Holidays are gone and back into school. I feel completely fucked. Man, this job is hard work. If you’re not being hammered by students, it’s colleagues. If it’s not colleages it’s marking, planning, thinking and trying to remember all the shit that is expected of a teacher. If it’s not that…well, shit….you’re asleep. I love this job….but shit it’s hard work. It’s hard to switch off to the students’ lives sometimes. Most are great people but have some shit World’s to live in and it’s hard to hear some if it, work with it and not burst into tears. If I have a whisky after work you can damn well bet I’ve heard at least one thing that has rocked my world…beatings, drugs, alcohol, frustration, pain, anger, violence, aggression. I hate watching kids deal with this stuff and am only able to help in small ways. I’m not their friend but I always feel like I have to be stable at school. Sounds pretty twee and all Florence Nightingale but if you worked with some of these kids you’d feel it too.
It’s been a tough few weeks and I have fallen back on punk music. I was thinking about my second year at university this week. It was a truly unpleasant time of my life and things were pretty bleak. I still remember the day that I popped a tape that my brother had left into a car stereo and heard… “aaaaah fuck, fuck , fuck, fuck” followed by Session. I worked my way from there. Punk music still seems to make things work for me. New Zealand is a great place to live but it’s a frustrated and insecure place which tends to wind up the locals. I hope we figure it out sometime soon.
I have started doing cross stitch again. Inspired by the Transformers movie I have started sorting out an image of the original Bumblebee for a cross stitch. It’ll be about 200mm x 200mm and 8 colours. It’s the pose off the original box and makes him look tough but still … Bumblebee. Hopefully it takes ages and looks as good as I think it will. Beats thinking.
Into the second week of holidays and all is well. I went down in a shower of shit and small stones last week and felt pretty crap for no real reason that I could ascertain but presumably, being the complex critter that I am, there was a good reason. Feeling better now and a bit more fit to face the World.
Following a few weeks of screwing up I have managed to install my first door handle. A spent days measuring the position and making sure I understood what I was doing (the instructions being written in what I can only assume was martian). I then spent 20 minutes drilling irrepairily into the door. I then spend 30 minutes throwing a wobbly as I realised I had it in the wrong place by 5mm. I then spend 10 minutes calming myself and discovering that the door knob allowed for noobs like me and had about 10mm of forgiveness. These martians are clever folks. After some filling and positioning and chiseling we now have a door handle and no casualties…actually not true. I managed to slice my finger with a craft knife while gently carving out a space for the wee knobby bit that actually catches the door. That hurt but it turns out my blood clots well so all positive. I am teaching Materials Tech to juniors next term…if I was a parent with a young person at Hagley I’d be freaking out.
I also had to make a foray onto the roof to repair a broken tile. I discovered it while opening a cupboard and being drenched by a bucketful of water that had been collecting. I spent a fun Saturday evening in the ceiling space setting up a bucket system and then a hysterical Sunday summoning the courage to get on the roof with one of those spunky little filler gun things to seal the crack. Like a ski field it’s much steeper up there than it looks but I manned through it and got back to terra firma without issue.
I have been working on a redesign for The Managers’ web site these holidays. It’s my first big foray into Drupal and so far so good. I’m liking the ability to create views of different content very quickly and then being able to style them fairly seamlessly. Certainly the ability to add modules quickly has been great and makes experimenting with different approaches nice and easy. Hopefully we get it live soon as I’m pretty stoked with the visual style of it. Might have to cut back on the freebie work soon and start getting in some paid stuff.
Turns out my somewhat snide comment about no tornados was a little prophetic with Taranaki being hit by a bunch of them. I will try and keep my comments to myself in future…though damn, warning signs anyone.
This weekend we are having our exorcism to rid the house of unwanted spirits…the downside of distilling stuff that I’ll never drink…I mean, CandyShots, who the hell will drink that. Begone evil spirit – Lorem ipsum etc etc.
One more week of this term left and then two weeks holiday. The last few weeks have gone by very quickly which is a little disturbing but it’s all good. We’ve moved back into the bedroom now. It’s a lot more comfortable and looking good.
I’m enjoying school at the moment. I get to give students a hard time and pass on my thoughts and opinions to what is effectively a captive audience. Sucks to be a student in my class I tells ya. Hell, being a co-worker probably isn’t all that good. I think it’s time to tone back on the extra bits I do at school and get back into the teaching side more heavily. I am keen to start tidying up some of the projects just completed for next year. It’s an ongoing thing I guess.
I see the cost of a season pass on our ski fields has gone up somewhat amazingly since I last went up. Luckily for me I stopped being able to afford skiing in NZ quite a few years ago. It’s cheaper and more fun to go to Norway. Better skiing as well. Actually as a country we’d better be a little careful about our pricing. We are starting to alienate the locals in favour of tourists which seems like a slippery slope to me. Piss of the locals at your peril. We might just decide to mess with your kids or loosen that nut on the ski lift. Lovely stuff.
Winter in NZ…but it seems much the same in the UK. Global warming is a bitch eh? At least it’s just cold here at the moment. We haven’t had a tornado or tsunami or anything….yet.
Long weekends are just made for wallpapering…so that’s what we’re doing. I have decided that wallpapering is one step better than stripping paint which puts it one step lower than eating poo. Anywho, the room is looking pretty good despite the lack of fun and we’ll be ready for painting soon. Good times.
ESPN is not covering the Stanley Cup this year which nails my last reason for having the TelstraClear TV on. The interesting channels repeat too often to be useful and I don’t watch enough to TV normally to make it worth while. Reduced to watching the game highlights via the web which is proving better than nothing. Shorter as well.
I think one of the batteries in my scooter has gone bung so I’m back on my bike. My fitness is back but I can see why people drive cars. She’s a bit tiring biking every day, especially if the day has juniors in it.
I really have nothing to say at the moment…must work on that.
I have the doors back on the closets in our bedroom. All the wood has now been stripped back to the rimu and varnished. The window looks excellent and the doors have come up really well. The skirting really sucked to do but it looks pretty good as well. It all has a restored look, not new but not shoddy either. I like it. We are now on to cleaning the walls, getting up wallpaper and painting. Then I’m having a little drink and a lie down for a few months. It looks good though.
I am beginning to think some of the folks at work aren’t coping particularly well. There seems to be a lot of snappy behaviour in the oldies which is starting to get tiring. Certainly won’t be asking any of them for help on anything, they seem to have enough troubles already.
My scooter’s batteries seem to be on their last legs. I did some quick acceleration this morning and it felt like one of the batteries dropped dead. Luckily I was almost at school and with the help of friendly grounds staff I plugged in and had enough juice to get home. It did the same thing when I was almost home so I’m thinking I need to get under the hood and see what’s going on … I’ll look at least.
Ubuntu Feisty rocks.
I have a new laptop at home now, allowing me to sit in my warm lounge and talk to C instead of being tucked away in the somewhat cold computer cupboard. It didn’t take me long to remove Vista and put Ubuntu on it and to my great pleasure it is working really well. Feisty is proving to make life nice and easy. It just installed the Flash plugin without any problems (so I could watch Mark Shuttleworth talk about the new Dell agreement to build with Ubuntu) and then it happily played wmv files so I could watch the latest NHL “On The Fly” episode. Can’t ask for much more than that really.
After a full on week at school I am starting to feel quite jaded. The admin work seems to be piling up behind me as the school systems seem to be crumbling. It doesn’t seem like a good thing but hopefully it balances out soon. Great projects and some really interesting work coming from students of all ages is making it worthwhile. Today a year 9 student asked me what year I was. I answered that I was a teacher and smiled happily but it occurred to me later that for a 13 year old to ask that meant they thought I was of secondary school age (or close to it). Usually 13 year olds assume anyone older than them is at least 80. I was stoked. Having bright red hair is probably helping.
Here endeth the holidays. Back to school on Monday, for two days and then we have another holiday. Life is tough.
We have had success with the window and it is now stripped and in the process of being varnished. It looks good and the hard work of stripping every little bit of crappy white paint has been worth it. We managed to do it on a pretty good budget as well which is great as we have a few more to do. The next steps are: varnishing the other wooden bits, getting the cupboard doors back in and then getting on to wallpaper and paint. Actually a lot of fun and nice knowing it’s all going into our own place.
I managed to upgrade Ubuntu to version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) last night. Actually it happened this morning but took most of the night to download. I guess the servers were fairly packed for a while there. Compared to the last upgrade this was phenomenal. Even a dufus like me can click an upgrade button and then sit back. It is really impressive how simple it has become and considering all my past Windows upgrades have required a complete rebuild it was simply wonderful to not have to set everything back up once it was ready to go. The desktop didn’t even really blink actually though looks a little slicker in places. New tools and lots of cleaning up and my web cam works again. I knew if I waited someone clever would fix the problem. There’s something just right about open source.
Tomorrow I put the finishing touches on my new trousers and get another coat of varnish on the window. I think I’m ready for another term of school.
The holidays are very much happening.The peaches were split up, some made into wine and some preserved in bottles for the long hard winter that’s a’comin…or something. We discovered the base of the distiller works well for preserving so it was all go. They look okay so will see how it goes when we try them in a few months.
I am now trying to get the window in the bedroom stripped back to wood and varnished before things get too damp and the wood starts to get soggy. Stripping the window has been a bit of a mission but today I got the worst of the paint out leaving the touch up work. We should be able to get a coat of varnish on this week some time. It looks damn fine if I do say so myself. Lovely rimu underneath, all different shades and grainy. It scares me when I think of how much more there is to do … so I don’t think about it. Problem solved.
After spazzing out a bit in town over the lack of decent men’s clothing I have started another pair of trousers. They have flames. Yessir, flames. Actually it’s cooler than that. They are a thick black drill with three panels making up the legs. The tops of the bottom two panels are cut into a flame pattern and sewn together. Took frickin ages but it is really looking good. Subversively innocuous enough to wear to school and cool enough to make me feel less of a muppet. I would also like to state that I nailed the fly … totally. No inappropriate holes, gaps, stitching or general dodginess. I have pockets to do tomorrow and then sew ’em up to fit. I’m also finally getting some new shoes … they have flames on them. Yessir, flames.
I will not think about the marking I left at school or the fact that term two is a long one .. I won’t think about it again at least.
This week was a bit short with two days at workshops and conferences and an onset of sickness today. It was nice to get a break from the classroom but workshops usually ramp me up with things to try out so I usually do too much at once and get burned out. I might actually learn that lesson one day.
Over the last two days I have had the displeasure of driving a car more often than I have in the last six months. Things have changed a bit and too be honest with the speeding, swerving and general dangerous and angry driving I can’t understand why we are so surprised that people are getting seriously hurt. It’s kind of a no brainer I would’ve thought. I’d love to know why we feel the need to drive so dangerously because it’s happening on all fronts and with all kinds of people. I frustrated someone yesterday by driving 50km/h in a 50km/h zone (which is most of the city actually). I could see them getting all wound up behind me before they roared passed at what I’d estimate was 70. What was odd is that a stream of traffic then went passed at the same speed. I felt the odd one out for driving at the speed limit. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, we have decided it is okay to be dangerous and as such we should accept that a certain number of people (and, yes that includes kids) will be killed. “My right to speed means you give up your right to live” seems perfectly okay these days. I guess the turning point will be when we start to decide that there is now intent and it becomes murder instead of manslaughter…and yes, to all those lovely, “law abiding” white middle class folks you are a major part ofthe problem. At least I can see (and hear) the boys coming. They tend to have a loud muffler and even louder sound system blaring out Britney Spears (way cool by the way boys…not at all weak or insecure). Those angry white suburbanites fire off repressed violence in their car without warning and are much harder to dodge. Freaks.
That said, I now have a weekend to enjoy and an electric scooter and bike to use with no need to drive anywhere for a while yet. I’ve even managed to top up my metro card so will give the bus another go now that we’re on a decent route.
We have lots of peaches starting to ripen up. ’tis a marvelous thing.
Will it ever be Friday? Actually time is doing that weird thing where it speeds slowly by. The weeks are going by very fast but seem to take a long time to do so. Not the best way to implement the theory of relativity but there you go…physics at its most annoying.
Despite being a rather silly busy day I tried something new and won. My combined graphics class needed to be split so I could take the year 11s up to the computer lab and as I can’t be in two places at once (yet…come on physics) I decided to be clever and set up a video conference system…which actually worked. We just used Skype and when I was ready I called the Year 12s in the graphics room. We got the video going and I could keep an eye on them and have conversations. The kick in the guts was that I needed to set up two rooms a good distance apart within 10 minutes, make sure students could get into both and teach two separate lessons. It worked but I got a headache real quick. Technology at its best.
Teaching is a lot more fun this year. I only feel like half a muppet.
I have finally found some support for my electric scooter. The original company appears to have gone belly up leaving me without an obvious supply of parts and no real tech support. After chatting to some folks at the latest sustainability expo I now seem to have some support with batteries and general parts. They sell a different type of scooter but the basics are much the same. Makes life easier really.
I need to lie down and get rid of this headache.
The last few days have seen the disappearance of intelligent people in my life and the arrival of the obtuse. Either people are getting tired or a hardcore hit of stupid just hit the water supplies. Maybe the stress of a new year has finally got to people. May the smarts return soon.
I have a higher load of teaching this year which is starting to leave its mark on me. It’s all good fun but I can see why good teachers stop and bad teachers get crabby. It’s one of those systems that just barely works. I find myself fighting the same sorts of battles I did as a web designer as people try to astound me with their technical prowess through their newfound ability to email. Email you say….wow. Try introducing that to the concept of an intranet…or in fact any sort of decentralised content management. I can see why teachers go mad and kill all their students and colleagues…they do don’t they?…it’s not just me right?
If you still drive a car to work every day you have your head wedged firmly up your ass. It has become the equivalent of blowing smoke into a baby’s face.
I’m sure something great happened today…
Today has been an odd day. Odd in that it has included an unusually extreme mixture of highs and lows resulting in a mixture of somewhat turbulent emotions. I imagine people who know me would say this is not unusual and that I am unusually turbulent most of the time…but today was odd.
Somedays you get a curveball from someone you trust and it can get you thinking for the rest of the day. Mine came today from a friend who, comparing me to someone they knew, commented that I tend to look at people with a sort of “you are wrong, dipshit” expression. If you really know me you’ll know this would hurt…quite a lot. I like people a lot, I like working with people and I have consistently and enduringly high hopes and expectations for people in my life…I am regularly disappointed by people. My natural thinking expression is to frown.
I went in to school today to sort out the broken computers in my classroom. I have set up a dual boot of Windows XP and Linux (Ubuntu) and the imaging hadn’t worked apparently. I spent time on each machine repairing the master boot record (as the partitions had copied over) and now have 24 working machines. Tall poppy syndrome be damned, that is bloody phenomenal considering I started using Linux seriously last July(ish) and had no support from the supposed IT people I know (and Iknow quite a few). I will never be thanked for my effort and in all likelihood my students will argue and fight the setup until they leave school.
In the last few days I have watched “Who Killed the Electric Car” and “An Inconvenient Truth”. The first was just plain sad for someone who rides an electric scooter in a city of SUVs and the second was…actually I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’ve heard all the info about climate change before, none of it is particular news to me and I live in New Zealand where 15 minutes in the sun can cause really nasty burns. I am making and have made major changes in my life to live more sustainably and I am educating others where I can and when it is acceptable for me to do so.
I am often more certain than right…today I feel more right than certain.
A whole new year out there. Fantastic. Having just spent a week in Nelson wandering around craft places, relaxing, eating and reading a fantastic issue of Computer Arts Projects on Urban Art I am feeling remarkably recharged. It’s nice when the cylinders start firing in unison again. I have started working on stencils for more t-shirt ideas and have been sewing up new shorts and trouser designs (the Trouser Project continues). Lovely start to the year.
I have had a few panic moments lately where I felt I should be looking for ZYPE projects before remembering I have paid holidays now. It is a truly weird feeling and in the ultimate act of inappropriate guilt I feel like a bit of a leech…I am getting over it though. The last two years, on reflection have seen fairly large changes in my life and I’ve got that same feeling I get after doing something a little bit reckless and dangerous, namely tingly feet and a bit of adrenaline in the system. Looking back the move to teaching was relatively quick and took a lot of preparation time. I’d forgotten about the time I spent before the training working my tits off getting money together to cover as much of the training year as possible and this last year was a bit nuts with all the course creation that went on. I think it’s all going to make the next few years that much sweeter.
I had a small shock last night as I tried to use Windows XP and found the basics irritating. Another reflective moment as I realised I’ve been using Linux successfully for about a year and have started to see it as the norm. Interestingly the way I use and organise my desktop is now closer to that of a Mac which makes moving between my partner’s computer and mine a lot smoother. I’m sure there is method to the madness.
Today, I have a door to strip, a stencil to print and trousers to make. School can wait a bit longer…
It is holiday time. After a few abortive efforts to actually leave school behind for a few weeks I have made it out, cleaned up most of the pre-Christmas jobs that needed doing around the house and taken some time beating seven bells out of the garden. It’s even a nice day today.
My bike blew it’s tire a week ago and pending a replacement I’ve been riding the scooter around. I have learned that a decent ride requiring a recharge every day is actually making the batteries work more effectively. A few days without riding or a long draining ride and they slow down again. My only slight concern now is that company I bought the thing off has gone very quiet and is not responding to any attempt to contact them. Usually not a good sign.
I rebuilt my little server a few days back after realising that Fedora Core was not going to update. It is now an Ubuntu server with a little web server running a music playlist and file storage. I was pretty stoked when I figured out how to SSH into it though to be honest I am loving the cut and paste help forums out there for Linux. I’m not always interested in how something works but I’m glad someone is and that they are willing to write about it.
Holiday time…
There’s something about sitting in your own garden early on a Sunday morning when it’s very quiet, the sun has come up and the norwester hasn’t. I am thinking about beehives, the veges, what I’m going to do with all the peaches, apricots and plums that are growing and generally feeling content. It’s quite nice really.
We have started wine and spirits for Xmas so our kitchen is full of bubbling fermenters and all the containers and bottles that go with it. It looks, sounds and smells like a great science experiment. All we need now is a bunsen burner and some test tubes frothing away and we’d have a complete picture.
School has started to go into a weird mode where the students have finished the assessment but haven’t quite finished at school and the teachers all seem to have gone potty. It’s really strange and I am looking forward to a holiday.
After a shit week I needed something to get me through the weekend…and found it. Generalisations aside, I thought this forum commenting on Baby Boomers was interesting. My interest is a long standing issue with dealing with greedy, cynical people who, for some reason can’t understand opportunity and think of risk as leaping off a bridge with a rope around their ankles. Having just been on the end of what appears to be a gentle shafting by the old people we rented off before moving into our own house I am probably less sympathetic than usual. Watching old teachers act in nasty, selfish ways at the expense of colleagues and students has me slightly sickened and it seems to be for no better reason than that they feel insecure about something or simply have no understanding of “all these new things”. I swear, if I hear one more old fart say that they are proud of their inability to use a computer I will smack them all the way back to the 60s. It’s tiring, it’s boring, it’s not a productive attitude and it’s time for a changing of the guard me thinks.
What a shocker of a day. I can only assume it was my day to deal with the World’s negative bits and as I’ve had a good run over the last few weeks maybe that is a fair deal. Didn’t reduce the impact of the day though. Lots of small things added up and people seemed to be niggly for some reason. It was weird and has reduced the value of some of my hard work at school. Sucks to the World, hopefully tomorrow is a touch better.
I have made an upgrade at home to Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft distribution. For a few days I was nervous as it blew away my monitorsettings and I spent time learning all about xorg.conf through the commandline. It has all pretty much been sorted which is somewhat gratifying as I had only a vague idea what I was doing and have learned a lot throughout the process. I am also amazed at how confident I am that fixes will appear over time to continuously solve small issues. There’s something about knowing you’re not alone in the issues and that others are working on solutions. I have decided to include a distribution upgrade as part of next years Computing College course…in fact Linux has just stepped into a very central role in the course with a lot of learning revolving around it. I’m quite chuffed about that.
My last comment for the day is on the increasing focus on useless, unproductive work. Surely, with the way things are headed and the progressively nearing changes (read downsizing) to our lifestyles we should be putting big emphasis on creative problem solving and technical production skills to support the creativity. Surely. Instead we propose closing down workshops in schools, move product development off shore, encourage young people to “get into game design ‘cos it’s a growing industry” and generally go down very dangerous paths. I hope we wake up before it gets too painful.
Sucks to the World, hopefully tomorrow is a touch better.
We’ve been in our new house for a month now and so far so good. Starting to settle in nicely and I am stoked with the new found freedom to dig a hole anywhere I feel like and set up gardens the way I want them. It’s the simple things that make life good. We have planted a few trees and the vege gardens are starting to grow…though the soil is going to take a while to build up. All good fun.
We have had a few tags placed on our property, most of which were pretty average so I decided to start recording and evaluating them. The flip side of this is that my interest in graffiti has been renewed. I have discovered the Graphics department at school has a couple of unused airbrushes so I’ve hauled these out to have a go. If nothing else it gets me away from computers for a while.
I have finally sorted out a decent system on my computer that involves a dual boot of Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) which has allowed me to play decent games while sticking with Linux for everything else. Hot on the heels of this set up I have been playing with Motion (a webcam motion detection tool) and getting it to record a video of the days proceedings down our driveway. This is always fascinating…today we watched a guy come and clean graffiti off the fence. I was pretty chuffed to get it working as it’s a command line tool and I had to sort out a bash script for concatenating lots of small video files into one big one. Not bad for a designer/teacher/gardener.
One week into the holidays and one week into the new house. So far, so good. With some help from friends and family we managed to get everything across and have spent the last week making everything livable again. We’ve also started getting the garden installed and while I’m no master builder I have managed to whack together some raised garden beds for veges. I spent yesterday digging compost into them and today lying on the couch wishing I hadn’t…it’s also raining and I’ll be buggered if I’m going out there. I’m on holiday.
TelstraClear managed to screw up transferring the phone and internet to the new house so we’ve had two weeks without either. It’s a bit of a reality check to find out how reliant we are on phones and the internet…and rather peaceful to not have either. The electricity company just sent through a huge marketing package that essentially said, “welcome to your new home” and “we have moved your account across”. A letter probably would have sufficed but I guessthese days if you don’t say it with advertising you probably haven’t said it. I am increasingly tired of glossy crap…under the gloss it’s still crap.
I am now looking forward to a slowing end to the year and more time in the garden getting things established. I am looking forward to enjoying some of my beer while sitting in my own garden. Interestingly I am also looking forward to getting back to school and getting my students through the end of the year…I take that as a good sign.
We move in to the new house this weekend. Our current place is packed with boxes and I have no idea where anything is…other than in the boxes somewhere. I am well and truly in freefall towards the holidays. The combination of packing up and the end of the term has taken it’s toll.
We are moving to the new house in a few weeks. Initial packing has started and it feels a bit unreal at this stage. Our tenancy contract has been set up to end and we are starting to sort out all the things that need to be changed over to the new address. I have this little voice in the back of my head, way down deep that keeps asking silly things like “are you sure you bought a house?”. I guess I’ll find out soon.
Today was a hard day back at school for some as yet unknown reason. I was pretty into life when I biked to school this morning and even felt unusually charitable as drivers ripped passed in their usual dangerous, ‘who gives a crap about human life’ sort of way. The classes went well and I got a lot done but I finished with a headache and really tired. With this behind me I was watching the news and essentially heard the following things: 1) Major gas disruptions in Wellington are causing massive problems for businesses there (restaurant and hotel businesses), 2) A supermarket supply strike is causing supermarket shelves to start looking a bit empty (we noticed this last night while sorting our groceries), and 3) a group of Christchurch suburbanites are fighting a bus route through their area because ‘it brings crime’. #1 and #2 seem to me to be one hell of a warning shot over the bow about how fragile some of our systems really are and how dependent we have become on them. Something we should be thinking very hard about I would have said. #3 I had to sit up a bit for as I was sure I’d heard it incorrectly. Turns out the residents of a few of our wealthier gated communities think buses are basically prison transports shuttling criminals to their lovely, not at all small minded or snobby little areas. Considering what it looks like we’re going to face with the end of cheap energy and personal transport I can’t help but wonder how long it takes for them to beg for a bus system. Christchurch people seem intent on proving themselves as spoilt children but some things go a little too far to be taken seriously. Gated communities would be great if we could bolt the gates shut from the outside.
Our new house has a backyard with some fruit trees and space for some of my other little dreams. I am looking forward to finally getting all the plants I have in pots established.
We have put our first offer in on a house that we quite like the look of and have found the whole experience to be a bit weird. We are low, being first time buyers so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I think I have managed to detach myself from the whole thing emotionally so there shouldn’t be any freak out sessions. Luckily last weekend I made a load of whisky so I am prepared for any ‘issues’. House hunting again this weekend pending a resolution to offer #1.
We went and saw “A Scanner Darkly” last weekend after a friend organised it all. I have just finished “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep” so I was in the right mood for a it all. Loved the movie and the interesting cartoony style they’d used. I seriously need some sleep soon.
House Update: we have agreed on a price for the house and doing the usual conditional bits for the contract. Very exciting.
It would seem that the combination of winter, teaching and house hunting has turned me into the World’s most boring person. Winter has been nasty this year, teaching seems to have encouraged every flu strain to take up residence in my system and by Friday I tend to be a social wreck. The weekends are currently spent trolleying around open homes which, it has to be said is one of the most depressing past-times known to humanity. Add these all together and it’s not a pretty picture. My latest and greatest achievement was starting another wash for distilling spirits. Good times.
Back to house hunting though. We are slowly getting a good look at housing in Christchurch and along with it a feel for what we like and don’t like. It’s nice to be in no particular hurry to buy and be able to take our time as we look. Real estate agents seem to either like us or hate us…we have become somewhat cynically mellow while looking through houses. There is quite an art to looking cynically mellow. It’s a sort of “we have time…and this house ain’t all that” thing that seems to infuriate some agents resulting in a lecture about “jumping on opportunities” and “we have 15 offers and this is the first open home” style comments. Odd people really.
The garden is still alive but that’s about all I can say about it. House hunting has sort of killed my interest in this garden and my attention has sort of moved to my new (and as yet unknown) garden. I’ll know it when I see it but in the mean time I guess I’ll stick with being a bit boring and carry on with business as usual.
Having a great holiday at the moment. My brother arrived back in NZ last Monday so we took a trip down to Moeraki to see mum and dad. Just back from there after a few days of sleeping a lot. Nothing like sea air to knock you flat.
The batteries for the scooter arrived while I was away so I spent the morning changing them over. I’d be lying if I said I was completely at ease changing them over but all went well. The new batteries are in and charging. Went for a quick ride to make sure everything was still all working properly before doing a longer ride tomorrow. Hopefully these batteries last a little longer so have started a record to see how many kilometers I get out of them.
Am looking forward to a new machine in the next few days. The old laptop is starting to fall apart so I’m getting something a little more Linux focused set up. Hopefully the last machine I have to buy for a while. The next few days are all about catching up with people, a little bit of gardening and maybe some beer production.
I have had a fascinating time converting my desktop to Ubuntu lately. Fascinating because I had to learn some new things…actually a lot of new things but also had to face up to what I use a computer for. It has also been fascinating watching people switch off when I start to talk about my latest challenge. Fair enough I guess. A number of the Computing College students have followed suit though. Change the World one student at a time I guess.
I am back on my bike pending the replacement of batteries in my electric scooter. I’d forgotten how nice this city is to actually bike around, especially through the park. Pity about all the cars. As this Friday is the last day of term I plan to show the Computing students “End of Suburbia” as part of our ‘Technologists and Society’ theme. I am not sure how this is going to go really but at least it has some educational value…certainly more so than what they want to watch. Maybe it’ll make one or two think. Change the World one student at a time I guess.
Watching the news a few nights ago I caught one of those articles about petrol prices and how the US has started pumping more money into finding more oil to solve the issue. Interesting plan. I think I’ll carry on with my plan to work towards living more sustainably. It’s a long term plan but I have more faith in it’s viability than the somewhat mystic “let’s find more resources” or “someone will invent something new” approaches.