Protected: Horrible news

Or should that be, I have learners? I met the instructor outside the learner’s house, as arranged, and we went in together. We met D, the learner, a Romanian woman of about my age, and then she introduced us to her husband, G and her cousin (or possibly he was her husband’s cousin? I wasn’t…

Total: 168 books January (17) Going Postal by Terry Pratchett The Orchard Thieves by Elizabeth Jolley Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P Feynman More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon The Cartoon Connection: The Art…

It’s amazing how emotionally invested you can get in an on-line community like DearDiary. I’ve been a bit slack lately about keeping up with reading diaries, so this morning I decided to catch up with some of them. I was clicking through the notify emails and came to one from someone whose diary is friends…

Waitangi Day tomorrow, so I decided to take today off as well and turn this into a long weekend so that I can actually get myself vaguely organised for the convention. I did have good intentions of getting up at my normal weekday time this morning and start work on convention stuff right away to…

It’s been a busy few weeks. Work has been as ridiculous as always (actually, more so, thanks to idiots panicking unneccessarily about swine flu), and the rest of my time has flitted away in inconsequential ways in the way that time always does. So, as usual, rather than any sort of real account of what…

I was right about the oil wells. Just across the border we went through hundreds of little wells, pumps bobbing up and down. Lots more wide flat grassy plains (prairies, I suppose?). Where they’re farmed they’re quite colourful – intensely red soil where they’ve been ploughing, green where it’s irrigated (the same huge irrigators we…