Hotter 'n Hades - Part Two

Melbourne is set to reach 43 today - yesterday was ONLY 40. (Here's a nifty unit converter for all sorts of measurements). I will be taking frequent dips in the pool and will go to see "Memoirs of a geisha" at the 1 p.m. showing in an air conditioned cinema. As I sit here typing, my fingers are sticking to the keyboard. Techie son, just now, has stopped at my study door to admonish me for having my computer on! And this from someone whose room is often 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house because he leaves his computer on all day.

I'm turning off the computer now and heading for the pool. Haven't had a chance to make my usual round of blogs so there will be some catching up to do when the cool change comes through.

Ginger plant flowering

The ginger plants are now in flower and the scent is wafting onto the veranda. I wish there were a way to make a file of aromas so you could click on a link to smell the flowers, just like you can upload voice and video files to hear and watch...

These flowers are about 30 cm (12 in). We've had the plants for more than 30 years. They were in our first garden, and we brought rhizomes with us to each new garden. Gives a very tropical look. You can also see a birds nest fern on the left, and a (struggling) tree fern on the right. Too much competition from the 40 year old elm!

Virtual Japanese garden tour

Inspired by a recent post by Susan (Takoma Gardener), I thought I'd offer a link to another virtual garden tour that I enjoy so much. Given my interest in Japanese gardens, I often "visit" this one in Seattle and it also includes soothing Japanese music. You need a good internet connection.

You can find a lot of good sites (and spend much time) by googling "japanese gardens", but probably the best place to start out is to visit the excellent Japanese Garden Database. Although it doesn't seem to have been updated for a while, the links from its various pages are very useful. I also like the Bowdoin College website on Japanese gardens.

I also love Japanese interiors and furniture - this is a cabinet from the 1930s that we bought a couple of years ago.

Castlemaine Festival of Gardens

Every year at the beginning of November we go up to Castlemaine in the goldfields region for the garden festival. We try to visit as many gardens as we can in the 3 or 4 days we have off. 2005 was no exception.

I took a whole album of photos with the digital camera and the other day was wondering how I can turn it into something for the internet. Rather than posting them here, or alternatively in the photo gallery my ISP provides, I decided to play around with the features available through the free software Picasa2. If you have a digital camera and haven't downloaded Picasa2 yet, you are missing out on a great freebie. It allows you to organise your photos quickly and easily, create slideshows, screensavers, collages, even "movies", as well as websites. You can view all your photos in a timeline too which is quite interesting.

Anyway, back to the website I created. I haven't fiddled around with it too much, just added captions to most of them before uploading to the internet. I'd have to learn more about it to get it exactly the way I'd want it to look, but it's not bad for a few minutes' work. Click here!

Feeding frenzy

I love going out to eat with people who really enjoy their food, and as usual, those Pope girls do not disappoint. Especially Phine (aka the Food-Phine) - last night she finished off her pizza while we were still working on ours, and then had the nerve to ask if we were going to finish our pizzas!


And here's me, looking just plain silly.

These photos were taken with the tiniest mobile phone (and "enhanced" with some software by me), and I hate to say it, but I can see how this type of thing (camera phones) has become so popular.

My bedside library

Cowtown Pattie left a comment in my New Year's resolution post about bedside reading:
"My bedside always has a pile of books by it (please, no dusting!). I get on a "jag" with a particular author sometimes..."

I can so relate to this. There's a good chance that if you've liked one book by an author, you'll like other things they've written. But that's just the start. What about books ABOUT the author? A biography or autobiography that will set the scene for why an author might have written what they did. And then there's all the stuff OTHER people have written about the author and their works. One of my favorite things to do is to follow up a historical event which has featured in a book I've read, and again Cowtown Pattie set me off on a tangent when she recommended the book "Crow Dog : four generations of Sioux medicine men" by Leonard Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes. After reading that book I now have to do some reading about Wounded Knee. And so it goes.

So how fortuitous it was that the house we bought 11 years ago has built in bedside bookshelves. And to think we were going to rip them out, along with the built in drawers, just so we could fit in our own furniture. Glad we didn't do that!



Here is a fairly modest collection, which includes what I'm currently reading ("On beauty" by Zadie Smith), "Dharma Bums" by Kerouac which I want Mel to read, and "On the road" because now I have to catch up on Kerouac, the new Doctorow book ("The March"), and for complete fun and charm, Alexander McCall Smith's "the Sunday Philosophy Club". I hope it's as good as his first series, "The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency" - Mel and I both devoured the whole series.

Gardening in the library

Did you know?: when librarians get rid of superceded, out of date stuff from the collection, it's called "weeding", and that's what I've been doing in the reference collection these last couple of days before I go on leave.

This is a much dreaded task but can be very satisfying and even entertaining once you get stuck into it. First hurdle is to find a spare trolley (hot property in library circles) which you can then trundle out into the collection and hope that no students are gathered within shhhhh-distance of the targeted Dewey numbers. Wouldn't want them to think we're spying on them. It's always a good idea to dress appropriately, clothing that doesn't show all the dust and dirt (uh oh, there's that old dust problem again). Then there are the gems you inevitably find, such as the riveting All India Fax Directory of 1992. And one can always hope to find a cataloguing error to gleefully bring to the attention of cataloguing staff. Not much chance of that though, our cataloguing division is pretty on the ball.

At the end of this gardening stint there should be a bit more room in the collection, although students will continue to ignore the print collection anyway and look for anything online (don't even mention Wikipedia). And sure enough, as soon as an item has gone into storage, someone will come to the information desk and ask to see that item.

New Year's resolutions - NOT

As in other years, I have thought about turning over a new leaf in certain aspects of my life, and that isn't confined to just the new year. I suppose the most consistent resolution-in-waiting is to do better in the housekeeping department. In another post I talked briefly about my attitude to dusting, but in terms of priority I place much more importance on having a tidy, uncluttered look, without taking that too far. Instead of sweeping things under the rug, I'd rather get rid of the rug and not have to lift it in the first place. There's always something else I'd rather do. To paraphrase a bumper sticker you used to see: "I'd rather be reading!".

Speaking of which, I haven't updated my "Currently reading..." section lately. Not that I haven't been reading (as if!) but I just haven't been taken with any one book lately. That is, until today when I borrowed Zadie Smith's "On beauty". I started reading it at lunch and can tell already that it will be a ripper.

There I go, even in the blogosphere I can be distracted from domestic things by reading, which tends to happen in my real life. And now I have blogging which is another distraction. But as much as I admire people who do such a nice job in keeping their houses clean, I myself am just not into it. So this will remain a resolution-in-waiting, I think. And I'll close with a quote from Rebecca West, novelist: "Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilisation." I take heart from this.

International House reunion

Today there was a reunion of people who had stayed in International House while studying at the University of California at Berkeley. This is where Mel and I met in 1969, and so is an important part of our personal history. I-House, as it is commonly called, is a world under one roof, and we have great memories of our time there and people we met. Just can't believe it was that long ago!

Here I am with Donna Rosenthal, who was at I House when Mel and I were there.

Having a planty tanty

First an explanation of tanty: it's the Aussie abbreviation for "tantrum", so you "throw a tanty". Well, if Tom Jones can have a panty tanty as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago, then I'm allowed a planty tanty, just a minor rant about modern garden trends.

What is happening to gardens these days? Is it happening only in Australia? And I find it doubly bad that it's happening here in Victoria, which used to be known as The Garden State.

Gardens are under siege from 1) the drought (can't do much about Mother Nature), 2) the modern trend to build big houses that extend practically to all boundaries, leaving little space for gardens, and 3) another trend to multiple plantings all of the same type, in straight lines no less. Boring! And downright silly too, when they trim bushes to have little pom-poms on top, like a head on a stick-like neck atop a roly poly bush. Ridiculous! These "gardens" are done by landscaping companies that buy the plants in bulk and just fill the space. And that is the extent of the "garden". Soul-less.

Having fewer trees to shade houses, very important in the Australian sun, is made worse by modern houses having no verandas, eaves or other type of overhang, making people even more reliant on using air conditioners to keep cool.

Are these trends happening elsewhere? End of tanty.