Quantity Surveying [entries|friends|calendar] ethel_aardvark [ website | slow loris sometimes rhymes ] [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ calendar | livejournal calendar ]

Apes Manifesto [21 Apr 2008|08:50pm] From mcookies livejournal, and worth repeating so more people can find out about and sign it (especially for cwillow and Andy L): "A group of primatologists got together and wrote up a manifesto to encourage governments to support conservation and economic development efforts in habitat countries so that wild apes do not disappear completely in the next 50 years (only 20 for orangutans)." More info and opportunity to sign at the apes manifesto website Right, am off to append my signature now... 1 comment|post comment

[18 Apr 2008|03:29pm] [ mood | cheerful ] Lots of things making me slightly grumpy at the moment, yet I am remarkably cheerful. This article about Iceland makes me slightly grumpy at all the stoopid people who've 'invested in property' and gone into debt to buy consumerist sh!t in the last few years. This article from George Monbiot makes me slightly grumpy about people who eat meat every day. Gardening makes me slightly grumpy because it feels like Sisyphean labour which is hard to do when I'm at work all week, and every single gardening book in the entire world seems to be designed either as gardening-pr0n or for retired people with far too much time on their hands. And being in the Comedy Fest makes me slightly grumpy because I've reached a point where I realised I don't need improv as part of my identity any more, and there's other things I want to do, but I can't do them till after the Comedy Fest is over. Anyone want to come over for boardgames in June? Anyone know of any good meals to feed other people for dinner? (I'd say the words 'dinner party' but I hate the connotations of that (expensive wine, discussions about kitchen appliances, slaving over a hot stove to produce gourmet food) hmmm... perhaps I should stick to pot luck....) 6 comments|post comment

Obligatory Improv Plug for Comedy Fest [04 Apr 2008|08:12pm] [ mood | ambivalent ] The obligatory plug for an improv show in the comedy festival (I'm in this one, but not yet sure I want to be): Catch 23, Wellington Performing Arts Centre, 8pm for 4 Saturdays in April/May starting on 19 April, running till 10 May. Costs $12. Blurb can be found here. If you want to come. I'm a bit ambivalent about recommending it completely because I'm not sure whether the format is going to work 100%. I'm also going to plug the improv divas show (which I'm not in) which will possibly be more interesting. (Gosh, I'm really selling all this improv.) post comment

Comments are strongly encouraged!!!! [10 Mar 2008|04:38pm] Anyone got any ideas on how to get taken seriously (update) in a work context? 11 comments|post comment

Stupid dream [07 Mar 2008|03:44pm] This is a dream I thought people might find amusing: I dreamed I was working as an eletricial contractor fixing electricity lines on Mairangi Road but this somehow was mixed with dungeons and dragons and every time I got up a pole to fix the live wires I had to make a saving throw to see if I got electrocuted or not. And then I woke up about 2am really annoyed with myself for having such a stupid dream. post comment

Poetry [09 Feb 2008|05:01pm] The weeding isn't proceeding. That's the nearest I get to poetry at the moment. I attempted to write some poetry recently. I kept getting 2 or 3 lines in and then having mental blanks, or getting repetitive. The only poem I even liked involved an AyeAye cooking. And I only wrote one line of that. 3 comments|post comment

My real age [30 Jan 2008|10:22pm] I was so expecting to be informed that I was secretly a stuffy old fart who should start sticking elbow patches on my jerseys...not fair! :-) You Act Like You Are 26 Years Old You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel like an adult, and you're optimistic about life. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. You're still figuring out your place in the world and how you want your life to shape up. The world is full of possibilities, and you can't wait to explore many of them. What Age Do You Act? 4 comments|post comment

Tired [30 Jan 2008|10:02pm] [ mood | tired ] I'm sure I used to be able to construct better arguments and think more clearly when I was younger. Now I just write everything like a policy analyst. I also notice when I'm tired that I completely lose any grasp on simple nouns like 'chair' and 'cat' and can't remember them, but more complicated polysyllabic words like 'polysyllabic' and 'innovative' still stick. 8 comments|post comment

Tongariro River [30 Jan 2008|11:09am] [ mood | itchy ] On the weekend I white-water rafted on the Tongariro River. It was good. I could write more adjectives, but they'd sound like platitudes, so I'll just say it's recommended. Particularly this summer as one of the Tongariro power stations is out of action so they're not taking water from the river for that, which means the river flow is higher, making the rafting more fun. It's also one of the more scenic spots for white water rafting - sheer pumice cliffs with ferns growing out the bottom are particularly worthwhile. Not recommended is the chafing I got from the helmet you have to wear. I now have a spectacular rash under my chin and down my neck, which is slowly settling, but looks and feels rather hideous. I had to work from home yesterday, while keeping my chin constantly smeared with Aloe Vera gel. Yuk. Still, better that than potentially hitting my head on rocks. post comment

Travel Broadens the Mind [28 Jan 2008|06:22pm] OK, people talk about the obligations of mortgage and kids, and society expecting these things of you. In my own personal experience I’ve actually found the opposite; that the social pressures for me not to have a mortgage or kids are actually stronger than the ones encouraging me to. (I’ve spent a long time attempting to convince myself that in actual fact owning a home does not mean you become a dullard overnight, never mind the time spent trying to convince myself that I’m not a dullard in the first place.) The expected obligation that I wrestle with is the one that insists that I must travel, and people who have not traveled do not have broad minds. Travel broadens the mind. If I don’t travel, then society/media/the man dictates that I am simply a dullard who hasn’t escaped the dominant social paradigm, but consuming travel could make a new exciting me with a broad mind. I’ve found when I have travelled that mind broadening is difficult to come by for a natural introvert, and that I’ve broadened my mind less by traveling than by spending the last four years writing regularly to my penpals overseas (ok, I admit I’ve visited them, and found traveling that much more rewarding for knowing people who lived locally, but then I would have just been a tourist without the previous four years of writing), or by reading. I’m reminded of the utter outrage I felt outside Westminster Abbey at the women who asked her traveling companion ‘What’s this building?’ and upon being told it was Westminster Abbey, her response was not to find out more, but rather ‘I may as well take a photo then – hold on, don’t take it until I’ve got my coat off, it makes me look fat’. And I thought ‘Fossil fuels are being extracted from the ground and combusted for THIS?’ So, how do I reconcile my desire to not destroy orangutans by flying to visit them with my desire to visit orangutans, with my feeling that unless I have visited them, I am not a worthy person, with my feeling that if I do visit them rather than watching a David Attenborough orangutan special that I’m somehow just being a consumer by wasting fossil fuels to see something that I can appreciate through TV? I don’t know. I suspect I don’t reconcile it in the same way that I don’t reconcile the need for meaningful work with having a career, or the expectation that if I work to live rather than living to work, there is apparently something wrong with me. Thanks go to JAFW for the emails that inspired this rant. 5 comments|post comment

They roused him with muffins [23 Jan 2008|04:15pm] I'm sick of the dentist performing money extractions on my wallet. At least I have now finished with the dentist for 2008. No more dentist till 2009! The last few weeks have been a bit unblogworthy really, I don’t know that my quiet weekends following departure of the many visitors really give me much to write about. I can't even talk about domesticity, because all I've done recently is pull weeds, because it's really not the right time of the year for planting, and before I can plant, I have to remove stones and weed matting, and if I do that too soon, I'll get mega quantities of weeds, which will lead to more potential lack-of-blogging about weeds. In the absence of other content I will write about movies recently seen - Shanghai Noon - it's a good film but not as funny the second time, particularly when you're getting frustrated by attempting to sew at the same time as watching, and Ice Princess - starring Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Cheerleader from Heroes, the film is a piece of Disney tween tosh. Physics geek studies the mechanics of ice skating as a means of getting a scholarship to Harvard, but then… surprise, surprise discovers she has natural talent, and has to overcome obstacles (misguided but well meaning mother, lack of money, competition from popular girl and her mother etc) to make it to the Ice skating regional semi-finals… Will she make it to the national championships? However, despite all that it was relatively enjoyable. Joan Cusack did a good job as the mother (Favourite line - 'I've made you a treat today - we're going to have pancakes with _white_ flour') and it's certainly a lot more entertaining than either Flashdance or Dirty Dancing, both of which were aimed at the same demographic in their time. post comment

What I did in my holidays by me [10 Jan 2008|01:36pm] [ mood | tired ] In the holidays my mother-in-law came to stay and we visited my parents and had christmas dinner and mince pies and cake and then we drove home. On Boxing day we went to the park and it rained. My sister and niece also came to stay and it was good and I enjoyed it. We went to the park and we played on the swings and then we played on the slide and the see-saw and then we went to the other play area and then we did paintings and we hung them on the stairs. We stayed up late and we watched Bob the Builder. In the holidays I also saw my friend Andrew because he was visiting from Auckland and we went walking to some hills and we took photos of cowpats. Then I was sad because my holiday was over and I had to go to work. 2 comments|post comment

Articulate! [11 Dec 2007|09:32pm] [ mood | chipper ] ...or should that be 'Inarticulate!' because I post this really with my tongue in my cheek, except for the part about the Single Entendres. I'm deadly serious about the Single Entendres. So anyway, I was playing Articulate with a bunch of people (this is the game where the person reading the clues can't use the word and everyone else has to guess words out loud until they get the right one) and noticed this tendency happening in the game for me to guess the correct word and have the person whose turn it was to read the clues completely and utterly not notice the fact I'd said the right word (or indeed any words) and then the game proceeded until someone else in our team said the same right word. Which meant our team lost, because the guessers tended not to repeat the word I'd already said even though the person whose turn it was to read the clues hadn't noticed. Anyway, game mechanics aside, this is going to be another self-focused blog post. (After all, what is blogging for, if not to talk about oneself…oh….ok… to talk about politics, movies and music… right…) I notice this tendency of people to ignore what I have to say until someone else says exactly the same thing 3 minutes later, and I wonder whether it is because I am quiet (can't be totally true because otherwise the other guessers in the articulate game wouldn't have noticed what I said, particularly given some of them were sitting further away) or (well, actually I don't have a decent alternative explanation that puts me in a good light, most of them involve me lacking in charisma and giving up and becoming cynical because of this tendency for people to not listen to me…hey, I've just explained a fair proportion of my lack of professional success! Hooray!) Yeah, so this has been happening to me since primary school, I remember one particularly outstanding incident at Sunday school where I ventured an opinion on a Bible story and got told that my opinion was stupid and no-one would do things that way, only to have Blonde Lydia (who was the sort of girl that if she punched you you'd get told off by the adults for standing in the way of her fist) venture exactly the same opinion five minutes later and get told how brilliant and insightful she was. Sigh. I'd ask for hints and tips, but like that Blackadder quote: 'To you Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people' I think that to me, charisma is just something that happens to other people. On another note entirely, I came up with an idea for a covers band called the Single Entendres, who do cover versions of songs with words they are supposed to have, rather than the words they actually do have. So for example, Def Leppard's 'Let's get Rocked' would be covered as 'Let's get Fvcked' and Generation X's 'Dancing with myself' would be covered as 'I'm (not sure whether I should be typing the m-word in a public forum such as livejournal, but I'm sure you're all clever enough to work out what the title of the song would be.)' 7 comments|post comment

Hunting for a book....Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency [06 Nov 2007|10:25am] I lent my 2 for the price of 1 edition of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency/Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams to someone, and I don't remember who or where it went. This is one of those obligatory appeals if anyone remembers or was the person who I loaned it to… could you let me know, so I know where it is? Thank you! post comment

The joys of ((It's) n(o)et)work(ing). [11 Oct 2007|02:39pm] More life lessons: It's normal to feel ambivalent about everything and just because I'm ambivalent doesn't mean there's something wrong with me that requires a large amount of self-improvement. OTOH I do feel like I lack social skills. Anyone got any tips on what happens after small talk? Somewhere between small talk and developing acquaintanceship I get stuck. 6 comments|post comment

Book Meme [25 Sep 2007|08:08pm] My turn to pick up the stick from off-black: 1.You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be? Having never read Fahrenheit 451, I had to refer to the Wikipedia entry, and I surmised this meant which book you memorise and get to pass on to future generations, rather than which book you would like to be, burned. I was tempted to go with 'Hop on Pop' (No, Pat, no, don't sit on that!) but I think I would rather be 'One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish'. I'm also tempted by 'The Sneetches and Other Stories', but although I like the Zax, I'm not so fond of the spooky pants, so I'll stick with 'One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish'. 2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Again, as off-black did, assuming from the context of the other questions that this is a literary character, almost undoubtedly. Yet nothing specific springs to mind. I can say, however, that I do not understand how anyone could possibly have a crush on Mr Rochester, but then I don't really like Jane Eyre at all, so that probably clouds my opinion. Wuthering Heights and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall were far better books. 3. The last book you bought is: The last book I bought new was so long ago as to be forgotten, so I will provide a list of purchases from the last book fair instead: The 1922 Oxford Big Book for Girls, The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears, I don't know how she does it by Alison Pearson, The Road to Memphis by Mildred D. Taylor, Emily Climbs by L. M Montgomery, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by E. L Konigsburg, Gretel at St. Brides by Mary K. Harris, The World's People and How They Live - A series of anthropology essays written in 1940-something for high school students, which seems to mostly focus on the world's people that live in western countries, e.g it has separate entries for New Zealanders, Australians and Canadians, but only one entry on the whole of Africa, but there you go. The next book I buy new will probably be 'The Pinhoe Egg' by Diana Wynne Jones if I can find a normal-sized paperback edition. 4. The last book you finished is: Prom Nights from Hell - A collection of short stories written by American teen authors about spooky prom nights that I borrowed from the library. 5. What are you currently reading? Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, Eating Fossil Fuels - Oil, Food and the coming crisis in Agriculture by Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Bait and Switch, The (futile) pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich, and far too much junk mail and daft community newspapers because we haven't put a 'No junk mail' sign on our letterbox yet. Also on my reading pile, but not yet started - An Ocean of Air – A Natural History of the Atmosphere by Gabrielle Walker, Monica Bloom by Nick Earls. 6. Five books you would take to a desert island: Rivals by Jilly Cooper. If I'm going to be stuck on a desert island I want some comfort reading. And this essay on AC/DC and Jilly Cooper might also help explain why. Shores of Darkness by Diana Norman. The rest of the Baroque cycle (The System of the World, the back half of the Confusion) by Neal Stephenson – I’m halfway through the Confusion, and as off-black noted in relation to a brief history of time, being on a desert island would make me finish it. One of those compendium editions of Chrestomanci Stories by Diana Wynne Jones, the one with Charmed Life and the Lives of Christopher Chant in it. Some sort of Asterix omnibus – Goscinny and Uderzo. Hmmm… not sure if those last two entries aren’t cheating, by being compendium editions, not to mention the half book at my third option…. 7. Who are you going to pass this stick to and why? JAFW because he reads interesting stuff. mcookies because I don't know what she reads but I bet it is interesting. bekitty because I miss her and want to hear more on her blog. Although a book meme probably doesn't really update life, so if she wants to she can ignore the meme and just update her blog lots :-) 6 comments|post comment

Sealing wax and string [19 Sep 2007|07:58pm] I went back to improv again last night. It was a lot better than the first time I went back*. We may or may not be doing a show in the Fringe festival last year, which I may or may not be involved in. I suspect not, because I don't know if I have the mental energy to be creative at the moment. We have some cool ideas for doing long-form improv (like Love, Possibly, but not) rather than scenes, so I may be tempted. Happiness tips: If you're feeling a bit blue, clear out the inbox in your cellphone. All the messages of how's the house, hope you're feeling better soon, is the cat settling in and would you like to meet for coffee etc collected over a few months make me really appreciate my friends. And my mother sends me these lovely random text messages pretty much every time she pots up a plant to go on the bank out the back of our house. I think our bank is going to be very full, and well retained with vegetation. The rumpus was great, and I had a fine time as Commander Switek. I still have chocolate, and DJ R's 80s set was great. I'd like to request some Tone Loc and also Aerosmith/Run DMC's Walk this Way for his next set. However, I should apologise to Fraser (who probably has a blog id but I don't know it) for being tired on the way home and phrasing 'is here ok to let you out?' as 'are you getting out here or not?' because it was 1am, which is past pumpkin-time for me at the moment. We will be having our house-warming on 13 October, when JAFW is in town. More details later when Morgan and I have actually organised something more than just the date. *some bloke I'd never met before accused me of having mad staring eyes and said that he wouldn't want to meet me in a nightclub holding a baby. All this within the first 30 seconds of meeting me. I know Monkey Shuttle once wrote a track called 'ethel_aardvark's eyes' at one stage, based on the idea my eyes were mad and staring, but telling me that within the first 30 second of meeting me seemed a bit extreme. The same guy then went on to do a slightly creepy solo scene involving him and a lot of women in a hot tub later on that night, so I suspect he was just a bit of a munter. 4 comments|post comment

So, did you watch the rugby? [10 Sep 2007|11:27am] Er…no, sorry, I didn't. 5 comments|post comment

Being Domestic [06 Sep 2007|10:15pm] Well, we've met one lot of neighbours so far - they gave us home-made marmalade and we had a long discussion about our respective cats. Still haven't met the other lot of neighbours - that's one of the things I'm planning to do this weekend, along with going swimming for the first time since the Thorndon pool closed its doors back in April. Also planning to - get a spade and some leather gloves and attempt to remove some of the gorse at the back of the house before it greens up again - get a bucket or something to put compost in - every time I throw a banana peel away I feel guilty. How utterly domestic. But then everyone should be composting and either discouraging gorse or encouraging natives to grow up from underneath it, so I guess it's only domestic where domestic means 'of the home or household'. But then we should all be composting in other locations, e.g. work and community too, and public gorse is as much of an issue as domestic gorse, if not more, because public land includes parks and reserves. However, cats should only be domestic, because feral cats are bad and eat native skinks and birds (Our cat probably does too, but I take them off her on the infrequent occasions I see her with them, and try to work out her hunting instincts with a laser pointer and a mouse-tied-to-a-string). Ok, I'll stop overanalysing now. One side effect of buying a house and being domestic appears to be that over the last month or so, I have managed not to buy my lunch (with consequent reduction in environmental impact of wasteful plastic packaging) except on days where I have arranged to meet other people for lunch (about 1 day a week). Toasted pita breads work well, as do crumpets. I'm also finding tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, vegetables and rice makes a tasty lunch. I seem to have an issue with hummus in that I only ever use about 1/2 of it before it goes bad, so I've given up on it. Anyone got any other suggestions? OK, now I sound completely domestic. Nerg. I'll have to start talking about TV and movies and going out of an evening: - I have been watching Judge and Jury's copy of Battlestar Galactica and it is good. - I have also been watching the most recent series of Doctor Who. It is not bad, but I hope it gets better. - Planet Earth (narrated by David Attenborough - I hear they redubbed the American version - horrors - is this true?) is replaying on Prime on Tuesday nights at 8:30. - I will be attending the Rumpus next weekend, which involves leaving the house in the evening. Hooray! 1 comment|post comment

A cup of sugar [29 Aug 2007|09:44pm] Meanwhile, does anyone have any tips on how you're supposed to meet your neighbours? I'm not sure that asking to borrow a cup of sugar isn't weird in this day and age.... :-F 6 comments|post comment

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