Who Says Poetry Doesn't Pay?

According to this newspaper story, a Washington College graduate won a $US67,000 prize for her poem about New Zealand's Franz Josef glacier. (You can read it if you click on the link).

Actually, reading the story carefully, I think they may have it wrong. It seems to me that she actually won the award for a portfolio of work, not just one poem. But either way, it's more than most poets will receive for their efforts in a lifetime.

Autumn Inspirations

At one stage I was trying to publish a daily photo. It got too boring, as some days I had little opportunity to find new things to photograph, given that I leave home just after light in winter and come back at dusk, always by the same route.
I'm sure though, that I can manage a photo expedition once a week or so.

On Mondays I switch jobs at lunchtime, which gives me the perfect opportunity to stop somewhere interesting on the way and snap a few shots.

It's almost too late to be taking autumn photos. I've never figured out the best time, because some trees are still stubbornly clinging to their green, while others are completely bare.

This is the Avon River, near the Christchurch Botanic Gardens (although we are never very far from a river anywhere in Christchurch)



and this is the Antigua Boatsheds, much featured on calendars. Tourists have been hiring canoes from here since the late 1800s.

You Don't Know How Lucky You Are

A few days ago the price of petrol went up - again - and our local newspaper published a list of prices from different countries.

In NZ dollars per litre (I have no idea how that works out as US dollars per gallon, but I assume the conversion is accurate):

United States $1.33
Australia $1.80
New Zealand $1.94
Britain $2.84
Netherlands $3.23

I will admit that Europe probably has much better public transport than the United States. But it is interesting that most of the complaints I've seen on blogs about high fuel prices come from the US. The Brits don't seem to complain about it at all.

Edited to add:
Maybe I should have converted those figures to prices per gallon. One US gallon is 3.78454 litres so by my calculations, taking the exchange rate into account , it comes out at $1.28 per litre in NZ dollars. A little lower than I said. And since our price has gone up nearly 10 cents a litre in the last week, we are now at $1.97 a litre for regular, over $2.00 for high octane.
I do realise that many Americans have to commute long distances with no suitable public transport, the whole lifestyle is built around cheap fuel. On the other hand, salaries are quite a lot higher in the USA or Australia (or just about anywhere) than in New Zealand.

(End of edit).

I'm trying (without a lot of success) to get up early enough to take photos before I leave for work, the light is lovely at this time of year. This is down by the river, I'm hoping to get back on a colder morning. When it is frosty, the mist rises from the river and the early sun shines through.

On Not Blogging

I feel as if I'm getting my life in order - more or less.

By keeping a household task or two in mind, I get them done as soon as I get home from work, which keeps things more or less under control. You just have to remember, as the late Peg Bracken once said, not to start in the same place every time.

(And if you want more handy housekeeping hints, she also said "If it's loose, pick it up, if it's not, dust it, if it moves, feed it")

Somehow my one or two daily tasks, as well as eating dinner, and keeping up with a favourite TV show or two (usually while I do the ironing at the same time) seems to fill my evening.

So now all I have to figure out is how to find time to keep blogging, writing poems, and giving myself the occasional treat outing.

I did get some more of the quilt done over the weekend. It's flagging a bit though, as I desperately want more fabrics. I think I need to reconnect with the quilt group I used to belong to, and find some other quilters to swap fabrics with. It wouldn't do my budget much good to get too carried away in the fabric stores (besides, the fabric stores here suck).

I also had a very pleasant evening on Sunday, as my eldest daughter invited us for dinner - presumably in honour of Mother's Day. And my middle daughter phoned from Wellington.

That's about the sum of the excitement around here at the moment.

I had hoped to have a poem ready for readwritepoem, but I'm running late. We'll see if I manage it before the end of the week.

Getting Reacquainted

Well, I set myself goals for the year, and promptly lost interest in them. I'm not beating myself up about it. I realised that I have certain obligations, and I don't need to make further obligations out of activities that I choose for myself.

I've been working full time for over a year and contributing a large part of the family budget. While I don't do so much of the meal preparation any more, I do most of the housework (as much as any housework gets done, that is) and I do all the laundry. I have commitments to the administration of Takahe magazine.

As for the family history, poetry, orienteering etc, I do it because I want to. And if I don't, I don't have to.

Here is what I am up to at the moment instead of pursuing the goals I announced earlier:



You can see my sewing machine manual on the left hand side of the photo, because it was so long since I had used the machine, I found I had forgotten how to turn it on. (In my defense, it was a fairly new sewing machine when I last used it. I can still remember how to turn my old machine on, the one I had for twenty years or more).

I also couldn't find the switch for the light. After searching the manual for a while, I found that the light should come on automatically. It doesn't. Or at least, it does sometimes. When I twitch my nose properly, or when the wind is in the east, or something. Grrr! I can still sew though, with a carefully placed lamp.

The idea was to make a quilt with fabrics on hand. There are two black and white fabrics and twelve coloured strips in each block of this quilt. I've made eight blocks so far - ninety six coloured pieces. Despite starting with a big stack of purple, turquoise and pink fabrics, I still find myself wanting more variety. I'm trying to resist the urge to buy too many more (besides, the ones in our local quilt shops all seem to look the same).

I'll show the quilt again as it progresses, and tell you more about it.

Meanwhile, there has been a little excitement in our household. One of the young people in this news story is someone rather closely related to me...

Catching Up...

I came home from work on Tuesday to find a sign on the street corner a couple of blocks from my house. The riverside street was going to be closed the next day for tree felling.

Since our little cul de sac leads off this street, with no other entrance and exit, I wondered if I would be able to get out the next morning. As it turned out, the sign was a block further up than the part that was actually closed, and although I had to slalom through traffic cones, I was able to leave without any trouble.

I'm not sure if I was relieved or disappointed. A day at home would have been nice. But I'd probably have felt obliged to go to work anyway, which would mean a tedious and complicated bus ride.

You'd think they'd find a better way to notify the residents than a sign on the corner the night before.

I had an errand to do on the way home (collect accounts for a small literary magazine from the auditor), which left me running late for the final session of the Canterbury Poets Collective autumn readings. However the first half is open mic, and the second half is the guest readers, so I didn't mind too much missing the first two or three. There were some fine open mic readers and a guest reader I was really looking forward to - Rhian Gallagher. Rhian is not very well-known in New Zealand as she lived in the UK for quite a few years, where her collection Salt Water Creek was short-listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection. I first came across her work on the Poetry Daily website (no link as their archive only lasts a year).

Unfortunately I was rather tired and found myself dozing off. In my waking moments I confirmed that I really did like her work, and I also enjoyed the final guest poet Tony Beyer. I think I'll be looking for their books to study more.

Overall I'm beginning to think that I don't really take in all that much at readings. What I come away with mostly is an overall impression of the sound of a poem. And what I am interested in is: does it sound like a poem? What makes it a poem? Much of what I hear, especially from the open mic readers, sounds like prose. On the page it may look like a poem, but on reading it aloud, the line breaks seem to be lost. And some of the open mic poems had really, really long sentences. Beautiful pieces of prose, but prose none the less.

I listen for rhythm and cadence. Some of my favourites were those that didn't contain complete sentences -lists and fragments. It reminds me to experiment more with grammatical constructions in my own writing.

I do have some reports and links on some of the guest poets from earlier sessions, but i'll keep them for another post.

Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

I went out to our backyard to pick grapes this morning and was greeted by a beautiful dew-hung spiderweb



It's quite hard to get all those little raindrops perfectly in focus!

Forty Years On

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Wahine disaster. The house where I grew up overlooked the harbour where this took place.

April 10th 1968

Every year we made the journey
stood on deck watching the wake
draw a thread between islands
north and south where grandparents, aunts
uncles and cousins mirrored each other like
left and right sides of a garment

Back home we watched the ferries pass
morning and evening as sure as
sunrise and tide fall,
tide rise and sunset
Maori, Rangatira, Wahine

That stormy day we watched the broken ship
drift onto rocks, list
the fleet of small craft weaving back and forth
trying to darn the hole in the harbour,
trying to stitch the ship to shore

On Sport and Writing

I've never thought of myself as athletic, but there are certain sporting events that capture my imagination. No, not the rugby. I'm just not a true Kiwi in that regard - I have no interest whatsoever. But one event that usually has me checking the results is the annual Coast to Coast adventure race.

Over two days - or one, for the really ambitious - New Zealand's top adventure racers (and some from overseas) cycle, run, and paddle their way from one side of the South Island to the other, across the mountains and the plains to finish at Sumner Beach not far from here. Some are there to try to win, others just to say they did it.

There are usually a number of people I know among the competitors, often fellow members of my orienteering club. It's the sort of event I could imagine myself competing in - but only in my imagination, never in real life!

First, the attraction. I grew up spending a lot of time outside - climbing trees, swimming in the sea, clambering over rocks, making hideouts in the bushes. I think of myself as an outdoors person, but in a rather dreamy contemplative kind of way, not in terms of "further, higher, faster". When I think about the sports I find interesting, though, they are the ones that take place in natural settings - climbing, sea kayaking, adventure racing etc.

The hitch is, of course, the deadline. Those people who do the Coast to Coast just for the sake of doing it? They are still a whole lot faster than I'll ever be. If you don't finish the mountain run by a certain time, you are not allowed to complete the course. The fastest people in our orienteering club do courses more than twice as long as the ones I do, in less than half the time. The fastest ever runner of the Coast to Coast did it in ten hours or so. The slowest ever, twenty four hours. The maths doesn't stack up.

Do you believe that you can do anything you want to do? I don't. That is, I do believe that if I wanted to cross the island by foot, mountain bike and kayak, I could do it. Given a week or so. (But the safety infrastructure wouldn't be there at other times of the year, so I'd be unlikely to try it).

Given enough time, we can probably all do way more than we imagine. But some of us are always going to take longer than others. Fortunately, writing isn't a timed activity. Some poets write a poem a day (I did myself, for a month last April. Most of them were rubbish, but the experience was exhilarating). Other poets spend years perfecting each poem. In the end, it doesn't matter how many attempts and rewrites you make - what matters is the poem itself, the end result.

On the other hand, if you need to leap across a ravine, it has to be in one leap. If it takes you more than one, you're in trouble!

Readwritepoem: Clothing

For readwritepoem, where the prompt this week was clothing:

(Note: the original of this poem is laid out in a wave formation. I'm lacking the time to put all the tabs in. Might come back and do it later. I haven't written anything new for a while, so this is "one I prepared earlier")

Girl in a Ballgown

For your final school
ball you choose shot
satin, woven at cross-
purposes, the warp and weft
of it, purple of a ripe berry,
green of a new leaf.
I cut and pin and stitch
because this is one thing
I can do for you these
difficult years –
make you a skin that
fits. When you walk
you are sunshine on green
seas, you are purple cloud
shadows shifting on the waves.

You stand high-heeled on the table.
Your level-eyed father
pins the hem straight.
And suddenly you are fainting,
falling head first in a shimmer
of green waves, tumbling
ocean
ocean
ocean
until he,
playing Daedalus to your
Icarus, catches you just in time,
rewriting the old myths

Catching Up...

A whole month into the year, and when I review progress I find I haven't done much towards my goals. The one thing I have done is to increase my level of exercise. I figure that if I manage one thing each month, I will get there in the end.

This weekend, anyway, may be different. I plan on tackling the first chapter of the family history, and I may even tackle a poem for readwritepoem, for the first time in a while. Mostly, I've been using the summer weekends for lawn mowing and gardening. This weekend that's off the agenda, because I made a visit to the doctor, and I have stitches in my back, so no heavy lifting or pushing for a couple of weeks.

I visited the doctor a week or so ago for some asthma medication, and she noticed a suspicious spot on my back which was why I went back to have it removed. When I was a child, it was quite normal to spend all summer on the beach, wih regular doses of sunburn. I recall peeling great strips of skin off with great glee! So I always figured this was going to come sooner or later, and it doesn't appear to be too serious - she thinks it may be a BCC (basal cell carcinoma) which is very slow-growing, but still not something you invite to stay for a long visit.

The trip for the asthma medication was overdue too, but the ongoing saga of the waterbed prompted me to visit - I'll save that one for another post.

In the meantime, here are some photos of the walking track I discovered while orienteering last week. We had another event this week, which was quite different - among flat suburbs with waterways and wetlands interspersed - lots of reeds, waterbirds etc. These Wednesday evening events are a series we have every summer around local streets and parks, and then for the rest of the year we mostly have Sunday events when we get out into the country more.

The track passes the bottom of a garden:



The view from the top:



I have a fascination with roots and rocks:

The Year Begins

Yes, I know it is late January. However this evening was the first orienteering event of the year. Each year we have a twilight series on Wednesday evenings in January and February, these are a little different from our regular events as they are on park and street maps, and are score events. That means instead of a set course to navigate as fast as possible, we have a set time to get around as many controls as possible, setting our own route. Each control is worth a set number of points, from 10 points for the easy, close ones, to 50 points for some of the further or more difficult controls.

Christchurch is mostly flat, but the mappers excel at finding the steeper parts for many of these events. Tonight's event started at a park at the foot of one of our hill suburbs. The map has a good section of flat land by the river, but I wanted the exercise of getting up the hill. So two of us, Sandy and myself, accompanied by dog, set off straight towards the hill and up a very steep climb by road and footpath right to the 50 point control at the top of the map, picking up a few other controls on the way. We were rewarded by a stunning view and the discovery of a pathway that I hadn't known about before, although I am fairly familiar with this part of Christchurch. And then I left Sandy and Jay (the dog) behind to walk back down, while I pushed myself a bit and managed a sort of slow awkward jog alternating with sections of brisk walking. I zigzagged down the hill picking up a number of controls and arrived back at the finish with about four minutes to spare. I have a feeling I had time for one more control, but with 20 penalty points for every minute late back, it didn't seem quite worth it.

I'm definitely considering returning to the area to explore the path I discovered, which seems to follow a ridge high above a valley - worth taking a camera, I think. I wonder where it ends up?

I have a feeling I'll be a little stiff tomorrow.

Two-Part Poetry Post

For the past week or so the New Zealand newspapers have been full of the death of Sir Edmund Hillary, his life and the funeral plans. And so another death, although attracting quite a few obituaries and attention, has been rather overshadowed - the poet Hone Tuwhare, at the age of 86.

The link is to the tribute on our local library's website. His poems were lyrical, sometimes political, but accessible - he came from a working class background, while many other esteemed New Zealand poets were university educated.

You can read some of his poems here including "No Ordinary Sun", a protest about the bombing of Hiroshima, and "Albatross" (Kay, are you reading this? I thought of you when I saw that one). "No Ordinary Sun" was 11th on the list of New Zealanders' favourite poems, and Rain was in first place.

And now that I have left you some poetry to read, I have to confess I haven't written any myself for a while. Instead I thought I would offer a giveaway.

I have here a couple of sets of "Kiwi magnetic poetry". The words in these sets are New Zealand vernacular and rather colourful idioms of the sort that I can imagine a Southland cow cockie using (cow cockie = dairy farmer). I've thought of trying to use them in poems, which would be an interesting challenge. It occurs to me that if any poet could slip these into a poem and have them sound natural, it would be Hone Tuwhare.

So, I offer you a few of the phrases from the set. If you would like to win a set, leave a comment to that effect. I'm leaving the conditions of entry open. "Please" might do it, but I'll be more impressed if you offer an accurate answer as to the meanings of the phrases, or even better, an inaccurate but entertaining answer, or if you offer me a short poem using one or more of the phrases. Use your imagination. I'll leave the entries open for a couple of weeks to give you a chance to think about it.

stone the crows
across the ditch
bit of a dag
down the gurgler
shoot through
hit the sack
suck the kumera
sparrows fart

For more poetic inspiration (if you haven't come from there), hop on over to readwritepoem

The Debate about Cloning

Earlier in the week the FDA released a report about the safety of meat from cloned animals. Since I'm in New Zealand, it didn't figure too highly in our newspapers, and I first read about it in blogland.

Here's a link to an article in the Washington Post

I have to say that I didn't find the standard of debate about the issue to be very high. So I thought I would raise a few points on the issue:

1) Firstly, since a large majority of people want to know what they are eating, I think it makes good sense that food that is the product of cloned animals or their offspring be labelled as such. Just as I want to know whether my food is produced in New Zealand or imported, even though it is all safe to eat. I have my reasons...
On the other hand, maybe it occurred to the FDA that the more information on labels, the more cluttered they get, and the less they get read anyway...

2) Most of those who don't want to eat meat from cloned sources seem to have only one reason as far as I can see - and it's not so much a reason as an emotional reaction i.e. "Yuck!" or "Gross!"
Actually, that's the reaction that children commonly have when they find out how the "natural" method of reproduction works. Fortunately for the survival of the human race, they usually get over it.

3) Since artificially cloned animals are enormously expensive, their meat is not likely to reach the market place in any significant quantities. Nor are female cloned animals likely to produce enough offspring for the market place - what is more likely is that cloned male animals will be used to provide semen for breeding, so the most likely scenario is the offspring of a cloned male and a non-cloned female.

4) The offspring of a cloned animal is not a clone (unless you do it all over again). Just as if you have an IVF baby, that child's offspring are not therefore IVF children, unless they go through the same procedure. Nor is the child of a twin (a natural clone) automatically a twin, just because their parent is.

5) Oh yes - about twins - they are natural clones. That's what a clone is, when you divide a bunch of cells to produce an exact replica of the individual. So of course, since farmers breed for twinning (even the organic ones) we've all been eating clones for a long time.

6) Do you have any friends who have had babies by IVF treatment? The process of cloning is pretty much the same, with one added step. I would have said "clinical" rather than "gross".

7) Cloning is not genetic engineering. Cloning aims to produce an exact replica. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, aims to produce something new, for instance introducing a gene segment from another plant into maize to make it more pest resistant. Or perhaps introducing a strawberry gene into an apple to give us strawberry flavoured apples?

8) Just possibly, the reason why the FDA said that it is safe, is that after seven years of study, they have found that it actually is safe. Of course, they may have missed a subtle risk. In my opinion, the world is full enough of obvious risks, like smoking, or being knocked down crossing the road, or food poisoning from eating spoiled food, without worrying about the subtle ones.
There are far nastier things done to food that we should worry about - like feeding animals large amounts of hormones and antibiotics, which encourages antibiotic-resistant bugs.

9) Reason to become a vegetarian? That's one common reaction I've seen. Well, meat may be cloned but that's nothing to the amount of genetic modification that is going on with crops. For instance, plants that are naturally pest resistant. Sure, the farmer uses less pesticides, which must be a good thing? Ummm.. maybe not, since the pest resistance comes from a high natural level of compounds toxic to bugs (and maybe humans). It's almost enough to make me want to give up eating plants and live solely on meat!

10) If you really want to avoid eating meat from the offspring of clones (not, as I said, the hugely expensive clones themselves), then by all means eat certified organic produce. Or New Zealand lamb, since we still produce it the natural way over here, as far as I know. Personally, I don't eat organic. It costs twice as much. It's better for my health to have some money spare so that I can buy running shoes, keep warm in winter and pay for a few other necessary things.

Comments? Always welcome, provided you read what I say and respond thoughtfully and intelligently. (Of course my readers always do that, don't they?)

Sunday Scribblings: Fellow Travellers

(No, it's not Sunday. Apparently that's how Sunday Scribblings works. Write a post on the prompt, and post it on a day that's not Sunday).

For some reason I read the prompt "fellow travellers" and recalled it as "travelling companions". I must have seen that prompt somewhere else recently. "Travelling companions" brings to mind friends on a quest, for instance Frodo and his companions in "The Lord of the Rings". Or alternatively, the travellers in the "Canterbury Tales", who met on the journey, and travelled together on a pilgrimage, because in dangerous times there is safety in numbers. I think of the tales they told each other to while away the time on the journey.

We don't really seem to travel that way any more. I don't, anyway. Of course I travel with other people sometimes - almost always my family. I don't think of my family as travelling companions, or fellow travellers, because of course they are so much more than that. They are - well, family.

Other than that, modern travel discourages getting to know the strangers around us. From what I've seen on long plane journeys, people don't pay too much attention to the people in the neighbouring seats. Other than to hope they won't be seated next to a squalling infant, or an obnoxious drunk, that is.

We travelled around the UK in a rental car, some of it on motorways, which were filled with fellow travellers, all tucked away safely within their own hurtling balls of metal, where no interaction is possible. And we stayed in bed and breakfasts where we arrived fairly late in the day, went out for a meal and returned in time for bed. And then in the morning we got up, showered, had breakfast and left. We weren't without human interaction - we visited quite a few friends and relatives, but they weren't fellow travellers - they were on their home territory.

Most bed and breakfasts these days seem to provide separate tables at breakfasts for the guests. I'm told it wasn't always like this. And then, there was that one place at Shrewsbury. There were two large tables in the dining room, and we were seated around one of these with, yes, fellow travellers. There were a young American couple who were taking the opportunity to travel around Britain by train. They don't have the opportunity for train travel in the US, he said. Well, a few years back, my daughter travelled vast distances around North America by Amtrak - but then, America and Canada are huge countries, so I suppose there are even vaster distances where the trains don't reach. And then there was a Welshman, who had travelled for quite different reasons - his wife was in the hospital. I can't remember what we talked about much. I do remember that for half an hour or so, I enjoyed the feeling of being in the company of fellow travellers.

What I've Been Doing

Not blogging, obviously. Although I've still been visiting other blogs, and occasionally commenting.

My part holiday came to an end, and as of this week I am working fulltime again. I am also trying to keep my goals for the year in mind, so here are a few things I've been doing:

1) Walking. I started off the year a bit erratically, but I'm having fewer and fewer days when I don't exercise. Last Friday I went for a particularly long walk, as I reached the top of the track seemingly almost effortlessly, and decided to leave the track to wander across the hills (allowed, as it is a public park even though it is also farmed). And then I came across a barbed wire fence. I figured I could cross it right by the post where it was a little lower, but I got stuck half way across. And I didn't want to rip my good trousers. Eventually after fruitlessly trying to unhook them, I decided that the best way would be to take them off. Once they were down around my thighs, I had enough slack to unhook myself, and I finished climbing over, did up my trousers and turned round to find a mob of curious sheep staring right at me...

2) Transcribing testaments from the 1600's, including those of my 7x great-grandparents. I was about to start writing the first section of the family history - but I've had images of these documents for quite a while, and only partially succeeded in deciphering them. Finding a full transcription of one of them in privately deposited papers in the Stirling Archives, I thought it would help with the others. Think archaic handwriting, archaic language, messy crammed up handwriting, ink blots, and show through from the other side of the paper.

I've also been practising my Photoshop skills by trying to clean up the images in Photoshop to make them more legible.

3) Sweating. It's been hot. Up to 34 degrees (in the nineties, for those of you using Fahrenheit still). No doubt our Australian cousins think that's quite cool, but it is hot for New Zealand, and we don't have air conditioning.

4) Trying to gather information and fill in complicated bureaucratic forms with details of my income so that my son can get a student allowance. It is means tested on parental income for students under 25, and they go on the last tax year. Since our income has dropped since then, we have to have it reassessed.
S. also has to give details of his income. He put "zero" and now they want proof of his zero income, eg a letter from an employer!!

5) Putting all my holiday photos (the ones I had printed, anyway) into an album. And then I found I'd missed one out, so I moved them all so that they would be in the correct order. And then I found three more I had missed out.... yes, I moved them all again! I'm a bit anal sometimes, can you tell?

So, now I should stop blogging and get back to the form filling...

Little Things Make a Difference

i finally had a bunch of holiday photos printed, while there was a special offer on at a local stationery shop - 15 cents a print. Then I went rummaging in cupboards as I had a feeling I had an old photo album or two tucked away. And yes, I did find one that was completely empty, and had space for 500 photos.

There's only one problem - it was produced in the days when photos were printed 3 x 5 inches, and mine are 4 x 6 inches. It doesn't seem as if it is a big difference, and yet the layout for 3 x 5 fits five photos to a page by careful layout, whereas the newer albums for 6 x 4 prints only manage two to a page.

It suddenly occurred to me that we waste huge amounts of resources just by insisting on making things a little bigger and better.

Oh the other hand, a suggestion I saw that we would save several tons of iron if everyone used one less staple a day seems ridiculous. (Wouldn't it be better to use fewer tin cans instead?)

Still in Holiday Mode

I have to go to work today, which seems almost attractive. At least I am looking forward to spending the day in an air-conditioned room. It's been hot here. Not Texas hot, but hot enough for a temperate-climate lass like me.

So, I am still easing into my goals for the year by spending a lot of time "clearing the decks". (Translate: reading old magazines and occasionally throwing one into the recycling). I've sorted photos from my trip, and historic family photos that I scanned into the computer, and had some printed while a local stationery shop was offering 15 cent prints. I did a little light gardening later in the afternoon yesterday, and by the time I was done I was dripping with sweat, which didn't encourage me to go for a vigorous uphill walk. But after all, I'm on holiday, right?

I know when our plums are nearly ripe because I start hitting my head on the branches when I walk along the path. They are weighed down with their burden. I found myself contemplating the idea of lying on the lawn under the umbrella-tree and gazing at the sky. Probably a better way of spending my time than playing sudoku on the computer. I may try it over the weekend. It won't be long before the lawn is covered in squishy ripe plums and then it will be way too messy for bathing in dappled light.

Oh, and I missed posting yesterday, so I am officially not joining the group who plan to write a blog post every single day of 2008. Well, that's a relief!

Cute Furry Animals

The trouble with being on holiday is that I tend to sleep in. And the best part of the day, when it's cool enough to garden, walk etc is first thing in the morning. The southern hemisphere sun can be harsh on the skin in summer, however I did manage to get out for a walk today in that narrow window of time between "too hot to move" and "dinner time". I found myself puffing and panting, but I hope that will change within a few weeks.

And now, back to our family visit to Orana Park, as mentioned in the previous post. We rarely get all our "children" together now that the youngest is twenty, however we had a real family outing with only one of the five missing.

Orana Park is not a traditional zoo but a safari park, with the animals in spaces as wide open as possible, and moats in preference to heavy wire fences.

Mostly, we followed around a route timed to catch feeding times of the various animals. Of course, being summer holidays, there were big crowds all doing the same thing. So we didn't get a very good view of the lions which are one of the most heavily fenced animals for obvious reasons.

Never mind, I think the giraffes are actually way cuter. And it is possible to get up close and personal at giraffe feeding time - they seemed quite happy to keep eating, and eating, to satisfy the long queue of waiting visitors.





Also high in the cuteness factor are the meerkats:



and the otters:





These are Asian small-clawed otters. They are more social than most otters, and spend more time on land. Apparently they are an indicator species - that is, if you have otters in a river or stream then it is an indication that the stream is healthy and unpolluted.

The otters are very frisky and act like a chorus line - they would be sitting in a grass, and all of a sudden would all dash off almost as one, with pauses to tumble over each other.

I suppose if we lived a more primitive life then we wouldn't be thinking of these animals as "cute". We'd be more concerned with whether they were good food, or whether they were competing with us for fish, or similar concerns. And I have to admit that from reports of how some of the animals can bite and scratch, they may be cute and appealing only at a suitable distance.



What's that they are eating? One young visitor was rather squeamish to see that they were eating whole one day-old chicks. Her father teased her about it: "Oh look, he's chewing on the beak". And then when she had had enough, he said, "We'll go somewhere else - somewhere they are eating two-day old chicks." I can't say that it bothered me - as long as I don't have to eat one myself!

Happy New Year

2007 was an interesting year - we weren't very far into it when it took a turn that I hadn't anticipated, so my goals were sidelined while I did other things.

While I never expected to find myself working full time, I've really enjoyed my second job and don't anticipate going back to part-time work anywhere in the near future.

Still - with a new year on us, and feeling adjusted to the new workload, I think it's time that I stopped procrastinating and found ways to achieve some of the things I hoped to achieve last year, and didn't. So no resolutions - I'm not strong on resolve - but several goals for the year, which at some stage soon I may turn into a poster for my studio wall.

Firstly, I really want to write the family history - a project I embarked on about five or six years ago, expecting it to take a year. Of course there is always more that can be researched, but having made the trip to Scotland, I think it's time that I acknowledged that I should preserve the research I have done in written form, even if it is not complete (and probably never can be). When I wonder what I would do if I was told I had a year to live, this is the one thing that comes to mind - get the research into a form that can be shared with the rest of the family.

Secondly, last summer I spent six months walking a lot, eating healthily and reducing my weight by 13 kgs (about 29 lbs). Once I started full time work, and winter arrived, that all faded away, and what with too much Christmas chocolate and candy I've put about 3 kgs back on again. That's not too bad - I'm still 10 kg lighter than I was. So this year I want to reduce my weight by another 13 kgs, and increase my fitness as well (I'm a bit vague on measuring the latter part, but my orienteering results should give me some record of my improvement).

Thirdly, I'm inspired by January who records her poetry achievements in the sidebar of her blog - numbers of poems written, acts of poetry committed each week and so on. I want to increase the number of journals my poetry has appeared in by at least one. This is not really in my control of course, but what is in my control is to spend more time writing, a lot more time editing, and to send more submissions out into the world (and not always to the same fall-back journal that has published my poems before).

Fourthly, become a whiz at Photoshop.

And then, there is the usual plan to keep the house and garden better organised, procrastinate less, blog more, play fewer computer games, be kind to the environment - and did I mention procrastinate less?

I have in mind trying to do a blog post each day, without being too rigid about it. Coming soon, photos of our family visit to Orana Park, but here is a taster:



Meet Jabba the ten year old (still juvenile) tuatara, one of the world's most primitve living reptiles.