pebblerocker

Blazing inferno engulfs Auckland coolstore - from the Herald. Check out the photos - that tower of smoke could be seen from a long way off. Fire crews came from Hamilton and Rotorua to help, and they'll be working there for days yet.

dr_sponge - how was the view from your place?

Thanks to indefatigable42 for this idea - and I seem to be more amenable to the positive thinking approach when it's not coming from my mother. :P I'm not sure if this is an official sort of meme which I'm supposed to do on certain days, but thinking about happy things is a good idea at any time, so I'll put down a few recent ones.

My partner and I cooked a meal together a few days ago, a stir-fry incorporating cauliflower from my father's garden. I like messing about in the kitchen together, I think it's good for our relationship.

I felt like drawing again, for the first time in many months, and I drew a reasonably proportioned humanoid and was proud of parts of it. It's not finished, but I might come back to it.

My two-year-old niece and I played together on the trampoline yesterday, and she ordered me about and told me when to jump and when to sit down and watch her jumping and when I should do a big bounce next to her and make her fly in the air. And I remembered jumping on the same trampoline all day every day when I was small.

I bought organic lemons today and they're much nicer than supermarket lemons, they look like real lemons off a tree, and I'm going to use them to make ginger beer.

Gather now to hear the story!

Or, if you just want the bottom line:

Some people have allowed political party hoardings to be erected in their front yards. There's one for the Greens and one for NZ First that I ride past, inside people's fences rather than on council land by the road. I'm worrying that people are being mercenary and unscrupulous and giving space to promote parties they don't agree with, just for money. And if they're not, that means they're putting up signs telling everyone who they're going to vote for. What's the point of a secret ballot if people do that?

I dreamt about vol-au-vents on the sea floor with hot water issuing forth and strange life forms growing around them as happens deep down there. I don't know if my brain is making clever puns while I'm asleep or if I'm just very confused by pastry.

And scientists came to study the interesting ecology on the sea floor, riding on moonhoppers. No diving gear, just moonhoppers. I sort of want to draw deep-sea scientists on moonhoppers, with their hair floating in the currents.

I'm looking through a few MP3s that I downloaded way back when I'd only just got the internet. One of them is of Ella Fitzgerald doing a fantastic scat version of Oh Lady Be Good. She's great. What a voice!

The thing is, how in the world did I manage to run a search for "scat" and bring up very good jazz music and nothing more? I want to reach back through time and shout at innocent 19-year-old self NOOOOOOO DON'T!!! or unplug the computer. But it wasn't even necessary.

There are two types of smoke alarms, ionising and photoelectric. The ionising type, which was fitted in my house, is good at detecting the heat and smoke of a house fire, but easily confused by steam and other sources of heat, so it's not recommended for use in areas such as kitchens and bathrooms. They stuck mine in the hallway right above the bathroom door.

We've become accustomed to closing the bathroom door all the way before turning on the heater light (and it's winter, so we usually want to use the heater light) and cringing a bit when coming out of the bathroom again in case some steam gets into the alarm. But now the silly thing has taken to screaming when it senses an incandescent bulb being switched on in the hallway, so we've taken its battery away.

With all the government-sponsored warnings about the absolute necessity of smoke alarms in the home I feel almost like a criminal. Will someone come and take away my license to live in a house now? I may have to go and sleep in a ditch, where at the moment there is very little risk of fire. It's put a new slant on all those sad newspaper stories about the family who were burnt to death where someone from the fire department says it never would have happened if the house had had working smoke alarms. Maybe they sabotaged their alarm, or just didn't bother replacing the battery, because they were sick of hearing it go off.

A photoelectric smoke alarm has been vaguely on the shopping list for a while now. I wish one had been fitted from the start. It would be nice if the alarms that the fire station gives away were the more effective type, but I suppose they're a little more expensive.

I have a pair of fingerless gloves and they're fantastic for keeping my hands warm, but I lent them to the boy to wear on the bus and my fingers have been freezing. Another pair would be lovely. How to achieve this goal? I can knit, just barely; I made bootees for my niece when she was born, with much running to mummy for help with mysteriously expanding ribbing and reminders on how to k2tog, and gloves should be only ten times more complicated, so I've been looking for patterns.

First I investigated a pattern for gaming gloves I'd seen in Cerise magazine a while ago. They look pretty simple, but they're not exactly gloves and they're crocheted, not knitted. Apparently crochet is easy to learn; I know how to make a chain, I have books with instructions, and there's a crochet hook kicking around in a drawer somewhere. This is definitely worth a try.

Then I searched the vast interwebs for other patterns and found that a huge proportion of what are labelled as patterns for fingerless gloves are something completely different, the same as the ones from Cerise: more like fingerless mittens than gloves, in some cases nothing more than a tube like a small legwarmer with a slit for the thumb. Easy to knit, but really not what I'm after and most misleadingly named.

What I really want to make is these lovely gloves. The pattern looks a bit beyond my current knitting capabilities though, with double-pointed needles and lots of fiddliness... but I WANT some.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put an asterisk next to the books you'd rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
( Read more... )

The door-knockers came around today to convert my street. They brought their adorable little kids with them, which I suspect might be some sort of ploy to make themselves more ingratiating. The young boy wasn't much interested in trying to convert me; he was standing on my front steps with his back to me, in his little suit and his dark-rimmed glasses, reading an Asterix book. I was more interested in trying to read over his shoulder than in the proffered Watchtower magazine.

You know, the Message might have a better chance of reaching me if it was about the good stuff, rather than Armageddon and burning and wrath. Maybe the God of Love is some other denomination. And they walk down the road so slowly! Not because they were escorting a toddler and a child who was concentrating on reading rather than walking, either -- there were two squads working, alternating houses, and the ones without children were just as slow. They looked like a funeral procession or a riding school dragging along. I'd be more interested in talking to active, energetic people who look like they're getting some joy out of life.