Zeborah

In which a one-hour seminar takes up the entire work-day

Fri, 27 May 2011 07:40:57 GMT

I did admittedly have couple of hours of my ordinary tasks first thing in the morning -- part of which involved communicating with some Internal Relationships (to use position description jargon) about whether or not they could attend the seminar. Then my manager instant messaged me to ask if I could a) make posters and b) do the physical set-up for it, so I made the posters and checked about extension cords and such.

Usually it's quarter of an hour to walk between campuses, but I had to go via another branch to pick up the dataprojector, so it turned out half an hour. Half an hour to set up. One hour for the seminar. Half an hour for lunch (which I spent with the speaker) and then a 40 minute meeting with her and an Internal Relationship who hadn't been able to make the seminar.

Then back to the other branch to return the dataprojector and discovered that the office it resides in was occupied. Now, this colleague -- just as, if you go between campuses you have to spend quarter of an hour walking, so if you meet this colleague you have to spend an hour and a half talking. Law of nature. I don't understand everything he says or how on earth he segues so smoothly between so many disparate subjects, but it's always fascinating.

Then I walked back to my current home-branch. I'd planned to check my email for emergencies before I left, but (partly due to a blister -- I may eventually give up on these boots :-( ) I only got there in time to pack up, phone the pharmacy, and grab the bus.

Attempted to return an interloan to the (temporary) public library except, even leaving earlier than I would on days when I have a 1-hour lunch plus proper tea breaks, it was closed by the time my bus got me there. On the way though I got attacked by a sudden fit of melancholy at seeing a glimpse of its proper (but inaccessible) location and walking over a hump in the sidewalk(*), and haven't figured out what I'll spend the evening doing to combat this yet.

(*) Have I mentioned humps in the sidewalk? And in the road, of course, but many/most of those are more or less levelled by now. I must have. But they're so fascinating. The asphalt has actually stretched over the sand volcano that's erupted beneath it. Stretchy concrete! So cool!

Oh, also I'll recommend the charity anthology Tales for Canterbury. 34 stories, extremely competitively priced DRM-free ebook (print version coming soon), proceeds to Red Cross. I reviewed it on Goodreads.

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In which she has dinner by candlelight

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:47:49 GMT

There's a moth here determined to prove the adage.

Three unpleasant blips that make it sound like life sucks more than it does:

1) Thursday I went shopping to Barrington. My book-of-the-bus-trip was an Amnesty International collection of stories about human rights; in particular, I reached one about residents walking to get water after Hurricane Katrina and being blocked on the way. This... proved to be mildly triggering. Especially because the 'moral' at the end of the story was that people have the right to go where they want in their own country - nothing about the right to have clean drinking water. This right was only resolved fairly recently and New Zealand first opposed it then abstained from the vote.

You know what, I have strong opinions about the right of people to have clean drinking water. I really like clean drinking water and am willing, when necessary, to take half an hour out of my day to go and collect it.

So there was that, and then I had to buy as many groceries as I could feasibly carry back to the bus, which proved really heavy and so I was feeling quite worn down even before the busdriver (I think the busdrivers are being pushed too hard; a lot of them are... not themselves) took off before we'd all managed to get seats, and proceeded to drive as fast as one can drive on bumpy roads and several times failed to hear people ding the bell for their stops so had to be shouted at. Which doesn't make anyone happier.

2) Yesterday I visited New Brighton to go to the library. The roads that way were bumpy, and there were more shops fenced off or shored up with timber, and by the time I reached the library I was feeling distinctly glum. I read a C. L. Moore story (the only one by a woman in the Mammoth Collection of Golden Age SF or whatever it was called) while looking out over the pier and grey-green waves and seagulls. That library has one of the best locations ever. Then I went to wait at the busstop. Or anyway, at the lamppost which is the de facto busstop since the previous bus shelter got buried under a pile of bricks.

(When I got home, I candied the petals of two roses while watching two and a half episodes of season 2 Buffy. Practice might speed things up I guess? Also there needs to be a way not to leave brown bruise marks from holding the petal with tweezers.)

3) Today I met some new quake-friends for a writing meeting at the Borders cafe. Riccarton Mall was busier than Christmas Eve and Boxing Day combined. It reminded me of being in a Seoul mall soon after its opening when it was The trendy place to be and so crowded I felt mildly claustrophobic.

Also then this evening we got a lovely 5.3 aftershock. This was possibly my fault: earlier today I reshelved a pile of my books. (They were blocking access to the gasfire which someone's coming to look at on Monday, hopefully to say that it's safe despite the rather visible shifting of the chimney. If not, I guess I'll have to try and get the chimney removed before winter.) On the plus side none of them fell down, though they did wobble distinctly towards the edge. Also the light swayed and piano wobbled as I made my dash to the safest-looking place in the room; but nothing fell at all.

Some water did splash out of the toilet cistern.

I have power still but was told my parents were cooking over gas anyway so came as normal to our Saturday evening dinner.

Anyway, really life's pretty good when one's on leave from work. I could definitely get used to being on leave.

Will post this when they get power back or I get back home, whichever is first... --Ooh, power's back! Unfortunately the ISP isn't. Fortunately we have access to another network. You know, snuffing out a candle looks a lot suaver in the movies.

There's a moth lying on the table, slightly singed.

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In which she completes a circuit

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 07:46:46 GMT

Updated Wordpress on my church website and was reminded yet again that doing this always destroys the tweaks I've made to the banner html and css. Fixed them, yet again, and this time saved copies to my computer.

Watched The Princess Bride with my friend last night. I love that movie, I just wish I could turn off the part of my brain that keeps noting that Buttercup doesn't get to do anything except be pretty and helpless (mostly helpless).

The Orbiter bus route (which wends around the suburbs instead of going through town) has been doing a crescent since it restarted after the quake, but today for the first time it completed the circle again. I came back from my friends' that way. It didn't look too bad (occasional dairies in need of demolition aside) - of course, because it was the fact that things were much fixed that allowed the bus back there - but you could see all the patches in the roads, and there was a point where the speed limit was reduced first to 30kph then to 10kph.

It's raining. Our wastewater system is hyper fragile at the moment. If oxygen levels at the thingy plant reach a certain level the whole city will get covered with sewage fog or something.

So I got home and first thing I noticed after the purple windowsills (not taking photos right now, it's raining and also daylight saving ended so it's dark) was a package in my mailbox, containing sachets of chemicals for chemical toilets. Have lodged a question with the city council's twitter folk about whether one can mix'n'match these with the original liquid chemicals we were delivered. In the meantime I opened the bag to pull out the instructions which were obscured by the sachets, and thus was enabled to read the line about not getting the sachets wet until they're in the toilet lest they dissolve prematurely -- just as a drop of rainwater from the lip of the bag rolled inside.

Hopefully they're not like Gremlins, and will survive a single drop.

Anyway, living alone I do actually have plenty of liquid chemicals to last me a good while yet.

Apparently the mobile library is visiting this neighbourhood twice a week now. This a) is awesome b) reminds me that I've got upwards of 50 books I was going to bookcross in the library's absence. Oh well, it's still absent 5 days a week.

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In which she uses her "toilets" tag some more

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 04:51:50 GMT

Worked while my house got painted on. It's gonna be awesome especially when they start with the purple ("troubadour" though I don't think troubadours were particularly renowned for wearing purple, but anyway) and all the people who got pained expressions on their faces when I mentioned purple will be proved wrong, haHA!

More or less after work I wandered down the road a bit for three purposes:

to see if the corner shops whose walls used to be perpendicular to the ground but after the quake were attempting to form a funky W shape were in fact now more reminiscent of this photo:

[ETA: Okay I shouldn't have tried to hotlink. Try http://twitpic.com/4cyyg5.]
And sure enough they were.
to see if my wee library of books had disappeared from the busstop. Not only had they all disappeared, but someone had tagged the sign I'd made. Ah Linwood, never change! I'll make another sign and put book-protection plastic on this time.
to see if the updated city council map was correct that there's a place to pour one's toilet waste in the next street over. Sure enough there is. It says "Human waste only" and "Beware of splashback!" and has a bottle of hand sanitiser duct taped to it.

I'm still gearing myself up to using the actual chemical toilet. Have been reading the instructions and looking at it mistrustfully. There's a water tank and a waste tank and a bottle of chemicals, and there's levers and knobs and lots of dire warnings.

I'm slightly disappointed that no-one commented about the exploding toilets I mentioned. Seriously, exploding toilets! However this is outweighed by the amount of disappointment I contain that the newspaper didn't use the opportunity to comment on the possibility that the contents of said exploding toilets might hit the bathroom fan.

Gotta go, Boots wants food. I was thinking of starving her a while longer so she'd catch and nom more of the flies that have been bugging me, but then one of them landed on my back and she launched herself at it and caught my back with her claws. She apologised very prettily, with lots of rubbing against me and looking cute and so forth, but I have my suspicions.

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In which she bans a book from a library

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:41:38 GMT

The local library being closed ("repairs required plus some issues with the neighbouring mall") I got around to grabbing some to-be-bookcrossed books from the mess on my living room floor and bookcrossed them to the busstop opposite said mall (with a sign to say "take/enjoy/pass on" and a note about which real libraries are open).

As I was putting the books in the bag, though, I noticed that one of them was "Under the Mountain" by Maurice Gee. "Under the Mountain" is a New Zealand classic and has been filmed a time or two, so you might wonder what could possibly be objectionable about it. Well, let me tell you, behind a spoiler tag: (skip) On the last page, after the kids have defeated the Threat To The World, it emerges that because the boy slacked off a bit in his world-saving efforts, things exploded and now they have to walk back to an Auckland suffering from the aftereffects of major volcanic eruption.

...I mean, this is a bit of an inexplicable downer at the best of times, which I only keep forgetting because it feels so pasted on, but right now I'm not inflicting that on unknown kids without warning, so the book's still sitting on my bedroom floor while the rest of the books are sitting at the busstop (or hopefully by now in a bunch of people's hands). If anyone wants to read it anyway, let me know and we can arrange something.

To balance this terrible display of censorship on my part, a fellow bookcrosser noticed my releases and has offered a box of spare books she's got, for continuing restocking efforts; I should be able to pick these up on Monday or so, and then I'll just put out a little bunch at a time. So that's very awesome.

I think there's also some more books on my living room floor that I wanted to bookcross, so that's more incentive to finish tidying them up. The big question of course remains: To put them back on the shelves or not to put them back on the shelves?

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In which the "have I or haven't I?" saga continues

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:43:39 GMT

I got to my desk today to find an email waiting, telling me someone's made an application on my behalf and I need to fill out a questionnaire to complete it. This email sounding startlingly similar to one I received yesterday, I phoned to confirm. After a short discussion, we worked out that I didn't have to.

Then a bit before lunch I got an email whose subject says the deadline has been extended to [closing date listed (possibly accidentally) on an important external website] and whose body says the selection process is well under way and I should hear from them in the near future. I'm not sure if they consider two weeks to be the near future or if their message got a bit jumbled in the confusion.

In between emails, I moved some more hundreds of books, with a brief pause to put into some semblance of order about ten shelves' worth that had obviously all fallen onto the floor and been put back randomly on the shelves by building contractors. This was particularly fun because they're in the internet programming section of the classification range, so these ten shelves of books ranged from TK 5105.888 [etc] to TK 5105.8885 [etc] (through such numbers as TK 5105.88815 [etc]) so one gets cross-eyed very quickly, and then also one discovers a stray TK 5105.85 from the next bay over, or a TK 7182 that must have fallen in from the other side of the stack).

We did as much of that area as can be done right now in the morning; in the afternoon (after an all-library meeting to update us on some technology changes planned for the summer) we went to another area to do some easier straightening of shelves. Not many had fallen off in this area; mostly they were all leaning over. Though we did find a book that seems to have fallen down from the mezzanine level straight above, and yes I mean that if the book had moved in a straight line it would have had to pass through the floor. I suppose there might have been human intervention at some point pre- or post-quake, but I dunno. Things move weirdly in earthquakes.

I've started... hmm. I haven't started actually writing again, but I've regained my interest in writing and am once more glaring at the unfinished short story that I was glaring at pre-quake.

Oh, I had an awesome dream last night that I was writing a bunch of fairytales in verse. Most were bare-bones ones, but there was a longer one in an aabccb rhyme scheme that involved a witch (rhymed with ditch), a princess carrying all her worldly possessions (maiden rhymed with laden) and a dwarf (which I think I managed to put in the middle of a line so as not to have to rhyme).

I rather expect I'll continue having rough moments/hours/days (and I remain easily brain-fried, which means my capacity for socialness, even the basic socialness of replying to comments, is a bit eclectic at present) but purposeful hard labour is awefully therapeutic.

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In which she has almost certainly applied for a job

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:40:25 GMT

It turned out that my application didn't get through after all. After talking/emailing with four HR people, attempting to follow several links which gave me new and improved error messages, and finally filling out a just-for-me version of the application which missed out a bunch of questions (a known glitch, apparently) it seems I have now successfully applied for the job.

I have no idea how many other awesome people have also applied for it so if you don't hear me wibbling about an interview just assume I'm remaining in my current job. Which is, for the record, an excellent job.

Part of my excellent job today involved finally being allowed to go up and move books en masse. This isn't putting them back where they ought to be -- actually it's currently moving them off the correct shelves onto new super-duper-reinforced shelves, so that said correct shelves can themselves get super-duper reinforcing and the books can be moved back. If this sounds intolerably frustrating, bear in mind that over the Christmas holidays all the books in our collection were moved anywhere between two and five times each, so we're kind of used to it, although admittedly there was a lot less ceiling plaster mixed in with them that time.

The utter chaos of things up there provides a great deal of comic relief (especially when one of my colleagues thought she might - having googled the bookcover - be able to be able to spot a report among the hundreds of piles stacked neatly, two-deep, the builders having helpfully sorted them by size, along every wall of the relevant floor. Hahahaha no) which is a vital prophylactic against despair.

I now have a bandaid on my thumb from scraping it forcibly against a shelf, but I got a shelf-putting-together guy to bang on one that wasn't quite in, thus cleverly avoiding a repeat of the Best Bruise in the World incident.

Plus and also, moving hundreds of books appears to be an excellent remedy for the case of GRR RAGE I had all weekend.

I'm now going to see how my "all those ingredients seemed a good idea at the time" crockpot concoction has turned out.

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In which she disapproves of anxiety

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 06:21:54 GMT

Work today was quiet, part twiddling thumbs, part tidying up details, part bonding and settling in.

There was the thing with noticing that one of our shear walls has a crack running the length of it. A crack which you can see on both sides of the wall. This made us a little nervous but when FM came along to check it they promised it was safe.

Not so one of our photocopiers, though, which received a yellow sticker. (The others got green stickers. I think the whole city is being triaged, piece by piece.)

I spent most of the morning sort of informally liaising between various departments. (In Central Library there's a whiteboard up to sign in and out of the building.) When I came back to my own branch I started by cleaning the ceiling plaster dust off my desk.

Some of my colleagues thought they felt slight tremors at lunch, but I missed them. Half an hour later I said, "I felt that one." (It turned out to be smaller than several I've missed, but near and shallow.)

I learned I'm not the only person avoiding my bed: a colleague's grandson is convinced the earthquakes are being caused by his bedroom in her house (fortunately he was staying there that night, rather than in his normal bedroom in his mother's house). I already knew I wasn't the only person sleeping in clothes (though I've finally stopped now) and pretty much everyone is keeping a flashlight and cellphone close to hand. Also, no-one laughed when I mentioned I keep my shoes upside down to prevent glass falling inside. Instead I got told of a colleague's friend whose thermometer broke inside one shoe, and she carefully brushed and vacuumed out all the glass but when she wore it her foot gradually got more and more sore, and at the end of the day she realised she'd burnt her whole foot on whatever liquid had been inside the thermometer.

At afternoon tea I shifted in my chair, accidentally making it creak, and my colleague next to me jumped. As we gathered to say our goodbyes and go home, another colleague leaned wearily against the lockers, making them clatter, and a fourth colleague jumped.

The roads are crowded and the buses running late.

Staring out the window as we drove through the suburbs, I mused. Thinking about that link that was talking about how one has to reconcile one's ordinary belief that the world isn't out to kill you with those moments when it did kind of give it a go. It's like these two things exist in your head at the same time, in some quantam superposition thing, and it hurts your brain. And over time I've been resolving that back to the single state of "The world doesn't want to kill me" (albeit with the caveat "but how about I get my emergency kit ready just in case"). This avoids brain-hurtiness, and it gets my anxiety levels down.

And the thing that enrages me about 9/11 is the huge effort Certain Interests put in to resolve the quantam superposition in the opposite direction. To convince people that the (Islamic) world is out to get them. And doing this doesn't make the world any safer. All it does is keep people anxious. And (even if the various reasons the Certain Interests have for doing this were pure as the snow, which they're really not), keeping people anxious after a traumatic incident is itself evil. It is so many kinds of nasty I just cannot express.

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In which it feels like Saturday

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:10:01 GMT

You know how you wake up on Saturday morning and you think, "Hooray! I don't have to be stuck in that same old building all day doing things I don't want to do; instead I can go where I want and do what I want to do!"

Today felt like Saturday because I could finally go to work.

(Oh guys, as I type this, Boots is sitting on my lap for the first time in almost a week, and she's licking my nose.)

Before I get to the work thing, I should mention that, having gone to bed in my spare bedroom, I managed to sleep sound all night - indeed so soundly that I didn't wake up until my alarm clock went off. Then I started getting ready, pausing briefly to crouch in the corner of the bathroom for an aftershock which, it later transpired, was two earthquakes striking simultaneously from two different directions, could you even make this stuff up? [ETA: Oh, apparently this was a Schrödinger aftershock or something, and has now resolved itself to a single quake.]

So I took my bus and chatted with the busdriver who knows me, and as we went through not-quite-the-centre of town (because the centre of town was still cordoned off) he pointed out this chimney and that roof and that building and that façade and so on, like a regular tour-guide. Some I'd seen on the news, some I hadn't.

At work I signed in at the checkpoint and got issued a pass to wear. Met colleagues and we went to one of the safe libraries to go through the list of what publishers are offering us to tick the things that we want. Then we talked about things we need to communicate with users and then we had lunch and I talked lots with colleagues, which was wonderful. And then I stayed with the IT people to work through some website pages.

Finally I went back to my own branch (via the check-in point so they knew where I was) - everyone else there had left except one who showed me around briefly. It's, um. <attempts to match words to scope for a while and gives up> Let's call it a mess. We can deal with it but it'll take some weeks or so I should think. But level 1 is pretty much okay so that part can open next week. And my office is fine, and my colleague watered our potted mandarin plant which is also fine.

After checking out I took a different bus home, through the suburbs. Mostly they're pretty normal. Then we hit Dallington and the streets are suddenly lined with silt and traffic cones and portaloos, and roofs have been replaced with tarpaulins, and doors are sprayed with "No go" and labelled with the dreaded red stickers. And then we came around the corner and I blinked and thought, "This isn't that far away from my own house."

When I got home I found that the guy who I'd asked before the quake to trim some hedges and trees had done it today, except he seems to have forgotten one. It wasn't that important so I won't bother saying anything. You know, it's just on the "Really, who cares?" list (as, indeed, so many things are these days).

I have emotions, I just don't know what all of them are. (Earthquake: Trauma and Stress makes me nod a lot. Sometimes I think I'm basically normal. And sometimes I think I should be normal. But I'm not. I'm tending strongly towards "okay" but I'm not normal except compared with fellow Christchurch-folk.)

By the end of the day it didn't feel so much like Saturday as like Friday evening after a long week. Coincidentally the calendar seems to agree with this. But it was a very, very good day.

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In which she sleeps

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:06:55 GMT

Three wonderful hours. (It looks like there were only a couple of little aftershocks during that time, which explains why I wasn't woken.) I dreamed that we were recovering from an earthquake.

The university has photos of the Central Library and says, "Be aware that the clean up operation will be specialised and is potentially hazardous in some places. For example we have library books mixed with window glass [...]" My manager mentioned that the branches might open before Central Library, now I can really see why.

I just saw my cat. She was hesitating about coming inside so I took her food out to her. She looked interested but too nervous to actually settle down and eat properly. (She might have nommed a bit of kibble or two before a noise distracted her.) On reflection I took half the kibble away in case she does manage to gobble it all at once and get sick; it's two days since she last ate here and if she's this nervous now she probably hasn't been thinking about scavenging either.

The buses still aren't running tomorrow.

The local mall looks like nothing ever happened - and so does the library there. Single-storey probably helps, and I think there's just something about the land in this part of town too.

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In which she must be getting old

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:38:49 GMT

(No, this is not about the increasing number of silver hairs on my head or, as I like to think of them, my passport to not getting carded when buying the occasional bottle of wine.)

A few years ago, we used to say as a joke, "Ah, so that's what the kids are calling it these days."

Now I listen to Lady Gaga's songs and I say, "Huh, the kids are really calling it these days."

--Which is why I'm really liking them. I just don't know that many other songs about masturbation, y'know? Somewhere I came across someone online saying she should stop writing such sexual songs and I'm all, "Dude, that's what's so awesome about them!" That and that the music makes me want to move in happy ways, which is good seeing as this is being a crappy week in which the university is proposing to disestablish nearly a third of my colleagues across the whole uni library, mostly managers and other highly skilled staff, and replace half of them with mostly cheaper and less qualified models.

<random wibbling!> After due consideration of risks and benefits, I began tweeting about this proposal under my name. People have been very supportive. Today I tweeted a link to the union's online copy of the proposal itself and only later discovered that it was maybe not meant to be quite so public as I thus made it. I don't think the union will fret and if anyone else complains I can always say that HR told us that after 2:30 Tuesday we could tell anyone we liked about it. I doubt they will though. And I don't seriously think that being bolshy about such an appalling proposal will seriously damage my future career prospects, so long as I keep on sticking strictly to the facts. So it's just really generalised wibbling, and Lady Gaga makes me feel better.

I may do a lot of shelf-tidying over the next few weeks with her as background. Did I mention I have a new iPod nano? I have a new iPod nano, and it's purple, and I've solemnly vowed not to accidentally throw this one out with the rotten apples.

<handy tip!> After a couple of days of normal operation, my volume got stuck too loud and hurting my ears and not being at all adjustable, and googling the problem just brought up a lot of people offering oh-so-clever advice like "turn the wheel to turn the volume down" and "use volume lock to set the maximum volume you want". After much desperate fiddling I came up with two solutions (in reverse order of finding them but in order of helpfulness):

Reset settings. This made the volume adjustable again, so I can now turn it down to a pleasant volume. The downside was that I had to tweak all my non-volume related settings to be just how I want them.
So before that I tried setting the EQ (equaliser) to "Loudness". This reduced the volume to something tolerable, but it was still stuck at non-adjustable.

At some point I may fiddle around to see what I did that made it non-adjustable to start with but in the meantime I'm glad it's working again.

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In which her hair is the ultimate cat-toy

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:22:24 GMT

As I went to bed the other night Boots scooted around behind my headboard-less bed. I lay down, and I guess some locks of my hair hung over the edge of the bed, because next thing I know a paw comes up to bat at it.

*

Managers should know how to perform basic desk functions because then, if they're trying to talk to other staff at the desk when a not-so-sudden onslaught of students arrives and they decide to help, they can in fact help, instead of interrupting another staff member trying to deal with another student to ask where the requested books are held, and then to ask if you issue it in the "check in" screen, and then instead of selecting the "check out" screen to minimise it, and so on and so forth, taking up more of said staff member's time than if the manager had stayed well out of it in the first place. --Alternatively they should know to stay away from the front desk when a major assignment is taking place, and I'm talking about an assignment that one year famously cleaned out all the books on the history of engineering from every library in town.

*

Dear colleague:

...Never mind, it'll be quicker to start reciting Latin straight away. Domine, dominus noster, quam admirabile est nomen tuum, quoniam est terminus hebdomis!

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