Getting close to nature...

Yesterday Freya & I drove up to Tracy's so Boog & Charley could play a bit, and we went for a walk up to the local park to feed the ducks. While they were feeding them I went to shelter from the wind by one of the bizarre concrete structures so I could phone Reb. Unfortunately a duck was perched on top of it, and it doused my hand with a big warm white splash of duck poo. My extremely authentic A & F jacket and my poor new phone were liberally spattered with it. Not happy! Fortunately there was a robot killer cyber loo nearby, so I managed to clean up fairly well. Bleugh I say.

The rest of the evening went much better, Freya had a great time playing with the other kids and cautiously playing with Nala the crazy kitten.

Fairly happy holidays

My mid year holidays are officially 3/4 over, and next week I'll be back at Mt Doom SC trying to learn those kids good. I had lots planned for these holidays, but there was one minor flaw in my plan... the biblical plagues which rained down on our heads as soon as the holidays dared to rear their heads. Freya had a cold for much of the first week, and there was a plague of conjunctivitis at creche, so she stayed home with me for most of the first week and on Monday this week. It took me a while to get back into the swing of full time Boogie wrangling, but we ended up having lots of fun. We went to the Dr a couple of times for various things and she was really well behaved. She ended up getting conjunctivitis anyway, but that has cleared up fairly quickly.



Freya is quite fond of the cats at the moment, and is always giving them nice cuddles. A few days ago she picked Grom up, which was rather cute, and one night Freya went to sleep with Grom curled up on her bed. Previously whenever Gromit went into her room Freya would yell "Grom! No!".

Today Freya had a marshmallow and she said "they're wonderfully squishy".

I've also managed to get a few things done around the place... gave the yards a good mowing and weed whack. and butchered pruned the citrus trees, hoping to get rid of the citrus gall wasps. Started to have a go at fixing up the old dressers that we have scrounged, and have been flogging off some unwanted items on ebay like our old clothes drier which never saw much use & isn't very eco-friendy. I've been putting some really junky stuff on freecycle as well.

Bought a new mobile phone a couple of weeks ago... it's an older model but still has a fairly good set of features. Nice to take photos of Freya with.

Exhumed my pig head one more time... all the soft tissue basically fell off. I was quite surprised to see that a spider was living in the skull cavity while it was underground, feeding on the wee bugs that were chowing down on the gooey tissue.



There have been a few big blowflies buzzing sluggishly around, probably thanks to my ghoulish experiments, so I have been chucking them into the spiderwebs. Evil Blackie the somethingth is quite lively, even though it's mid winter, and she is looking rather imposing.

Quick review 2: The Mist (movie)

I read The Mist once in 1990, and I have always thought it was a brilliant story, and would have loved to see it made into a good film. It's a great story, both as a scary science fiction / horror and as a thoughtful piece about human behaviour in extreme circumstances. I was quite excited to read that the story was being filmed, and even more so when the reviews came back very positive, although there was talk of a "shocking ending" which was obviously different to the novella's ambiguous one.

So, tonight (in celebration of the end of the semester) I brought the DVD home for some serious veging. I was impressed - it's a really faithful, and really good adaption of the novel. Every aspect of it - the claustrophobic nature of the situation, the disintegration of civilization in the face of a mysterious, apocalyptic event - was done perfectly. And then we get to the ending.

There are a couple of things wrong with the ending. It has been praised for being not a typical Hollywood ending, which is kinda stupid considering that Stephen King rarely writes Hollywood endings. While the novella's ending is ambiguous, the film's new ending is very bleak, which I am OK with, after all the movie is basically about the end of the world. I would have vomited blood it it was the kind of schmaltz that Spielberg wrecked War of the Worlds with. What annoyed me about that aspect of it is that it's a cheap cliche in horror movies. Oh, what a relief, the hero has made it to the end of the movie. Rooaar! The monster's little brother is hiding in the back seat and leaps at him. Roll credits. IT'S A CLICHE.

Why I hate the ending Part Deux (contains a big spoiler for the movie here). After the bleak ending, the mist is clearing, and the good old US army are restoring order and the American way of life. OMG, it was all for nought. They should have stayed in the supermarket all along, it wasn't really the end of the world. Bet you feel a bit silly now! There are two aspects of this I hate: that the whole premise of the movie is diminished is EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING. The second, huge, gag inducing one is that it STINKS, like a bloated maggotty dead water buffalo in a manure pit on a hot day, of being some post-September 11 American military propaganda exercise. Don't you worry about the end of the world, my fellow Americans. The military will save you. What seems like a tactless piece of propaganda diminishes the whole film. My advice is to press the stop button on the DVD just after they see the really big monster towards the end of the film. Then you will have seen the best of it which is pretty close to Stephen King's original story.

Quick review 1: Pushing Ice, by Alistair Reynolds

Oh that I could be like my erstwhile Nanowrimo writing buddy Filthy and vent my spleen in the most creatively offensive manner on the intarweb. Alas for me, and fortunately for you Gentle Reader, I can't quite carry that off, so here is the first of my somewhat cranky but nonetheless fairly polite reviews.

First, Pushing Ice, which is a book of the Science Fiction kind. Although it's a somewhat enjoyable read if you're into this genre, overall it is a sloppy, lazy piece of work. It feels like it was cobbled together - there's about 80% of a decent story in there, but it is marred by a whole lot of stupidly unbelievable character development (if that's the correct term) and gaping plot holes, especially relating to the motivations and actions of some of the alien races encountered in the story.

Although I enjoyed The Prefect, on the whole this is putting me off Alistair Reynolds.

Welcome to the House of Snot

We are all coughing and spluttering with some mid winter cooties and lurgi and stuff at the moment. Freya was a bit sick on Thursday, we thought it was pneumonic plague or perhaps dutch elm disease, so I took the day off to look after her. I needed to go to school to get some stuff (such as the answer sheet to the exam I will get around to marking shortly...) and Freya charmed everyone by being really quiet and hiding behind my legs. Once she had got the idea of talking to people she was better, when one of the other teachers popped in to talk to me she said "I'm Freya!".

Today we all have come down with the same sort of lurgi, and have taken it fairly easy, although I traipsed across half of Melbourne or perhaps Australia to pick up a funky wee bedside table for Freya's room that we got off ebay.

Glad that it's the shortest day this weekend... these dark mornings are a bit tedious.

Funny chick...

The other night I was walking down the hall and I pulled Freya's door closed, thinking she was asleep. "Hey!" she yelled, as the room went dark, "you just wrecked my room!"

Wisdom of Freya...

Conversations with Freya are a bit challenging at the moment... they tend to go along the lines of "you are the poo poo poohead, wee wee poo poo wee wee." Sometimes we get a haiku:

"Wee wee poo poo poo,
Poo poo wee wee poo poo poo,
Poo poo poo wee wee."

The other popular lines are "you're not my friend anymore" and "you're not coming to my party", which are also fairly charming!

Today she had a birthday party for one of the creche kids & went in full fairy regalia. A good time was had by all, but in the afternoon she was pretty wrecked and manic. We had a good conversation in the bath: "My butt is where poo comes out of." "What are your ears for?" I asked. "For getting earwigs out of them!" What is your mouth for? "Chewing!". What is your nose for? "Sniffing!" What are your eyes for? "Blinking!". Shortly after that we went to bed and she recited almost a whole storybook word-for-word, clever chick.