Plantagenet Penguinista

...also very delicious, again. Thank you, Café 7. Also watched a guy setting up & warming up to play Sax or Flute with some accompanying music there, swapped instrument, compressed-format & MIDI tales. Could almost feel my digestion improving with each reedily-warm note. Met a new Café waitress, a young lass with a name spelt the proper Gaelic way. Being new, she was nervous about getting everything right, but was patient & careful so that everything did work out right. (-: She seemed familiar with the music & it turns out that she sings as well (as does her Mum). This place is getting awesomely attractive, building as a collection of very small things rather than a single, failure-prone do-or-die effort. It starts with the obviously good food, works out through features like the music, artwork & (during the day) DVDs like Madagascar, & celebrates a finale on an amazingly helpful & cheerful (but not intrusive) team spirit.

I wandered out for a quiet walk at 09:00 this morning, packing an umbrella because I’d been told that Rottnest (~50km away) was seeing 102km/h winds. I wondered how long that would take to migrate to Perth. The wind outside was a moderate breeze. We didn’t get those gales, but around 10:00 to 11:00 we took a reasonable amount of rain — thank you, mine host, for that warning — plus some excellent, rumbling big-drums effects & now I see that this afternoon we’re seeing 115km/h winds in the hills, & patchy thunderstorms everywhere else. It feels comfortable to “know” an area well enough to have a rough idea of how these things will work out, without having to much think about it. This weather doesn’t look too good for the ~5km (walking or cycling) trip to a decent, good-value rest-err-wrong for tea, but we’ll see what happens at the time.

Bumped into a lady (late 30’s) on a train last night who was (against the TransPerth rules ) assembling a nice non-hot curry & munching it with some rice bikkies. Conversation landed on the curry & the ingredients for the bikkies. It turns out that she’d recently given up smoking, but was unable to stay that way. Why? Because her husband has a variant on CJD , a nasty degenerative disease which essentially wastes away your brain cells en masse. That sort of shook things into perspective very suddenly. My own problems are manifold & intrusive (featuring aspects like malice , & rash (but AFAICT non-malicious ) mistakes apparently made through fear) but really don’t compare with the certainty of having your loved one’s mind vanish, cell by cell, until they die a confused zombie. On the lighter side, I was able to make the day of a lass running a perfume stand (which was driving her troppo but funded her ECU studies of forensics ) by the simple expedient of buying her an i

This week, helped 4 different Mums struggle with unwieldy prams (& even less wieldy kinder), prompted a definite raise in morale for at least 8 people (made the day of at least one of them, a “fat” (hah!) wonder whose name is not Sarah), relieved Australian Geographic of a pair of projecting clocks for just over $20 ea (line price ~$90 ea), unexpectedly arrived with a cup of coffee for a Chinese-Malay princess, provided a full set of bedding for a Sudanese family... Sure there was something else... oh, yes, spotted a pair of dolphins playing under Canning Bridge... & ate at Cafe 7 again, twice — delicious as always. (-: Perth is an excellent place, naysayers can go looking for a train in Hobart :-) Could really, really do with a few more people explaining “why” for certain issues, though. Life would be great if it weren’t for a few gaping pieces of damage remaining, undermining all else.

When one has been walking kilometers every day, & cycling tens of km every day, one has one’s muscles tuned for walking or cycling, not running; After lugging a flying fox up a hill again 8 times, one needs to keep lugging the ’fox back every so often lest one’s muscles seize up; Fit 5-yo or 9-yo boys can soldier straight through/over stuff again & again which one must then struggle past, & one’s adult companions are sufficiently daunted by that they detour; Suddenly-absent Thandis leave a massive social hole about equivalent to a missing hut-full of mere mortals, & deflate most of the joy of physically conquering obstacles; Riding on a 4WD will get you up the hill faster — at a certain encased-mud cost through the brook crossing. (-:

Still not aware of any particular significance. Ran into a few less usual names as well (e.g. Ukranian: “Nat” becomes Natalka, looks quite pretty, not at all hard-line Russki style), & a Jessie who was literally “Jessie” rather than an abbreviation for Jessica or whatever.

Tortellini! Yuuuum! (-: Oh, yes, fell for another super-duper-calorific iced chocolate. Thinking of which, will have to get serious about this weight-loss thing again (i.e. find ways to overcome the imposed handicaps), as my 92cm jeans now require a belt to stay up, & my 87cm set do fit on... but luxuries like touching my toes are still (literally) beyond me. (-: Meanwhile, must find ways to fit more Cafe 7 in without the iced choc... hmmm... have heard of people driving others to drink, but never before of driving someone to eat...?

It’s amazing just how fast a full-sized black forest cheesecake will vanish if you happen to leave a spare one in an office kitchenette, all sliced up, with a stack of plates & teaspoons. (-: 2mins 43secs :-)

Installed a system on one disk with RAID1 (that is, each RAID segment owns one partition on the existing drive, /dev/sda ). Then plugged in the second drive, copied the partition tables ( cfdisk ), rebooted to make sure disk & kernel agreed, now any attempt to use a partition on the second drive ( /dev/sdb ) — mkswap , mdadm , anything else — results in “Device or resource busy.” lsof , lslk etc show nothing for sdb ; /proc/swaps shows just the sda swap partition in use; mdadm --detail shows just the sda partitions in use for RAID. Where next?

In the last couple of weeks, sticking to a weight-loss programme has become suddenly hard, when it wasn’t beforehand. I put it down to the instant elimination of certain psych benefits plus some resulting psych damage. Either way, the result has been a rapid 6kg “bounce” in weight. Sigh. About the only tool I have left is stubborn determination. That, at least, has had copious exercise in the face of miscellaneous shocks, lies (yes, that includes some major lies-of-omission), betrayals & complete stonewalling.

Today, I piled onto a train at Cottesloe (after one of a long series of medical appointments) with a pushbike, & used my backpack to chock the back wheel to prevent the ’bike from rolling fore & aft. By the time I got to Perth, I’d become so involved with other passengers that I simply walked off with the ’bike into Northbridge, leaving backpack, laptop, bike-lights, torch, food & numerous other items aboard. CSO Gail radioed Bassendean Station, who found & rescued the backpack intact, returning it on another train about 20 mins after I’d walked away. Good thing, too, since said laptop had/has legal documents on it which will help to short out some of the lies being told against me by others. Note to self: plug new hard-disk in (& SO-DIMMs), keep old as a backup.

Wandered up through Landsdale on the pushbike today, & found Cafe 7 open for lunch — on a Sunday. Having enjoyed a great nosh-up there with Matt, fixing computers at a local school, I asked about when would be best (the place was absolutely packed at 09:30, guessing Mothers’ Day had something to do with this) for lunch, & wheeled back in at 14:00. Lunch was absolutely delicious; these people seem to have refined the art of using serious food (e.g. rice) backgrounded by scrumptious stuff & cooking it so the flavour is spread throughout rather than blanded. I was able to get something reasonably low-fat, plus veggo (hi, Steph! :-), for about the price of two burgers from one of the fast-food chains. Their choc-milk is not exactly low-fat (it includes both cream & real ice-cream), but was so delicious that I “had” to order a second. (-: The staff were very helpful, spontaneously offering to rearrange the table so I got a clear view of the wide-screen DVD showing (“Hedge,”

Now have no less than 6 magazines interested in having me write for them. With that & miscellaneous other work, all I need to do now is get my life organised enough to manage all of this, & I’ll be only a few steps away from career paradise. (-: Only three major line-items awaiting solutions, but two of those are biggies. Did I mention girls going crazy? Remind me one day to explain “second best” as a ranking — it offers both ongoing frustration & eventual hope, if I’ve interpreted the promises of certain people (back window of your car) correctly. Meanwhile, looking at fighting for a duplex in southerly Girrawheen which “should be” in ADSL2/2+ land for at least 2 ISPs.

Discovered a new mode of learning yesterday, & that I have used it all along (I match up bullet for bullet down the characteristics list). Sister’s kinder are very much VSL. Know a pre-teen who is probably going to crash during primary school because he’s begun to collide with the non-VSL techniques used in State School, finds school “boring” (a word which evidently carries a heavy freight of meaning for this bright young lad). Another branch to the tree is emotive learning, which I’ve not explored yet, but sister’s 2nd-last munchkin is an absolute genius at it (as in, I don’t understand the detail, but I can see the little light come on as she flashes to a conclusion far faster than I’m able to). Know another pre-teen in which this mode also is not being addressed. Sigh. /ME wishes for a perfect world in which not only was the understanding wider spread, but social politics didn’t intervene with communicating it in time.

Had a couple of little strokes of happiness in the last few days (don’t make up for the irrecoverable king-hit of recent weeks — co-starring medical symptoms & other consequences — but...) in that when I went looking for Eric Berne TA books, the library had one of many which they are getting in for me — in a while — & book-shops “could get” for $$$ I don’t have... then in Elizabeth’s (Perth branch) I found “What do you say after you say Hello?” which is an excellent primer. To my surprise, today I found “Games People Play” in a random 2nd-hand bookshop in Warwick (one of the benefits of a push-bike over busses is the ability to dally for a while en route). The mint-slice balls were only half-effective (paranoia saw about half given away), but I got to drop a little basket of chocolated short-breads before a random Real Estate receptionist (also very slim, concept of “fat” self-evidently ludicrous, appreciated help making tabs work right on MS-Word) today, which earned her a bun

Technically relevant? Not even slightly. Today, I accumulated my 8th new Jess in two weeks. She was a bit disgruntled about another Jess whom I’m gently torturing with chocolate biscuits (& attends gym regularly, & is stunningly slim, & plays the dumb blonde so skillfully but is the only staff member at that workplace who hits proxy sites to get past web filtering) but was still helpful & good value like the other 7 new Jesses plus 3 pre-existent Jesses. Tomorrow’s torture plan is a bowl-full of Arnott’s Mint Slice Balls on Jess Pre-Existent-3’s desk. I also had some fun with a school-girl (about 15-16yo) on a #64 bus from Warwick Station: she was speaking VERY LOUDLY with her dad on her mobile ’phone, so I continued the conversation VERY LOUDLY to the obvious amusement of many other bus passengers. When she finished with the ’phone, she (loudly) stated “My Dad is so gay!” I looked non-plussed at her for a few seconds, then asked, “Um... so... how did you get here?”