A Postscript, A Meme, and an Etcetera

I have all sorts of stuff that I have to do by tonight at the latest (and it's tonight already). But I have dinner in the oven, and the house is quiet, so I'm blogging first. (So there!). The house wasn't quiet a little while ago. I was browning meatballs in a pan on the stove top, and set off the smoke detector. That's fairly easy to do because whoever installed it put it a little too close to the kitchen. With the old smoke detector, this just meant someone had to stand under it flapping a tea towel to keep the smoke away from it, and it stopped. Eventually the smoke would clear and you could stop flapping.
I didn't realise that we have a new alarm system. Now the smoke detector connects to the rest of the alarm system, all the time, not just when we are out of the house. So the alarm in the hallway was screeching and no amount of flapping would stop it. So, iIcalled my husband on his mobile. Unfortunately our phone is right by the alarm system. Actually, it could be fortunately, because at least I could go back and forth trying to follow his instructions. Which didn't seem to be working. Eventually I managed to get it to stop by pushing a lot of buttons in various orders. I'm still not sure what combination did the trick though. So I will have to be extra careful not to get remotely near to burning anything in future (not even heating oil until it is a little smoky). Now, I still have a little hearing left, and I have dealt with the etcetera, so onto other matters.

A Postscript
I wrote a story for Sunday Scribblings, because I didn't want to come over all earnest with my three wishes and wish for world peace, and I didn't want to reveal anything private either. But after some thought I realised the following three would do quite nicely. I'm really quite comfortably off, though not filthy rich - filthy rich being very rare in New Zealand - Bill Gates could easily afford to buy the whole country. And after all, we raised five children which soaks up quite a bit. Still, a lot of what I want, I could get, if I just knew what it was I wanted to go after. So:
1) Clarity - I want to be clear about what I really want, what would make me happy.
2) Courage, or is it confidence, to go after what I want when I'm clear about what it is.
And 3) Cash. Did I imply I had no material wants? I lied. Even if I could get most of what I want in time, with more cash I could get it quicker. So, around a hundred thousand to pay someone to fix up our house really nicely, and then another hundred thousand or so to invest, to give me some income towards what I want, when I know what it is, would be very welcome.

A Meme (Five Things)
This is from DebR, and I offered to be tagged, so here are my answers:

5 Items in my Fridge:
It was more interesting before my daughter left to go house-sitting for a few weeks, and took her kimchi and hot pepper paste with her:
1) A packet of anemone corms. Because you are supposed to chill them for a few weeks, then soak them in hot water, so that they germinate better. After two years in the fridge though, I suspect that they aren't going to germinate at all.
2) Lots of yoghurt
3) A jar of active dried yeast
4) Half a bottle of Barkers blues n berries dessert topping
5) Half a packet of apricot and rum flavoured cheese

5 Items in my Closet:
Clothes, of course. Fairly unremarkable clothes. But there are a lot of shelves in there, so things get put there when I don't know where else to put them
1) My wedding veil. I thought the dress was there too, but it's not. It must be in a cupboard somewhere else.
2) A bag of orienteering gear - the shoes, the gaiters, the special lightweit suit - which I wear occasionally, when I'm trying to look like a serious athlete or when I expect a hot day or lots of prickles on the course. Mostly I just wear regular pants, t-shirt, track shoes
3) A microscope, which my parents gave me for my twelfth birthday
4) A collection of violins, all sizes from sixteenth size up to full size.
5) Several boxes of old photos

5 Items in my Car
When I went to look, I couldn't find my car keys. For a bit, I thought that my keys might have been locked in the car. But they weren't.
1) A broken pedometer
2) A set of street maps of my city
3) A book of sixty different walks in and around my city
4) A spare pair of glasses, in case mine break when I'm an hour's drive out of town (they proved to be a bad buy, as the side hinge is very delicate)
5) A hawthorn leaf, autumn colours, that I picked up on a walk

5 Items in my Purse
Cluttered but not very interesting:
1) An engagement diary
2) A cellphone
3) A bunch of receipts, that I am shortly going to remove and enter into a spreadsheet
4) A booklet of stamps, letter rate
5) Four Bic ballpoint pens

Deb added five items in her desk. But my desk doesn't have drawers - it is just a top on a couple of cabinets full of books. So instead I am adding:
5 Books by my Bed
1) The Book of Loss by Julith Jedamus (a novel set in Heian Japan)
2) Fabric Journey: An Inside Look at the Quilts of Ruth McDowell
3) Escaping into the Open by Elizabeth Berg (on writing)
4) The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (the poems are coupled with very beautiful landscape photographs)
5) Gardening in the Dark, by Laura Kasischke (poems)

There is lots of potential for linking the above, but I've spent enough time on this already, so if you want to look for the books you will have to google, or search Amazon. The landscape poems are published by Craig Potton Publishing.