I Drew This

Interesting discussion on 891 this morning with Matt & Dave discussing a local politician’s appearance and speech at a Midwinter dinner at a Masonic lodge.

While not outwardly mocking the dinner or the timing thereof to coincide with the pagan celebration, I did detect a hint of Matt & Dave’s slightly superior smugness regarding the goings-on at said affair.

The mere mention of waiters/waitresses wearing hooded cloaks was enough to convey a sense of derision to listeners. I’ve never heard them mention the attire of serving staff at other events, political or not. But because this was based on a pagan ritual that pre-dates Christianity, they saw fit to make light of it.

Now, I could be wrong, but I would think most modern functions celebrating pagan rituals do so in a fairly light-hearted not-completely-serious manner. Of course, most pagan rituals were appropriated by Christians centuries ago. Christmas in the northern hemisphere basically took over the midwinter thing, falling only a few days after the solstice, and Easter carries the legacy of the Easter Bunny, left over from the rabbit’s significance as a symbol of fertility, coinciding with new life and the vernal equinox.

But I think the ridicule was perhaps a bit misplaced. Especially coming from a team of whom at least one is a practising Catholic.

The line about sacrificing a goat was probably, well, the least tactful. And yeah, despite what I said earlier was outwardly mocking.

I would put this in perspective by mentioning that Catholics believe that the wafer and wine taken at Holy Communion transubstantiate into the flesh and blood of Christ himself.

Ritual weekly cannibalism. Nice.

I’ll have the goat, thanks.

We interrupt this near-abandoned blog to flog my camera.
I have the following for sale:

• Canon EOS 20D
• EF 28-80 f/3.5-5.6 lens
• EF 70-300 f/3.5-5.6 lens
• 1GB memory card (holds 100+ RAW or 200+ large JPG)
• Battery & charger
• USB cable
• Strap
• All in a Lowepro kit bag, below.

$600 the lot

Send me an electronic mail, at idrewthis<at>gmail<dot>com or ask any questions in the comments.

Soup commercials.
Annoying.
It’s been the same tinned recipe for ever.
Someone presents soup for consumption, passed off as home made, done from scratch.
Oh, this soup is so good. Where did you get the recipe? What? No! This can’t possibly be from a tin!
Rinse. Repeat.
I will now outline the bait and switch concept of a soup commercial taken to its most extreme.

A contestant on Masterchef is preparing a minestrone. He looks at his competitor’s dish and grimaces in panic but then has a sly, cunning look come over his face.
From his secret bag, he pulls out a bag of Brand X minestrone and secretly “plates up” (for crap, what happened to “dishing up”?).
The judges try the soup.
Matt Preston is impressed.

I was teaching Little Miss L the joy of Roman Numerals the other night. She’s 7 now, so after explaining the concept, she picked it up pretty well.

Once she got the hang of how they worked, she insisted that I give her a quiz on them. So I drew up a page with two columns and wrote some random numbers in the first column. Her job was to write the equivalent Roman numeral in column two.

She got a couple of the easy ones, like 8 and 11 but then she got to something like 37, and rendered that as III VII. You could see her brain working and things clicking into place as I explained how to do it properly. She then blitzed pretty much all the numbers under 100. I inlcuded my birth year, 1972 and had to hold her hand through that one but she did well.

One of the last ones was 309. It was the only number I’d given her with a zero in it. She asked me “How did they write zero?”

I said “there was no zero”.

After a second or two she asked in reply, “Well how did they blast off rocket ships?”

They’re everywhere and they’ll always find something they don’t like. And if the thing they don’t like gets better, then they’ll complain about the fact that it’s not what it used to be.

Case in point:

I work for a government institution. Everyone that works here has either a government email address or an institution email address. The government addresses work on Outlook; the institution addresses run on some old-ish Novell system, which nobody likes much.

Over the break, the Novell system was switched over to the M1cro$oft Live system. It’s web based; it can be accessed from anywhere; it has 25GB of web space for each user. And lots of other bells/whistles etc.

But new technology is always something to complain about.

I run the facebook page for this institution and made the mistake of asking fans what they thought of the new system. A complainer thought this was a great opportunity to complain.

“It’s terrible,” she said. Then listed why it was terrible.

She has since removed her comments, probably out of embarrassment (and probably after I posted a slightly passive-aggressive comment of Shakespearian proportions on how staff switching over to the new system are pioneers, paving the way and overcoming the hurdles so that others may face the transition easily).

But she wasn’t disappointed with the features of the “terrible” new system, only with the fact that the changeover hadn’t been seamless.
Which is like buying a DVD player, then saying it’s shit because you can’t watch your VHS tapes on it.

My sister has a new “shack” on the south coast. I use inverted commas because it’s not a shack at all: it’s a brand spanking new house. But because it’s their house away from home by the coast, they use the vernacular and call it a shack. (All the more ironic when you consider their actual home is in a different town on the south coast and probably physically closer to the beach than their “shack” is. But I digress.)

Because the place is new, they chose to furnish it with new stuff. This included new beds, furniture, and appliances like fridge, microwave, dishwasher and TV. And they got a pretty nice 42″ plasma job.

My extended family was invited to spend a couple of nights there in the days after Xmas. And a lovely time was had by all.

On the drive home though, C suddenly made it known she wanted to upgrade our 80 cm CRT TV to a 42″ flat screen model.

Now, I’m as much into new tech and gadgets as anyone but I know that with an 80 cm TV, sitting 4 m away, the detail of the picture is just fine. I’ve never really felt the need to jump on the HD bandwagon. I might have mentioned as much before: so much of what’s on TV is either shit, or I don’t have time to watch it. I don’t need to see Deal or No Deal in stunning HD quality. It’s just overkill.

But, on the drive, home, we stopped in at Colonnades and picked up a 42″ LCD and a surround sound AV receiver.

Later that evening…

We were asking ourselves what we should watch on our new big screen and the choice was naturally a random episode of Gilmore Girls, which we love for the witty banter and esoteric pop-culture references. I think we dived in somewhere in the middle of season three.

But it wasn’t the same.

The picture was so clear, it made the whole show look like it had been shot on home video; there was none of that movie-quality softeness to the picture. It somehow broke down the fourth wall and made the show look not like genuine people in a small town in Connecticut but made it look like we were looking through the camera at actors, acting on a set on a backlot in LA. It ruined the illusion completely.

First step was to desaturate the colour. Then, I took the sharpness right back to as low as it would go (because Lauren and Alexis should be in soft focus) and then I dug through the menu and found this setting that takes the blur out when there’s panning and turned it off to put the blur back in. Save settings.

So now we can watch stuff in HD when what we’re watching lends itself to that. But when it’s more about the story, the characters and the show (as opposed to the technology), we can now apply our own “make it look like shit” user settings.

I’m in Port Vincent for New Year’s. It’s a great place to be. On New Year’s Day there is a Gala Day, with street markets, lots of really shitty but tasty food, a big bouncy castle for the kidlets and really really bad entertainment played over an ancient PA.

It’s brilliant.

We’re staying with friends who live on the main street. Which is nice.

Anyway, around this time of year, what with all the colour and summerness of the place, I like to whack a colour film in my Holga and set out to take that quintessential summer photo.

I took the kids to the beach this morning: my two and our friends’ son. He saw the Holga and wanted to know if it was a real camera. My eldest explained to him that it was a Toy Camera that took real photos.

The boy was trying to look at the back of it. I could tell why.

“Doesn’t it have a screen?” he asked.

“A screen?” I said. “It doesn’t even have batteries.”

Firstly, mind the look of the place. This blog is like most people’s spare room at the moment. Nobody comes in here much, it’s a bit of a mess but there’s definitely a plan to fix the place up a bit. That said, Christmas is coming and with all the weekends pretty much booked out between now and then, I’m not sure when I’ll find the time. But I digress.

Here is something what happened to me the other day.

I was picking Little Miss L up from after-school care. I was walking towards the building when I heard her yell to me from across the yard and come running towards me. She gave me an update as to what she’d been up to and one of her friends showed me a butterfly she’d caught. It was very exciting. The carer looking after them was a young man, I think he was one of the year 12s.

I noticed there was some sporting equipment strewn about the place and as my daughter and friends were talking to me, I picked up a stray volleyball a few feet away.  I told Miss L to go inside and get her gear and as she took off, I threw the ball above my head and set it in the direction of the big green wheely bin the balls go in. I think it hit the edge and bounced away but it was close.

The carer said “So, you used to play a bit of volleyball…?”

!?

“Used to…?”

I’m not in a fucking walking frame just yet, thankyouverymuch.

I’m still in my 30s and when I did play volleyball I played with and against people in their late 40s, possibly 50s. And while I may be retired hurt, you can’t tell just from looking at me: I walk upright and I’m still rather thin.

So while he was technically correct on the fact that I used to play (technically incorrect on the “a bit” part; I used to play a shitload of volleyball), I just didn’t like his assumption.

I guess though, that if I have a shoulder chip, then it’s my inability to play any kind of meaningful sport. My ankle is never going to recover, so that pretty much rules out any sport that involves standing up.

Which is most of them.

So I hate it when I hear people saying “oh, I can’t be arsed going for a jog”, when I’d gladly do it for them.

And no, I’m not about to launch into some kind of self-indulgent teenage song lyrics (is there any other kind of teenage song lyrics?). My heart isn’t broken, and thank you, I’m over all the nasty stuff that happened in high school. None of it was actually nasty, I was just there with a bunch of teenagers and you know what they’re like.

What I got goin’ on is the traditional, hurty pain that you get when some of your bits are broken or damaged or angry at you for daring to go out and have a bit of a run around after four years of not. “Take that!” my injured bits are saying to me. And I am. Taking it. For four weeks now.

It’s been interesting as the pain has changed from something deep within the joint: something dull and nebulous that I couldn’t quite point to but that made me feel almost nauseous, to something sharp and articulate like wearing an anklet of thorns.

There are a few tried and trusted ways of coping with pain like this.

• Painkillers. Anything codeine based seems to do the trick for me, though they never completely mask the pain. I mean, it’s an ankle: the pills go into my stomach but the ankle is all the way down there, so far away. I’d prefer having the edge taken off than no relief at all. And I may joke about it but I never mix them with alcohol.
• Not minding that it hurts. Not as silly as it sounds. The very reason the painkillers don’t work–that the ankle is so remote and distant–also enables me to somehow distance myself from the pain, and observe it as an impartial observer. Like looking at the sun and saying “gosh, that’s bright”, I’m able to look all the way down there at my foot and say “fuck, that’s painful” and just treat it as an arbitrary sensation. It’s very zen and detached, I know. But that’s just how cool I am, I guess.
• Other distractions. Work is actually good, when you can get into the swing of things and keep the painful bits relatively still. Lying in bed doing nothing on the other hand… not so easy to ignore it. I might try reading a book later and see if that helps it go away.
• Sex. Hoping to report on this as a method of pain relief sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.

But it’s all fun and games really. I’ve been seeing some lovely doctors, such as my podiatrist. Now, I’m not covered for podiatry; I usually only go twice a year so it’s not really worth the extra in health insurance just to have her re-cover my orthotics. But now I’ve been going a bit more regularly I had to rethink it. And of course, if I were to get a whole new set of orthotics it would actually be cheaper to pay for it outright than it would to pay the extra premium —and I wouldn’t be able to claim the new ones for a year. Gotta love insurance.

Next week I’m booked into a foot/ankle specialist. Someone new. I get to tell another person the whole story and don’t we all love talking about ourselves?

But I’m going to be pleading with him to inject some cortisone into my joint. Now, I know that’s not a very long-term solution but while I’m working out what that might be, I just need some relief in the short term. Because it hurts.

And, for better comfort, I had to wear sneakers to work today and consequently I look like a bit of a dick.

This week marked my auspicious return to the volleyball court. I had forgotten which year it was that I last slipped on the knee pads but due to the magic of putting a lot of work into writing a blog since 2003, I can simply go back in time and see that my operation was in December 2005.

Footballers have whole knee reconstructions and are on the field again after six weeks. You’d think that after nearly four years, I might be able to have a bit of a runaround, whack a few balls about the place and generally enjoy myself doing what I love.

And, as things went, I did have a pretty good time. I was very rusty and very out of shape but the rest of the team I was on was just as rusty or maybe less experienced, so I found myself compensating for some of them; encroaching on their space a bit when the other team’s best server came on (well, someone had to get a dig up).

I was really unfit though, and my legs’ transformation to jelly began somewhere around the end of the first set.

But wow. It was really good. The game wasn’t of the best standard but I got a few good hits in, set up a few good points, saved a few points and even blocked on or two.

After the game though, I knew I wasn’t going to be jumping about the place the next day. I even stopped at the supermarket on the way home for a bag of frozen peas: they make great ice packs.

I had taped the ankle, wrapped it in a bandage and put the whole lot in a lace-up brace. I didn’t land on it funny, twist it, roll it or even give it a dirty look all game.

It wasn’t swollen or damaged. But it was angry.

Next day, I couldn’t walk on it. I worked from home but had to go into town for a meeting and had to grab my trusty old walking stick.

There I was with my stubble, untucked shirt and pack of painkillers. If I’d suddenly amassed an incredible knowledge of diagnostic medicine I could have passed for Doctor House. I had the odd urge to send random strangers for a liver biopsy. I even thought of taking all my painkillers out of the blister pack and putting them in one of those little yellowy-orange plastic bottles.

Anyway, long story short, it’s Saturday morning and I still can’t walk properly. The ankle is just too weak. I’ve told the guy who got me on the team that it’s not looking too good. He’s hoping it’ll come good; so am I, of course.

But the writing’s on the wall and the writing says ‘Whatever you do, don’t even think about setting foot on a volleyball court ever again unless you want a life of pain and resemblance to a certain fictional crippled TV doctor’.

In other news

We’re going away today, back Tuesday. Off to the Yorke Peninsula. We usually get out for a drive or other such fun but the weather’s looking like crap for at least the rest of the weekend. I’ll be voting for sticking the kids in front of a DVD, sitting on the verandah with a glass of wine and a good book.