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megpie71: 9th Doctor resting head against TARDIS with repeated *thunk* text (Default)
megpie71

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megpie71: Photo of sign reading "Those who throw objects at the crocodiles will be asked to retrieve them." (Crocodiles)
Monday, September 25th, 2017 08:33 am
1) It's a non-teaching week this week, which means my alarm is turned most definitely off and I am catching up on sleep. It's also cold and wet and rainy, to the point where when I was starting to write up my journal this morning I inadvertently started entering the month as "June".

2) I have managed to complete the AV presentation which was driving me bats, and now I have to concentrate on getting my poetry portfolio done. Which means I have to settle down and actually get into a poetry mindspace, which is somewhat akin to having an unstructured dose of therapy. Poetry involves rummaging around in the subconscious, and the problem with doing this for me is I keep finding things in there I don't remember putting there. Like discovering the reason I'm so keen on Final Fantasy VII as a fandom is because I actually empathise strongly with Cloud Strife's memory problems (because they're rather akin to the ones I have as a result of chronic depression).

3) I've done my vote in the Marriage Equality survey, and I think Steve dropped both of them off in the post-box on Friday. I voted "yes", of course, because quite frankly I cannot for the life of me see how allowing people who aren't heterosexual to marry is going to "damage marriage". The arguments of the "No" campaign appear to be mainly based around "think of the children" (I don't have any myself, and I'm thinking of the non-heterosexual and non-gender-binary children who might want to get married when they grow up); "it's against our religion" (well, nobody's saying you have to go out and get married to anyone); "marriage is about having children" (oh, does that mean my infertile friend is damaging the institution of marriage? How about my mother, who's past the age of reproduction and still married to my father?) and so on. None of their arguments really appear to be based on anything sensible, because let's face it, we can't point to a sensible argument against extending marriage to non-heterosexual people.

(Also, on the whole "freeze peach" side of things: if anyone who is busy screaming about how it's going to result in priests being forced to perform gay weddings against their wills and against religious canon can actually point to a single case of this having occurred anywhere in the world where non-heterosexual marriage is already permitted, then I'll start paying attention to this particular argument. But until then... it's a stupid argument).

4) I have a bunch of seedlings from my mother that I picked up on Saturday - Mum buys a bunch of seedlings every year to plant out in her vegetable garden, but the vege patch isn't really all that big, so she's usually got some over. So now she's giving them to me, and I'm going to be planting them out in my vegetable garden space. If the rain ever lets up for long enough for me to get it done. I will also be surrounding them with enough snail bait to hopefully keep the troops of snails we currently have decimating everything in the garden well away for a while.

5) We have received an invitation to come over for dinner tonight from my parents. My brother, in a fit of enthusiasm (and in the grip of a high-protein diet) decided since today is a public holiday (and he thus doesn't have to go in to work) he was going to barbecue an entire beef brisket. So he went and bought himself what looks like half a cow - seriously, the thing occupied about half the width of my parents' chest freezer. So they've invited myself and Steve over to help consume the wretched thing. I may wind up being given some leftovers to take home with me, which means cottage pie for dinner some time this week.
megpie71: 9th Doctor resting head against TARDIS with repeated *thunk* text (Default)
Monday, September 18th, 2017 08:11 am
There's lots of things I could be talking about here. I'm going to talk about the plants I've purchased for the garden.

Gardening under the fold )
megpie71: Avon standing in front of Zen's dome, caption "Confirmed" (confirmed)
Saturday, September 9th, 2017 10:14 am
This week has been a slightly better week than last week. Not heaps better, mostly because the two topics being covered in my two university units are an unfortunate conjunction which means I'm wading into uncomfortable psychological waters. On the one hand, my communications unit, Culture to Cultures, is currently covering the Indigenous History of the region, which means I'm dealing with a lot of racism which appears to me to be based largely on envy, viciousness, and free-floating stupidity (and the really depressing part is it's still going even today... *sigh*). The paladin part of my brain, the part which gets annoyed at unfairness and stupidity, and wants to ride out on a crusade to Fix The World (or at least stop me being so irritated by it), is getting twitchy. On the other hand, my writing unit, Introduction to Creative Writing, is dealing with poetry - which means I'm dipping into my subconscious and discovering things even I wasn't aware of - and not all of this is pleasant.

So there's that side of things. Thanks be to the gods our tutor for Creative Writing is placing a stipulation that we have to supply three poems, and two of them have to be from highly structured formats (which changes the whole game from "the psychological exploration inherent in finding your voice" to "the intellectual puzzle of fitting your idea into the right combination of lines, stanzas, words and metre". Gods know I'm far more comfortable with the latter than the former. I mean, yeah, sure being a writer means being vulnerable, and putting your Self on display. But I'd rather at least be picking and choosing the bits of Self I'm putting on display such that "underbelly" and "key shatter points" are not among them. Call it a reaction against too many years of bullying.

But studying poetry has made me want to read my old favourites, so I'm going searching for my Norton Anthology of Poetry again. Problem is, I don't know which of the various boxes of books in the storeroom it's packed in. So I'm having to unpack boxes of books again. Got one down off the shelf last night, and discovered it wasn't the one (I wasn't expecting it to be - this was a box sealed back in 2011, two moves ago). What I did discover were the last two volumes of the Belgariad (so I'll probably be re-reading that some time soon) as well as the whole Malloreon, Belgarath the Sorceror, and Polgara the Sorceress. Fortunately for me, I've cleared off my "farewell re-read" shelves recently (got rid of everything which has been sitting there for a year waiting for me to give it the farewell re-read, on the grounds of if I haven't done it by now, I ain't a-gonna do it), so there's space for the few books from this box that I might be interested in re-reading to be unpacked onto it, and I'll see about going through them over the next twelve months or so. The rest can go to one of the various op-shops around the area, once the donation bag (which is currently full of the last lot to be donated) is emptied out again.

As a bonus, the space in the storeroom the box used to be occupying is now available for something else to move into, which means there's the option of shuffling things around in the store-room so I can find the box wherein my Norton Anthology of Poetry resides, and retrieve it!
megpie71: 9th Doctor resting head against TARDIS with repeated *thunk* text (Default)
Saturday, August 5th, 2017 11:33 am
Short one this week. My main computer, Orac, is making hideous grinding noises each time I try to start him this morning (I suspect he needs to have his innards cleaned of any dust - a job I'd do myself if it weren't for the fact we don't have a fine enough Phillips head screwdriver in the house to be able to shift the screws of his casing). So I've put in requests with various tech groups to get the job done, and I'm waiting on one of them to get into contact with me. Which may, I suspect, not happen until Monday. (Minor update: Orac will be picked up by the nice person found through Nearby Nerds at around 12 - 12.30 today, and should be fixed up by Sunday. All to the good).

In the meantime I'm using my university notebook, Elfadunk. While Elfadunk is ideal for the things I purchased her for (taking notes, downloading university readings, being portable from home to uni and back again) she is less than ideal as a full-time machine. For one thing, she's only got a 32GB hard drive, which is mostly occupied at present with holding Windows 10 and MS Office, and can't handle much more than than that. While I can fit a semester's worth of notes and readings on her for two units, after the end of semester I have to clear things off to fit the next semester's batch of stuff on there.

So at present I'm letting Elfadunk fill in for Orac as much as she can (she is NOT a gaming machine in the least) while I wait for the nice young man who's going to fix up Orac to arrive.
megpie71: Impossibility established early takes the sting out of the rest of the obstacles (Impossibility)
Saturday, July 29th, 2017 09:55 am
Gearing up for the start of classes next week, which means this week I've been practicing getting up at 5am (mostly to find out whether I am going to be able to get up at 5am, or whether I'm going to have to shift things even earlier in the morning). Good news: I can get away with a 5am start on the mornings I have 8am classes (8am class means I need to be ready to leave the house by 7.30am). Bad news: by about October, I'm going to have to shift my wake-up time back to 4.30am, because I'm still working on extending my writing time each month, and I don't have too much to spare at present. Today I have plans to clear last semester's readings and work off my uni laptop, and make sure its battery is all charged up and ready to go, and then I'm all set to go.

So this week I'm going to get a bit political.

Ranting below the fold )

Okay, so, spleen vented. How's everyone else this week?
megpie71: Avon standing in front of Zen's dome, caption "Confirmed" (confirmed)
Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 09:47 am
Good grief, the inter-semester break is nearly over. It's O-week for the mid-year starting students next week (good reason to stay away from campus, in my opinion) and classes start again the following Monday. Back to the grind again...

I went down to campus on Thursday for a couple of reasons. One was meeting up with the wonderful [profile] princesskessie, the other was finding out where all my classes are being held (two of my classes are starting at 8am, the other two are starting at 9am, and quite honestly, I was less than enthused about the idea of trying to find a lecture theatre I've never been to before on a crowded campus at 7.45am in the morning in the pouring rain (it's winter here, plan for rain) when I'm only running on 1 cup of tea at best. Much easier to locate the classes ahead of time, and be able to pootle along there without too much stress.

I'm lucking out this semester - so far, no stairs for any of the classes I'm involved in. Might have to go up a couple of rows in the lecture theatres, but I suspect that's going to be easy enough. Which means my cranky knees (one of them doesn't like going up stairs, the other one isn't fond of going down them) will not have anything to annoy them this semester.

The jaw is healing up on schedule - I've finished the course of penicillin the dentist gave me to avoid infection, and I've also stopped needing to take Nurofen every day. Things are still a bit owie, but not seriously enough so that I'm needing pain relief.

I got back to the baking this week - I made a spicy fruit loaf on Thursday, and I've been working my way through that, as well as the fruit cake I made back before my dental misadventures. I also have plans to make up a batch of citrus poppyseed muffins, just to see how it all works out (if I'm really enthused, I might treat 'em with the lemon syrup from a different recipe as well). It's a good way of working through some of the lemons and limes I have in the fridge (they've been on special lately, so I've been buying them on the regular, in the hope it'll prompt me to make things with them. So now I just have to make the things!). The spicy fruit loaf was a "rub in" method cake, which showed me how little strength and stamina I had in my thumbs (when rubbing in butter hurts, it's a sign I need to do it more often. Time to start looking out scone recipes, I suspect).

Aside from that, and the housework, of course, I've not really been doing much. How's everyone else?
megpie71: AC Reno crouched over on the pavement, looking pained (Owie)
Saturday, July 15th, 2017 09:54 am
This week I had a tooth crack on me on Wednesday. This resulted in a trip down to the local government dental clinic "emergency" sessions at 8.15 in the morning on Thursday, and a third tooth extracted. I'm sitting here with a hole in my jaw which is throbbing at me, but recovering pretty much on schedule.

Gory dental details under the fold )

I feel inclined to send the dentist a thank-you card, and the hope the rest of her day's work wasn't anywhere near as frustrating.

I'm currently on a diet of soup, pasta, and other such mush until my jaw heals up enough that attempts to chew aren't interpreted as a direct assault on and by every tooth in my head. It's not actually the socket which hurts when I chew, it's the other teeth near the socket, all of which got jostled around in the process. Clenching my jaw is not likely to happen for at least another fortnight at this rate. I'm taking nurofen (ibuprofen) on a regular basis to deal with the pain (down from every four hours on Thursday to about every six hours today, I think) and hoping things will clear up soon. I'm also on a course of antibiotics (amoxicillin) to prevent any infection, so one of those three times daily, plus rinsing 4 times a day with warm salt water.

I trust I don't need to point out this is a good reason to keep up with brushing your teeth? Trust me, this stuff isn't fun.

Hopefully I'll wind up on their maintenance schedule, and I'll be able to see about things like replacements for the three teeth which have been removed so far (as well as maybe getting a bit of work done on my right-hand incisor, which is also gradually chipping away).
megpie71: Text: "My grip on reality's not too good at the best of times." (DrWho1)
Saturday, July 8th, 2017 09:34 am
So, week one of getting up at 5.30am, because I have to get into training for a 5am start during the semester (and it's easier for me to make a half-hour shift than it is to make a full hour shift) and I've managed the new wake-up time six days out of seven (I wound up sleeping in on Thursday because I'd just got too tired for a 5.30am start that morning). I'm also getting a fair bit of work done on the two main writing projects. I'm adding about 300 words a day to the large fanfic piece I'm working on, which isn't a huge amount, but is definitely better than the 0 words per day which was being added before I started working on it on a daily basis. In addition, I'm spending 5 minutes a day working on a plot outline for an original piece - I have a certain amount of stuff written for this already, and I figure what I want to do is get a workable plot outline done, so I can shove the whole thing into Scrivener and start writing the first draft. Again, there's a limit on what I can do at five minutes a day, but it's more than I was accomplishing before, when I wasn't working on it at all. More than zero words is good, in terms of progress.

The weather has been getting colder here, which means I've started baking again, mainly because putting on a cake to cook is a good way of heating up the house using the oven. The oven leaks heat like nobody's business through the base of the grill space, so having it on and the grill bay door open means the house gets warmed past the standard 1 - 2C difference from the external temperature. It can even get discernibly warm in there, if I have something like a fruitcake cooking and all the doors leading off the main area closed. Which is a bit of a plus. However it does mean we're having lots of cake sitting around needing to be eaten (I'm busy working through a boiled fruit cake I made on Sunday, and I made up a coffee cake yesterday, so that's going to be started next).

Also, for low-spoons (in terms of energy expended) cake making, I can recommend the Women's Weekly "Quick-Mix Cakes" cookbook - it's got heaps of recipes, and most of them are things like "one bowl cakes made with an electric mixer, blender or food processor", "melt and mix cakes" (melt together most ingredients in a saucepan, mix in flour and eggs once the melted stuff has cooled to the point where you're not going to cook the eggs straight away), "cake mix cakes with a twist", "rub in the butter to the flour" cakes and muffins, "beat it with a wooden spoon" mixtures and so on. All fairly simple, and there's also suggestions for decoration and recipes for icing up the back of the book. It's one of the generation of Women's Weekly cookbooks from before the point where they decided home cooking was effectively in competition with high-end restaurant chefs. It's basically arranged around the idea cooking is something you have to do on a regular basis to feed the family; it can be a bit of a chore; and quick, easy, simple recipes with a minimum of ingredients are more likely to be made than complicated show-pieces. The version of the cookbook I have is a reprint from back in 1999, which I picked up in one of those discount books pop-up stores, possibly while I was living in Canbrrra.

To be honest, I prefer these older-style cookbooks to the newer ones - mainly because at some point between about the mid-1990s and today, it seems like home cooking suddenly turned into this massive competitive wank-fest, requiring professional quality equipment and professional-level skills out of even the most everyday home cooks. Cooking for the family isn't just about getting a nutritious and/or filling meal on the plate any more, it's all about displaying your skill at plating things and creating an attractive display. Given I have all the artistic skill of a particularly isolated rock, this rather annoys me, because I cook food to be eaten, rather than looked at. The meals I cook are never going to look like the ones on the page. Meanwhile, the older cookbooks are more about a form of perfection achievable on a budget and without specialist equipment and training, which suits me far more.

Tonight we're heading out for dinner with Himself's parents, a much-delayed celebration of Himself's birthday back in early June. We're also going to count it as a slightly early 20th anniversary dinner (we officially got together at about the end of July 1997, so yeah, twenty years).

So that's where I am at the end of this week. How's everyone else?
megpie71: Simplified bishie Rufus Shinra says "Heee!" (Ha ha only serious)
Saturday, July 1st, 2017 02:38 pm
It's a wet, grey, miserable day with lots of rain falling. Perth winter, in other words (we appear to have had a long-delayed delivery of same). As those who have been reading along for the week know, my brain has been busy trying to make me depressed (not succeeding, fortunately, but managing to irritate me a fair degree with its efforts) and we had the washing machine break down on Tuesday (repaired the same day - I have nothing but praise for the repair person).

I managed to choose my classes for next semester (after much puzzling at the whole interface, which is possibly the least intuitive thing I've run across in years - it doesn't show potential classes for more than one subject at a time, which makes it very difficult to figure out whether you actually have a potential clash). This coming semester is going to involve visiting campus a lot more often (I managed to get everything down to two days last semester - this semester it's four) and a lot more early mornings. I have a one hour lecture on Tuesday at 9am, another on Wednesday at 8am, a two hour tutorial on Thursday starting at 8am, and another two hour tutorial on Friday with a 9am start. Given I've just bumped up my writing time each day to about 45 minutes total (30 minutes on my journal, 10 minutes on fanfic, and another 5 minutes working on original stuff with the beginning of the new month) I think I'm going to have to switch my waking up time to a bit earlier in the mornings on Wednesdays and Thursdays (maybe 5am or even 4.30am, depending on how long it's going to take me to get moving) so I can make it to classes on time. I don't want to drop the writing time, because I've worked so hard at building the habit of doing this writing in the mornings first thing, but I doubt I'd get anything done if I tried to schedule it in after finishing classes. I know the way my brain works with regard to that sort of thing.

The housework is starting to settle down into a bit of a routine (up to a point - the moment there's any disruption to said routine, my brain throws a tanty and sulks, but I'll work on that later). I have a system where I alternate thirty minutes of sitting in a chair noodling around the internet with a period of getting up and doing chores, and this seems to be very effective in getting things done.

So yeah, things are going pretty good this week, actually. How's everyone else?
megpie71: Kerr Avon quote: Don't philosophise at me you electronic moron; answer the question (don't philosophise)
Saturday, June 24th, 2017 09:07 am
I made a bit of a change to my routine this week - instead of staying in bed until I was ready to wake up on my own (which was about 8am, if not later) I set an alarm to get me out of bed at 6am. Why? Mainly because I was finding the 8am wake-up time meant I felt as though I was getting nothing accomplished in the day - I was having trouble getting dressed before 10am, having trouble getting the housework completed before my spoons ran out at about 2pm, and overall just feeling as though I wasn't getting anywhere. Since the switch to a 6am wake-up, I've been feeling much more positive about the amount of stuff I'm getting accomplished in the day (same amount as previously, it has to be said - I just feel more positive about it), particularly since I'm managing to get a certain amount of it done before 10am, and most of the housework completed prior to noon. My spoons still largely run out around 2pm, but I feel better able to manage things before then.

In the wake of the (much-delayed) delivery of an actual Perth Winter this week (cold, wet, grey, windy) I got all enthused and bought a new tarpaulin to cover our clothesline. The previous one had deteriorated to a set of holes, loosely held together by blue raffia, over the course of the past twelve months (well, a bit less than that, actually - maybe about ten months all up?), and it wasn't doing the necessary job of keeping the clothesline dry during rainy days. Given we don't have decent facilities for drying clothes inside the house on rainy days (we don't own a clothes dryer, and we can't afford to have a heater running all day in order to dry things off) we need the cover provided by a tarp over the clothesline. There are other reasons for the tarp as well - our clothesline is situated under the overhang of a neighbour's jacaranda tree, and jacarandas, while being lovely trees for the most part, drop leaves in late winter, purple blossoms in late spring, and are favourites of the local bird life all year round (who drop things I don't want on my nice clean laundry at all). So we pulled off the old one yesterday and lashed down the new one, and since I bought a good quality one which is UV-stable and has a 4-year warranty, it should hopefully work to keep things dry and clean for at least the next year or two.

What else happened this week? Oh, we got the renewal on the lease, which I have to print out so we can sign it and initial all the pages, before returning it to the real-estate people. So I'll probably do the printing out today, and we can get all the signing and initialling done over the course of the next couple of days and hand the wretched thing in on Monday.
megpie71: 9th Doctor resting head against TARDIS with repeated *thunk* text (Default)
Saturday, June 17th, 2017 11:03 am
This week the weather has been playing merry hob with my temperature sense at night. Early in the week I was throwing off the quilt in the middle of the night because I was overheating, and I wound up pulling the crocheted rug off the bed because it was just making the overheating worse. Then from Thursday onwards, I've been cold enough at night that I suspect I'm sleeping in the one position all night rather than lose heat (and consequently winding up with a strained shoulder and neck) - the crocheted rug is back on the bed, and I'm starting to consider whether bringing out the summer-weight quilt as well would be a useful move. Or I can give this a week and see whether our weather decides to flip back to comparatively warm nights.

A quick look at the weather forecast says it's possible we might get double-digit night time temperatures around Wednesday and Thursday next week, but single digits for the rest of the week (7 - 10C range for minima). Which, I think, means pretty much more of the same.

The house is cleaner than it was, and probably cleaner than it has been since about mid-March, really. I have free time, and lots of it, and I can now schedule things like cleaning the house as part of my daily routine without running out of spoons for other things. The dust doesn't know what hit it!

Aside from that, most of what I've been doing this week is noodling around on the internet reading things. I haven't even been playing games all that much, which is generally an indicator for me that I'm going through a bit of a depressive slump (which, yes, I am - reaction to not having the week full of uni stuff to deal with). I'm starting to get a bit better at dealing with things. I'm pulling out some old self-care habits, like alternating internet activity for thirty minutes with getting up and doing chores; something which made me more productive yesterday than I had been for most of the week. But it's all a work in progress.
megpie71: Simplified Bishie Sephiroth says "OMG I Luv You" (I love you)
Saturday, June 10th, 2017 10:37 am
Well, I finished editing the short story I needed to submit for my Introduction to Writing unit, and I submitted that on Tuesday (due day was Thursday, so I'm getting in ahead of deadlines, which is a nice habit to be building). Which means my study requirements for the first semester of 2017 are now officially complete, and I'm done.

The owner of our place came out on Wednesday to measure up the kitchen for new cabinets (from Ikea), and he also cleaned out the gutters while he was here. This involved a lot of rather wobbly work on top of a ladder, but at least we now have nice clean gutters which will hopefully not overflow onto the front verandah (front of house) or the bathroom window (rear of house) in the next heavy rainfall. Now all we need is the heavy rainfall to test things. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as though we're going to get one of those any time soon. Best bet this week is possibly Wednesday, which is offering a 40% chance of about 0.4mm of rain. It's looking to be a dry winter this year.

In the wake of having finished all my study, I'm currently in a bit of a quandary about what to be doing with myself. I've wound up re-starting Villagers and Heroes (a free MMORPG) in the hopes of being able to use up a bit of the Copious Free Time I currently find myself endowed with (the problem with being on the dole is you wind up with lots of time, but not really enough money to actually do anything with it), although I'm running into my typical problem with these things - I've done the initial stages enough times to find them boring, but I can't be arsed to continue past the boredom to the point where I get to the interesting stuff. I may well start allocating myself a set number of hours of work in V&H per day, just to keep myself going through the dull bits.

Now, before anyone starts suggesting things I could be doing with myself during my downtime, can I just point out I'm a grown woman, and I'm posting these things more as an observation of how things are than a request for help. My inter-semester downtime will be lasting until the end of July, which means I have about a month and a half before I'm going to be back at uni again (classes start again on July 31). Don't panic, I think I can figure out how to entertain myself. If nothing else, there's two shelves of books waiting on their farewell re-read, and another few boxes of books in the storeroom which need to be opened and culled. I have plenty of stuff I can do. What I don't have (due to brainweasels and similar) is the impetus to do any of it. My brain is currently in mopey teenager mode at me, saying I'm boooored, there's nothing to dooooo, and when I suggest anything, it makes it very clear to me I've done the equivalent of suggesting cleaning my bedroom. Given I'm fast reaching saturation point with the inner teenager, I suspect things are going to be picking up soon-ish.
megpie71: Avon looking unimpressed, caption "Bite Me" (Avon2)
Saturday, May 27th, 2017 12:05 pm
This week everything happened at once.

I've known for a while that I had an essay due, a rationale and reflection document due, a short story to write (1500 - 2000 words) and a rent inspection due at some point this month. This week, the uncertainty bubble surrounding the date of the inspection collapsed, and we discovered when it was going to happen: this coming Wednesday (it's due in May, Wednesday is the 31st of May, it apparently counts).

For those of you not ensnared in the morass of the Australian rental market, let me describe the joys of a rental inspection to you. Firstly, you get told the inspection is happening at some time on a given day - usually with about a week's notice. The current real estate agency are nice enough people - they narrow it down to "some time between 12pm and 5.30pm", which is positively generous. Before this happens, you need to have the property in a condition which would satisfy either your mother, or your mother-in-law (depending on who has the more rigid housekeeping standards - if neither of these qualify, pick your unfriendly local germophobe). You also need the gardens (if there are any) looking good as well - the local mowing places do a lot of good business out of people who have inspections due! So, once you have the property in pristine condition (including things like cleaning off light switches, wiping down walls and cleaning the oven) you wait for the property manager (if you're renting from a real-estate agency) or the owner (if you're renting directly) to come in and have a look over the place. Now, technically, they're not supposed to be judging you on your housekeeping standards - but we all know this is so much horse elbows, so yeah, they are. If it's a property manager, they come in and often (these days) take photos of the interior of the place, in order to prove you've left the walls where they were when you came in, and to prove the roof hasn't spontaneously fallen in or similar. This, of course, means they're usually taking photos of your goods and chattels as well. Anyway, they come in, do their walk through, make sure you haven't knocked the place down since they were last there, then breeze back out again after making a report for the owner. The whole business takes about fifteen minutes to half an hour tops, but it requires about a week's solid effort in preparation because the place needs to be pristine for them.

This happens every three months, by the way (four a year).

We had the tradesman come around to have a look at the kitchen cupboards on Friday at about 7.30 in the morning. He brought the owner with him, which I would have appreciated knowing about beforehand (while the house wasn't in "complete dog's breakfast" condition, it wasn't quite at "suitable for unknown strangers visiting" levels of cleanliness). Basically, the owner and the tradesman consulted with each other, and I suspect the outcome is going to be a replacement of at least some (if not all) of the kitchen benches. Now, when this will happen (and whether we'll be in the property when it does) is currently all up in the air - our lease expires on the 21st of July, and while I'm going to be talking to the property manager about getting another twelve months in the place nailed down, what may wind up happening is the owner might decide (in the interests of "not disrupting our lives", gods help us[1]) to give us our notice to quit at the end of this current lease, so he can get the tradies in to do things uninterrupted. Now, I don't know whether this is certain, probable or merely in the range of possibilities out there, but it's something I've added to the list of potential worries coming up.

I've mostly finished all the uni assessments - I finished off the editing of my major essay for one of my units this morning (it's been sitting there waiting to be done like an albatross around my neck for the last three or four days, but when I try to do it in the afternoon, my brain basically throws up an "Out of Spoons" error and refuses to parse the wretched thing). I just have the short story to write a first draft of (for workshopping purposes) by Tuesday. Which should be fun, right? But once I've submitted that short story (due the 1st of June) I've finished for the semester, and all I have to do after that is wait for my results.

Of course, this also means I have to go and speak to AtWork regarding Work for the Dole, since at present my university study qualifies as my Work for the Dole activity - and technically they have me on the books as needing to do Work for the Dole until about August or thereabouts. So I need to find out whether I'm going to be breaching my mutual obligation requirements if I don't immediately start doing something else (like picking up litter, sorting rags, washing bottles, or picking oakum) immediately the moment I've handed in this last assignment.

Still going on MFF, have deleted Avengers Academy from the tablet (since it wasn't going anywhere, and was crashing on a regular basis every time I tried to open it) and I'm getting very fond of Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which I've been playing for over a year now, and which hasn't crashed, glitched, or demanded money from me in all that time. Why can't there be more games like that?

[1] The logic here being that having renovations done around us would be disruptive. Which, yes, it would. But having to move out on short notice, and find another place to live in for the amount we can afford (preferably close to uni - that's the main qualifying feature of this place, by the way - it's close enough to the university that we can basically be there within 15 minutes of leaving the house) would be even more disruptive.
megpie71: Photo of sign reading "Those who throw objects at the crocodiles will be asked to retrieve them." (Crocodiles)
Saturday, May 20th, 2017 10:30 am
This week's fun thing was starting to play Möbius Final Fantasy on my tablet. I'd originally got interested reading about it on Steam, and tried downloading it for the PC, but got a message saying "this isn't available for your platform" (presumably the PC version doesn't work on Windows 10?). So I decided, sod this, I'll get it on the tablet instead.

Ramble/review of FFM beneath )

Other than that: winter continues apace - it started raining yesterday, and is forecast to keep raining for most of the next week or so. I've regained a lot of my spoons from the past few weeks - I'm back to cooking again, and I'm starting to get back into the routine of housework. Given we're forecast to have a rental inspection at some point this month, that's just as well, really. Oh, and one of the cabinet doors for the cupboard beneath the sink fell off - the weight of the door pulled the screws holding the upper hinge out of the wood they were anchored in. Given the doors have been falling out of alignment for a while now, to the point where closing them meant lifting them up and into position, I wasn't particularly surprised when it happened. Again, this place doesn't appear to have had any serious maintenance or non-urgent repair work done since my age was in single digits, so it's not surprising that when you put a couple of hefty doors onto a door-frame which is designed for something much lighter, the blasted things work themselves off in less than a year.

(For my non-Australian readers: welcome to the joys of renting in Australia, where asking the landlord for maintenance on the property can be essentially asking to find a new landlord - landlords evicting tenants for requesting maintenance is a known Thing here. Judging from the string of names - never the same name twice - we've noticed on the mail coming into the mailbox, it seems rather unlikely most tenants in this place stayed longer than about the standard six to twelve months of a fixed-term tenancy. Oh yes, that's another thing about renting in Australia - maximum fixed-term tenancy is twelve months at a stretch).

We're still continuing with the Caterpillar Cull, although the numbers are dropping somewhat. Their latest point of entry into the house is the bathroom, apparently through a finger-width gap in the skirting board down near the bathroom cabinet. Himself sprayed the area with surface spray yesterday, so we're going to see whether that works as a deterrent (it seems to, up to a point, in my room) and just keep picking them up and drowning 'em. These past couple of days, it's mostly been in the twenties per cull, so there's that. I've wound up buying a separate dustpan and brush set for the front verandah, so I can scrub the caterpillar guts off the existing one for inside the house.

We've also had the Red-Tailed Black Cockatoos coming by for their final shot at the under-ripe berries from the Cape Lilacs - which means the trees, which are starting to drop their leaves for winter, are starting to look just a tad bedraggled as a result. I hauled up a sucker from one of the front Cape Lilac trees earlier in the week, and I'm going to have to go and have a look around for any others.

Uni continues apace. I have one essay to finish, one five hundred word rationale and reflection to write, and a 1500 - 2000 word short story, personal essay, or feature article to write. The essay and the rationale/reflection are both due Monday week (29th of May), the short story is due the following week (8th of June). All of which is within my ability to do in the allotted time, so I'm not particularly worried about it. The more irritating item is being expected to find a feature article from a newspaper for my "Introduction to Writing" tutorial on Tuesday - mostly because I tend not to buy the newspaper on the grounds of it not being worth the money one spends on the wretched thing. Given the standard of Australian print journalism these days, I rather doubt there's going to be a feature article in the wretched thing anyway. Wonder whether my tutor would accept something from the online Grauniad - I know they do feature articles - quite a few of them, in fact.
megpie71: Unearthed skeleton, overlaid with phrase "What made you think I was nice?" (Bitch)
Saturday, May 13th, 2017 10:33 am
Yeah, I'm trying to do these weekly. We'll see how it lasts.

Winter is icumen in here in Western Australia - I woke up today to see fog in the valley heading down toward Berwick St, and the neighbours with the wood fire are starting to get some use out of it now the nights and mornings are getting chilly. My current level of rugging up: leggings under my jeans, jumper[1] over my long-sleeved t-shirt, and shoes and socks (I may dig out my ugg boots today, just for the fun of it; Saturday is "stay at home and play games" day, so I can dress the full slob if I want to).

I have a whole heap of stuff for uni I'm supposed to be working on at present (and this week's schedule was complicated by me needing to get to and start writing something I'd previously thought was due about two weeks later - discovered this on the Monday, had to have it in by Thursday). Fortunately for me, it was three five hundred word pieces, and I can do five hundred words in my sleep. So that's been submitted. The harder job for me was actually something where I have to do three hundred words plus/minus ten percent (so between 270 and 330 words) - in one case I was editing down something like 1000 words to 330, in another trying to knock things down from around the 500 word mark to the 300 word mark. What's worse, the brief for this second assignment only mentions a three hundred word minimum - it doesn't mention a maximum at all. So I wound up having to actually ask my tutor: okay, we have a minimum and no maximum stated; what is the unspoken maximum here? (And why they couldn't be bothered to just say: three hundred words, plus or minus ten percent?).

Things I learned this week: editing is hard mental work. I edited down three pieces to fit the word count, and I was exhausted by the end of it.

I'm still in recovery from the flu, but I managed to reclaim enough spoons yesterday to make cooking seem like a good idea. I have some Pumpkin Mulligatawny (basically, curried pumpkin soup, to which I plan to add rice and coconut milk) going in the slow cooker. I did a bit of preliminary work with the potato masher to get the veges broken up a bit, and I'm going to be running the stick blender through it in batches a bit later on.

The Great Caterpillar Cull continues, although it's dropped down to a mornings-only proceeding. Unfortunately, the wards appear to be breaking down, because I've started to find caterpillars coming back into my room again in the mornings (only one or two per day, but still... caterpillars). We're still getting over 30 caterpillars a day in the cull, and I suspect we're going to continue seeing those sorts of numbers for a long while yet.


[1] This is the Australian/British meaning of "jumper" - a knitted garment which covers the upper body; as distinct from a sweatshirt.
megpie71: a phone, ringing. (hardly working)
Saturday, May 6th, 2017 12:53 pm
Since I last wrote:

* I've spent about two weeks dealing with the flu and the after-effects of same.

* I've been going through a depressive patch (complete with mini-breakdown on Thursday).

* I haven't been eating well, due to said depressive patch (too tired to cook, which means a lot of meals for the past couple of weeks have been things like two minute noodles with chilli sauce, or tinned spaghetti with a bit of sriracha sauce, or similar.)

* I discovered going shopping while my depression!brain is in the middle of a "we don't deserve anything nice" kick is something of a vicious trip. It's surprisingly hard to buy convenience food (so I can have something vaguely nutritious I can just re-heat and eat when I'm feeling too damn tired and spoon-poor to cook) when my brain is basically looking at everything and going "you *know* how to make that, how dare you buy it ready-made? You should just buy the raw ingredients and cook it yourself!" (plus an additional metric half-ton of abuse, but I'll leave that out of things). Wound up getting four of whatever McCain's latest happy meal is and trying them.

* The new McCains steam meal Lean Cuisine things are okay, but the cooking instructions are a bit wonky for our microwave. The sauce container needs a minute less, the pasta/rice/vege container needs a minute more, and this seems to be pretty consistent across recipes.

* I have a heap of stuff for uni I'm supposed to have done already, and which I haven't done, and which I will be writing up pretty rapidly over the course of the next week or so (in order to have it done in time for the deadlines which are arriving in predictable fashion this month).

* The house looks like a hovel (okay, most of that is because it's a 1920s worker's cottage, and it hasn't had much serious maintenance since about the 1970s) mostly because I've been low on spoons and depressed.

* We've been dealing with a serious invasion of white cedar moth caterpillars (the side effects of having four Cape Lilac trees on the property), particularly in the room I'm using as my bedroom. One of the Cape Lilacs is about a metre away from the wall of my room, which means the underside of the house is the preferred daytime rest space for the caterpillars, and since this place is approximately as weather-tight as a sieve, they keep crawling into the house through gaps between the skirting board and the floorboards and similar. Plus there's the ones which crawl in from the front veranda under the front door (the door is poorly hung - it sticks at the top, while there's a gap below it the bugs can walk under on tiptoe), and the few which come in from the back garden and hit the rear hall and bathroom. So we've been spraying the house inside and out with surface spray (up under the weather-boards on the front of the house, down around the skirting boards in my room, across the threshold of the front door and so on) as well as doing a three-times daily "emu stalk" to collect up the caterpillars we find and dump them in a bucket, where I give 'em a dose of the poor man's pesticide (boiling water). One stalk in the morning, two at night (one just after dusk, one around 9.30pm, when I'm getting ready to go to bed). The numbers seem to be dropping - I didn't have any caterpillars in my room last night or this morning, so that's a good start. But it's another little aggravation in a series of them at a period where I could really do with a few less of same.

* I am learning some of the more irritating quirks of Windows 10 as an OS. Such as the apparent tendency for marketing to get in everywhere (why are there ads in the Windows Solitaire games, for gods sakes? Are they losing so much money on the OS that they can't afford to put them in there without ads any more?) and badger me about "whether I'd recommend this device to others?" and such.

* I've been binge-reading fanfic, to the point where I really need to start working on re-setting my sleep cycle so I'm not going to bed at ten and then reading until two in the morning.
megpie71: Simplified bishie Rufus Shinra glares and says "The Look says it all" (glare)
Wednesday, January 27th, 2016 06:53 am
Had a very poor night's sleep last night (had trouble going to sleep due to the heat; woke up during the night overheated and dehydrated, and couldn't get back to sleep for over an hour; got jolted awake again by leg cramps about a half an hour before my alarm was due to go off). I'm currently sitting here experiencing one of my warning signs for gastro-intestinal distress (burping up gas which sort of tastes like bacon as it passes over my tongue). I have an appointment with my Job Active provider at 9am (which I am NOT looking forward to, because they're about as useless as tits on a bull, and they're intended to be this useless as a point of government policy). Oh, and I got another letter in my email from the nice people at Moton Group "offering" me a "job", as well as two email letters from the latest iteration of the "LKT Company" scam (the company has changed its name and now calls itself "Nocturne", and refers to itself as "fast-growing", but the other particulars are pretty much the same).

The signs are not positive. Unfortunately my preferred remedy (going back to bed, pulling the sheet over my head and pretending today doesn't exist) is not available (see: appointment at 9am). So I'll need to head to plan B - bull through things.
megpie71: 9th Doctor resting head against TARDIS with repeated *thunk* text (thunk)
Thursday, December 31st, 2015 08:31 am
My partner wound up with an unexpected windfall. He spoke about it too often where our appliances could hear him. The washing machine has now sprung a leak somewhere in its innards.

Which I wouldn't mind so much, except there's two and a half loads of washing left to go, and neither of them are large enough that I'd be willing to trust them to a laundromat machine. I can't call my mother and ask to use her machine, because hers just sprang a leak earlier this week, while I suspect my partner would have Views about me asking his mother whether it would be okay for us to run them through her machine (of the "oh gods, anything but that" variety).

Either way, the earliest we're going to be able to get the wretched thing repaired is some time next year...

(I told him he was talking about that windfall too loudly and too often!).
megpie71: Text: "My grip on reality's not too good at the best of times." (reality)
Friday, January 16th, 2015 09:57 am
Just to bring people up to speed on what's happening in my life and what I've been up to.

The good news:

1) I have a new smartphone! I've been saving up for this for most of the last couple of years, and the Telstra shop had a fortuitous sale. My old mobile phone was a little Nokia handset which had been a bit dodgy from the word go - one of its little quirks was that whenever I used it for phone calls, the "6" key somehow kept being pressed. No, I don't know how. Either way, calls were constantly interrupted by beeping and at the end of the call I'd have a page of 6's to delete. Plus it only had text entry from the keypad, which meant it was slow and fiddly to use, and meant I didn't really get much use out of the non-phone functions.

My new phone is a Samsung Galaxy Trend, and it seems to be a lot closer to what I was actually wanting (which was a replacement for my old Palm m515 which could also make phone calls). Certainly it's far easier to use the calendar, note-taking and contacts features than it was on the Nokia. I don't think I'm likely to be using the web-based features of it all that much, though - while I'm at home, I'll use my computer for web browsing, and while I'm out, I'll either be driving, or if I'm on public transport, I'll be working on crochet.

2) I've started to work seriously on improving my performance as a housekeeper. I'm using a combination of Chorewars (to track what I've done, and how much I've "earned" for it - at a rate of 10c per chore) and Habit RPG (to keep up with the weekly and monthly chores and try to keep me up to a couple of daily targets). I'm trying to do 20 "chores" per day on weekdays, and 15 per day on weekends (which, at 10c per chore, means I'd be earning about $13 per week for the housework. Given that by setting my own pace previously I was averaging about $10 per 8 days, this means I'll be saving up for things off my wishlist a bit faster than I was before).

The not-so-good news:

1) Himself was home earlier in the week with a nasty cold/cough combination which I appear to have caught off him. Woke up this morning with a scratchy sore throat, and I'm feeling a bit flattened and dull. Hopefully it will burn through in the next couple of days. In the meantime, lots of peppermint tea, and maybe some lemon and honey later on. Oh, and lots of feeling very sorry for myself, always an essential part of being unwell.
megpie71: AC Tifa Lockheart looking at camera, very determined (Give me the chocolate & nobody dies)
Tuesday, December 9th, 2014 09:37 am
Since the beginning of November (or thereabouts) I've been undergoing one of my periodic mood downswings. Which is why things have dropped off somewhat. Essentially, I've been spending just about every day for the past forty days waking up, realising I'm not dead (and cursing when I realise this, because it's been a massive disappointment at times) and working my way through life as though I'm walking through chest-high treacle in a cold climate. On top of this, I've had an impromptu rent inspection (sprung on us with about 7 days verbal notice - the real-estate agent decided to take advantage of an opportunity and get a look at the place to make sure we're not destroying the joint) which has necessitated cleaning the place to inspection-ready standards, and also a minor meltdown over my partner hiring someone to get the windows done. Currently I have a knee-rug to assemble before Saturday (7x9, I have 4 of the 7 strips already joined up; I'm finishing assembling the final one of the remaining 3 this morning. Then it's just tidying up ends, which is long and fiddly and takes forever; joining them to the main rug; and making a border for the whole thing) as a Christmas present for my father-in-law, as well as a batch or two of biscuits for my mother-in-law.

Fortunately, I managed to beg off going to my parents' place for the evening meal on Christmas day (I've been doing a lot of therapy lately, which has stirred up one heck of a lot of unresolved anger at the 'rents) and will instead be just knocking it down to a quick trip to drop off their presents and pick up ours. But that means at least another two or three batches of biscuits to bake next week (in time for Christmas) to cover my parents, my brother, and my two nieces; not to mention a quick plunge into the joys of the local shopping mall at Christmas time in order to purchase something fancy to pack them all into.

All of this while, as mentioned previously, feeling as though I'm doing everything through chest-high treacle in the middle of winter.

To add to all of this, the depression makes me as irritable as all get-out, so I currently have a temper shorter than a wet cowpat, and a fuse which is best measured in micrometres. I've been taking care of myself by avoiding the political news and the political blogs as much as possible, as well as walking away from a lot of stuff that I'd otherwise be wading into.

So, that's why I've been fairly quiet (for me) this past month or so.