Snow Photos

View from the car at a rest stop. I was trying to show the valley, not the fence, but it got flattened out in the picture.

Me, in styley construction orange and steel cap boots.

General prettiness.

Snow in Taihape

So everyone's got a snow story, right?

Mine was driving up to Taihape yesterday on a work trip. And there was some snow in the trees, and a bit in the flowerbeds, enough to do a token snowball and that. By this morning there was a heavy blanket everywhere, and soft falling flakes all over, which means a lot when you're out and about at 6am talking to people, and driving around hanging out in the rail corridor, and stopping by the road just so we could kick about in the snow - so light and fluffy! It really did feel like a fairy tale, and being just a bit out of time.

Oh yes, and second leg of my trip got cancelled because the roads were closed out to Taihape, so I ended up back in Palmerston North for the rest of the day. Seriously. Worst Week For Site Visits. Ever. On Friday I go to Christchurch, I hope things are a bit more passable then.

Photos to follow when I get them off the guy with the camera.

Christmas Holiday Special

You know how when a soap opera is getting ready to close down for the holidays they put in a lot of big dramatic unpleasant events so the the audience will be raring to start watching when it starts up again?

I'm having one.

The restructure fairy has turned up at work and sprinkled her little fairy dust around. They're not reducing head count, but my particular job is one of the ones deemed unnecessary. At this point, I can make a submission about how I think they should do their restructure instead, apply for one of the new jobs being created (seeing some job descriptions would sure be handy for that), wangle a spot elsewhere in Council, or leave. Things could be a lot worse, but yet I'm still feeling very uncertain about the future.

Clicky Boxes!

(This is a brief plug for work.)
The Wellington City Council is in the early engagement phase of a simply enormous document it has to produce called the Long Term Council Community Plan. It's a big deal, because it sets the high level budgets and levels of service for the next three years, and has a lot to do with what things are available and how much the rates next year are going to be. If you're going to talk to the Council anytime in the next three years, this is the best time to do it.

Fortunately, they're trying to make it easy for internet-bunnies, with the provision of a website with Genuine Clicky Boxes, Calculators, and Voting Buttons. (Plus there's Councillor-staffed phonelines, and documents available through the libraries and all that regular stuff.)

What has Steph been doing for the past three months...

I've been working on the council's latest annual report. It has the financial status of the Council from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2008, erudite and entertaining commentary about what we've been spending your money on, corporate stuff, environmental stuff, and a picture of a naked man on the cover.

You can see a copy on our website, by visiting your local library, or calling up the nice folks in the Planning, Performance & Research team at the council (ie me) and I'll send you a hard copy. Also, there'll be a Summary hitting your mailboxes (if you live in Wellington) Real Soon Now.

Just remember: artistic naked man on cover = council annual report.

Gosh, it has been a while since I updated...

There is a cat who looks like a pirate sitting in front of the heater. His name is Mort and he had one of his front teeth removed so that now his top lip curls upward and makes him look sinister. He's come home after a long period of hanging out with people across the road, and also made Prana feel more comfortable about hanging out in the main rooms of the house, making our FTE cat total go up from about 1.95 to very nearly 3.

Work is going well, although a bit quiet this week. The unusual thing that's going on is being invited to paw through people's rubbish on Thursday. (There's a Waste Awareness officer who sits near me several days a week, and she's trying to work out what kinds of things are getting thrown out. She's lovely, just got engaged, and is pleasantly geeky.)

A few weeks ago I went to Chimera, a Larping convention, which was much fun, and got me inspired to run my own small experimental game at KapCon. If it works, it'll be interesting, if it doesn't work, my name might be mud, but oh well.

It is very windy outside.

Look! Fanfic!

It's Friday, And My Colleagues Don't Have Enough Work To Do...

Currently they've built a 9 high tower of coke and beer cans on the filing cabinet and are throwing a frisbee at it. Their aim stinks. The best they've managed so far is knocking two cans off the top. Dearie dearie me. Maybe I should move out of the firing lanes...

In other news, I've spent a week in Auckland beavering away and actually managed to solve something. Sort of. Also, I'm -
OK, they finally knocked it down with a resounding crash, I'm glad I don't have to clean it up -
nauseatingly well rested and prone to waking up at 6 in the morning. I put this down to the fact that my hosts (the lovely Donald and Tanja) who are often a hive of social activity have had a fairly quiet week, so we're all going to bed quite early. (The hive is on hold for various reasons, including a frequent guest acquiring a new boyfriend, another buggering off to Scotland, and Tanja being dewisdomised yesterday.) As strange as it feels to be awake and chirpy at 6.30 in the morning, I can only say that it's a mug's game and I want nothing of it. Well, OK, maybe a little of it. Still, I like that dozy warm feeling you get in the morning when you're all snuggly and don't have to get up quite yet. Particularly if there's company...

In other other news, I was one of the GMs for a Mordavia day game on Wednesday - I spent most of it in the spiral stair case having private conversations with players. There's something about those player plots, they take a while to get moving, but once they're going they have an awful lot of momentum. ;-) Also, Adam gave me a ride there on his shiny yellow Triumph motorcycle, and it is a sad fact that it took me most of Thursday morning to find someone I could brag to who would realise how incredibly cool that was. (Like a Kourier from Snow Crash letting someone hitch a ride on their skateboard, maybe.) Fortunately, my boss who's on a school camping trip near Ruapehu checked his email that morning and was able to make appropriate Ooh and Aah noises.

Anyway, back to Wellington on Sunday. I should probably get some work done...

Hooray For Being An Unemployed Bum

Well, not that I'm actually unemployed, just that I've finished up my holiday job, and I have the rest of the day to enjoy it.

Things that have been happening lately:
-I went to a Haunted House. It was very noisy, with lots of heart pumping frights along the way. I find it interesting, though, banging things and blood spatters will give me a fright, but for true serious fear it's generally the quiet psychological getting-into-your-imagination that really creeps me out. There are some photos.
-I went to a leftover party at Malcolm, Judy, Gordon and Lisa's house. The food and company were lovely, as always. Then we climbed Mt Albert. I can remember back when I thought that that was a big serious hill...
-I've been having royally awful computer problems all week, which is why it's taken me until Friday to clear out my workload. Grrrrrr.
-I went to see the new Pirates of the Carribean movie with John on Monday. Premieres are interesting. On the one hand, they decorate the theatre and have actors dressed up as pirates having fights, clambering out on ropes, and generally haranguing the audience. On the other hand, you have to hang out in Very Long Queues and then sit in the theatre staring at a blank screen for half an hour before the movie starts. The movie itself was great, lots of sustained and well executed silliness, combining gorgeous stunt scenes, well timed acting, photo realistic CGI and the ever pressing question of "Will Keira Knightly get to kiss Johnny Depp?" I loved it.
-I went to a frisbee training session on Wednesday which involved teaching us the basics of speed mechanics. It was lots of fun, and now I have sore muscles in unusual places in my legs.
-I have worked out the precise cutoff temperature at which Babe will cease to be a hunched up miserable cold feline, and start being a lolling relaxed happy warm cat. It's 16.5 degrees. The pair of us have been hanging out in my room for most of the previous three days because it was easier to heat, and the new clock that Cat gave me happens to have a thermometer on it. It was fascinating watching the change that half a degree in air temperature can make on my cat.
-It's nice and sunny today. I think I'm going to go have a walk.

Randomness

Right now I'm staying in a hotel that's exactly my size. The bed is just the right length for me, the shower head barely clears my head, there is precisely one piece of paper in the handy folder, which is good, because I had to leave a note about the power to the kitchen area having shorted out. (I haven't had a cup of tea this morning. I won't get one until midday because the water is off in the building I'm working in. The pain!) So it all kind of works, but I wouldn't want to be John's or Morgan's height and staying there. The problem is that I can't remember the name of the ogre who had an Inn and stretched or shrank people to fit it, or this post would have had a much more interesting title.

On Monday, I went to see a chick flick called Just My Luck. It's a workable example of its genre, although no real surprises. I think that Serendipity, with a similar premise, did a far classier job of setting up elaborate coincidences and making them work. Still, it reminds me that the genre of Romantic Comedy, one of the most contrived around, gets most of its entertainment value from the secondary characters - the two leads have too many restrictions on what their characters can be like.

Georgette Heyer is back in print. :-D She, too, writes highly contrived romances, and they're a lot of fun. She's noticable for using a lot of Regency slang which I can only assume is correct, because most of the phrases she uses I've only read in her books, but I will add for your consideration, gentle readers, the phrase "I must have returned" which is a genuine period phrasing because the more sophisticated verb phrase "I would have had to return" or even "I should have had to return" had not yet been invented. I also note that she makes the distinction between the "will" of volition and the "shall" of obligation. ENGL224 is a course that rocks!

The computer program I'm working on is giving me some results that I don't understand. This is very frustrating.

Take care, all.

EDIT: And in other, happy, news, NeonGraal has trumped the rash of Aucklanders recently announcing that they're pregnant by announcing his engagement. Many congratulations and felicitations.

AND ANOTHER EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT TO SAY BEFORE:
One of the pleasures of staying in a hotel is being able to bum around in your underwear entirely free of worry about wandering flatmates, neighbours or random visiting vicars seeing that which they ought not while you're making yourself a nice hot cup of tea. This is only a good idea, however, if the fire alarm doesn't go off.

How Things Change...

So I'm up in Auckland for a couple of weeks pretending to be an engineer again, and I'm struck by how things are changing around me. We have a new boss, Lee Finniear, whom I got to meet for the first time today (he seems a nice bloke), but there are also other bits and pieces like people moving and shops closing that I think everyone who lives here takes more in their stride because they happen so gradually. For instance, this really cool cafe called Alleuia has changed it's tables. This makes me sad, in a petty kind of way, because it was the tables that I liked most about the place - they were all mismatched and sanded down rescuees from second hand furniture shops and they were, well, cool. Except someone decided that they wanted posh shiny tables now and an essential part of the place's laid back atmosphere has dissapeared. And it's not particularly important, but once again I'm reminded that you can't ever freeze a place (or a person) in crystal and expect them to be exactly the same when you come back as when you left.

Updates

So, what has little Steph been doing with herself, lately?
Well, I went to a Frisbee tournament, I went to work (in Auckland), and I went to Easter Camp. Also, today was the start of the University Games, although I'm getting over a cold and slunk off home after the first game to get some sleep.

Memorable bits from the last couple of weeks (in no particular order):
- Getting a shiny new sword, made just for me! (Thank you Darren.)
- Actually managing to figure out a problem that was happening at work and come up with a solution. It was a frustrating few days to start with. :-(
- Watching a couple of friends break up with fairly vindictive timing within about 10 minutes of arriving at Easter Camp.
- Being told by my sister that there was a girl there that wanted to hit on me within about 10 minutes of arriving at Easter Camp. (She didn't, but it was a rather surprising thing to be told.)
- Seeing, in Waiouru, an ad for fetish and leather supplies outside the local Subway. Supplying the army trade maybe?
- Realising that people in small towns like Pahiatua are actually quite cool about people in weird clothes invading their supermarkets (unlike three_monkey's Christmas experience).
- Being in a story circle that lasted for, like, three hours. "Sing a song, tell a story, ask a riddle, do a dance, or go hide in the cow byre until an angel inspires you." (People who were really stumped were let off with autobiographical anecdotes, like the first time they fell in love, or that time they almost died. Although I'm not sure that that's being let off lightly.)
- Getting home. Thank you for looking after Babe, Edward, she's looking happy and comfortably squishy.
- Relaxing in a spa pool working out kinks afterwards. Thank you for keeping me company, John. :-)

Frisbee Win!

We won our game! Convincingly, even, with a final score of 6-3.
Also, lots of fun to play, the last point was a series of improbably bizarre catches, house_monkey made a spectacular point scoring dive roll, and I got to run around lots which thankfully cleared the bad temper I'd been nursing all day.
(You know that you're having a bad day when you find yourself wishing that everyone else in the world but you had died in a plague. Stupid work laptops. Stupid crowds.)
But it's all better now. :-)

Sneezes

I have been cleaning. I got home yesterday from a week away and was horrified by how filthy the house is. Alas, I can't even blame this on feckless flatmates; no house gets this bad in a week, Norman and I have merely been slack. So anyway, death to sticky floors! Death to messy kitchens! Death to mysterious smells in the bathroom! Death to black patches on my duvet! (How much fur can one cat shed, anyway?) Death to grey carpet! (How much hair can I shed - oh, never mind.) Death to Smoochy!!!

The reason for my trip was work, which was very productive, and Mordavia, which was very fun. The biggest thing that happened was a huge and horrific battle which wiped out two thirds of the player characters. For about half an hour the GMs thought there wasn't going to be another game, but the straggling remnants of the battle and the players who hadn't turned up [ahem] managed to pull something shifty and took out the major war leader and after that the army kind of drifted off. The town of Berium is probably toast though, and we're wondering where a good site to shift to for the next game is. (In case anyone is wondering, there was a lot going on that had nothing to do with battles at all, it's just that it takes rather longer to explain why it was so significant to send a large section of the crew into the game as a group of coolie labourers asking where the road they were supposed to dig up was. Actually, playing a coolie labourer was rather a lot of fun. I think I have an innate fondness for playing venal peasants. "To Fred, who was very well hung!" etc)

And my feet have almost stopped hurting. Joy!