The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

David Rowe always delivers the golf goodies.
In the meantime, in between rounds of golf, the Grim Tweeter has gone feral even by his own despicably low standards. If there is one tawdry toxic trumPET out there even nastier than him, he will find and retweet the jerk

Meanwhile, here is hoping that Nancy Pelosi is sharpening her teeth and getting ready to tear strips off him

It is a week now in the Wild West of Oz since the first significant loosening of the 'lockdown' rules
Since Monday 18th cafes can have up to 20 people seated at a time as long as they adhere to the 4 square metres per person rule. Pubs and restaurants face the same requirements so therefore a lot of them have chosen not to reopen because margins were already razor thin even in the normal BC times

( Coffee crawls and wicked weeds )

On Monday it will be 3 weeks since the Federal Government ordered the shutdown of all pubs and ordered that cafes and restaurants could do take aways only.
I guess that they use fines and threats of loss of licence to enforce such rulings because within hours the CLOSED signs were up on the pubs and the cafes either had removed all their chairs and tables, put the chairs on top of the tables or resorted to using crime scene tape to keep people from using them

( Cafes and Crazy Dog Ladies )

Three weeks ago I came across a cute little Italian cafe where a health food shop had recently been. Went in for a sniff but was on the way to the century old Carriage cafe. The cafe is not that old. That honour belongs to the railway carriage it is in. It is located in an tree lined old park near the edge of the ocean and is a most magical place indeed.
Came back next day to the Italian place for a proper peek. There were all sorts of delicious looking pastries with sliced apple, plates of very tasty elegant rolls stuffed full of interesting savoury ingredients and boring sweet and sickly stuff like donuts.

( Serpent snacks )

Not been slinking much in Cyberia lately or rather devoting most time there to Hogwarts homework. The old Hermione Granger incarnation is well and truly dead, buried and cremated. This emerald serpent is much more of a plodder lately. But the advent of a new year is a good opportunity to catch up.

Last night was supposed to be dedicated to the big “Think Again” catch up. Everyone else is at week seven and I’m way way behind still watching video lectures for week 4. In spite of having an extra 30 hours a week to play with which really is the next best thing to having one’s own personal Time Turner, still slacking and procrastinating

( Lazy serpents lounging about )

Today was party time in Izzieland. We saw the welcome return to civilized weather. Sunny but crisp and crunchy and a respectable maximum temperature of 27 celsius forecast and delivered
All the weeds are looking happy, lush and green. It was such a relief not needing to water them after last night’s rain
It was time for celebration. Got all snaked up and wore a most special emerald green hat for a visit to the old lurking grounds of a certain old lunatic asylum in Fremantle. It would be a day spent ruminating, plotting, planning and doing a whole pile of squiggly stuff that should have been done yesterday.

The rituals would begin with a detour to Buratti art gallery which presently has an exhibition of Aleister Crowley paintings and other esoteric art work.
Visited this place for the solstice only to find that it was closed over Christmas and would not reopen until Wednesday 2nd January 2013. So instead of gawking at assorted beastly art works had to make do with second best - a certain deck of cards.
But the lure of Wednesday 2nd being the very first opening day of the new year, I figured it was just too auspicious to resist. After all this is a day that has been devoted to matters concerning the invisible worlds for the last eleven years and that would be just the perfect entree before the main course in the Garden of Insane Delights

( The map is not the territory )

It is most silly of this serpent to be indulging in nostalgia especially when this very day in 2001 which marked the descent into three weeks of complete misery with a dozen Dementors for company

Today was a veritable picnic in comparison but still jinxed and miserable. At times it seemed the clouds of doom and gloom would depart but such illusions were soon shattered

Had decided to commemorate the occasion by paying a visit to the old lunatic asylum along with the very cute carriage cafe which celebrates its 100th birthday some time this December.

Neither of those things were on the agenda for Wednesday 12th December 2001 which was so disgustingly hot and muggy that even the anniversary celebrations of Marconi’s radio at Wireless Hill could not tempt this miserable muggle out of the house

The point of the visit to the asylum and the cafe was for a feast of squiggling. Not just a bunch of Christmas cards which should really have been all posted by now. It was supposed to be a ritual for banishing the beastly Dementors. It’s worked wonderfully before and maybe it would again.
But once again the misery magnet was working overtime. Around 2pm while sitting on the deck at the carriage cafe it started raining down in buckets. Had picked a spot with an umbrella but using a fountain pen with emerald ink was tempting fate

This also meant abandoning plans to go to the lunatic asylum from 3 to 5pm since the most inspiring places to squiggle are all outside under the shade of the plane trees. So pottered off to the wonderful New Edition book store instead with its cafe and lots of old fashioned tables and proper wooden cafe chairs and trying to avoid getting soaked in the process
It did help having narrowed down the present problems to one central issue. That dark grimoire four of pentacles with the creepy corpse sitting in a chair clutching a book to his chest with his cold dead hands summed up the problem most magnificently

Many moons ago had made numerous attempts to solve the problem of being very easily upset over the silliest smallest things. Would go completely murderous in the old skull but managed to avoid outward displays of such rage except in safe environments such as at home alone. But one day the old luck might run out and all hell would break loose with some possibly nasty consequences
Absolutely nothing worked at all and every attempt to destroy or dampen this rather short fuse just ended in failure. Until one day it happened with absolutely no effort whatsoever

But nature abhors a vacuum and the inner beasts soon found new ways to channel their evil intent. What used to be the odd spare tyre has turned into the Michelin warehouse, what used to be the well stocked pantry is now full of stuff long past its use by date, there’s a veritable menagerie of cute and cuddly creatures lingering around the lair and as for books. We thinks it was Kaasirpent who found the wonderful quote that books breed like rabbits but book shelves breed like elephants (Izzie would have suggested unicorns)

( Hubble bubble, toil and trouble )

Lately the serpent has not been squiggling much in Cyberia. Even mundane Muggle real life is not scoring too many emerald ink words in the spiral notebooks. Should be toning up those writing muscles for the November marathon but there’s just so many other distractions

Finally gotten over the Queen of Toads and her reign of terror. It’s not that nothing is happening just that other things are much more important. Completely useless stuff like Coursera’s online classes in cryptography and mathematical thinking. Useless in the sense that they have no practical value but they serve as a wonderful antidote to the toadish toxin that have for too long infested the green cells.

Unlike so many folks these days who spend hours at their desks both on the job and off, Izzie’s computer access is limited to between two and three hours in the evenings on weekdays. Daylight is too precious to be spent hunched over a creaking keyboard unless it is raining or sizzling outside.
Still playing catch up with downloading and watching the various video lectures for the two courses. But we cannot neglect squiggling completely. The old head will explode without the odd peek in the Pensieve. The sad and pathetic 6,600 and something words for September do not do justice to the vast quantities of faeces that are hitting the fan.

Discovered recently that one serious key to unleashing creativity is to do a mind dump of stuff put on the long finger. Used the looming start of the new month to tie up a few loose ends on the last weekend of September. There were letters and emails to be sent and a one off trick that will provide a guaranteed supply of bus travel at a big fat 25% discount. It felt so amazing to clear the decks and of course the knowledge that all procrastinators have that the time spent ruminating and considering getting around to doing something vastly exceeds the actual time and effort expended on doing the deed.

Decided that this was also the week to finally do a print out of all the assignments for the mathematical thinking course. It has the intriguing short title ‘maththink’ which in itself alone is reason to sign up. It is a fun and seriously double plus good course

The assignments themselves are not assessed but are the main part of the course. There’s some seriously delicious little morsels tossed in there. But the Izzie does not have a printer so this called for a visit to a city netcafe. Decided that there would be no peeking until finding a decent cafe. Izzie is one seriously sick serpent who actually looks forward to doing her homework. But then again one could expect that from most students enrolled at Hogwarts.
Izzie thinks that the lecturer Keith Devlin would approve a tiny tweek to Dumbledore
“Ah. Mathematics. A magic beyond all we do here”

So far the course is concentrating on basic logic. Never did get past the obvious ‘and’ and ‘or’ before so it getting both tricky and interesting. Been introduced to all sorts of tools to enable clear and logical thinking. Intuition can be fine but it is nice to be able to follow and check the accuracy of intuition with some rational and repeatable procedures. How else can you separate the real heirloom seeds from the Monsanto mutants?

It’s the strange loops that the serpent is really looking forward to. The very first week gave a hint that they would be playing a starring role at some later stage.
Decided to spend the day on the wild side of the city on the northern side of the old horseshoe bridge. The museum was one item on the agenda due to the presence of the Spiegel tent in its gardens and being one of the locations in the Awesome art festival for bright young (at heart) things
Turns out it does not start until tomorrow but that did not stop the serpent soaking up the magical atmosphere of the old cabinets with sea shell, corals, star fish and enormous stuffed elephants, bison and Tasmanian tigers

Noticed that the cafe is now open again. It had been closed for renovations on the last visit and now has a shabby retro chic look with formica tables and hideous orange and brown sofas.
But with a name like “The Muse Cafe” written in Geekish Greek style letters, how could Izzie possibly resist. Yesss. Outside in the sunshine near the gorgeous old wood and glass Spiegeltent and the old red brick walls of the museum with the odd owl sculpture hiding on the roof, it was the perfect nano cafe. Spent a good ninety minutes there. There were a handful of customers most of whom were sitting amongst all the kitsch inside. The mad rush is most likely in the morning and lunch time.

Did two rounds of index cards for the upcoming November adventure. There’s only twelve cards to be completed at this stage. Still not got a story line but something should evolve out of the 270 something story suggestions. Each card is linked to the chapter theme and the card before and after it so some of those story seeds should produce useful fruits.
Also took a peek at the five assignments and started on some of them. When the muses come to visit you got to grab and snatch what they offer because who knows when they will next arrive. Of course Izzie is not taking chances and intends to abduct and kidnap a couple.

Last Thursday was a glorious crisp and crunchy sunny spring day. Not too hot and not too cold. A veritable Goldilocks day. It was perfect weather for a picnic in the park at the top end of town. But that particular activity was already scheduled for the very next day.

Thursday evening would be spent at a discussion group on the topic of “What makes us tick”. So it made sense to find some place to lurk near the bus route. The first visit to the group’s new meeting venue way back in May had made it quite obvious that this was not a place to linger any longer than necessary. It too had been a beautiful sunny day but a bit crisper and colder than at this time of year. But being unsure of exactly where the new meeting place was and how long the bus took to get there, decided to make a day of it rather than just timing it to turn up an hour or so before the 6.30pm start

It took a week to recover a visit to the hell hole that is the Galleria shopping centre. Izzie hates large shopping complexes at the best of times but this place is just so enormous, so noisy and crowded and infested with rug rats and squealing rampaging beasties.

The group used to meet in a cafe right next to the train line in a pretty old suburb with lots of spooky little streets and interesting locations to lurk. Was most peeved indeed when they changed their opening hours to match the rest of the nanny cafes in the area meaning that the venue was no longer suitable for long and rambling discussions about life, the universe and everything.
So the grand plan was to lurk in a lovely old bit of the city and to catch the bus around 4pm in order to avoid the worst of the rush hour traffic. It would also be an opportunity to find some interesting locations for lunch.

Been trying out various cheap and cheerful Asian restaurants in the search for kosher cuisine suitable for vegetarian serpents. Figured it was time to broaden the horizons beyond dahl and basmati rice.
Chinese vegetarian food is generally bland. The only spice option seems to be chili and more chili. Malaysian and Indonesian seem to have the best of both worlds with both a Chinese and Indian influence along with one marvelous magical ingredient - satay sauce.

Found a pretty poky but seriously cheap and cheerful Indonesian joint on the north side of town. The owner is very friendly and the food is cheap but decent. In spite of the low prices it is not your average greasy spoon. It also happens to be a short walk away from a gorgeous little cafe on Lincoln Street overlooking a spooky art deco cooling tower.

Izzie likes the quiet quirky places that are just off the beaten track and these two are little gems. It is also wonderful to walk along the side streets looking at the gorgeous old houses and gardens.

( slinking and snooping )

So another month of nano nuttiness comes to an end. This one was very different to all of the others. Every other time had at least two weeks holidays from the mad house and no other dramas or distractions. It turned out that developing a regular habit of squiggling overcame those particular obstacles. Good habits got the runs on the board but this time the muses remained sadly absent. Not once was there ever the experience of having to grab bits of paper and squiggle furiously while the muses dictated page after page. They simply refused to linger any longer than a few minutes at most.

But without the six months worth of training would not have been able to put two words together at all so this was a minor inconvenience. Took four days off completely so still managed to maintain a daily average of 2,000 words for those remaining 27 days.

Had also introduced the incentive of a bribe and today was time to collect the prize.
Having raided several nest eggs, the serpent was in a position to splurge on some decadent indulgences. Decided to allow such wickedness but with strings attached. A fascinating book about gardening and the politics of food written by some one who knows her stuff would sit there looking ever so inviting on the shelves of the New Edition book store. Small little store that it is, they had more decent books than all of Borders that must have been 30 times their size.
This book shop now includes a cafe. Not only do they have decent coffees and real loose leaf teas but they cost only $3 a cup for the coffee and the same for a small pot of tea. They also have the daily papers. But to sit at an old wooden table amongst shelves of books and little stands of assorted yuppie Moleskin journals and notebooks is just the sort of location for inspired nano squiggling.

So a copy of “Outside the Magic Square” could be ours on condition of reaching the 50,000 word count at Camp Nano. And today it was time to pick up the prize. This book is so good that the ma will be getting a copy too for her birthday which is just over two weeks away.
Just been ordering a bunch of heirloom tomato and chili seeds so that will make a nice present too just slipped in between the pages.

One side effect of the recent toxic toad drama is the realization that this serpent and caffeine just do not mix. Should have worked this out ages ago. The signs were obvious but was just too naive and stupid to read them. With a bit of joining the dots, nearly all the times where the Izzie has had serious almost psychotic episodes or panic attacks were almost always accompanied by several large cups of the evil brew. Not an espresso drinker but a lover of big fat bowls of smooth creamy milky coffee, so just did not realize that the lack of black bitterness was no indication at all of the lack of caffeine.

It was after drinking two enormous bowls of cafe au lait back in April last year and then coming down with stomach aches and the head ache from hell that the serpent started putting two and two together. Slinked off to the serpent sack at 8pm that night and did not even have a glass or two of red for another two days. Discovered later that a cup that size would have contained three ‘shots’ of coffee.

So if coffee can produce such nasty effects without underlying stress, figured that it was time to stop tempting fate by drinking the stuff when there is good reason to feel psycho, paranoid or just basically neurotic. It certainly worked wonders. Even got a bit adventurous today and tempted fate with a mug of the stuff at the New Edition Cafe of course while perusing the freshly snatched copy of “Outside the Magic Square”

It was delicious like ever. But at least this time when the old green cells started buzzing, knew that it was not everyone out to get this poor innocent serpent just a bunch of overloaded brain cells in overdrive. So kept away from crowds and drank lots of water and the craziness went away.
New Edition does have decent loose leaf tea and marvelous chai masala but not every cafe has such interesting options. Too often the low or no caffeine options include tea bags in water at coffee prices or proper loose leaf tea which tastes foul due to an awful water supply.
So only one hour left of August’s Camp Nano adventure. September will take a bit of a break from squiggling and start catching up on that online cryptography course. It might even provide some inspiration for November. Some one has already mentioned a novel with the most intriguing title “Cryptonomicon”

Also finished reading “The Omen” today so evil inspiration is everywhere. We thinks it is time for Damien to get himself a twin sister and her name is Dolores

Last month the Izzie got adventurous and decided to abandon the monthly meeting of the Vegie wannabees group in favour of a recently joined book club. They both had their meetings on the same day. One had the theme of Mexican vegetarian food and the other was discussing “The Hunger Games”
The meeting was scheduled for 7pm so decided to slink over there around 2.30pm. A bit late for lunch but that was not a problem as Rifos had their $12 pasta special until 4pm. Would just keep an eye out for the place while on the bus and then slink around the cafe strip before arriving at the pub in time for the book club.

But the map is never ever the territory. Had the beady Izzie eyes out on full alert but this pasta palace was nowhere to be seen. Silly Izzie should have gotten the exact address. While there was a very long strip of cafes and restaurants nearly all of them closed their kitchens by 3pm. Was well and truly ravenous by the time they opened again around 5.30pm. Chose an Indian restaurant. Last darkened the door of the place on Wednesday 12th September 2001. That was a day that was very easy to remember. Izzie always chooses the vegetarian thali as variety is the spice of life. But the waiters claimed that they only do those at lunch time. So made do with Biryani - the Indian version of fried rice. Decided to come back at lunch time some time in the future to do the Thali test. It is interesting to get the same dish in lots of different places and see the variations in both quality and price.

Today was the perfect day for a second visit. Had been to visit the vampires for blood tests and had to fast for ten hours or so. Had nothing to nibble since 10pm the previous night so by midday was feeling exceedingly ravenous.

( In search of the perfect noodle )