Zeborah

( Cut for images )

When the painter came this morning for the last of his gear he asked if he can take photos and get a recommendatory quote from me for his website, so he can't think the purple looks too ridiculous. :-)

Now to tidy up the lavender and roses. The existing lavender is quite old and prone to splitting in storms / when crushed underfoot by painters / when you look at it (so I don't blame the painters at all - they were actually really careful) so I think I need to both do some seriously careful pruning and also to buy some new bushes to replace the ones I ended up rooting out entirely. Or I could grown my own new ones from seed but this would take longer.

In other news, "Other [bugs in one's pantry] chew straight through any packaging - they've got diamond-tipped mandibles. Once you've got them, you've got them."

In battling with my RSI I've resorted to a mixture of wonderful amounts of catch-up reading, ridiculous amounts of TV, and rare amounts of gardening.

I've nearly finished weeding the cracks in the bricks that run a path around the roses in my back garden. Granted the cracks I weeded first are now sprouting new grass again, but in the meantime I've discovered bricks I didn't even know existed for being buried under the encroaching lawn. Also in the meantime the plums, peaches, and grapes are ripening - I even ate a particularly early plum yesterday. But it got to 32 degrees outside (my thermometer claims 29 inside) so even my usual practice of going out for a few minutes then coming back in seems insufficient to avoid sunstroke.

(A flannel with cold water helps, though it dries amazingly quickly.)

So I read more than usual today, lounged on the bed in the coolest room in the house while the cat attempted to aestivate on the windowsill. I finished two books (an easy and fun YA and a classic that alas didn't have a plot to my taste but nevertheless told its plot extremely well) and... well, one gets tired of reading. Especially because holding the pages open anything less than carefully actually places a certain strain on one's wrists which one doesn't notice when one isn't battling RSI.

And unfortunately today I ran out of Boston Legal DVDs (need to visit my sister to borrow the next season) and the TV's marathon of Queen Seondeok has expired so I only get one hour a day instead of four. (I could rave about both series but even with my microbreak software on high my wrist is protesting.)

I would also love to be writing right now, but, well, I may have overdone it a bit yesterday.

[Software-enforced break during which I make the bed]

<remembers some video files my brother copied for me>

<on reflection, turns microbreak software up even higher>

The building is being renovated, so we all have to move out of our normal office into the other end of the building. I was out on Wednesday morning when my desk needed to be dismantled, hence the box.

Finally got official word of what I'd long suspected, viz., I'm not getting a job interview. Which is a shame because recent events have been putting me into quite a "Must stage a coup and fix everything now!" mood. But it was a long shot and I lost out on it for the reason I expected to be a major problem so I'm not disappointed so much as wistful. Also on the bright side my application seems to have made them think, "Uh oh, she's getting ambitious and we don't want her going somewhere else, we'd better give her awesome leadership training opportunities." So that sounds cool if intimidating. (It's not that I want to be a leader. It's just that I want to fix everything.)

So (chronologically, not consequently) now I'm on a two-week holiday, in which I plan to do as little as possible. Yesterday I was going to do some cooking, but I don't have a cooking icon so I did some gardening instead. (Or possibly I had a nap instead, and then woke up and did some gardening; I forget. The sun is wonderful this weekend, due to yesterday being Show Day.) I pruned a bazillion roses and looked sad at a gazillion aphids. And weeded and pruned more and weeded more.

And! I discovered my baby grape vine (grown from a sprout weeded from my parents' garden) has tiny baby grapes! Each bunch is about the size of a large raspberry. They're so adorable! But I'm probably supposed to prune them off to allow the vine to grow more and because they're unlikely to be very good the first year anyway. :-( But tiny baby grapes! What to do??!

What I did then was, despite the lack of a cooking icon, I cooked anyway, because rushthatspeaks posted a wartime recipe for potato truffles and how can one resist trying something like that? It's so ridiculous that it's got to work.

So, I boiled potatoes without salt, and mashed without milk or butter, and mixed in cocoa and sugar. And then I tasted it and thought, "...Hum. This has a texture remarkably similar to mashed potato."

Adding in some butter helped a little but not much, so I reported it as something of a failure.

However! Having rolled the mixture into balls I left them sitting in the fridge overnight, and this morning they actually seemed better. Possibly I was just hungrier, but possibly the delay had given the moisture time to soften some of the powderiness of the texture.

Also it occurred to me that chopped nuts and sultanas mixed in could help distract from said texture. So I added these, remoulded the truffles, rolled them in dessicated coconut, and brought them this evening to my family who knew nothing of the recipe.

Beta-taster #1 thought they were a bit soft and not very sweet.
Beta-taster #2 thought they were fine.
Beta-taster #3 thought they needed something which, on mature consideration, turned out to be rum.

So here's my revised recipe:

Peel, chop and boil a potato. (Salt is probably still unnecessary.)
Mash potato with milk and butter.
Mix together:

• 4 tablespoons potato
• 2 tablespoons cocoa
• 2 tablespoons sugar (or more for folks with a sweet tooth)
• 1 tablespoon chopped sultanas or other dried fruit
• 1 tablespoon of chopped nuts if there's no fear of nut allergies, otherwise substitute more dried fruit
• either more vanilla essence than I put in, or rum essence

Mould into balls, roll in dessicated coconut (or chocolate sprinkles as per the original), and put in the fridge for several hours or overnight.

I wouldn't serve them at a fancy party, but for a children's party while the adults at the big table get the proper stuff, sure.

It's been twenty-four hours since I felt a quake. I slept through a bunch (in the spare room with a pillow over my head) and then the 5pm ones... I might have been moving around the house, I don't know. It makes it feel like they're over, like aftershocks are so last week. Hopefully they pretty much are and there'll just be a few more fading rumbles. Except you don't want to let your guard down. Except keeping your guard up is the worst of it.

So I woke at about 9:30 from a long and solid sleep and I felt like crap. I wanted to go back to sleep except I didn't, it was really just that I didn't want to be awake.

Someone phoned from choir to say we're allowed back in our practice-room this week. That will be good. (I have at times this week taken advantage of the fact that singing helps anxiety somewhat at least inasmuch as it forces you to control your breathing.)

I poked about online for a bit. I really wanted to set up a "We survived a week of #eqnz!" tweetup except I also really didn't want to deal with it. I wanted to go into town and do some economy-boosting shopping, but also didn't want to. I also really didn't want to sit in the house anymore. I ended up going for a random walk in the sun. Halfway down the road my iPod reminded me that on Saturday I should go to the library, and I thought, yes, going to the library and sitting in a corner with a book would be nice.

It was beautifully sunny. Unfortunately sunglasses can only do so much to hide the fact that one is crying; tears streaming down one's face are a bit of a giveaway. Fortunately I kinda figure Cantabrians are used to people looking upset at the moment. Anyway I wiped most of them away before I cut through the mall.

The mobile library was parked outside the library. This perhaps should have been a clue. (The other clue would have been that all week the list of libraries opening hasn't included my local branch.) I figured it out when I saw the hazard tape across the library's entrance. I think/suspect/hope it's just minor damage, it's just no-one knows yet. I had a brief chat with one of the staff in the mobile library then wandered away again. I wasn't wanting to borrow books, I'd just been wanting to sit in the library and... have a library around me.

I went shopping for a bit. And got to that state where you're looking at things and slowly realise you've zoned out and you're supposed to be doing something, and also where you're swaying on your feet (in a non-earthquake-like manner).

At home I ate a bit, and watched videos, and hacked at the tree the tree-guy forgot because, on reflection, when it rubs against the house it makes creaky noises like the start of a small aftershock. Plus it was something active to do.

The tree he did remember to do (needed dead branches pruned away) still has the branch I want to attach a swing to. So once the rest of it has filled back out I can do that and will have somewhere nice to sit and read in summer.

Back on the internet, someone tweeted something about keeping one's phone charged and I thought-- "Where's my phone?" I've had it on me practically nonstop for a week (though it usually stays by my bed 24/7 being used as nothing more than an alarm clock) and had to hunt through the house to find where I'd put it down while getting changed earlier.

I visited my siblings for dinner. I wasn't great company; half of me didn't want to go, except I wanted to be with them, and then half of me didn't want to leave, except I wanted to be back here. And then I got back here and coming up to my door everything was so quiet. Not scary quiet, and not peaceful quiet, just... quiet like the whole city is numb.

On the bus I overheard some boys talking about how their school will get a bunch of girls coming from another school with damaged buildings. Actually his words were "their school is broken". And the logistics of so much broken feels overwhelming. Mostly I'm equally overwhelmed by how everyone is doing their part to put a piece here and a piece there back together. But today I'm collapsing a bit.

I've been reading Meera Syal's Life isn't all ha ha hee hee which goes around a whole lot of different viewpoint characters in a way that doesn't suit my reading style. So a few days ago I was vaguely pondering a book that has the viewpoint handed off from one character to another, following the story through a literal cast of hundreds, never coming back to the same viewpoint character twice. The sort of conceit that makes a great thought experiment but probably a terrible novel... On the bus I thought that this sort of structure might actually suit a book about recovery from a disaster, to really show the scope of things. (It'd still require a genius to make the reader not mind the fact that we've got no stable characters though.) But then I also thought: I still don't feel qualified to write any such thing. I probably feel less qualified than ever. I often find it harder to write about things I know more about because then I know what I don't know and dread what else I might get wrong. But also, how dare I speak for people who have really suffered and lost?

Not that I think I really want to write a book about recovery from a disaster anyway.

Bah. I'm just trying to find the new normal. It's bound to be around here somewhere.

I currently have a cat sprawled all over me, though at least she's stopped trying to poke at the flies landing on my laptop. In any case it makes me notice again that there are scattered hairs on her that are significantly longer than the rest of her fur, and thence to wonder if those are related to the hairs on humans, and thence to wonder how on earth she fits all this fur on her skin because this is one seriously furry cat.

--Ah, she's just leapt off me to fall instantly asleep on her armchair, I suppose I should go do some dishes and make a cake or something.

Oh but first I was meaning to write about something I was thinking about during a hymn at church today. We had two really interminable hymns and, gorgeous as they were, about halfway through the second one I was getting ideas for a story where a character finds themself singing a song and they're trapped until it's over, but the verses keep on going and going and just when it seems like it must end at this verse, suddenly there's another one.

But also I was thinking about the chorus of the second song (I had about six or seven opportunities to think about it after all), which was:

Lift high the cross, the love of God proclaim
Till all the world adore his glorious name. --Shirley Murray

And I am so not an evangelist for so many reasons, one of which is that I'm pretty sure anyone I'm ever likely to meet has probably already heard about God/Christ's name, and if they don't already adore it then me telling them about it yet again is just going to make them even more sick of it.

So I started thinking that what we actually need to do these days might be (to heinously misparse the word) to in-vangelise: to remind other Christians that our religion's meant to be about God's love and that when Jesus talked about hell he never once mentioned abortion or homosexuality or anything like that (when he talked about things like that he mostly said "Keep your sticky beak out and worry about your own conscience"), but rather the sin of not giving practical help to people who need practical help.

And (to parse the word properly) "You're going to hell unless you do what I say" isn't actually good news. It's more like blackmail. So when we let that be the message that gets spread we're kind of failing. If we want to spread good news we've first got to create it, by proclaiming love and living love and spreading love. We need every mention of "God" or "Jesus" or "Christian" to be associated with something good happening, something making people happy. Because when we associate those words with door-knocking and hellfire that's just a really great way to make God's name dreaded; but if we associate them with hugs and puppies then whether or not people actually convert -- it doesn't follow, after all, and honestly I don't think God cares, cf the Good Samaritan -- they'll at least like hearing his name.

--

Boots just looked out the window and noticed that it's 5pm, therefore time for her to be fed.

--

In other random news:
* I ate a peach from my peach tree (the others all went mouldy on the tree, I need to do something about that);
* I ate a blueberry from my blueberry bush (I think the birds got the other one, note the singular, it's a very small bush);
* the neighbour seems to be halfway through chopping down plum trees though he hasn't yet attacked the main one;
* the other neighbour, who pops over every now and then to retrieve errant tennis balls, is going to nail our fence back together temporarily and also talk with his landlord about going halves with me to arrange a more permanent solution;
* filling a green bin with garden waste once a week actually makes a measurable difference to how tidy said garden is;
* otoh doing so during the sunniest part of the day leaves one in danger of sunburn (albeit mild and easily treated with aloe vera gel);
* the company who was going to give me fake double-glazing has now decided that they don't want to be responsible for actually guaranteeing it so have refunded my money, so I guess the next thing on my to-do list is to get a new roof.

I've discovered I like a) having a vase of flowers on my kitchen table and b) renewing the flowers from time to time so the water doesn't go brown and slimy. This is best achieved by throwing the old flowers out when I get my empty green bin each Wednesday, and then (having generally filled the green bin with prunings and weeds within an hour or two that same evening, and given myself new blisters with my secateurs) using some of the leftover prunings to fill the vase.

The flora which I have aplenty this week is plums.

Anyway so I'm going to try and take a photo a week this year, and the fledgeling set is on Flickr. I may or may not continue posting them to LJ depending on how boring they are and how bored I get.

(Also, I confess to fiddling the colour balance in this one using GIMP. That's because my camera was at work and my webcam gave my beige cupboards a dishonestly red hue.)

Wikimedia Commons has a category for Damnatio ad bestias. It's probably disproportionate how much this amuses me.

If you don't read Dinosaur Comics you totally should and this is why. Seriously, I think it may even be awesomer than xkcd. Also, if you subscribe by RSS you get the title which for some reason seems not to show up on the individual pages. (Today's was "it has a certain jee nee says quey" but usually they're 5-10 times longer.) tl;dr - Awesome fun times!

My house is amazingly tidy! I'm getting rid of some stuff by Freecycle and I'm planning to acquire some actual insulation by taking advantage of a government subsidy, as soon as I find out why this place has quoted me for 92 square metres when someone else (who however feels less inclined to violate health and safety regulations to squeeze into my narrow subfloor) measured 104 and I get 102 +/-2. (Well, probably +/- more than that for various reasons, but definitely not +/-10% which seems on the high side as margins of error go.)

Did I mention how tidy my house is? I keep going into rooms and squeeing at how tidy they are. My clothes are put away! My mandarins(1) are repotted and possibly regaining some of their green! My dining table has a clean tablecloth and a vase filled from a rosebush I pruned! My stovetop reflects light! My cat wants scritches!

Oh, no, that one was always like that.

But still. Imagine how tidy my house could get if I didn't have to go back to work on Monday!

(1) I was eating a seedless(2) mandarin and, after I'd finished being annoyed that it wasn't as seedless as advertised, I wondered what would happen if I planted the seeds. It turned out that they grew into tiny mandarin plants! I've no idea if I'll ever get actual mandarins off them or if there's secret sabotagey genes waiting dormant to thwart my dreams of homegrown citrus, but they seem more likely to be fructiferous if the leaves are green than if they're yellow.

(2) I may be lying about this part. Honestly I can't actually remember if these particular seeds came from a seeded seedless mandarin, but I have been disappointed by seeded seedless mandarins in the past. Also by hard to peel easy-peel mandarins.

Done:
Washed hair;
Aired damp rooms while the day was less grey than usual;
Did laundry;
Ate food;
Dug up about four weeds and mulched with clippings from the pile of rotting lavender;
Made a shopping list;
Counted and measured spaces that need grills around the foundations;
Sent three items out to various slushpiles;
Edited another item until falling asleep.

To do: stop procrastinating on Chalice and send queries out to agents already. (Also, quite a lot of other things, including work out why "calendar" but "lavender".)

While I'm working on that, does anyone want to betaread a short story for me? 4700 words, horror-lite. (Like, you know how celery has so few calories that you burn more than you gain while digesting it? Lite like that.)