Tag Archives: House

How did it get to be June already?

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks.  Fuzzle was here for most of the first week – it was great to see her, and we had loads of fun (plus she cooked the most amazing enchilladas for dinner one night – who knew she’d turn out such a good cook after all those barely edible “experimental” meals we ate back when we were flatmates?).

She went home on the Thursday, and then on the Friday Dad arrived with the kids.  The main reason for the trip was to take Niece to see Disney Princesses on Ice (or something like that, anyway – no idea what it was actually called, but it was some combination of those things), but he’d also promised to help me with a few repair jobs around the house.  And the boys, of course, just wanted to play Minecraft with me (although ironically it was actually Niece who spent the most time playing Minecraft – the boys rediscovered Lego Star Wars on the playstation, and almost managed to complete the entire game in one weekend (which kind of tells you how little of anything else, including sleeping, they did!)

Combining a visit from the kids and Dad getting work done round the house was exhausting – I seemed to spend all my time jumping from computer to playstation to trying to actually help Dad (or at least stand there trying to get him to accept my help and maybe remember that he’s not 21 any more and has bad knees so really shouldn’t be trying to balance on top of tall ladders…) while the kids are calling out for me to come back to the game.

The most peaceful moment was actually when I took the boys to Laserstrike while Dad and Niece were at the Disney thing.  For the first game at least, I got to sit in the foyer and quietly read a book while the boys raced around with a bunch of other pre-teens trying to kill each other.  Unfortunately the peace was shattered shortly into their second game, when Nephew #2 managed to run full-tilt round a corner into another kid’s gun, resulting in lots of tears and a nasty black eye.  (I was very unimpressed by the staff’s reaction, by the way – according to Nephew #1, who saw the collision and went to look after his brother, the guy in charge just said “Take him out and find your parents”, and didn’t seem all that concerned.  And then when I asked at the desk for an icepack they didn’t have any such thing (Really???  With all the bumps and bruises that must happen constantly in that place?  Sometimes I think it would be nice to live in a more litigious society…)  In the end I bought a popsicle to use as a makeshift icepack (which did have the bonus of being a useful diagnostic tool – when he asked if he could eat it I figured he must be feeling better ;-) ))

Then Nephew #1, who’d gone back in to finish the game while I comforted Nephew #2, came back out because his gun had stopped working.  Which happened again in his third and final game.  So Laserstrike, which was supposed to be their birthday treat (both of their birthdays were this week), turned out to be a bit of a flop all round.  They were given vouchers for a free game if they wanted to come back, but both had such disappointing experiences I’m not sure they’ll ever want to use them.

The rest of the visit was good though, and they had lots of fun (even though I made them do the dishes – mean aunty!)

Between kids and building work the house was a total mess by the time they left on Sunday.  After I waved them off I thought I’d sit down for five minutes then start cleaning up.  Three hours later, I woke up :-)   So I didn’t really get the house back to normal until yesterday, when I could finally give it a really good clean.  Life feels so much more manageable when the house is tidy!

Big and scary news: I’m presenting at an academic conference on Wednesday!  And not even in my own field!!!

Our programme funded a load of earthquake-related research projects last year, so we decided to set up a mini-conference so the research teams could report back to our funding committee on their progress.  It was supposed to be just a little internal thing, only a handful of people, so when my boss asked me and one of the analysts to jointly do a presentation on the archive as a whole, we happily agreed.  Of course, then the marketing people got hold of it, and decided it was a great opportunity to let the public know about the great research coming out of the university, so they did lots of advertising and opened it up to the public and invited all sorts of important people, and our little mini-conference has suddenly morphed into something much bigger, and I’m suddenly faced with giving a presentation at a full-on conference!  Eeek!!!!

So, my first ever academic conference presentation, and it’s not even in Linguistics.  I feel like I should wear a t-shirt saying “I don’t even have a degree in this subject – please don’t ask me any tough questions!”

Random thoughts from a trip into Riccarton today:

The importance of customer service. 

I’ve been thinking of buying a wee CD player for a while, having given H the big stereo and the kitchen radio.  So, feeling slightly less poor than usual, I went into Dick Smith to have a look, and spotted a $50 one that looked ok.  I wanted to ask a question about it, though, so tried to get a salesperson’s attention, and waited, and waited, and waited… Eventually I got sick of waiting, and went to Noel Leemings instead, where a salesperson came up to me straight away, and gave me friendly and helpful advice even though it was obvious I wasn’t going to earn him a big commission.  As a result, even though they didn’t have the $50 model, only a $70 one, I happily paid the extra $20.

Losing a tiny $50 sale isn’t a big deal for Dick Smith, I’m sure, but how many other little sales do they lose because their salespeople don’t pay attention to customers unless they’re looking at big-ticket items?  It must add up.

The importance of a name.

I saw an ad on the side of a bus for the Women’s Refuge, which has just been rebranded as “Aviva” – something to do with their wider remit these days than just providing shelter for abused women.  A few thoughts sprang immediately to mind:

  1. If I was a woman suffering abuse who’d finally made the tough decision to seek help, would I really be in a state of mind to remember their new and exciting name?  I couldn’t even remember the name for the hour or so between seeing the ad and writing this, and had to look it up – if I was in a panic there’s no way I’d remember it.  I hope they keep a listing in the phone book under their old name.
  2. Because they’ve changed their name (and because of the problem above), they’re having to spend a lot of money on advertising to remind people of the new name.  Money that surely would be better put to use providing their services?
  3. What on earth does Aviva mean anyway?

Craft progress report:

Actually, I can’t show you any pictures of my latest projects, because they’re both intended for people who definitely do read this blog.  So you’ll just have to wait for the big reveal.

The weather hasn’t been brilliant, and as mentioned, I’ve been a bit busy, so I’ve only managed to put a couple of coats of varnish on my mosaic table.  The fabric soaks up the varnish enormously, so I reckon it’ll need at least 2 or 3 more coats before it looks right.

This has got to be the longest actual writing entry I’ve posted in a very long time – I seem to have defaulted to lots of pretty pictures and few words lately.  But I can’t let it go without at least one pretty picture, so here’s the cat drawing Yetzirah sent me, which I finally framed and hung.

It’s in good company, with a couple of my favourite cat prints (and yes, I know they’re a bit crooked – I’ve given up straightening pictures, because every time I do we have another wee earthquake and they all move again!)

Wet stuff falling from the sky

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I think our drought has officially broken.  After a long dry summer when we’d all forgotten what rain is, two days of pouring rain (with several more to come, by the look of it) have reminded us.  It’s a bit of a shock, suddenly being all cold and miserable like this – I’m definitely not ready for winter yet!

Neither is the house, it seems.  I discovered yesterday that although I’d diligently cleared the gutters ready for winter, it was completely in vain, because some thirsty plant has grown its roots down the drain the downspout empties into, totally blocking the drain and the downspout.  So although the gutter is beautifully clear, the water can’t get out of it, so it’s backing up and some has flowed into the ceiling, producing a lovely wee leak in the corner of the sunroom.  Yay.

My attempts to clear the drain have been completely unsuccessful, so it looks like I’m going to have to call a professional of some sort tomorrow morning.  Wonder how much that will cost me?  And then of course I’ll have to see how much damage it’s done to the ceiling – hopefully it won’t be *too* bad, because it’s only a tiny drip coming through – most of the water luckily is flowing over the outside edge of the gutter rather than the inside edge, so it looks like not that much is getting into the ceiling (though of course any at all is a bad thing).

Apart from the leak (and clambering around on the roof in the rain making sure it wasn’t a broken tile causing it), I had a great day yesterday.  Jenny and I had been talking about an expedition to Hands for ages – she because she’d never been, and I because I had a voucher from Lytteltonwitch burning a hole in my pocket – so we finally got round to it yesterday.  We went for lunch first at a cafe nearby (which had an open fire – perfect in this weather!), and then spent a very pleasant hour or so wandering around Hands.  I ended up buying some materials for an experimental project I’ve got in mind – might try and make a start on it next weekend, in which case there’ll be some work in progress pictures coming soon (unless it all goes horribly wrong, of course – like I said, it’s a bit experimental… it’s something I’ve read about that I know is technically possible, but I’ve never actually tried it, and I’m a little vague on the details…)

Afterwards we went back to Jenny’s place out in Sumner to visit the tiny kittens she’s fostering for Cat Rescue.  They’re very young (about a month old, I think?), and still a bit unsteady on their feet, and incredibly cute – little bundles of fluffy silver tabbyness.  At one point I ended up with all four of them piled up on my lap, tangled up together in one big ball of fluff and all purring incredibly loudly.  I was sooooo tempted to sneak one into my pocket and take it home, but I don’t think Parsnips and Pushkin would have appreciated it (besides, I’m already breaking the “don’t have more cats than you have laps” rule with two of them!).

Later we got takeaways for dinner and watched Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson’s hoax documentary, which I’d never seen because it aired when I was living in the UK).  Jenny and MrJenny are both very knowledgeable about cinema history, so it was really interesting watching it with them – they saw a lot that I completely missed (and vice versa – there was a lot of NZ stuff that they were oblivious to, having only been here a few years).  Really cool film, anyway, and I could see why so many people were taken in by it – he was very clever in the way he made it just plausible enough and intermingled the hoax with a lot of genuine history and local legend to create a story that it was guaranteed people would want to believe.  Of course, knowing in advance it was a hoax I was easily able to spot the clues he’d put in (the frequent references to bulls (as in, a load of…) for a start), but I think if I’d seen it when it first screened I would have been totally fooled.

Busy doing nothing

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Time is rapidly running out on my holidays, but I’m kind of looking forward to going back to work – this year is going to be full of all sorts of interesting challenges which I want to get stuck into.  I could very easily get used to this leisurely lifestyle though :-)

Not that the last few days have been that leisurely – we decided it was finally time to face down the monster that is cleaning the garage.  As you may know, we don’t own a car.  Our garage then, not needing a vehicular space to be kept clear, has become the all purpose storage space for things that might come in handy one day, broken stuff that might be repairable so it seems silly to throw it out, useful boxes, leftover building material from various projects, furniture I’ve been meaning to Freecycle, stuff the previous owners left behind… you get the idea.  Plus it doubles as a wood shed, and houses the usual tools and stuff of any garage.  Yeah, basically a room-sized junk drawer.

It was getting to the stage where we couldn’t actually find any of the tools, and getting to the woodpile in winter was work for a skilled mountaineer (ok, so maybe not that bad, but it was a bit tricky squeezing past the lawnmower).  So all year I’ve been saying that when we had a few free days we should clean it out.

So having quite a few free days, with no excuses left, we finally tackled the job.  We hired a skip and filled it with everything of the “might come in handy some day”, “don’t even know what this is” and “outright rubbish” categories, restacked the wood pile to limit its gradual spread across the floor, sorted out the Freecyclables ready to post offers, cleaned and organised everything that was left, and we now have a perfectly usable garage.

Yeah, I give it about a month before it’s back to chaos again, but in the meantime I can feel proud of our efforts :-)

Progress hasn’t been as steady on craft projects, but that’s because it’s been so hot – it’s hovered around 30o most days this month, accompanied by Christchurch’s famous hot and dusty nor’wester.  And hot and sweaty really doesn’t go well with keeping crafty things clean.

But yesterday the weather finally broke and it rained and was nice and cool.  Which coincided nicely with Jenny having a free day, so she came round and we had a sewing circle – or sewing line, really – it’s hard to have a circle of two… and actually it was more of a knitting and embroidery line – she was finishing off a jersey she’s knitting, and I was working on my cross-stitch. But we called it a sewing circle anyway ;-) and it accomplished the same goal: company and conversation while working on crafty things.

So I did make a small amount of progress:

160113embr

And I have added a bit more to my knitting experiment.  I’ve just been playing with different patterns and using up some of the random odds and ends of wool Jenny gave me, and just picking up stitches off the sides of existing squares to start each new one, so it’s developing very organically*.

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*Translation: messily

In bookcrossing news, I got a catch which was definitely a record for me, and may even (according to Gorydetails) be a site-wide record, for longest time between release and catch.  I released Ossian’s Ride in April 2003, and it’s finally been caught almost 10 years later.  Just goes to show you should never give up on a book!

Other, less notable, recent catches:

Currently reading:

  • Napoleon’s Buttons by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson
  • Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel B Smith (audiobook)

The good, the bad, and the… also good

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One of the nicer side-effects of the earthquakes is that because we lost almost all of the city’s arthouse cinemas, the mainstream cinemas have started showing a broader range of films to cater to some of that market.  As a result, the local Hoyts is celebrating Diwali with a selection of Bollywood films, one of which we went to see last night: Son of Sardaar.  A totally mad mix of action movie, slapstick comedy and musical that could only be produced in Bollywood, it was great fun – we both giggled our way through it (even if we were often laughing at different times to the rest of the (mostly Indian) audience).  Of course, now I’ve got the theme tune stuck in my head…

On the less pleasant side of the earthquake balance is the fact that it’s our suburb’s turn to have its sewers checked for earthquake damage (the council are slowly working their way round the entire city – a four-year job, apparently).  We got a letter the other day warning us that they’d be working at night (because apparently not disrupting traffic is more important than not disrupting our sleep) and that there might be some disturbance from noise and lights.  What they didn’t warn us about though was the smell – they must have been forcing air or water through the pipes to test them or something, because there was much bubbling and blowback from the toilet (luckily it seemed to only be water splashing out, but we put the lid down anyway), and a wonderful reek of sewer gasses through the house.  Plus I reckon they must have had the truck parked right outside our house, and it was just noisy enough that whenever I’d start to drift off I’d be woken up again.

So not a pleasant awakening this morning, to not enough sleep and a lingering horrible smell.  Luckily it’s a nice day today, so MrPloppy will be able to open all the windows and air it out a bit, so hopefully by the time I get home tonight the smell will be gone.

I really hope though that that’s our bit of pipe done and they’ll move further along the street tonight, because the notice said they’ll be working on the pipes until the 30th, and I really couldn’t cope with that every night!

In other good news, I got my marks back from my assignment, and I got an A+!  It’s only a provisional grade at the moment, because postgrad work has to be checkmarked by an external assessor, but I’m still grinning like a mad thing.

Now all I have to do is keep that up for the next three years, and I’ll have a high enough GPA to get a chance of a scholarship…

And talking of good things, I got a parcel yesterday from Lytteltonwitch.  She definitely knows me well:

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And the perfect size for carting books, too.  Thanks, LW!

And even more good news, the electrician has almost (after many stop start visits when he had to drop our work to go and attend to earthquake rebuilds (which we’d said we were ok with him giving priority to – people who’ve been living in broken houses for two years definitely have a greater need than us!)) finished our re-wiring.  Thanks to Stepfather’s generosity in his will, we’ve not only got a much safer house, we’ve now got power points everywhere we need them (instead of trying to run everything off one power point per room plus a spaghetti of extension cords and multi-boards), and better lights, and can even do exciting things like run the washing machine and the dryer at the same time without blowing all the fuses (trust me, that’s exciting when you’ve been living with 1950s wiring for 10 years!).  He’s just got to finish disconnecting the old underfloor heating system (which we’ve never used, because it cost a fortune to run and generated more smell than heat anyway) and installing a nightstore heater in the hallway, and we’ll be done.

Next project: carpet.

In Bookcrossing news, only a few days until the Australian UnCon.  Which means I’ll be getting up ridiculously early on Friday morning (my flight’s at 6.30 am, so that means check-in at 4.30, which means…. arrgh, I don’t want to think about what that means about when I have to set the alarm for!) to fly to Sydney and then catch a train to Canberra.  Canberra’s not supposed to be a particularly exciting city to visit, but when it’s full of bookcrossers it’s sure to be a fantastically fun weekend.

And a few recent (and not so recent – I must remember to post more often) catches:

Mr. Corbett’s Ghost  by Leon Garfield was an early Halloween release (ok, so I meant to release it on Halloween but got the date wrong) that must have been caught almost immediately, because I released it in Deans Bush about an hour before they close the gates for the night, and it was caught that same night.

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett is a second-generation catch on a book I released in Washington DC.  After being caught and taken to Seattle, it languished in a lost and found box for months before being rescued and enjoyed.

The Tower on the Rift by Ian Irvine – a catch from Ireland, from our visit to Clonmacnoise.

Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann and Consequences by Anna Dillon – more Ireland catches, this time from the hostel in Cashel.

Working Wonders by Jenny Colgan – and another one from the hostel in Killarney.

Beside Myself by Russell Haley – nearly two years between release and catch, a couple of blocks apart from each other.

Man and Boy by Tony Parsons – caught and re-released.

Demon Rumm by Sandra Brown – and a quick catch for a themed release.

Feeling lucky

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We’re finally getting round to having the 1950s wiring in our house replaced (I’m so looking forward to having more than one power outlet per room – finally an end to the maze of extension cables and multiboards we live our life off!), so had the electrician round on Saturday to do a walkthrough of what we want.

While he was checking the connection where the powerlines come into the house, he pointed out that the lines were stretched taut between the house and the nearest powerpole, which was on a slight lean (thanks to earthquakes, no doubt).  He reckoned we were probably just a couple of centimetres away from having the lines pulled out completely – and given the latest swarm of aftershocks (a 5.2 on Friday, amongst a scattering of 3s and 4s), it’s amazing it hasn’t happened yet.

So we’re feeling very lucky he noticed it before it went, and the best bit is it’s not our problem – the power company will have to fix it (he said he’ll try and convince them the best solution would be to replace the lines with underground ones, which would make our view a lot nicer!)

In other news… um, there isn’t any, really.  Still up to my ears in study and work, but still enjoying both enough not to mind that I don’t have any other life at the moment.