Sunday Morning

Good morning my dears

This week has been very quiet here, you may have noticed. I have a list of excuses but I'm sure that you dudes are cool with me vaguing in and out. My best excuse is a change of computer - which is a strange one, no? But true enough - for some reason it's much harder to blog in a strange position. Also, I've been spending all morning thinking about computers and usability and design, and when I get on the computer after school it's to do Work work. Blogging I'm afraid has slid down on my list of things to do (but unfortunately well above "going for a run").

Also, in case you missed, there has been a major disaster in New Zealand this week. Christchurch has suffered a devastating earthquake and as I'm writing there has been 113 confirmed dead and there are still 200 people reported missing. As my mum said "things like this don't happen in New Zealand!". Shannon is down south in Christchurch at the moment working for Radio New Zealand and helping them out with their broadcasts. My friend Katherine, flatmate James and his girlfriend Porndy are all from Christchurch; as James commented, even if they've accounted for all their close friends and family, with the amount of people who will be eventually reported dead it's not really possible that they won't know some of them. People not in New Zealand: the damage might be isolated in one place, but we're a tiny country of 4 million people and really, it effects all of us to a lesser or greater degree. If you can make a donation, I strongly recommend you do. It's might not seem like much, but it's at least something!

 

In more cheerful news, I have been Doing Things: school work, knitting socks (adore) and sewing myself a new duvet cover from lovely Egyptian cotton sheets. As I write I am sitting under a beautiful mound of crisp, snowy-white cotton. HEAVENLY. I want only white Egyptian cotton duvet covers from now on. I am super pro Little Luxuries at the moment, and this duvet cover definitely counts as a luxury. Sleeping like a queen! Also, I'm slowly sorting out my debts - and am in the best place I've been, money wise, for about two years which is especially ironic given that I'm living off the tiniest amount of money - but as I've noted before, there's something very liberating about not having very much money. Squee!

Also, the Lack of Blogging means that I'm reading a hell of a lot more at the moment (OMGEEEE). At the moment I'm reading Linotte: The Early Diary of Anais NIn, and Doctor Zhivago. Ready a diary has made me feel far more like keeping a diary than I have for about a year, but it's pretty awesomely fabulous I think. I really do love writing stuff but sometimes I just need a nice long break to feel like it again.

I try and read Russian epic novels at least once every couple of years and I usually enjoy parts of them but - as a genre - I'm just not that keen. All the randomness of the Passionate Bits! And things happen so quickly and so slowly at the same time - tediously long philosophical tracts on the Land Question et al and then dramatic bits happening so quickly that it's difficult to remember, only to later discover that those two paragraphs were the key to understanding the whole novel. At least Zhivago has a list of characters at the front so it's easy enough to refer back if I get very confused about who is who. Last night I watched the 1953 film version of War and Peace, so I hope like hell I don't get the two mixed in my head  - at least the time periods are far enough apart but I think I probably just made my life infinitely more difficult. Oh well.

So, enough introspection today I think. Back on the Band Wagon people!