pebblerocker

I've been back in New Zealand for a week now, so busy I haven't had time to sit down. Given that I praised the vegan meals provided by Qantas recently, though, I thought there should be an update on what we got on the flight home.

Our meals were served first, of course, before everyone else gets theirs -- I find that a bit awkward when there's someone sitting next to me, it isn't polite to eat in front of people! -- and came in trays with stickers marked with our names and the code "VGML". Boyfriend opened his and we thought it looked pretty boring as compared to the exciting meal on the flight out: just sausages, mashed potatoes and peas. Well, I thought, the presentation isn't much but at least they're trying with the vegetarian sausages. Boyfriend had taken a bite of his before an attendant came hurrying to snatch our trays away; as you might have guessed, even with the "special vegan meal" stickers they'd managed to serve us the meat meal. The exchange meal was pasta in a cheese sauce, which boyfriend CAN eat but didn't because he felt somewhat queasy, and which I shouldn't eat but did pick at because it smelt good and I was starving. (No severe symptoms resulted but I found it didn't taste that fantastic.)

Boyfriend feels rather ripped off that after not eating meat for years he was tricked into some and it wasn't even nice. He felt weird and a bit ill for a couple of days afterwards for mainly psychological reasons.

I think in these circumstances one is supposed to make a formal complaint, but I don't see it doing any good. Presumably nobody meant to stick the stickers on the wrong containers; there's not much that could be done differently to make sure it happens again.

I love using the trains and trams in Melbourne. The trains are electric so they're much quieter than the diesel engines in Auckland. They also run much more often! Today my hosts took me around on a sightseeing trip and when we were ready we just walked to the train station and got onto the next train leaving, ten minutes later -- no looking up timetables, no hurrying or waiting, no worries. When I just missed a train to the Auckland city centre I had to wait an hour for the next one. Also the trains here run on Sundays and there seems to be no panic about missing the last train of the day and being stranded. Marvellous stuff!

Trams are fun too. It's quite eerie watching cars whoosh past so close to the tram as it trundles up the middle of the road, it looks quite dangerous but I suppose trams don't swerve around unpredictably and drivers would get used to them. A pity Auckland's tram lines were all ripped up long ago; the only ones left are antiques running a very short distance to and from the zoo (not that those are not wonderful machines).

Of course the main drawback of public transport is that it is used by the public. Some people seem to have headphones that direct more sound outwards than into the user's earholes. The mouth-breathing turd opposite us on the way home must have been severely inconveniencing those among my fellow passengers who don't like death metal.

It was a most enjoyable day despite the sudden rather wet thunderstorm; I am happy to be back from my explorations and in dry clothes!

First on the agenda: it seems pingback is worse than previously suspected. Shutting down pingbacks on your own journal doesn't work, pingbacks happen both to and from locked posts according to murky and inconsistent conditions. Not very cool. Pingbacks work on blogs because if you're blogging on Wordpress or something you expect everything you write to be visible to the general public. It would take actual thought to make a pingback system that works in LJ's culture and nobody has bothered with that.

Second: the Facetwit debacle is not making me happy. I have some overlap between LJ and Facebook and don't want the two dragged together by a careless comment. I keep my Facebook locked down pretty tight as far as possible, but the way they change settings around stealthily doesn't give confidence.

Third: http://pebblerocker.dreamwidth.org/ is getting under way. I don't know yet how I'm going to handle things: do I want to hide all my LJ posts and use LJ just to comment on communities I'm in, or use Dreamwidth's crossposting feature to keep both journals active, or something else? Those who have no intention of moving to DW, please let me know so I can put you on a special reading filter and see your posts easily. I'm adding people on DW as I find them :)

And for anyone who would like to try Dreamwidth: invite codes available here.

Babelfish strikes: its translation of a German-language blog into English gave me the phrase, "Really, I would like to vibrate each of the readers until they wake up."

National Art Making Month, Day 2!

I am pleased with this picture. Blue makes me happy. Inconveniently, however, after pre-washing these brand new bright blue sheets and getting them dry I found that the fitted sheet of the set was quite obviously for a single bed. It must have been packaged wrong at the factory; I'll be taking it back to the shop today, and I just hope they still have a beautiful blue one to replace it with, otherwise I'll be sleeping on plain old white sheets tonight.

Fellow NaArMaMo participants have complimented the photo on its sunny summery vibe -- a reasonable assumption considering most in the group are from the northern hemisphere, but to me the photo is a celebration of sunshine on a clear winter day.

Front door handles ought to work for several years at a time without needing servicing, generally speaking, in my personal opinion. Not lock people into the house in the morning when they're trying to get to work.

Currently am watching the first series of Blackadder. Rowan Atkinson is actually riding that horse, not just holding onto the saddle while a horse handler gives signals from off camera. And he looks perfectly competent riding sidesaddle too!

I do not think BRIAN BLESSED actually grew those teeth himself.

We had a hot water bottle failure last night. It's the sort of tremendously frightening thing you hear about theoretically happening to other people with DEATH AND DISFIGUREMENT and you always assume that although every hottie must die eventually it will never actually happen to you. I imagine floods of scalding water and being trapped in the blankets unable to escape the simmering puddle, but in fact it was just a little dribble causing no injury and only a minor wet patch.

Now you can't put rubber in the recycling bin and it looks sort of useful, what shall I do with it? A quick google reveals that the world is short on ideas: cut the hot water bottle into squares to use as jam jar openers or non-slip mats, stuff it to use as a garden kneeler, or hang it on the wall as a modern sculpture. I expected to turn up pages of results of hot water bottles turned into various things and sold on Etsy, but no such luck. My main plan is to cut out a replacement rubber washer to fit on my vinegar bottle with the wire clamp top... otherwise perhaps I can use the ribbed sides to re-sole shoes, or cut it into gigantic rubber bands for powering big balsa planes.

My rapidly-expanding second favourite Sims 2 family needed to move out of their cramped two-bedroom Maxis house into something a bit bigger, preferably something with room for enough beds for everyone and more than a two-seater couch. My favourite family got a really neat blue weatherboard house I designed and built myself, but for this next building project I lacked inspiration. Making all the bits fit together can be hard.

Thank you, wonderful makers and sellers of houses, for putting your plans online for my perusal! Grand Sim matriarch Loretta will now preside over the next generation in a generously-proportioned four-bedroom home loosely based on Select Homes's "Swansea" plan (warning: floor plans in PDF). The house may not be exactly my style but it certainly is hers -- she's moving up in the world and she doesn't mind who knows it.

I love op shops. I bought a pair of three-quarter cargo pants for a dollar. They were hanging on the end of a rack as I walked past on the way to the counter, so I grabbed them and tried them on and not only did they fit, they felt GREAT. You know when you try something on and it feels so good it's like you've already owned it for ages? I love clothes like that, especially pants because a lot of pants don't fit me right. These pants have little strings in the bottoms so they can stay rolled up a bit for riding bikes.

There's a sort of magic with op shops. You can't "go shopping" there, you never find anything good if you try too hard. You just have to walk in there and see if there's anything there wanting to be bought, and if it wants you, you'll see it.

Incidentally, ought I to haggle with the volunteers to make them let me pay the price that's marked on things? I got a comfy pair of sandals, from the "All shoes $3" shelf, for $2 because the woman at the counter didn't want to charge me full price for something she'd donated herself, and although "Mugs $1" I bought a couple of marvellously ugly examples at half price.

New season apples are in the shops, hooray! It's hard to get through early summer when even the Granny Smiths are unappealing. I feel decidedly odd when I can't eat an apple every day. Now the lean time is over and apples are back, and as well the plums, peaches and nectarines are in season and smelling nice. It can't be long now until Golden Queen peaches come in...

Apricots, however, are still not worth buying. I sniff them every time I go shopping and they're never ripe and nice-smelling. They never became nice-smelling last year at all. I suspect that all apricot orchards have now replaced their trees with a new variety with very commercially-appealing yield and disease resistance properties and no flavour at all. Maybe next time I visit the city I can try the organics shop. There must be good apricot varieties around somewhere; dried apricots have a smell, after all.