Entries Tagged 'Random thoughts' ↓

I just don’t know what to believe any more. Everywhere I go, conversation centres on bird flu. Should I be worried? I’m about to get on a plane.

pan·dem·ic

adj. n.

an epidemic that is geographically widespread; occurring throughout a region or even throughout the world

Today I had wrote a half-page note to a friend and when I was reading it over a random thought popped into my head when I noticed I’d not dotted many of my i’s – if a handwriting expert got a hold of this sample, would they proclaim me lazy?

Being curious (not that my handwriting necessarily reveals that about me) I “asked the Internet” (a cute phrase I heard the other day which I’ve adopted as my own), and now I have my very own Personal Handwriting Analysis (from some dreadfully tacky, unauthoratitive website somewhere).

Believe it, or not:

• sometimes you may blow your top when you get frustrated, but you don’t do it every time;
  
  
  
• you are poor with details, careless and forgetful (this is the not dotting i’s result);
  
  
  
• you do not have a lot of staying-power and may quit tasks after a short period of time;
  
  
  
• you prefer logic and reasoning, and you have little or no intuitive ability;
  
  
  
• you may be too open-minded. It may be too easy for you to accept other people’s points of view. This could be an indication that you are gullible;
  
  
  
• you don’t need to have others approve of what you do;
  
  
  
• your sense of humour does not show openly;
  
  
  
• you are not self-conscious, and have nothing to worry about;
  
  
  
• you are not sensitive to criticism at all.  You can be objective about the opinions of other people and accept or reject these opinions without getting emotional about them;
  
  
  
• you are rigid. You are obsessed with structure and have a fear of being proved wrong.  You are imposing stress on yourself and others around you;
  
  
  
• you have weak willpower.  You are not too clear about your goals.  You may have a vague idea – perhaps someday you will get around to them;
  
  
  
• you worry about certain things, but not everything.

I was at yoga (again!) last night and missed the TV news so only heard on the radio this morning through my blurry sleepy brain that plans are afoot to build a coastal motorway right through a home belonging to our family at Paekakariki! I must say I’ve not been active in my opinion of previous plans for Transmission Gully or the urban motorway changes near where we live in Wellington – it’s that old fence-sitter attitude where the fire inside doesn’t start until direct effects are felt. And the fire has started!

The Fisherman’s Table Restaurant on the coast at Paekakariki and the houses occupying the same land are to be bought and presumably bulldozed to build the 4-lane motorway. Regardless of how much money home-owners may get for their properties, that spot is a very rare find so close to Wellington and the family we have living there just love it and want to retire there so how can they face finding something equally as good? On that same block of land someone has only just finished building a huge 4 million dollar house – they must feel devastated.

The Council are calling for submissions and in such cases I’m not sure what anyone can say that will change their mind so we need to get used to it being a reality. It’s unclear when they might purchase affected properties and the motorway is 20 years away from being complete.

Plan and submission form are available from Greater Wellington Regional Council.

I had no idea you could defibrillate from the comfort of your own home but it seems that every time you turn around some gadget is filling a gap. I went to amazon.com for the first time in a while today and there on the front page was the ‘Philips HeartStart Home Automated External Defibrillator‘. Wonders will never cease.

I was terribly brave last night and went off to my first ever yoga class. I haven’t been to the gym in over a year and feel like the walk to and from work is just not enough to make sure I don’t end up in a permanent sitting-on-office-chair position. I say ‘brave’ because I’ve never really understood where yoga comes from. I know plenty of ‘normal’ people do it (including my mother (yes she’s fairly normal!!)) but I was still petrified that I was going to be asked to find my spirit inside or take place in some ranting chanting prayer or something … but it was all perfectly harmless. Well, actually it was NOT harmless. Yikes! It was a beginners class and obviously I did not know what to expect yet it was nothing like I imagined and way harder than I thought it would be. My muscles were screaming by the end of the 1.5 hour class and I was a shaking mess so actually did not find the lying-down-under-a-blankie-in-the-dark bit at the end as creepy as I might’ve done because my poor body did indeed need to ‘reflect on my practice’.

Today I do ache in my back and shoulders and hamstrings but I am no longer scared and think it will be very good for me so I’ll be going back. Plus their 10-class ticket is orange!!

Purchased Scrabble at the weekend. I must say, I was not that impressed to find that we’d spent $40 on far less than what was in the box when I was a kid – no green baggie for the letters to live in (just a plastic bag which is dumb because you can see though it duh!); wooden tiles which arrived on strips of Sellotape which means they’re now sticky and stick to the board, your hands, the inside of the plastic bag; no pencils and no little score pad! Hrumfff!

However, we played our first ever game of Scrabble together – we’re not that good – using only 3 and 4 letter words mostly but in an absolute fluke (despite a strong start from yours truly) we ended up with exactly the same score! Crazy aye!

Second game, I won, but got exactly the same score as the first time! Double craziness …

I suppose I am reasonably vain and while I don’t pass judgement on people of different sizes and shapes, I still secretly wonder how some people can wear the stuff they do.

Due to the sunny nature of the day yesterday and a comment from one of the waitresses at Nikau about a rumour that girls were out in bikinis on Oriental Beach, we wandered over that way. We found a fairly central park bench to sit on amidst the crowds and took in the fairly typical beach scene:

• the crowd of boys in long board shorts playing with a ball
  
  


• the back-packer travellers in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and boots with their packs sitting on a blanket stolen from Emirates airline
  
  


• circle of Goths/junkies dressed in black sitting in a circle drinking beer and wine straight out of the bottle, waving their arms in the air and making slurred proclamations
  
  


• Mr-Metro, rippling and tanned showing off his dolphin-diving grace in the breakers testing out his new waterproof digital camera
  
  


• a real man, who probably drives a great big noisy flat deck Ford with an enormous killer-looking dog with very enormous balls. He (the dog!) had a kind of cute look at times and just when we were saying you can’t judge a dog by how mean he looks nor by the chain with metal spikes around his neck which dug right into his flesh when the real man yanked his leash, the dog went ballistic at a guy with a camera, and the real man shoo’d away a couple of little kids that went up to pat the nice doggy saying “Ahh, no, don’t come close, he’s not good with children“.
  
  


• a few small clutches of skinny teen girls in the lolly-pink singlets, cut-off jeans and fake Armani glasses smoking and looking with distain at the boys playing ball
  
  


• and right in front of us, a group of girls in their early 20’s who seemed to be unaffected by those nasty women’s magazines proclaiming that you’re only beautiful if you’re thin and detox regularly by eating beetroot and carrot juice, because there they were, wobbly bits and all in skimpy bikinis cutting into their flesh, smoking and swapping stories about who texted who and who was seen at so-n-so’s party.
  
  I found my eyes drawn to it like the car accident or animal squashed on the side of the road that you just can’t look at, yet always do. But good on them for just being comfortable with who they are.

Fascinating! It’s not a nut or a meg, but specifically the kernel in the seed of the Myristica fragrans tree grown in the West Indies.

This, from ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Part VII Micropedia:

The tree is cultivated in the Moluccas and the West Indies principally, and elsewhere with varying success. The trees may reach about 65 feet (20 metres) tall. They yield fruit 8 years after sowing, reach their prime in 25 years, and bear fruit for 60 years or longer. The nutmeg fruit is a pendulous drupe, similar in appearance to an apricot. When fully mature it splits in two, exposing a crimson-coloured aril, the mace, surrounding a single shiny, brown seed, the nutmeg. The pulp of the fruit may be eaten locally. After collection, the aril-enveloped nutmegs are conveyed to curing areas where the mace is removed, flattened out, and dried. The nutmegs are dried gradually in the sun and turned twice daily over a period of six to eight weeks. During this time the nutmeg shrinks away from its hard seed coat until the kernels rattle in their shells when shaken. The shell is then broken with a wooden truncheon and the nutmegs are picked out.

Heading up to Napier this weekend and already wondering where to get a decent cup of coffee. I’m not one for ordering a motel breakfast so will head into town in search of peanut butter toast and a flat white. Just had a scavenge on the Napier tourism website and found a couple of possibilities:

• Cafe DMP – “Winner of the Hawke’s Bay Barista Competition 2004” does not necessarily mean awesome coffee,
  
  
  
• Cafe Aroma – ex-Wellingtonians sounds promising, if they came from the cafe trade down here.

My partner had some Doris moments when attempting to play house-husband yesterday. While I appreciate the gesture, I have to wonder what led to his actions:

• He folded a basket full of clothes that were waiting to be washed, believing them to be clean. Perhaps that was my fault for queuing them up to be washed by putting them in the basket that was normally filled with clothes that have just come out of the washing machine.
  
• He packed all the dirty dinner dishes into the dishwasher with all the clean dishes. Ahhh, the expectation that clean dishes always find their way out of the dishwasher and into the cupboard, therefore meaning there are only ever dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

Not getting at him, honest, just smiling at the situation!