some more photos

The view from the top of the track up the Bealey Spur.
From the railway tracks as we walked along, on Tuesday.
My father--as we sat at the top of the Bealey Spur, having lunch, sheltering from the rain and wind behind a tree.
Evening falls. From the Waimakariri riverbed, where I was having a stroll after dinner (you can basically walk out the motel door and be by the riverbed).

Here's some more pictures from Arthur's Pass; I got both films back today. I wasn't quite so happy with them as I could have been but some turned out really well.

I especially like the bottom one, I think. I love the Waimakariri river, it's beautiful. It braids its way down from the mountains across the plains to Christchurch, where I live. We get our water from it, and it is so pure that it doesn't need to be treated, after filtering through all the gravel on the way down. The best water in the world, in my opinion! No yucky chlorine taste. :)

Arthur's Pass

How's this for a view out your bedroom window in the morning? [Insert big plug for the Bealey Hotel here]
This was taken from halfway up the Bealey Spur track. Glorious views from the highest point, but I'll post photos of those when I get my film developed.
Castle Hill--hard to take a photo that shows just how big and cool this place is. It's very like the area where they filmed the battle scenes for the film Narnia, but on a much bigger scale. (Flock Hill, where they filmed Narnia, is actually very close to Castle Hill.)

Well, I'm back from Arthur's Pass! Had a great time, of course. We took both bikes up with us on the back of the car, which made us look very sporty, but we didn't actually end up using them...! :) Oh well, we did do a big walk yesterday, up Bealey Spur (see middle photo), and we did a lot of other little walks just as we saw something that interested us... ie we went up to Castle Hill (as shown in bottom photo), which I've driven past hundreds of times and never actually walked up to, or we walked down the railway lines for about three quarters of an hour on the way back. We stayed at the Bealey Hotel (which is really a motel, with the BEST views of any motel I've ever stayed in-see top photo).

I used my 'real' (ie film) camera most of the time, just as it's easier to use on the go; turn on-point-click-bang, whereas the digital is more like turn on-wait-wait-wait-point-click-wait-wait-wait-it's there. I also have a feeling my film camera is better with colour; my digital camera seems to make Arthur's Pass always look very brown and dull when there's much more colour in reality. So I have to wait for a couple of days while the film is developed before I can see most of my photos. I tried to take a few on the digital camera though... as you can see.

By the way, I went busking again on Saturday with Louise, and we made 1000% more money (=$10) in half the time! Yay for us. $10 still isn't loads but we've found a much better place now and if we play for longer, we'll make more easily.

Good Friday

Happy Easter, everyone. I like Easter; I guess mostly because it's a time when one can't help be reminded of what Jesus did for one... sometimes a pretty nice and timely thing to be reminded of. (Excuse my understatement.) We had a Good Friday service at my church this morning, a joint service with an Anglican church that's nearby us. It was really nice to do a bit more mixing with other denominations and get a taste of their format of things (eg we all said the Lord's Prayer out loud, which we hardly ever do at my church; that was lovely). Usually we do stuff with other Open Brethren churches and between you and me, I'm a bit sick of jokes about Pentecostals. :)

This afternoon I went to the beach with my aunty, uncle and grandmother. It's been a beautiful day here; I love April. We just wandered the length of Sumner beach, watched a few kite surfers, all the dogs, and everyone out enjoying the holiday.

As you can see, I tried taking a few photos of the kite surfers. I've never seen so many out before; there were about fifteen in all. I got a few photos of them flying through the air as they took jumps but none of them worked that great. I was really disappointed the photo of the little girl was so blurry. (That's why it's so small; hopefully it's clearer!) I might go back tomorrow or another fine day and try and get some more photos because there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on there.

On Sunday afternoon my dad and I are going off to Arthur's Pass for two nights. Arthur's Pass is our classic family holiday/day-trip destination. It's a national park, and one of the only ways to get from the east coast to the west coast. We're going to climb mountains and ride bikes... not so much a me thing but I always enjoy it, and at the very least feel a better person because of it. :) I made Dad promise we wouldn't be biking up or down mountains; I find mountain-biking so frightening and besides, I'd die of exhaustion before we'd been going five minutes.

provinicial chambers

Yesterday I went for a wander round the old Canterbury Provinicial Chambers - they're the old council buildings for Christchurch city, and I have never been into them before, despite spending my whole life in Christchurch. How weird is that. Because they are really cool, very old (well, old for New Zealand, anyway) and very pretty. I never had any idea, before, that you were allowed to go into them, but they're open every day, free admission. I had trouble taking photos because it was dim inside for the most part, so using the flash was too extreme, and not using it was not quite good enough. But here are some of the ones I liked, and I'll put more up later too.

P for pegs

Funny story for today: my sister was down here a few days ago for a conference, and she was telling me she has a policeman friend who is on the squad that trys to bust people in Auckland who make P (a type of methamphetamine, if you haven’t heard of it). He told her that a man who’d recently had his furniture stolen was flicking through the realty section in the paper and saw a house for sale, with photos in it of his stolen furniture! So he went to look at the house on its open day, and sure enough, it was his furniture. He also thought there were some slightly odd things about the house, and he rung the police to report robbery. The police raided the house and discovered a fully-functioning P lab. :) You’d have to be pretty stupid, really, to advertise your house with photos of all its stolen furniture.

She was telling me a lot more about this and it’s actually pretty sad how big a deal P is now. There’s actually an excess of it so its price is way down, meaning more and more people are going to get addicted. She said the police are only discovering a tiny fraction of the P labs around, and that a lot of them are these poor family homes with lots of kids around, growing up in a horribly unhealthy environment. On the other hand, people who are way up in society and business are just as likely to be P-smokers as the poorer people. My sister is a speech therapist and she says they really often get people coming into hospital with really grave illness due to P, it just can’t be proven exactly what the cause is. She said last week she had a fifteen year old and his thirty year old uncle come in with really bad strokes after they had both been smoking P in the uncle’s apartment—fifteen and thirty? That should be proof enough, methinks. It’s a disgusting drug. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for the dealers or despise them.

busking

Well, on Saturday, Louise and I went busking for the first time. I wouldn't call it an abysmal failure, quite. It did help in terms of finding the best spots to play in. Yet we finished with the fantastic sum of $1. Hardly a raging success!

Let me explain. We started off near the Art Centre, which is a very popular spot on the weekend with locals and tourists alike. Our license doesn't allow us to go actually into it, but we got a good spot on the edge... until a one-armed man with a performing dog came along and set up right next to us. (It's kind of comical when I think about it now...) We were pretty angry then, because we had got there first, and he came along with his little dog who sat on a skateboard and tooted a horn loudly, completely upstaging us! :) To be fair, I've seen him there before, so he probably views it as his spot. All the same, it wasn't very polite.

That was where we made our dollar, and then we moved because it just wasn't working, with this loud horn going off every ten seconds, battling our beautiful recorder duets that we'd worked on all that morning (and I must say they sounded fantastic--I didn't think we'd get anything quite that good). So we tried the City Mall, but all along there the sounds of bagpipes reverberated, very unhelpfully, and our recorders are no match for bagpipes. Then in the Square, there was some cultural concert on, with a big kapahaka group doing loud hakas and waiatas--all amplified, of course. So that didn't really work. Then we went to the Worcester Street bridge, but it was really really windy there, and our stand kept blowing over. So we decided to leave.

What's kinda funny is that parking cost $2. So we actually lost money. :)

We're definitely going back, a bit wiser about where to go, and when. We're planning to get there earlier, and get a spot on City Mall before any bagpipes players get a chance to get there, because that really was the best spot. And it, being sheltered, had the best acoustics for recorders, which don't carry well in the wind.

The recorder I've included a picture of is a Moeck 239, a wooden treble (or alto) recorder that I would love to get. One of the girls at music has one, and it's beautiful. (Only problem is it's $500 so yeah... I'm settling for a $75 Yamaha plastic one which at least is better than the only I have now.)

(By the way, have managed to post those photos that were giving me trouble on the last post.)

gates

Finally managed to get these photos up!

For your reading pleasure: here is a short thing I wrote a couple of years ago. Don't know why I'm putting it on my blog now... but here it is!

On Moving House

The worst part about open homes is not the tidying-up. It’s not the fact that you’re being kicked out unceremoniously for half an hour. It’s when you come back before it has finished and sit waiting outside in the car and watch people walking brazenly into your home as if it were just a house, wandering around checking out your wardrobe and flicking their eyes over your bookshelves, criticising your wallpaper and letting their kids play on your bars. You didn’t know that seeing it would make your stomach clench like this.

It makes you think about how much you love your house. There is something about it; you don’t know if it’s just because you’ve been there forever or if there really is something magical and safe and alive about it. And the memories flash through your mind like a slideshow. Fragmented orange light through the leaves of the hideaway; daisy chains in the long grass; red currant picking of a summer evening; tall, personable corn dominating the vegetables; hanging upside down off the bars with your head touching the grass; violets at the bottom of the garden; leaving gifts for the fairies under the piles of Halswell Quarry stone; plum blossom and daffodils; hot potatoes in tin foil and ash; tennis against the red brick wall; screams through the sprinkler.

And then there was the huddling around the fire with marshmallows; the candlelight games of Snap when the power failed; lying on your stomach gazing at the flames and feeling like you couldn’t be more comfortable if this was Buckingham Palace and you were the Queen; the sprints up the stairs in the freezing cold with two extra blankets; Mum’s lemon and honey drinks when you’re dying of a runny nose.

Still more images attack you, and you can’t get up, smile, and think about something else. Getting up at 6:00 on your birthday and groping around in the dark for your presents; waking up your teenage sister at 6:15 to say thank you; being sick and lying on the couch looking through the window at the mountain beech leaves and the patterns they make with the clouds and feeling like you’re the most special person in the world; the way you come down the stairs and open the door and are suddenly hit with the smell of the roast chicken or bacon or whatever it is that’s for dinner; the house full of people and noises and smells and laughter at Christmas; songs in the new-lounge with everyone playing a different kind of instrument or making do on a tin whistle; bookshelves exploding with every kind of book; your sisters and brothers coming home and you being so excited to see them come and so miserable when they leave; returning from holidays in the old blue van and the house being so pleasingly familiar and solid.

No house can ever compare. Suddenly it feels like leaving the house will be like betraying your best friend. You’ll drive past in the future and everything about the house will say, 'I’m not yours anymore. You have no right to look at me.' They’ll cut down the deformed silver birch that Dad annually mangled and install a second bathroom with tasteful wallpaper, or they’ll dig up the vegetable garden, filling it up with manageable concrete, and they’ll transform the kitchen into a symphony of stainless steel. You hope the dodgy gutter falls on their fat heads. You hope they freeze upstairs in winter. You hope the roof leaks on their beds. You hope the mice plague them.

You never want to leave.

the entrance to Hell

Scary picture huh? It's weird because in normal colour it's the prettiest little church door thing ever... but here it looks like the opening to Hell.

Yay for holidays! I am now officially on my mid-semester break, a wonderful three weeks of near-freedom... well, maybe not freedom exactly when I have an essay due first day back... but a lot less restrictions, anyway! I have no plans whatsoever at the moment. I might be going to Dunedin to visit my sister and her family, and a few friends I have there, but at this stage, probably not. Dad wants to go away to Arthur's Pass for a night which I admit would be great but it doesn't really tie in with my whole image of blobbing all holidays. :) I think I'll go with him if he does go, though. Arthur's Pass is the coolest place.

I had an odd dream last night that Colin Firth married my sister. Hmmm. It was very strange. We got to go to the premiere of one of his movies. Doesn't sound that odd, but in the dream everything felt very strange...

cellophane

I went for a walk this morning, taking my camera plus a few squares of multi-coloured cellophane... makes for quite a striking result, does it not? I'm not sure if I exactly like it but I think it's quite cool really... will post a few more later. I found the red cellophane made the hugest difference, whereas blue hardly none at all, and yellow and orange a little bit of difference. (The second photo is blue + red.)

Have been writing notes on Aleksandra Kollontai (Bolshevik feminist) for three or four hours; got so sick of it I went and photocopied the rest of the pages that were relevant. That's the problem with these huge biographies of people--there's too much information!

Bolshevik social policy 1917-1924

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you all about Bolshevik social policy. I just feel like it is coming out my eyeballs at the moment. I am feverishly researching for my essay because I would like to finish by the end of the week, when we have our mid-semester break for university. I have only gone through three books so far (aiming for six or seven) but it's such a soul-destroying operation it feels like I've been working on it for weeks, with hundreds of books. Yes, it is interesting. I just hate copying everything out into notes. Gah.

I'm not sure if I said anything about getting my buskers license before? Well, I have! My friend Louise and I are meeting up this Saturday to go through the music and then possibly going into town if we have time to busk. How exciting. :)

Hi Angie, thanks for visiting my blog--very nice to meet you! In what way are you making your career out of Jane Austen? (Cos that sounds really interesting/tempting!) I think I agree; right now Jane Austen is probably winning the war. But I really admire Bono too, and the rest of the band, especially the Edge.

Ta da da daaaa

Well. This weekend I have been indulging my list-making mania, and I present you with [insert drum roll here] the 2006 list of Allie's Favourite U2 songs!! I am planning to do this again next April and see how it changes. Reading this, I cannot help but see just how piteous my life is. :)

1. One
2. Walk On
3. In A Little While
4. All I Want Is You
5. Desire
6. Bad
7. Running to Standstill
8. One Tree Hill
9. Numb
10. Pride (In the Name of Love)
11. Yahweh
12. The Hands That Built America
13. Original of the Species
14. Where the Streets Have No Name (and this won the special Best Live song award)
15. Beautiful Day
16. Discotheque
17. 40
18. Until the End of the World
19. Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own
20. New Year's Day

And honourable mentions go to: Exit, Miss Sarajevo, Grace, With or Without You, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, New York, and Kite. It was actually very hard to decide all this and there's still some I'm not exactly sure on--but as a general idea, it works! The first six are very very close and I had real trouble separating them out.

I had a go at deciding what my favourite Jane Austen books are but wasn't quite so exciting because I already basically knew the order and there's not that many!

1. Persuasion
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Emma
4. Sense and Sensibility
5. Northanger Abbey
6. Mansfield Park

[Photo from Retro Toys]

I belong in Dublin

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions. You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Sighhh... I'd settle for any European city, if only I could actually GET there.

stained glass

I just realised I forgot to tell you how my second creative writing class disembowelling went. Actually pretty well! Everyone was really positive about it (even the moralising-reactionary-conservative guy) but at the same time, there were heaps of really helpful suggestions/comments -- and I mean really helpful. It was fantastic. And our teacher, Claire, was so helpful in giving me the major problem and what the story is missing. It was nice, because it seemed like none of it was critical in that the story was bad; it seemed rather like she was suggesting this stuff because the story was really good and it just needed something more to make it great. Which made me happy! I think her main question was, does Allie really know this character inside-out? This really got me thinking, because in writing this story I feel like I know the character and understand them more than anything I've ever written before, so obviously I need to find a way to let the reader in on this also. (It's funny, actually, that I should feel like I know the character so well, because he's about seventy years old and a male!)

This photo I took about half an hour ago, at a cafe near my house. It's an old vicarage that's been turned into a cafe, and it's so pretty. Unfortunately I only managed to take one photo because the battery suddenly went flat, and I'm not as pleased with this as I could be. :P I really need to check that battery more often! But luckily it's the sort of photo I can always try and take another time.

Having done my Linguistics test (which went amazingly well--I hope!), I've started research for my first History essay of the year. I'm answering the question How successful were the social policies of the Bolsheviks between October 1917 and 1926? So that's basically their policies etc on women and the family, education and literacy, and health. It is possibly also nationalities issues but I'm not sure; I'm going to have to check with the lecturer. I was surprised because the questions don't seem that much harder than last year, but I guess we're expected to go more in depth, because we have to write 2500 words this year rather than 1500. (Yay! I felt like cutting all those words off my essays in first-year was like killing my baby... slowly.)

meme??

Patty tagged me on her blog with a 'musical meme', whatever that is! I suppose I should do the smart thing, like her, and look it up on dictionary.com. Anyway it was very fun; I got out my iPod and put it on shuffle and this is the result! (I promise I did not engineer the large number of U2 songs that came up.)

The Rules: Go to your music player of choice & put it on shuffle. The song which pops up when you press play is the answer to that question!

1. How does the world see you? Out of Reach - Gabrielle
2. Will I have a happy life? The Unforgettable Fire – U2
3. What do my friends think of me? Pride (In the Name of Love) – U2
4. Do people secretly lust after me? Atomic - Blondie
5. How can I make myself happy? Think of Me (from The Phantom of the Opera)
6. What should I do with my life? Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own – U2
7. Will I ever have children? Rescue Me – Fontella Bass
8. What is some good advice for me? My Mistake – Split Enz
9. How will I be remembered? The Reluctant Cannibal – Flanders and Swann
10. What is my signature dancing song? Numb – U2
11. What do I think my current theme song is? A Heart Full of Love (from Les Miserables)
12. What does everyone else think my current theme song is? Breakdown – Jack Johnson
13. What song will play at my funeral? Mofo – U2
14. What type of men do you like? Inner Smile - Texas
15. What is my day going to be like? Don’t Dream It’s Over – Crowded House

I can't believe how relevant some of them are! It's amazing :) although I can't see Mofo ever being the sort of song you would play at a funeral! I think the funniest one there is number nine, definitely. Number three's pretty funny too. :) Number 10 was spot on--I love Numb and although I'd never actually thought it's my signature dancing song, it's definitely the sort of thing I'd dance to! So thanks, Patty! That was very fun.

My friend Sarah has left today, off to Samoa to do her DTS for 6 months, and possibly another year or so after that. It's very odd thinking about it; I hardly worked myself up about it so when I went to see her off at the airport it just didn't feel like she was leaving for that long. ... Interesting ...

[Photo at the top: cartoon version of the photo I posted a couple of weeks back, of my nephew Finlay. I like the original much better because the colours are so much more vivid but this is quite cute too.]

same old same old

Here's a couple more photos--another of Piha, and another from the airplane.

Am having a yucky day. I finally get to the point where I feel I've got over the worst of my cold and then I start getting headaches and feeling nauseous and panicking that I have meningitis or a brain tumour. I'm also feeling a bit of pressure having to catch up having missed a few classes last week, and having a test on Thursday. It's quite encouraging though; I've actually been studying for Linguistics, and you'd be amazed at the difference it makes. :) I actually know how to do some stuff now!

I got myself a busking license the other day! I'm very excited. Me and a friend from music are going to start busking quite regularly, we think. We'll have to learn up a few duets and then, Christchurch, beware, because we'll be on the streets every weekend. If we get a reasonable amount of money I probably won't have to get a job, which I would love!

I feel like I don't have much to talk about at the moment. It's a little depressing because I have to wonder if anything is happening to me, although I feel much busier and so on now that I'm back at university. Very odd.

secrets

Another photo from Piha, tweaked a little, obviously.

I would really really really like to send a card to PostSecret (the blog under my links to blogs) but I can't think of any secrets I have! I'm going to have to do some serious sitting-down-and-thinking. Actually, no I shouldn't--I should be studying for a linguistics test on Thursday... sighhh... Linguistics this year has been so much harder than last year, and requires about triple the amount of concentration. :P

I am handing in another piece of writing for my creative writing class to dismember today. It's part of a story I've been writing, but I just gave them the first half to look at or it would be a bit too long. I will report on how it goes! The idea this time is to write something, any way we want it, on a character. My character is an old male piano tuner. I quite like the story, actually, so I hope they don't demolish it too badly!

how Hamlet are you?

I've just been checking out the Jasper Fforde website (I've lately been really getting into his series on Thursday Next -- The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten), and discovered that you too can find out how much like Hamlet you are, by clicking Here. :)

party party party

Do you know, for some reason I have an irrational fear of the 21st birthday party. Not other people's, as a rule, but my own. I can't figure it out. It feels like it felt when I knew that someday, eventually, I would have to get my full driving license... which I got, with very little pain, in the end. I think it's just the idea that it's something you apparently have to do, that everyone else does, when turning 21, to me, seems so irrelevant. Obviously it's the big traditional coming-of-age thing in my culture, but it seems that by 21, you're allowed to do everything already and so there's nothing particularly liberating about becoming a 'proper adult'. It seems to me that 20 is more of a landmark because you're out of the teens. And you have to invite heaps of people, that's like one of The Unwritten Rules, so you get stuck with all these people you have to entertain that you don't necessarily know that well. It seems much cosier, to me, just to invite your really good friends and family for dinner or something--but then, because The Unwritten Rules say so, if you only do that, it seems slightly offensive for anyone whose name you know to be left out.
And then there's the whole speeches/etc thing. It just makes me feel uncomfortable to imagine that. As if I've put on a party to be all about me. The silly thing is I never feel other people put on parties to be all about them. But yeah...
Once I got my full license, I thought I would never worry about anything or have any spectres in my future until I got to my seventies and had to resit my driving license. How very wrong I was. :)

colds are GROSS

I hate colds. They are so disgusting. I think this is the worst one I've ever had cos I'm just so blocked up I can't even hear out of one of my ears. I feel miserable and cold (it's raining) and I want to lie on the couch at my old house drinking one of Mum's hot lemon and honey drinks and listening to classical music. Isn't it weird how one always knows exactly what one wants when one can't have it!

Here are some more photos from up north. The top I just took out of the airplane window. I tried taking quite a lot of photos from the planes but unfortunately on both flights most of the land was obscured by cloud--although I did get some cool cloudy ones too! This was taken as we flew over the hills near Kaikoura. The other two are from Piha, again, with my feet, again. :)

Recently, the father of a girl I knew at school died suddenly of a massive heart attack. He was in his early forties and very fit and healthy, so it was a complete shock. My friends and I were talking about it and one of them happened to say that they thought that was the worst way for someone to die, in terms of the effect on the family. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've come to the conclusion that it is evident she has never had to watch someone she loves die slowly. It makes me quite angry when people make these flip generalisations when they can't even fathom what it's like to be in either situation. Because there was some relief involved when my Mum actually died, they assume it's much easier to lose her than if it had been a complete shock. I'm not the sort of person who describes in graphic detail to my friends what it's like to see my mother slowly deteriorate so some of them just don't understand. I guess I don't really expect them to. But I do expect people not to assume they can understand just like that, and not to make things so simple, so black and white.

hello again

I'm back from my weekend in Auckland--had such a good time! I went up on Thursday afternoon and came back yesterday (Sunday). Went shopping, had fantastic food, went out to this amazing beach called Piha which is one of the big NZ surfing beaches (and the photos above are of that), and obviously saw my sister Felicity and her husband Mike. I managed to develop a bad cold which meant that the descent back into Christchurch on the plane was hellish--apparently a blocked nose means all this pressure builds up in your head. It was so painful and my ears blocked and wouldn't unblock at all for about two hours, and even then they weren't perfect. Yuck, I hate not being able to hear properly.

I really like Auckland. It's just that much bigger than my hometown to seem like a real city, yet it's not so huge it's inconvenient... although traffic is terrible and I don't think I could live there, it takes ages to get anywhere. But there are fantastic restaurants/food stalls/etc everywhere, and I tried Moroccan food for the first time ever, and it is so unbelievably good! I think it's a new favourite of mine. I also had some masala dosa, a southern Indian dish, from a stall in the Aotea markets. We had it in Malaysia and loved it so much, and Mum had it all the time when she was teaching at Hebron School in the Nilgiri Hills in India, but it doesn't seem to get sold much in Indian restaurants in NZ. So that was quite exciting!

I've got heaps of pictures, mainly of Piha and some out of the window of the plane, but I've just put three up for today. Piha (as demonstrated in the bottom photo) is a black sands beach; I think iron used to be mined from it. So quite striking really.

I've just been reading my friend Vicki's blog, which is on my links to blogs as 'Gapping in Kenya'. She and I have been penpals for ages. At the moment she is spending a gap year (or maybe less than a year, I'm not sure) in Mombasa in Kenya, but her home is in Guernsey, and she spent her childhood in East Africa with missionary parents, and she went to boarding school in England... :) Her blog is amazing, I can't believe some of the stuff that's happening to her. It makes all the stuff I write about seem quite irrelevant... :S

november

Well, there has been an announcement--U2 will probably be resuming their tour in November. Seven or eight whole months to wait! I'm relieved, though, that it seems they'll actually be coming at all. I've got that song, I think it's by Wyclef Jean, running through my head... the one that goes, I'll be gone till November, I'll be gone till November... I see you crying but girl I can't stay cos I'll be gone till November... Give a kiss to my mother

So I'm going to go up to Auckland this weekend anyway, just for a holiday, and to see Felicity and Mike. Hopefully that'll be nice and I won't spend much money. :S At least I am no longer in overdraft and in no danger of being so. I have even opened a savings account, with 4% interest, and I actually have a substantial (for me) amount of money in there! It's a miracle.

Jane and I realised that Sunday Bloody Sunday is actually a very apt song for the tragedy of the postponed tour. Example: I can't believe the news today / I can't close my eyes and make it go away / How long, how long till they sing this song? / How long, how lo-o-o-o-o-ng? :) All right, so we changed the words very slightly, but other than that, it works rather well.

If I was in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, my father would tell me that the postponement is going to build my character. I suppose it will, actually, because I am such an impatient person normally! There you go; every cloud has a silver lining.

I have watched both film versions of Pride and Prejudice in the last few weeks. I have to make myself ignore the book when I watch the newest one but it's growing on me in its own right. And I have to admit that Matthew Macfadyen isn't bad-looking anymore, but actually quite scrummy :) However, still he doesn't have quite the same feel of the character as Colin Firth did.

tedium

[a nephew of mine. I took this when I went down to Dunedin just before Christmas.]

To tell the truth, I don't know what to write in my blog today. That being the case, I should probably just ignore blogging until I have something to say, but actually I just feel like writing in my blog.

Nothing interesting has happened since Saturday and now it's Monday morning, I came earlier to uni than I need to so I could get a car park, and I'm bored. It's completely my own fault. I don't have a class till 1 o'clock (it is now 10:15am). I'm meeting someone at 11, which makes everything a bit better, but for all I know she'll need to run away very quickly. I have creative writing from 5-7pm this evening. Not so fantastic a day to look forward to really. Oh, but Katie and I are going to go and have Indian for dinner straight after Creative Writing, and Desperate Housewives is on TV tonight! :) Hooray for that.

Argh I'm so boring. :( I need a life. It's so depressing that my whole exciting weekend in Auckland is now postponed. There is a Navs camp on, but since I'm not in Auckland I'd really like to go to my friend Sarah's farewell on Saturday night--she's going to Samoa very soon for a longish period of time with YWAM. I'm going to miss her so much!

My friend Jane, another dejected U2 concert-goer, has suggested we randomly go somewhere like Hanmer or Dunedin this weekend... but I don't think it will work out. So maybe a few of us can get together on Friday night, play U2 music loudly, jump up and down and scream, and pretend that we're at the concert... Or, it could just be super-depressing :)

Oh flamingo. Just realised we're going to miss out on the St Patrick's Day concert now. That would have been so cool.

I need to get off here and stop complaining. See youuuu....

[Quote for today: Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. --Oscar Wilde]

gypsy fair

I went to put some flowers on my Mum's grave this morning and on the way back stopped at this 'gypsy fair' at one of the parks. The people who run the fair all live in these fantastic vans/trucks that have been converted into a kind of house truck. They're all beautifully painted and very very cool.

I must say it was a bit different from the usual 'fair' as such, though. Despite the hot dogs and Shetland ponies doing tricks and fire poi dancers and handcrafts on sale, I couldn't help noticing that they were also selling portraits of pagan religious stuff, those glass pipes you smoke P in, tarot card readings and so on... A little different perhaps! But mostly it was pretty cool. I felt a bit rude taking photos of everything, although I tried to swallow this, so I didn't get as many photos as I would have liked. But still, here are a couple.

beach

I went to the beach last night with my church's youth group; it was really nice but because it's getting darker earlier now I didn't manage to get many good photos. I hate how my camera won't take photos after it gets to a certain level of light. It still seemed quite light, and the moon was out and shining really brightly over the pier--but no, the spirit of my camera was uncooperative. However, I quite like some of these. The middle one is just looking back from the beach towards the setting sun, and the two others are just from walking along the pier and taking photos with the flash off.

originals

These are some photos Patty wanted to see--when she gets back from her vacation I suppose! I posted them in cartoon format a few days ago, so here are the originals.

Just heard on the news that it's rumoured The Edge's seven-year-old daughter has leukaemia. Gosh, how horrible. I feel kinda bad because when you think about it my response to the original news of the postponement was completely juvenile and lacking in perspective.

I have been watching a lot of Season 4 of Alias today (my one uni-free weekday); my friend has the DVD box set and she lent it to me. It's so good! Fantastic soundtrack (it even has a U2 song, Bad, at one point), just the same creepiness, and the characters are really cool, as usual. It's so bad, I'll watch one episode and go "ooh I have to watch one more!" because of some big cliffhanger at the end, and suddenly I've watched four in a row without realising it. :(

Later: just realised this is the 100th post on my blog! Yay!

the joy of having siblings

This is an email my sister Felicity, who is going to the U2 concert with me, forwarded me. It is a series of emails she and her husband Mike exchanged on hearing about the postponement.


-----Original Message-----
From: Felicity
Sent: Thursday, 9 March 2006 3:08 p.m.
To: Michael
Subject:

U2 postpones NZ concerts ......

***

From: Michael
Sent: Thursday, 9 March 2006 15:40
To: Felicity
Subject: RE:

Oh stink!

***

From: Felicity
Sent: Thursday, 9 March 2006 4:10 p.m.
To: Michael
Subject: RE:

Indeed. Am amazed we haven’t heard from allie yet.

***

From: Michael
Sent: Thursday, 9 March 2006 16:19
To: Felicity
Subject: RE:

Give it time. That it will come is one of the few certainties in this life.

---END OF EMAIL---

Har har.

flamingo!

Am so so so so SO upset. U2 have gone and postponed the rest of their tour. It was in ONE week, the concert I was going to, and I have been pretty delirious with excitement up till : NOW.
It's because of an illness in the immediate family of one of the band members. I'm trying to sympathise but it's really very hard right now. Do they realise the cost this is going to involve for hundreds of thousands of people? I'm probably going to lose my plane ticket and have to pay for another! Grrr. Flamingo. (Flamingo is my substitute swear word.)

It actually makes me quite angry. I mean, in 2001 they went ahead with the tour, on schedule, even though Bono's father DIED, for goodness' sake. I really hope they'll give us some more details or it'll be really hard to take. And I also really hope they give us the new dates very soon or it'll be impossible to change flight dates/times.

Me and a couple of friends are going to meet up tonight to have a crying party.

It just seems like EVERYTHING has gone wrong in buying these tickets. First, I bought them and had to sort out major issues because I used my brother's credit card and to pick the tickets up, I needed to be the credit card holder, and he lives in Malaysia. That took ages because they didn't reply to my emails. Then, I tried to arrange postage of the tickets and although I asked them to do this three times, it wasn't until the fourth time I rang that the ticket company actually posted them. Finally I thought nothing more could go wrong, and now THIS. Argh.

LATER:

Okay, I am feeling a lot better about this all. My friend Jane and I met up for a coffee and discussed this rationally and decided it's very unlikely that they'll cancel TEN concerts entirely. And I realised the reason I'm taking this so badly is that it was just so close. If they had postponed it back in January it wouldn't have been such a big deal. So I just need to be patient.

And, the nice news is, Air New Zealand have promised to transfer U2 concert-goers plane tickets for free.

But not-so-nice is the news that apparently one of their daughters is seriously ill. Which helps quite a lot to understand why they had to postpone. It's fair enough.

find your inner squirrel

(Above: yes, I am a little over-excited about the U2 concert. This is my standard practise whenever I make pikelets, although in this case they were banana pikelets.)

You too can find your inner squirrel, at Squirrel Name Generator! For Allie, I am Colonel Drunkenpaws, which I didn't think was quite dignified enough, so I tried again with my full name (Alison G___ S____) and got Princess Von Bushy.

Hmm. I suppose you could never really expect to have a really dignified squirrel name. I have a feeling Princess Von Bushy is as good as it gets.

Random information: on the radio this morning they had a competition where you text in your fantasy in order to win a prize. I expect they were meaning fantasy as in sordid details but I thought about it and realised my fantasy has always been for New Zealand to have a national day of mourning when I die. :) I think everyone fantasises a little bit about their death, and how everyone will realise what a genius they were, and canonise them, but it will be TOO LATE.

photo shop is fun

I've been having some fun tonight playing with the digital photo software that came with the camera I use. It's not amazingly great software and doesn't really have that many features but all the same it's fun just experimenting with photos and seeing how they look in sepia or black and white or as cartoons... These are some random ones that I thought turned out okay. My nephews, at Quail Island again, as a cartoon; some flowers in town as a cartoon; my little baby nephew who is just so cute, in sepia.

liberals and conservatives

Thanks for your comments on those posts, Patty! My sister and I had a big conversation about the whole 'conservative' label actually. She is doing a PhD in sociology/education sort of stuff and said something about how there's quite a lot of study done on how people use words like 'conservative' or 'moralising' to invalidate other people's positions--ie as shock words so their position/opinion remains unthreatened. It was pretty interesting that it's actually very unacademic to say such things now, according to these studies. I mean, usually it seems that it's all the 'academics' who shoot you down for saying anything vaguely conservative.

I'm a bit of a mongrel because there's some things I'm very conservative in and others that I'm a little bit liberal. By US standards I'm probably a liberal but by NZ standards a borderline conservative. I think liberals generally annoy me more than conservatives though!! And I just don't see how some things, such as abortion, can be so widely accepted by liberals as completely okay. They don't even want to admit there's anything morally niggly about abortion at all. The main reason I would see myself as liberal is because I believe it is more important to help the poorer people of the nation than to give huge tax bonuses to the filthy rich. It also makes me a little angry to see that the reason a lot of people in the Church vote from a right-wing stance is because of issues like civil unions and prostitution reform. I just think it's wrong that so often we Christians focus on all the 'don't do this' stuff, and ignore the more leftist ideals of helping the poor (in politics, anyway; I don't want to minimise all the amazing charity work done by Christian organisations). I have a moral problem with civil unions, yes, but I have more of a moral problem with the leader of the right-wingers saying that people on welfare are lazy, and that more money should go to the already wealthy.

U2 fever

I woke up this morning and it was the most beautiful feeling. Want to know why? :) I remembered that this time in two weeks I will be going up to Auckland. Then I remembered that in two weeks and one day I will be going to the U2 concert.

It suddenly feels very close. Like how it feels when it's two weeks before your tenth birthday and you now have a reasonable right to start counting down. I think I just find it so hard to believe I'll see them in the flesh, in 3-D. The only time I've ever seen anyone else who is actually famous in a worldwide way is when Bill Clinton drove past my school in 1999 (I'm convinced he smiled at me. Me alone. I was waving a sign saying 'ton'--the last piece of a sign my friends and I made that said Hel lo Mr Clin ton, on five bits of A4 paper). That was so thrilling and I don't even like him that much. I can actually see myself getting sick with excitement over this. :S Which I very much hope doesn't happen!

A friend diagnosed me with U2 fever before. She's got the same symptoms, apparently.

just a note

Plug time! Halfway Down The Stairs, the writing e-zine I am senior fiction editor for (haha, how grandiose that sounds), has just released its second issue, 'Wanderlust'. Do check it out. This time round we have a variety of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction. I have a short story in it called "Soundtrack Of My Life." I think it's got some fantastic stuff in it this time round that heaps of very different people would like. And if you're an aspiring writer too, we accept submissions--our next publication is in August, and the theme is Kaleidoscope, or Colour. (Kaleidoscope was easier because we all spell 'colour/color' different ways!) And if you submit a short story, I'll be the one who writes the acceptance/rejection email, and I promise I'll be nice, so don't be scared!

I return, wounded

This is a photo of my nephews, dancing to what must surely be the most annoying song ever recorded (Crazy Frog). It wasn't supposed to turn out blurry but I quite like it like that! I also like how it looks like they're jumping out of the cabinet, rather like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy out of the Wardrobe.

Well, I have submitted myself to the bruising critique of my Creative Writing classmates. It wasn't as bad as I thought it could be, at all! What a pleasant surprise. I already had some good vibes going from being one of the first to volunteer, and got a lot of leeway because we couldn't have a perfect view of how we were supposed to write it. So, in fact, that was a bonus. But I did get it wrong in that we were meant to enlarge it more from just straight dialogue into how you would normally write a short story.

The nice thing was that most people liked the dialogue a lot. My teacher wrote "What was at first a rather incoherent exchange becomes a lucid and intelligent conversation between a father and his daughter, a moment of bonding between them and of the father influencing the daughter with his beliefs. One has a sense of the connection between them, that they are friendly, that the daughter admires the father." And most people commented that it was very natural and unlaboured, that they liked how the characters came across so strongly despite it being only dialogue (especially the father), and that they liked the ending.

The main problem was obviously the lack of strong plot. I knew that would be what came up because I found it so hard to move from a conversation that was primarily about politics to an actual plot. Also I was unsure how far we were supposed to go in terms of changing the conversation. The most critical reading I got told me I was 'moralising'--which I suppose I was. But he also told me that the characters were a 'reactionary father and conservative daughter', which I dislike immensely, as I don't believe it's at all conservative to disagree with people insulting each other. I hate people who say that if you don't agree with something they want to do, you're old-fashioned or reactionary. I couldn't read much of his writing, he used silly terms like 'chronological inversion' (puh-lease, who knows what that means?), and he critiqued the original transcript, which I did not write, and this seems to me to go beyond the usual bounds of stupidity. Besides, he had silly hair. (I really hope he never reads this blog!) So I'm not going to take his more negative critique too seriously. :)

All in all, it was very helpful, although it's not like I'm going to use the dialogue for anything more serious that homework. It was a good exercise.

Hi Fraser Don, thanks for visiting my blog! Yes, I usually write way too much for essays etc, as you can probably tell from this blog--I just can't stop. How did you find second year Ling? What courses did you do? I'm quite disappointed I'm not having Kon for any classes this year. His anecdotes kept me sane. :)