was astonishing, and hilarious, watching this dick with a car so badly modified that it couldn’t even cope with basic road surface. I am a simple man, and pleased by simple things.

The Nee Naw blog has an excellent, if chilling, discussion of appropriate emotional responses to stressful situations - and why it's not actually that shit hot an idea to freak out and panic when things go bad. It's quite a common human reaction to shut down emotional reactions when everything goes really wrong; but unless you're rending your garments and wailing, a lot of people (often including yourself) feel that there's something wrong with you. Being calm and controlled is a pretty normal reaction to shock, but it can look unfeeling. I've talked to several people who've felt guilty because they just felt calm and a bit disconnected when very bad things happened to people close to them; the post by Nee Naw is a good example of why this reaction is often a good thing.

ding dong the witch is dead September 17, 2007  

It's been a hard couple of weeks. We're full on and full out at work, so I'm just knackered when I get home and in no mood to face the computer and knock out a blog entry. My leisure-based mental capacity is basically up to supervising a bath and then reading Billy's Beetle (one of Mick Inkpen's less known, but very good, creations). Still, it's good to be busy, and to have definite goals. We're currently at the point where you do the hard yards in order to ensure that everything works smoothly going forward. Satisfying but exhausting.

I can confirm, however, that there are few things more satisfying than a patronising, workshy coworker with a grossly inflated sense of their own capability being pulled from your project.

As much as anyone else, I was quite interested to discover that George Orwell had Burmese tattoos on his hands. What worries me most about this is the two statements that the tattoos were on his knuckles, and that they were the size of small grapefruit. Either they were actually the size of grapes, or he had freakishly large knuckles.

One thing I've been pondering for a while is a common syndrome in personal interaction, from the individual to macrocultural levels. YRBFY syndrome. It's when someone is saying something that's right, but you don't want to hear it. This is usually either because they're being a dick, or you are. Hence the name: You're Right, But Fuck You. It's incredibly infuriating when people give unsolicited advice; it's even worse when you realise that it's good advice. Particularly if they're being a a bit of a dick about it: being patronising or supercilious is typical. "You might find it more effective if you do [x]", sort of thing. This typically gets a reply like "No, I'm fine with doing [y]", often delivered through gritted teeth. So you're left in either the position of doing the right thing but being pissed off by the dork who told you to do it, or doing the wrong thing and knowing it, while being too pissed off at the dork in question to give in and do what you know to be the right thing. This happens a lot as a parent, I find. It also happens when people are telling you something you don't want to hear,

Listening to: Enter by DJ Kentaro (that Harvest Dance is a cracker of a track) and Annie's entry in the DJ-Kicks series. Excellent stuff.

Rebecca is agitating for pets. I jokingly commented to Heather that she already had loads of pets: the worm farm. Rebecca seems to have taken this on board. Now a regular weekend feature is popping outside to see the worms. I take the lid off the worm farm, Rebecca picks up her stick (she has a particular stick), and carefully locates a worm. Then she picks it up neatly on the end of the stick, removes it from the worm farm, and loudly declares it to be her pet. Cue five minutes of rocking the worm to sleep, digging small holes for it to live in, hugs, etc. I figure as long as we wash her hands afterwards, it's all good. And, you know, if she takes good enough care of her worms then maybe we'll get her a puppy. More seriuosly, she is really into the worms - I can't go into the front garden without her demanding to come along and see the worms.

Maggie grows apace. She's moved from boggling at the world to attempting to eat it. Anything in her hands goes into her mouth. Needless to say, we're keeping a sharp eye in case Rebecca smuggles any of her pets into the house to introduce to Maggie. Rebecca has also given Maggie a nickname - "Gigi" (with a hard g - think the Chinese 'gege' but with different vowel sounds).

Set your Thursday nights aside; the Mighty Boosh are on C4 on Thursday, starting off with the Killeroo episode. I really rate the Boosh - a surreal attempt to resurrect the sort of thing the Goodies used to do. Plus loads of electro references. It's the show that gave us the ambient hutch, you know.

i wouldn't mind, but she comes over all smug September 03, 2007  

Is it just me, or is it terribly ironic to hear Germaine Greer railing against Princess Diana as desperate for attention? As she gets older, Germaine Greer has become one of the most rabid publicity whores around. She's been on Celebrity Big Brother, for god's sake. She makes a point of driving around Cambridge blasting Eminem on the stereo because "it's not what people expect"; Jesus, love, starved of attention much? She's a complete media whore and intellectual troll, ready to say or do anything to offend people and thus get the attention for which she clamours. It's the sort of behaviour you put up with in teenagers; to see someone past the official retirement age still doing it is both pathetic and annoying. I also had to laugh out loud while reading her diatribe against stuffed toys, during which she asserts that children didn't have dolls until they became available in the 19th century due to mass production, and cites the damning evidence that she saw a number of small children on a ferry trip talking to their stuffed toys and making the toys answer them back. The first point there is on a par with the Mormon beliefs on how America was settled in the "stupid pronouncements that are flat contradicted by a number of pieces of documentary and archaeological evidence" stakes. The second is just pathetic: I mean, here's the actual spectacle of someone railing against children daring to indulge in imaginative play, creating fantasy worlds with their toys and interacting with them. Heaven forbid that children should indulge in their imagination.

Not that I've had any respect for Germaine Greer since I learned that she opposed a transgendered woman joining the faculty of Newnham College (women only) at Cambridge. Which, to me, means that she should just wear a t-shirt with "Bigot" on it and be done with it.

I'm working on a new project, and we're being housed in a new building. The building is a bit scruffier than our normal offices. This morning, when taking the lift, I idly looked up and noticed an empty biscuit packet. Yes, that's looked up and saw the packet - it was resting on top of the light-diffuser panelling in the ceiling, right under the fluorescent light. Presumably someone working on the lift from above was having a bit of a snack and didn't quite finish cleaning up.

Oreos, in case you're curious.

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