Elephants in the room

Nobody mention the pachyderm. It's there, it's eyeballing you and thinking about standing on your foot, but if nobody mentions it, it doesn't exist. Even when it does. Right?

Electric (un)necessities

I saw the Tescos recycling centre again today. And started on my usual rant about it. Which is really quite unproductive. So instead of ranting to Hwsgo, I'm going to start a list of things that are so mindlessly wasteful that they can't possibly justify their place in a civilised green economy.

1. Automatic recycling machines. What? The? F? Which genius thought: "I'd like to encourage people to recycle things so they can make the planet last a bit longer. I know: we'll replace all those boring (and over-used) metal recycling containers with something that takes ages to load, uses lots of electricity, and has a huge ground footprint". This. Is. Not. Green. At best, it's pseudo-green to encourage people to recycle things because it gives them points, and to put a bloody great big electric into the carpark presumably because it looks nattier than the original set of mismatched metal containers. So consider. The big box takes lots of types of recycled materials (bottles, cans... erm... anything else?) but only has two slots in it, into which you can post just one thing at a time. The original bins had 6 holes each, through which you could post bottles, cans etc as quickly as your heart desired (and your hands could manage). Clustered with this were boxes for foil, shoes, books, clothes, and all the other things that most people don't know that they can recycle unless they're looking at them. This system has been working in carparks all over the country for an awfully long time now. So why mess with it? Why replace it with something that actively consumes time, patience and electricity? Why? And before anyone says things about wind turbines and solar panels: I've looked. These don't appear to be fitted to the machine at my local supermarket. And if they were, I'd much rather they were powering something a little more useful and a little less hypocritical.
2. Automatic towel dispensers. A serious pet hate. When we don't even notice that we're using electricity to do what we used to do with one tug on a (manual) paper towel dispenser, then we've seriously lost our way about energy use. And then there's the automatic tap. What in Gods' name (deliberate apostrophe: choose your own deity, including none) is wrong with turning a tap on for yourself? Okay, so it probably means less maintenance on the washer front, but at what cost to the environment? And then there's this, the electric kitchen towel dispenser (and its friend, the electric-powered bin lid). Which is wrong in so many ways that I don't even know where to start.
3. Electric toilet seat covers. Actually, I've noticed that the favourite places for this sort of electro-madness are airports and service stations. Maybe it's just a subtle form of acknowledgement: y'know, we exist because you're using up too much energy, so we say sod it to political correctness and thinking green, we're just going to party like we're on biofuels. Man.
4. I can now make an exception for electric carving knives however. When my dominant hand stopped working for a while recently, I discovered just how difficult it is to carve bread with just one hand. In fact, it's impossible: I was reduced to making marmite sandwiches by putting the bread under one arm and tearing lumps off it with the other hand, then pasting marmite onto the results. It's not pretty, and said electric carving knife would have made all the difference. And probably led to another dodgy accident, but lets not go there.

Okay, QVC generation: it's over to you now. Prove to me that I'm wrong about this...

Death and self

I think I watch too many brutal detective series. Mostly to play with the puzzle, to see if I can work it out before the protagonists do (which is of course always easier when all you see are the necessary clues with a little light obfuscation). And it doesn't usually go much deeper than that (except of course watching mortuary scenes during dinner, which can always be a little offputting). But tonight I was watching Cold Case whilst doing something else, and looked up to see that moment between life and death, that change from a moving sentient thing into a body. And thought again about how contradictory my beliefs on life and death seem to be, even to myself.

The other thing I thought about was something I saw on holiday recently. I'd taken a boat to the top of the Bosphorus, to look out over the Black Sea; a futile effort in itself since the day was so misty that I could see a few large boats and just enough water to sense that the Sea was indeed very very big. And as I walked up the hill to the local castle for a second time in the hope that the mist had cleared a little, someone ran over a cat with their car. I didn't see them run over the cat, but it was a single road with no sidestreets, and the car had been going fast and just narrowly missed me on the lane less than a minute earlier. And I rounded the corner to see the cat in the road, smashed but fighting, with the car gone and people walking past it, seeing but not pausing. It was probably only 100 yards, but it seemed to take an age to walk, to stand by the cat to see if there was anything I could do, and all the time the cat fought, struggled to get its paws on the ground, fought to get itself up, presumably up and out away from the danger. And then it was still. Stiff then relaxed, tenaciously alive to body, bleeding out to blood flowing down the hill. I've seen that moment before, watched my father break the neck of a wild creature that was too injured to survive. But this time I felt helpless. Angry at the driver, at the people who didn't stop, but aware too of the culture difference between us that made them accept death and ignore just a cat.

On my things to do pile is a letter from the woman who cradled my husband by the road as he died. It's been there a while (there have been other things going on, mainly at work, but they did take over precedence late last year). She's a friend of a friend, and he only connected the two people by accident. I believed in the continuation of spirit when it happened; that part of a person continues for a while after their death. But the cat was such a live-to-dead thing, a there then gone moment. And if I can be shocked by a cat. If.

Therapy

Memories stir. Lithographs of a time ago; thoughts, images, feelings brought back to life by a practiced hand. And with them comes self. Me. Was, is, can be. Pain floods, but the tears are good. I curl near him, careful not to disturb, grateful for each listened breath, for each sense of nearby warmth. And am comforted, return to sleep.

New Year's Resolutions: Life

And so another year starts. I can understand the need to party, the pagan urge (I'll hold on my usual comments about England really being a pagan country, with pagan festivals, tastes and traditions - it's a whole post by itself) to light up the darkness and race headlong into the gathering light, but some part of me wants the switch from year to year to be more considered, more thoughtful, more like Yom Kippur. For 15 years now, I have spent one significant day in early December thinking about what I've done in the year past and what I want from the year to come. But this year it seemed less possible (all hell breaking loose at work) and somehow less appropriate (the time for mourning is perhaps now past).

So to thinking. The year past. It's been quite an explosive one, on almost every front. Which for my own memory, I'm going to lay out in gloriously monocolour bulletpoint...

• I became poorer. My boss stopped my payrise, which meant that I was not just below the cost of living but positively going backwards from it. I stopped my lodger so I could move out and move on, but events have left me in an expensive house, not wanting to move yet because I'm waiting for the next (job) things to happen.
• I got away from said boss, but not without collatoral damage. I now have a great (if demanding) boss and an amazing job, but I'm still within the sphere of influence of the person who made my life and others' so difficult over the last two years, and after a couple of wonderful months working out of his way, he's back and has done all the damage that he can.
• I learnt the hard way about HR procedures. It's been a rough few months, but the beauty of always telling the truth is that there is only one truth (granted, there may be many perceptions of truth, but there is, generally, only one underlying truth), and it's very difficult for lies to be consistent. The beauty of bullies is that they rarely attack just one person; once one victim is dispatched, they quite often seek another then another. And the beauty of supposition is that people rarely have the gift of full empathy: often what a person says about you tells you much more about them than about yourself. That said, seeing how other people see you can be an enlightening and sometimes liberating experience too.
• I got way way too stressed about all the above, and let the rest of my life slide away a little too much. I've hardly spoken to many of my friends all year, haven't spent much time with my family (granted some of it is sailing round the world, but that's not the best of excuses now: there's still email). What is most difficult perhaps is that I became too stunned by my own troubles to be there for anyone else. Like my grandparents. My grandmother has Alzheimers, which has got worse this year. Apparently (and I say apparently because I haven't even stopped to visit them this year), she wakes up every morning as smart as she always was, but by the afternoon she's alone, afraid and in some dark place that even my grandfather, who's loved her for almost all their long life, can't bring her out of. He needs comforting, reassuring that life continues, but apart from the above couple of peaceful months, I haven't been able to do this.
• I tried to get another job. To be fair, I was very fussy about what I wanted; to be close enough to Hwsgo to become a short-distance couple at last but still do something useful and interesting; but I failed quite spectacularly to get a whole set of wonderful jobs. All of which had a common theme: I failed mainly because I'm not programming enough any more. I have the CV (she says modestly) of a tech god, but without regular practice, I can't easily back that up in an interview. I might once have written Trojan horses (only small funny local ones!) and obfuscated Perl in my sleep, but if I can't instantly explain SQL tree traversal, I'm not going to get the job that I want.
• I went to the gym again. Mainly because S got us a personal trainer so she could pass her fitness tests. I did go to the gym, but I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have done; I went for the training sessions, but gradually tailed off on the rest of my training. Stress again, despair, and interruptions from work, illness etc. And I hurt my back and shoulder; I’ve spent 6 months doing press-ups with an inflamed rotator cuff. Which is probably not good. I didn’t do much running – I always meant to, but somehow it was never quite the right time. I did a 5k race with Dad a couple of days ago, which proved that I can do it, so it’s much less of a worry now.
• I started to tidy up my life. I had no-buy months, and I have removed stackloads of stuff that I no longer need or - yes, and this is hard for a girl to admit - bought in error. I removed my ex's stuff from my garage after repeated attempts to get him to take it away followed by finding a mouse invasion that had headquartered within it. I wouldn't have believed that a mouse could eat a washer-dryer and a lawnmower, but I'm definitely convinced now. Anything rubber, anything soft plastic, anything ridiculously difficult to reach without disassembling a complex and heavy piece of machinery. This year, I gained a new-found hatred of small furry uncontained invaders, to go with my only other great loathe in life, namely container-based slugs.
• I had cold after cold, my back packed up, my mind started to go pzzt. All stress symptoms. I’m tired. I know I’m tired, and I know I need to fix that, but it’s difficult when you’re tired.
• I finally found a good place with Hwsgo. We are neither of us simple creatures, and even Shakespeare would have had a hard time following all the complications that we managed to knot ourselves in this year.

Things to do this year:

• More programming. If I want a tech job, I have to have tech credentials. It’s not enough (as it is unfortunately in the defence industry now) to be able to talk about how to build systems, and to outline their designs; I need to get myself back at the coalface of reality, making those difficult compromises between ought and can, even if it slows down my apparent output.
• More running. Starting with mapping out some genuine 5k runs from my house and from work. Then taking a set of kit to work, so I have no excuse not to run at lunchtime (it’s too cold… the car’s too far away). And putting myself in for some local 5k and 10ks, to find myself a local club that I actually want to go to (the town one here is mainly track and field, with no plodding road runners at all).
• More gym. Which is a difficult one: get a cheap subscription to the company onsite gym, or continue very occasionally attending an expensive one. Okay, that’s no contest. Company gym it is. Gyms are strange places. You can dress them up, dress them down, put in pretty machines and nice staff, but in the end it’s all about you and your willingness to keep repeatedly pulling down a difficult weight. Kinda like life really: you can dress it up all you like, but in the end it’s all about heart.
• Do a job I love for people I can trust. Or at least people I can trust to not cause as much damage as I’ve seen in the last couple of years.
• Move house to somewhere smaller and less dark. This has been waiting on my job for the past few months (waiting for a new one to move to, and waiting out what's happened at work), but I need to set a deadline now. I want to move out of this house by April 2009. Even if I don't get another job by then, or am still stuck in limbo here, I'm going to move anyway. Even if that means being somewhere temporary for a while.
• More tidying. Shrink down the number of my possessions. Hwsgo pointed out this morning that although I appear to have lots of shoes, I don't have many good ones (the Russian hooker comment about the J-Los was erm - possibly appropriate). I would, optimally, like to be able to fit all my basic possessions into one room of my house. Books, cd, clothes, detritus: I have too much of each and I need to deal with that.

Happy New Year

So I just lost a job opportunity that I really really wanted; panicked and fluffed the second interview. It's rough, but that's life. But you know what? I am tired of checking what I say and think and do all the time, tired of working in places that beat down their staff but expect miracles from them anyway. So I say stuff the world, I'm off. It may be the most stupid thing I've ever done, but I'm going to follow my heart and do what I love instead of what pays the bills. And what I really love is building systems. Top down designs to nuts and bolts twiddly bits, and out to the interface and user needs too. It really shouldn't be much to ask, that I can build stuff that's useful, but it seems to be. And when it's got to the stage where I'm fighting personal politics by day then trying to find time to go home and relax by building stuff at night, then something is deeply terribly wrong. So I have a plan. It's not going to make me popular, but it suits me better than becoming a lesbian lumberjack in Peru. Onwards... oh, and Happy New Year - may all your choices be both courageous and right for you this year.

On Being Nice

I’ve decided to be more balanced in my posts. Nicer. Lately, I’ve caught myself being automatically cynical, and I’m not sure I like that. F’instance… Dutch cuisine. Now some people (and I’m looking at you, anonymous), would argue that this is an oxymoron, that a nation that revels in deep-frying almost anything possible, although possible not quite as much as Glaswegians (haggis, Mars bars, granny’s underwear), couldn’t possibly have cuisine, and that the strength of the local beer can be directly related to the local croquette density (or whatever those horrible fried sandwich thingies are called).

See that – an almost-perfect example of why I think I’m way too cynical. I’m bitching about a nation that thinks a stein is an acceptably small beer measure, a place that produced the chap who told me to chill out and stop working whilst I ate earlier, a city where the cookies that come with your coffee can be especiaaaaally niiiiicccce (No, not Glasgow, although I’m sure that’s possible in some of the artier pubs there too).

So lets start again. I will, for at least as long as I can remember, attempt to be more pleasant in my posts. To see the good side of things, the hopeful in everywhere, but – and this is the difficult part – without being too hopelessly optimistic about life, the universe and human nature. To just be. And see. And comment as fairly and positively as I can. This probably won’t outlast Christmas, so grab it whilst you can.

So. Holland, Den Nederlanden, the place with all the windmills: what can I say (without ranting). Several of the people are nice. The beer is plentiful, drinkable and comes in big glasses that make you feel 3 again (the glass, not the beer: I’m not recommending that 3-year-olds drink here). Some of the Old Master art is stunningly good, ranging from almost-photographically perfect to capturing a mood, a soul and a time in one flat space. There’s some good modern art in Den Haag’s galleries, and some of it is set in stunning old formal rooms, all tapestries of wildly-coloured birds and crafted wood with no clothes on. It’s easy to find water, even in unexpected places (including lawns, which must be keeping the mole population down beautifully). It still has enterpreneurs who believe in new red-lit hotel lobbies despite the credit crunch. And. Erm. The tulips are cute. Can I have a gold star now please?