plasticwrap

Puzzle

I was driving along by the river today watching the water levels rise, and thinking how stupid it is to build a city around two rivers with no stop banks. We’d be screwed if we got a few days of heavy rain, there’d be flooding for sure. Another thing I learnt the other day while driving (or actually, while trying to start the car) is that if you park the car with the steering wheel turned a certain way, the key won’t turn in the ignition the next time you try to start the car. After a good ten minutes of futile jiggling, sweating, swearing and an increasingly-steamed-up windscreen, I admitted defeat tinged with desperation and called Dave, who advised me to turn the steering wheel slightly. I’d tried thumping the steering column and breathing into the lock (I thought it might be cold) but for some reason the steering wheel hadn’t occurred to me!

Things are weird with Deb now… I kind of feel like I have no excuse to be around her anymore – I can’t just drop by for a cuppa given that she is always busy with Leon etc – and yet I don’t want her to think I’m snobbing her. I always wind up with this dilemma: I don’t want to inflict my company on people who are just wishing I would go away, but I don’t want to offend people by having them think I don’t want to be around them. And I never know whether people are pissed off or offended!

I’m just watching the Simpson’s… gods I love the Simpson’s. Which brings me neatly into my next paragraph… does anyone out there have a video recorder and good TV reception? I am a bit of a Simpson’s nut and I can’t handle the thought of not being able to continue recording them, but now I’ve moved out of Deb and Keith’s I don’t have a video – or aerial! Can anyone out there commit to recording them for me? 7 – 7.30pm on TV3 Monday to Sunday, and an extra one, 7 – 8pm on Wednesdays. I am happy to pay for the tapes and stuff, but I’m just really desperate not to miss any more episodes, given that TV3 are fulfilling the noblest calling on Earth – broadcasting every Simpson’s episode ever made 

Man my house is chilly. I can see my breath! I think it’s the high ceilings that does it. The curtains are quite efficient and I keep the doors closed, but the ceilings are about one and a half times as high as usual ceilings.

Mel and I have worked out a really awesome system so that I can get online regularly. I get to come over with my laptop and use her phone line and take a shower with her hot water (too expensive to have that on at home), and in return I’ll do 45 minutes of housework a day while she’s at work. I figure it will save me about $45 a month by not having the phone and hot water on, and it means that Mel gets to come home to a tidy house each day, so we both win with negligible cost.

I was planning to post some cool pictures that I took of my new place and of the settler’s graveyard yesterday, but having managed to remember the camera I just realised I have the wrong cable, and no idea where the right cable is. Hmm. I might have left it at Deb’s, I’ll have to check.

I’m reading a biography called The Vermilion Gate by Aiping Mu at the moment, which got me thinking about naming conventions. Does anyone know, when the translation for a Chinese name is something like “Auspicious Cloud”, is that literally like me being called “White Wave” in English? Or are the words for proper-noun names like this distinct from the words for other verbs and nouns in some way, so it’s more equivalent to being called “Jennifer”, which mean “White Wave”? No one goes to the beach and comments on the jennifers, and I have yet to be nicknamed wavy, so I was wondering if the same was true in China.

I have a puzzle stencilled on my wall so I’m throwing open the floor for submissions… The following pattern is stencilled in a frieze around my living-room walls:
VI II
X V
It’s in purple paint and is repeated 27 times. It’s corroding my brain trying to come up with explanations for it, so any brilliant ideas? I’ve tried looking for secret passages, but to no avail.

Henry is driving me insane and so I have decided to start treating him like a cat, rather than a cat-flatmate. Ruby was a good flatmate, but Henry is just constantly demanding of affection and attention. I can’t sit down without him wanting to be on my knee. I can’t lie in bed without him ramming his face into mine. Every time I move, he’s under my feet. It was driving me to distraction. So I hardened my heart and have started putting him outside at night for about 12 hours. The first night I must have got up about 10 times to see if he was crying to be let in. Then when I couldn’t see him I was convinced he’d been hit by a car, or run away because he thought I didn’t like him… he sauntered back in around 9 looking for breakfast, and since then I’ve decided 7 months is plenty old enough to camp out in the back yard.

Posted by phreq at August 9, 2004 10:39 AM | TrackBack