Lazy sunday afternoon

There's something about sunny afternoons in Dunedin. It doesn't matter what the actual temperature is, but if there is there merest hint of sun everyone will be out pretending to sunbathe in their backyards or on their rooves, listening to music. Our neighbours had a real smorgasboard. One was rocking the Linkin Park, another blaring Queen, and so on. Down town I noticed a flat full of students drinking beer on the roof and proudly playing The Gambler. They presumably thought this was cool and ironic - I guess you have to let people figure out for themselves how hackneyed it is. Sometimes the stuff they are playing ironically is goo too - you hear things you might not have thought of in years. Its just terribly aging to think that they are listening to it and laughing in the way you would listen to your parents music and think 'DAGGY'.
How I have longed to use that term.
So it is a nice day out there and the good folks are out there washing their cars. I am inside procrastinating about my assignment instead. I've done my dash outside, I just about overheated walking home in the hat and coat I was wearing. Sun burn you understand. Maybe one day I will really freak people out and wear clothes that show snippets of my pasty white skin. Or maybe not, I have my pride.

Lets do the time warp again

---

Imagine this is me walking down the magical hallway of time distortion. In mummy wrappings.

---

Its taken grit and determination, but I have actually done some work on my assignment this evening. I was pretty damn pissed off to find that I can make it up on the computer and just e-mail it, nooo, I have to make a physical scrapbook. Which really makes all my scanning redundant unless I can get a colour printer somewhere. Perfect end to a rather bad day really. It was destined to be crap though; I knew that as soon as I left for work five minutes earlier than yesterday...but arrived at the same late time as the day before. You better believe I was pissed off. From then on in it was stuff up after stuff up. Its enough to make one want to throw it all in, but then again I see equivalent incompetancy on a daily basis & those people don't kill themselves, so maybe its all relative.
Anyway I just had to point out to everyone that something strange was going on with the time around my house, over and above the missing fifteen minutes in my room. And the 5 hours we've gained by the oven clock.
...hang on, the airforce is trying to get me to join, but the jokes on them, especially if they set me to signalling down jets. I'd get the perspective wrong with my bung eye kicking back, maxing relaxing or just chilling. Kicking it like Tae Bo even. Keeping people wondering. I don't know what part of the armed forces I would join if I were forced to, but I do know that my bar brawling signiture move would be creeping up on people and smashing glass bottles over their head.

Scanning for gold

I have been trying to work on my assignment, so I have scanned a lot of examples of book design and typography. Well not that many, it takes a while to scan & there is always the pesky shadow caused by the spine.
Anyway, I am fielding suggestions, yet again, if anyone has any amazing examples of good or bad book layout.

i could never get into scrapbooking as a hobby, as soon as I set my hand to a picture the inverse midas touch hits.

Like I said, I'd rather stick my head in the sand

I have been thinking of romance novel ideas, but this image dried them up in short order. Image with thanks to Kura, fellow afficionado of the overblown romance cover.

RN to post! to post!

I'd rather stick my head in the sand

Anyone read this book?






Anne Enright has been named the winner of 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering a bleak story of a dysfunctional Irish family.

Very good book I'm sure, but the same thing that prevents me from watching drama stops me from reading it. I just don't want to know about any more misery, thanks. All my pity is lavished on myself.

Besides, I can't take the book seriously now that I have seen Master Goblin created an important, nay, seminal list featuring it.

I do wonder why the hell people insist on putting their reviews and lists up on Amazon. More often than not they are less use than a cats flux, and an excuse to grandstand. Get a blog why don't you? And if they are good reviews the reviewer should be paid. Don't get me started on those monkeys who make advertisements for corporations as an "in" to a design career, or the spaniels who provide free entertainment on youtube (so companies don't even have to provide the material to the viewers, how cheap is that)?


Yes yes yes, I am sure I am oversimplifying the matter, but I simply must vent after a day of keeping my less pleasant opinions to myself.

Discharge/discourse

I have been vascillating between the lounge downstairs and my room. Misleading statement that, it makes it sound like we have a downstairs lounge, from which the rumpus room is annexed, and the upstairs lounge etc etc. Anyway, I left the tv going because I was confident I would not become entangled with the internet. I just ducked down there again to hear a conversation on Good Morning about discharges. They always tackle the glamour phisiological problems don't they?
Anyway, I was actually going to remark on something I noticed a few weeks ago. I don't know if the phenomena is seasonal or related to the world cup. As I was traipsing through Robin Hood park, I noticed that the rugby goal posts have been taken down. Was this a sign of the utter despair felt around the country? Or part of a conspiricy to further weaken our game play from a grass roots level? I like to imagine the groundskeeper heading out after the match with France, tears streaming down his face, ramming the posts with the ride on lawnmower until they were broken, all the while screaming something about betrayal.

A new order of kitchen responsibilities

What a month of whinging and moaning I have had. All I can say, people - it's tough to be passive aggressive. I try so hard to state what I want, why and all this in a reasonable manner, but it winds up me backpeddling and initial demands backtrack to whimpering miniscule request with all the compromise on my part. Kitchen politics for instance. I start out with the self righteous, "I should not have to clean other people's nutricious snack and lunch dishes when I don't make multi pot efforts during the day saving explosive cooking for dinners". Then I think, well, I have left a bit of a mess in the lounge because all my stuff is exploding out of my too small room. Then I revert to "But when I bake or make non-communal things I clean my own mess up" which flips to wondering if I have maybe left something inadvertantly, a bad transgression if I am making something with dairy products (I have vegan flatmates).
Anyway, yesterday I had done a load of dishes in the ten minutes before work. I find out today that this was noted, but that it is expected that people do ALL the dishes when they do some. I have never noticed this occurring, unless the dishes all get done and then more appear immediately afterwards. Usually not rinsed or stacked neatly. And lets not begin to talk about the hair clippings on the bench.
Come to think of it, I never do all the dishes. I have my things I refuse to do - cups with teabags in them, pots with burnt stuff on them (unless I did the flambe)... and increasingly pots and pans from baroque creations throughout the day. I need a rule of thumb - one pot, non viscous material, will clean. 2 pots with creamy substance - definitely not. Its rather like my feeling about sick days though; I feel disadvantaged by not having taken sick days when other people have many paid days off. In the case of the dishes - here we have this marvellous policy whereby flatmates do dishes even if they were lunch dishes, or private cook ups - and I am not taking full advantage of it.
I bet my lunch dishes would not get done.
So whats a passive agressive person to do? Suck it up and then post about it, obviously.