pebblerocker

Finally getting around to posting about B7 again. Second episode, yay! I think everything about Blake's 7 is full of yay. This is fun!

( Read more... )

My library asked me to do a survey and it was all going nicely until I got to question 10: Do you think it's important for people to have access to a library? [yes/no] Why?

Because people need AIR. And PARKS with TREES in them. And LIBRARIES DUH. Should I answer this question as if explaining to a three-year-old who asks "Why do we breathe?" I should probably answer as if explaining to a soulless public servant who is looking for ways for the government to save all that money it had to use up on tax cuts for rich people. I don't know how to answer.

I haven't actually been to a library for quite some time because I'm going through a phase of re-reading books I have in my house in order to prove that I need to have them. Later this month there's a book sale on and I have already arranged for a day off work specifically so I can go. I have also donated THREE whole books to the sale to make room for the AT LEAST TWENTY that will come home with me. I can't wait.

The Marriage (Definition of marriage) Amendment Bill had its third reading in Parliament this evening, and it passed: 77 votes to 44. We watched it live right through. Louisa Wall (whose bill it is) made a wonderful opening speech and a lot of the other speakers were fantastic. It was great to see gay and lesbian MPs speaking about what the Bill means, and that there was so much cross-party support. I didn't expect so many old men of the National party to vote in favour - some who weren't even wearing lavender ties. Maryan Street, Mojo Mathers and Te Ururoa Flavell made amazing speeches. Suddenly I feel like Parliament might be relevant to me more than once every four years.

This makes New Zealand the 13th country in the world to legislate marriage equality and it feels so good.

I can't tell which occasions are an encounter with someone who uses "bro" or "mate" as gender-neutral terms and which are people misreading me until after the double-take, if there is one. I think the man at the tyre shop is one who calls women "mate"; I mean, I've just had a haircut and was wearing my baggy checked shirt, but I was carrying a handbag.

When I was 20 it was easy to see how people could mistake me for a short, downy-chinned 14-year-old boy. I wonder what will happen as my skin shows more and more signs of belonging to an over-30 in outdoor occupations. Will having wrinkles make me obviously not a boy? Or will I turn into some sort of ageless, genderless leprechaun creature?

--

I signed up for snapshot_bingo! I always feel arty near the beginning of the year, maybe from the general resolutionary atmosphere of New Year, maybe because I'm halfway between NaArMaMos. I'm not sure what the general artistic standard of the community will be like, and if it'll be encouraging or intimidating, but it'll be fun to try even if I don't show the results to anyone. Here's my bingo card:

Partner and I got bored with having the same old food every day. Potatoes, rice and split peas feature heavily and we end up rotating the same meal every 3 days instead of once a week -- that's if we feel interested enough in food to make something instead of just having toast. He also wanted to start taking lunch to work so he doesn't end up buying chocolate bars for lunch every day, which is hard on the bank account as well as on his health.

I looked up meal plans online and got this one (link via Wayback Machine because it went 404 a day after I found it) and we're working from that pretty closely this week. It's going well. Partner is remembering to take sandwiches or leftover dinner to work for lunch; I think the external authority, this LIST that orders him to take a certain packed lunch, is working better than his internal "suppose I should but I'd rather watch cat videos" or my "I would pack lunch if I was you". Dinners are not all that different from what we'd have normally -- stir fry, bean stew, pasta -- but not having to do the thinking is a big help, and working from a recipe means we get new flavours, different spice combinations than I'd think up myself, and that makes things so much more interesting.

We put hoisin sauce on the shopping list since the stir fry recipe wanted it, and it's a new favourite. I can't stop sticking my finger in the bottle for a taste. And pickled gherkins is another new food: partner bought some for sandwiches because he likes it when they give him some on his sandwich at a chain of sandwich shops. (They always just say "pickles" on the menu but it's always pickled gherkins, not pickled something else.) He bought the gherkins to try and I had some and liked them a lot and accidentally ate them all in a week. And there was a recipe that said cilantro, so we bought a bunch of coriander, which has had a mixed reception. I never ate it growing up because my mother can't stand the taste, but I think I like it; partner tasted it and is very wary of having any in his dinner.

I'm going to have to make sure I try new foods regularly so I don't get bored with food. I only discovered olives and eggplant a couple of years ago; it's well past time to add a few new tastes to my repertoire.

1. I like my dentist, he's very cool. He's really into his subject and loves talking about it, a bit of an Adrian Anorak only more personable. After my check-up he was telling me all about different types of bacteria that exist in the mouth and why some cavities progress faster than others, and I was really interested in it, I was fascinated by fun science. If only it was fun science that didn't have Lots Of Pain as a consequence.

2. I like gaming with other women! My guild used to have lots of women when I joined, women moderating and mentoring and women just playing. With attrition the active playerbase has gone down over the years (the game's ten years old after all) and for the last couple of years I've been gaming in several overlapping groups in which I'm the only woman, and I know of one other woman playing on the same server whose sessions don't usually overlap with mine. Now, with the release of Diablo 3, there's an influx of new players; I'm playing regularly with the niece of a long-time D2 friend, I had a game with an LJ friend this week, and there are more women around in my guild which is GREAT. I want there to be even more.

3. I like Scrapheap! We're watching the first series, before it became Scrapheap Challenge and got a new format and more money for sets and a different pair of teams every week and semi-finals. In the first series Robert Llewellyn is the only presenter and there are only two teams, trying to win the most challenges by the end of the series. I love that it's low-budget and doesn't care. I love how everything is dirty and they eat lunch with greasy hands and wear grubby grey uniforms. I love Anne the hovercraft champion and I love Major Dick's moustache. I love all the welding and bashing things. I love that it doesn't try to hype everything up and make you wait two ad breaks to see anything interesting happen like some shows I could mention, it's actually exciting and doesn't need hype because everyone just wants to see which tractor is strongest and whether the trebuchet will work better than the mangonel.

4. I like not being at work. I had to work 6-day weeks for a year due to constant ongoing staff shortages and it was really hard and I was getting depressed because I never had the energy to do anything fun. They've finally managed to hire two new people and I haven't been needed to work at all for a month, which is longer than I'd normally like to be away from work but since I've been overworked for so long I'm really happy about it. I haven't exactly been an explosion of industry and making the house perfectly tidy and writing all the stories I never got around to and being organised etc, but I am doing a little gardening and reading a lot and I'm able to do fun things that also need physical effort rather than having to save up energy to get through work. And my strained wrist is recuperating nicely.

5. I like reading the same books my mother is reading, working our way through a series together and swapping books back and forth and going to the library to collect books for each other and talking about them. I'm amused when she's read a book and I'm partway through and I say I don't think things will go as well as Certain Character hopes and she just says Hmmmm.

Here's what I've done so far!
( Read more... )

For the last week or two I've been gradually running low on deodorant and intending to buy deodorant, and now I'm absolutely completely out of deodorant and still haven't bought deodorant, because the time most convenient to buying deodorant, when I'm near shops that are open, is after I've finished work, which is when I smell exactly like someone who's been doing hard physical work for five hours in a polyester uniform shirt, deodorant or not. I feel some aversion to going into a shop to buy deodorant while smelling bad. It just doesn't seem like the done thing, to go around buying deodorant because you need it; I should appear to be buying deodorant I don't need so that I can decorate my dressing table with the bottle while being fresh as a daisy all day long with no outside assistance.

Ah well. Baking soda has many uses.

Cut for sad, involving animals not being alive any more. Don't click if the not-alive word still hurts.
( Read more... )

Election news: the special votes have all been counted at last and the Green party went up to over 11% of party votes, meaning they now get a fourteenth MP in parliament. I've been hoping for this, both generally because the more Greens we have, the better they can try to curb the worst excesses of the National party, and in particular because the fourteenth on the Green list is Mojo Mathers, who becomes the world's fifth deaf member of parliament. She'll be a good advocate for the rights of people with disabilities, discrimination and accessibility issues as well as hearing impairment issues. So exciting!

Before the election I was reading news stories about the possibility that Ms Mathers could get in based on poll results, and of course one shouldn't read the comments on the Herald website but I did and there was the inevitable moaning about the horror of someone getting special treatment and having transcripts made available and a sign language interpreter at taxpayers' expense -- and the next comment pointed out that hey, deaf people pay taxes too, which I found most heartening.