oj’s status update

I’ve been feeling disheartened with our recycling service since discovering that my county council ships (and sells) metal waste (and plastic? not sure) to China for recycling. The defense is that ships that bring goods to the UK from China would otherwise be returning empty.

But the goods in question are largely rubbish anyway. Even if they’re not complete rubbish, they still have a limited life-span. A large part of me just doesn’t want to condone the whole scheme, and I find myself chucking plastic wrappers in the general waste bin just to thumb my nose at the recycling policy. Sin of sins!!!

Since first thinking these dark thoughts, and experimenting with these reckless, devil-may-care acts of land-fillage, I’ve suddenly noticed just how much plastic we bring into our home. Now, I know this is not an original thought. But it’s been much on my mind lately.

I see a couple of categories of plastic consumption. There are the goods which we deliberately purchase for some purpose, some of which we could choose to buy in a material other than plastic (say, a dustpan and brush. Surely there are wooden-handled brushes out there… I’m not so sure about tin dustpans. But I would like a tin dustpan. I think it would be very satisfying to use.) Other items of course are harder to find in non-plastic materials. Like a laptop. Anyway, the second category is the slipstream of plastic that just comes with everything. Like a newspaper, or a selection of cheeses from the market, or even a bloody packet of tofu.

And it’s this last one that’s got me thinking. Tofu is not a great food. Soybeans are not easily digested unless fermented. Pulverised soybean with chalk added for textural integrity is not the best thing to put in your body.

So, I’m leaning to tempeh. But in keeping with my culture-loving (and plastic-hating) habits of late, I’m tempted to try making it. A little research indicates I will have to purchase the fungus to start it off (and possibly keep purchasing to carry on making the tempeh, unless I can find a way of perpetuating the culture. More research required).

Anyway, it’s gotta be worth a shot. The bought stuff is even more plastic-wrapped than tofu.

It’s nice to see there’s been traffic to my blog during my pox-inflicted inactivity. This is thanks partly to my blogging pal plumsource, who has linked to me from her family shenanigans blog, which is ripe with wit and lucious visuals, and a nice ‘city girl in the country’ thing.

There was also something about a ‘meme’ business… I’ve got to admit, there are areas of blogging life that just pass me by. Call me old-fashioned, but a meme to me is an idea or belief that spreads through the population according to how well it works. Like the idea that not spitting on the ground can help you be more socially successful. That one seems to have caught on pretty well (in this society. Still catching on in China).

Anyway, I digress (isn’t that the point?). Thanks for the link, or tag, or meme, plumsource. Hopefully my tag return will meme you some stat traffics. Or something.

Chicken Pox is not much fun when you’re a grown-up. I don’t think it’s much fun for kids either - Pip and Griff didn’t seem to be having a ball.

I am still picking off scabs (to admonishment from Pip) but generally back on my feet. It’s kind of a novelty having a short-term illness, especially a childhood one in adulthood. It never felt that serious, just inconvenient. Anyway, it was a nice chance to get a bit of sympathy… kind of.

Doctor: “Wow, you got it bad, didn’t you? So, how did you escape it as a child?”
Me: “Um… I was kept isolated from other children throughout my whole childhood? I don’t know!”

Me (putting down phone): Well - just found out my baby has chicken pox.
Colleague: Oh well, it could be worse.
Me: Gee, thanks!
Colleague: Well… it could.

But the prize goes to Mr H. Harold.

Me: Anyway, I’ve got the chicken pox.
Haroldo Harold: Oh, you tit!

Sixty-something male colleague commented:

“I was surprised when they started employing women in the energy sector… I mean - they haven’t really got the technical skills.”

A pregnant pause, then:

“What’s the connection on this new keyboard, is it a USB? It looks funny…”

“You need to take the PS-2 converter off”

“Ah yes, righto…” (much laughter from all present) “I think I’ll go and put the kettle on…”

Took Pip and his mate (L.) for a bit of skate park fun. They were thrilled to have the park to themselves so they could take turns pushing the tricycle up the little ramp and thinking about riding it down again…

They were a bit disconcerted when a couple of teenage boys turned up with a bmx. They took turns yelling “Go away, you two!” at them, and kept it up for a good few minutes until the bigger boys complied.

A while later, the swings beckoned. However, shortly after they’d started swinging, a couple of skaters turned up in the skate park and started skating around. Pip and L. started yelling out again, but this time got a little more creative with it:

Go away, you two!
Go away, you two!
Go away into the toilet!
Cut your arms off!
Cut your belly off!
Cut your nose off!
Throw a glass at you!
Put a car on you!
Put a real car on you and you bleed, and we don’t put any band-aids on you!
Put a truck on you!
Cut your poo off!
Cut your willy off!
Cut your big ears off!
Cut your boobies off!
Cut your back off!
Break up the skate park!
Break the skate park and take the fence away!

I wasn’t encouraging them… honest. Unless you count giggling uncontrollably, and the absence of active discouragement.

or: Who gives a flying click?

Is it just me, or is this a bit surreal? This is the complete transcript of a facebook ad:

Life is better in 3d

It’s free. It’s easy. Turn yourself into a 3d creation today. Express your unique personality with your friends.

Sounds like it should lead to a page advising that people turn off their computers and go outside… I haven’t clicked through to see what it’s advertising, and I don’t intend to (unless I let loose with a flying click whilst vainly trying to prove my intelligence by clicking on spinning asteroids in the ‘biggest brain’ game) because I know I’ll be disappointed.

I don’t know what possessed me. Perhaps I sensed that I had to do something pleasant and outdoorsy after spending an hour trying to kick-start an uncooperative CZ125 (in hindsight, I’m sure it was flooded after about the second minute. Anyway…..)

I spotted a flowering gorse, and was suddenly gripped by the desire to make gorse-flower wine. I’ve never tasted it; I wasn’t even sure I’d ever heard of it. So I ran inside to check whether such a thing existed. There wasn’t anything in the pocket edition of ‘Food for Free’ but there were plenty of references and a couple of recipes on t’internet.

5 pints of gorse flowers are required for a gallon of gorse wine. That’s 3 litres of flowers. It took about 90 minutes to gather the flowers off four different bushes. I’ve no idea how many hundreds of flowers that involved, but for each flower I picked, I was pricked at least once by the thorny bastard that is the gorse bush.

Once I’d gathered the first litre though, I stuck my nose in and was greeted by a sweet and heady aroma. A bit like walking past a honeysuckle bush on a summer’s evening, but milder. This delicious smell was my incentive to continue. I now have a gorse flower stew sitting, extruding in the fermenter. It smells incredible… in a few days I’ll add yeast and sugar to do their magic - and by the time I raise a glass in toast to the rugged, thorny bastard gorse bush, these prickles and invisible splinters will be a faint memory.

Hopefully the bird I scared out of the last gorse bush will have only a faint memory of Pip’s and my presence… just as I finished gathering, I glanced into the centre of the bush and saw a neat, round nest with 4 large-ish, blue eggs. I think it belongs to a blackbird, but I didn’t see the bird, and can’t find any egg descriptions in my 3 british bird books.

J came sleepily downstairs late last night; as I heard her approach I hastily shut down my computer and jokingly tried to pretend I hadn’t been sitting up late playing ‘who has the biggest brain’ on facebook. Which, of course, I had.

With a wry smile, she handed me a section of Saturday’s Guardian. I quote Pascal Wyse:

Chronanism: Watching a movie you already have the DVD of, just because it is on the telly; Googling ex-lovers; contemplating a cheese diary; starting a charity bag; experimenting with screensavers… The special collection of vague activities that gets you from 11pm (when you were totally ready for bed) to 1.30am.

We gazed up at the clock… of course it was exactly 1.30, which just proved her unspoken point that I am an inveterate timewaster and really should get a life (not to mention some sleep).

I have a wholesome excuse tonight, it is tomorrow’s sourdough loaf, due to come out of the oven any minute. 100% spelt flour this time, which is a first for me. Seems to be rising just nicely, perhaps it’s the addition of white flour that’s been holding my loaves back. Any sourdough experts out there care to comment…?

Isn’t it just amazing that we have flowers? (I know I sometimes sound like i’m on lsd, but honestly, I have seriously never touched the stuff). Not just that flowers exist, but that there’s almost infinite variety in their shape, colour, function, size, timing (seasonal and daily).

I have a vivid memory from my early childhood of watching a water lily open up to catch the emerging sunlight. Never seen anything like it since, and even at the time I wasn’t sure it could be real, a flower opening that quickly. But if it wasn’t real, why should I have perceived it?

Of course, it’s by no means limited to flowers. And it’s largely about sex… most evidently when all these birds and mammals put on elaborate, unweildy and incredibly impractical additions as soon as it’s springtime, in the hope of spreading their genes around. It’s usually the males, natch. How unlikely is it that there’s a whole genre of birds that construct scoopy-looking frames of grass and fill them with trinkets of a particular colour (peculiar to the species) in order to demonstrate their genetic superiority? I guess they’re saying “I have such strong genes that I can waste time finding bic pen lids to strew around my lovely bower”. And this message is understood by the lady bowerbird… unbelievable.

With this sort of incentive or competition, it makes sense that nature’s creations enlarge, brighten up and diversify in a way that no fractal screensaver could ever come close to.

… actually, I can’t figure out which way I see it.

It would seem that in being born, we have such an incredible opportunity to participate in (indulge in, contribute to, marvel at) whatever fragment we have the time and ability to access out of the whole spectrum of human cultural achievement, nature’s mind-boggling inflorescence, geological formations, the physical workings of clouds, plus whatever’s beyond the stratosphere if we have the means to magnify it… that we couldn’t possibly waste a moment on the mundane…

Or to look at it with the other eye, it’s so incredible to be born that anything else is a bonus, and you might as well waste an half an hour drinking Indian lager and watching Mondo Rock clips on YouTube.

At least it was only half an hour.

I haven’t completely worked out how ‘tags’ work in this blog. But I have chosen the following tags for this entry, and I think they make an elegant arrangement:

banal, mondo rock, youtube, lager, existence, clouds