P365 - Day 158 cooking spaghetti

Me: Juniordwarf, have you been eating the spaghetti out of the pot while I wasn’t looking?

Him: No.

Me: Juniordwarf, have you been eating the spaghetti out of the pot?

Him: Yes . . .

P365 - Day 157 poor neglected eMac, I haven’t seen you for a while

I worked from home again today, with the intention of turning what I’d written down last week into a document that made some kind of sense.

This meant a shift from my cosy reading chair to my ergonomic OH&S-approved-by-work computer desk, upon which my 2003 eMac sits forlornly, after having been upstaged by my MacBook last year.

I got it as part of an insurance settlement following a power surge that wiped out most of the electric and electronic equipment in our house. It took several months, and many phone calls to the insurance company (and possibly a couple of letters of complaint as well), before the electrical repairer that the insurance company had seemingly picked out of the phone book because it was the first one listed in our area admitted that he actually couldn’t repair my poor old fried Mac Performa, and the insurance company agreed to get me a new computer.

I can’t remember exactly which model of Mac Performa I had, but 580CD rings a bell. If that’s the one, according to www.everymac.com, it

featured a 33 MHz 68LC040 processor, 5 MB or 8 MB of RAM, and either a 250 MB or 500 MB hard drive in a relatively-compact all-in-one case with a 14" color display. The Performa 580CD was sold in Canada, Asia and Australia, and was discontinued in February 1996.

Yep, five MB of RAM and a hard drive measured in megabytes. A 33MHz processor.

I may well laugh now, but it was the first computer I ever owned, and I loved it. I was shattered when it was fried.

The replacement eMac has an 80 GB hard drive and came with 128 MB of RAM. As you can imagine, I was pretty over the moon with it eight years ago, and couldn’t imagine how I’d ever need anywhere near 80 GB of memory.

That was before I got a digital camera, a digital camcorder and had a child.

Say no more.

I don’t remember the last time I actually used it, and it felt weird to be using a desktop Mac again. I’m now so used to the MacBook trackpad that I kept reaching for the non-existent trackpad on the keyboard. (I don’t do that at work, mainly I think because I mouse with my left hand, whereas I trackpad and mouse at home with my right hand, so I don’t get confused at work.)

Apart from the fact that it had been so long since I’d used it (maybe we had a power outage since then) that it had reset itself to 1 January 1970, everything else was working fine, and I got a good amount of work done today.

And I took a couple of photos.

These pics are edited in Camera+ and put together in another nifty little app called PicFrame, which lets you make picture montages on your phone in different sizes and layouts. I like it a lot except for an annoying habit it has, of whenever you try and move a picture around in its frame, the Rotate/Mirror menu keeps popping up.

Weekly Check-in #1

Remember my post a couple of weeks ago in which I made a commitment to myself to wash up and clear off my kitchen bench every night?

Well, it's not much good making that sort of commitment unless I have a way to keep myself honest, so I made myself a version of a star chart to keep track of whether I've actually been doing what I said I would.

And to keep myself more honest, because I made a public commitment to doing this, I've decided to have a weekly check-in post every Sunday night so I can celebrate my success (or admit my not-quite-success).

So, where am I up to?

Week 1: 5/5 possible stars. A good start.
Week 2: 4/7 possible stars. I didn't quite get there.

Next week's commitments
1. The kitchen task remains.
2. I will be in bed by 11.00 every night.

The reason for making this commitment is that I simply am not getting enough sleep. I'm run down and sick all the time and I need to rest. So I'll see if this makes a difference.

I'll be back next Sunday night to report on my progress.

P365 - Day 156 tread lightly

It was World Environment Day today, and the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens held its annual TreadLightly EnviroFest. 

Last year was the first time I attended, and I had a wonderful day exploring all of the stalls and activities, and listening to the speakers. I learnt a lot and I came away with a lot to think about.

This year was a bit different, and I went with Juniordwarf, Lil Sis and Mum. Despite the winter weather, we had a great time. Juniordwarf was very excited to be able to take his Aunt and his Nanna to show them his favourite place in the Gardens, the ‘Cold House’ (technically the Subantarctic Plant House, but it’s about four degrees (Celcius) in there, so his name is perfectly apt).

I caught some of the amazing Peter Cundall’s talk on growing vegetables in Tasmania.

This gentleman is an absolute inspiration. I remember seeing him on TV when I was much younger in the days of Gardening Tasmania, and used to watch him regularly when that show morphed into Gardening Australia.

I own a beautiful first edition copy of his Year Round Gardening book, published in 1985 (which I was able to find in a second hand bookstore after lusting after the copy held by the Library) and I enjoy reading his articles in Organic Gardener magazine. 

I missed most of what he actually said about growing veges (other than that cauliflowers need the trace element molybdenum and beetroot needs boron and that you should sow beetroot seeds yourself, not buy seedlings).

What really got my attention was the man himself. He is 84 years old, but you’d never know it. He said that there was nothing wrong with him at all and the last time he went to the doctor for an illness was over 40 years ago.

He puts his good health down to a healthy lifestyle – most specifically gardening, which is all the exercise he needs (he asks ‘did you ever see a happy jogger?’), and growing his own food. 

I compared myself to him. I lead a rather unhealthy, overweight, sedentary lifestyle, and rely almost solely on others for my food supply. This winter I’ve been constantly sick and have felt rather uninspired and, well, just bleh. Yet here was someone more than twice my age bursting with an energy and enthusiasm I can only dream about.

It certainly gave me something to think about, because I’ve noticed when I’ve made a real effort to improve my diet, such as focusing on fresh, non-processed ingredients and cutting out things like wheat, alcohol and coffee, it’s made a noticeable difference to how I’m feeling, my attitude and energy levels.

And that begs the question why haven’t I stuck with it, if it’s made me feel that much better. I don’t know the answer to that and it’s something I intend to work on.

But that aside, back to the Festival, the other speaker I saw was Paul Healy, who writes about sustainable gardening and raising chickens in the Mercury's Saturday Magazine. He breeds Barnevelder poultry, and he brought a couple of these beautiful birds with him to the Festival. Juniordwarf was a bit wary of them, so we didn’t get too close, even though they are apparently a very placid bird.

Last year I listened to all of Paul’s talk on sustainable gardening and other issues around food and the environment, and got a lot out of it. This year I only heard a bit of what he had to say, but that was still interesting.

He was talking about the principle of feeding the soil, rather than feeding the plant. He said that if you feed the plant, you are forcing it to take in everything you give it, regardless of what it actually needs whereas if you feed the soil, the plant will take what it needs and leave what it doesn’t need. He said plants have a sort of intelligence in the sense that they ‘know’ what they need.

I’ve heard a lot of people say to feed the soil. I never really knew why, but this made perfect sense.

Paul referred to a book called The Living Soil, by Lady Balfour, published in 1943, which he says is the soil ‘bible’ and should be your first port of call for more information about this type of gardening. It is out of print, but the State Library has a reference copy.

The other thing I didn’t get to find out as much as I’d have liked to today is Peak Oil,  which is an issue that doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention in the climate change debate, where everyone seems to be focused on the proposed carbon tax.

It’s an issue that really frightens me when I think about the implications, but I won’t go there today – it’s a whole other blog post, or more. I might even rant a bit. I don’t think I’ve done a ranty blog post yet.

In the mean time, I think it’s time to use the inspiration from today to actually do something. 

P365 - Day 155 scrapping with the wheat paper

It’s been two weeks since I went to the 12 layouts in five hours scrapbooking class.

In that time I’ve finished five pages. Today I finished my sixth.

I did a lot of the layout at the scrapbooking night at our local scrapbooking shop last night and just put the finished touches on it today.

A feature of this layout is that I used some paper that has become a bit of a running joke at scrapbooking, fondly referred to as the ‘wheat paper’, because it predominantly features, well, what else but wheat. 

Until last night, no one has wanted to use it, and we were staring to suspect that D, the shop owner was trying to foist it off onto anyone for any project just to get rid of it.

It’s almost as big a joke as the running joke about me and stitching on layouts, but we’ll leave that for another day.

For the record, the wheat paper is part of the Creative Imaginations John Deere collection. One side is wheat and the other side (which I used in the journal block) is a lighter version of the wheat image, with a green John Deere tractor on the bottom.

P365 - Day 154 a bus ride (3/6/2011)

Some background:

Today's the first day of Juniordwarf's school holidays and it was my mother's day to look after him.

Lil Sis is in town this weekend to do some stuff with Mum. She flew in this morning, and she was very excited to be spending the day with Juniordwarf as well.  They decided to take Juniordwarf on a tour on one of the double decker tourist buses that operate around town.

And so to the story of today's photo, best explained by a series of text messages between me and Lil Sis, that started when I went out at lunch time.

Me: Hey, where you at?

Her: Outside your work

Me (looking around and not seeing them anywhere nearby): Where? So am I.

Her: We're going on the double decker bus tour.

Me (still none the wiser, thinking the bus might stop at the normal bus stop, but not seeing them there either): I'm going for lunch. Where's the bus stop?

Her: Opposite the pub.

Me (after finally figuring out where they are, and heading off in that direction): I can see you.

By the time I got there, the bus had started to move off, so I was standing at the side of the road, frantically waving at them, which probably entertained the lunchtime diners at the pub across the road, and I just managed to take a picture before the bus drove off.

You can just see them sitting up the front.

See them?

P365 - Day 153 going out for dinner

Neither of us felt like cooking dinner tonight, so we treated ourselves to a rare night out and went to the pub for dinner.

The Bush Inn, apparently Australia's oldest
continuously licensed hotel