izmeina: Roz with clipboard from Monsters Inc (monsters inc)
This is now my 12th time doing Nanowrimo in November
The first time was in 2009 and by coincidence, this year’s days and dates coincide - i.e. In 2009 (and also 2015) the first day of November was a Sunday, which also meant that it is a Black Friday month
The last Black Friday in November was in 2015 and I remember it as if only yesterday because it was the day that a bunch of terrorists attempted to attack a football game in France and managed to kill more than a hundred people in the Bataclan theatre

So aside from those awful anniversaries, what I have noticed over the whole time is that I usually spend the first week in a sluggish snailish state unlike most Nanowrimo squigglers who are full of enthusiasm and bright ideas. They start all bright eyed and bushy tailed and chalk up YUUUGE word counts while I just plod along just managing to reach the daily word count quota of 1,666 words

The Missing Muse )
izmeina: (circle serpent)
A quick fix of Grinch Porn

No Collusion. No Cover ups

Still not gotten around to reading the annotated version of this giant hissy fit.

It's not just the Don whose heart is 666 times too small. The other Grinch has also been slinking and stalking this serpent in spite of my declaration of divorce some 4 months ago. All my accounts of his appalling cruel and callous behaviour are to him nothing more than made up nonsense, Corruption and Lies.

It literally is a case of "Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you're reading is not what’s happening." and gas lighting on steroids. But this serpent has kept copious contemporaneous notes (just like her mother) and there are also other witnesses to the relentless never ending bullshit and lies.

The Izzie has been busy the last few weeks being a zombie. Too many dramas with dementors and precious squiggling time spent curled up in the serpent sack trying to catch up on a giant deficit of snooze time due to Dursleyish dramas. I did manage to keep up with the daily Duolingo streak and even managed to sneak into the Sapphire leader board due mainly to the silly buggers forgetting to open it until there were only 3 days left in the week. Looks like the same is happening this week too.
For the first time in 2 weeks, managed to stay up until 9pm last night. Before that it has been 7 or 8pm each evening at the very latest. So obviously between working and snoozing, not much else got done. Until last night, I did not even indulge in my favorite ritual of sitting in the garden next to the Angel's Trumpet tree breathing its most intoxicating and hypnotic fragrance while sipping a glass or two of red and toasting to the memory of the muchly missed Petunia.

Particularly peeved that I fell off the rails during the run up to the Federal election. So much time spent snoozing instead of snarking.


Tomorrow I will be slinking down to Eden Vale for four days. Been 5 years since my last visit to my favourite serpent sacred site. It used to be an internet dead zone. Not sure if that has changed since. I will be too busy sniffing the weeds to notice and hopefully doing a giant catch up on squiggling during the long dark nights of winter.
izmeina: curly green leaf spiral (spiral)
I barely lurk in Cyberia at all these days. Not even on Twitter. Even then it is usually to catch up on and of course snaffle the latest David Rowe masterpiece.

Monsters and weeds )
izmeina: a spooky blue Cthulhu brandishing wicked weapons (pen and paintbrush) (Cthulhu)
It was just over 4 weeks ago when I attended an antiques auction on a mission to rescue some of Petunia’s precious possessions which miserable grinch Vernon Dursley was too mean to even offer to any of his offspring.

Serpent stuff )
izmeina: (oro)
Today was a seriously busy day. After 2 days of lurking and slinking at Borgin and Burkes eying up the territory and the Enemy, today was the big day.

I had been drawing up the battle plans because auctions are infamous pits of quicksand for those who do not have their reason and wits about them.

The Serpent's Strategy )
izmeina: a wicked witch on her broomstick by moonlight (broomstick)
I was supposed to post about an amazing surreal and spooky show in the Usher girls' school

Once upon a Midnight dreary


That was until vile Vernon Dursley rang and gloated about how the auction mob came and took away Petunia's collection of kettles and cauldrons that he KNEW that I wanted for nearly the last year. We had recently discussed waiting for my brother to come before taking them to the Lair since I did not want him to be carrying anything heavy. I said that I would put them in the van and Dudley could drive.

Of course he could do nothing to stop them in spite of being there to let them in. The auction removals people were instructed to take everything that wasn't specially marked. The cauldrons and kettles which were not even IN the house were not marked so therefore they got taken and there was nothing he could do about it. And anyway he had suggested lots of times to take them over and I had said NO so it was all my fault anyway for leaving everything until the last minute.

Daisy keeps asking what nasty petty shit he has to do before I finally stop being a doormat putting up with all his bullshit

I can't tell her because today of all days is her birthday and I don't want to trash her day like he has just trashed mine

It reminds me of the time that Petunia was overseas in December 2001 and he made a point of telling her when he phoned on Christmas Day that her dog had died unexpectedly. All of course justified in the name of truth telling

It's finally time to go nuclear. I have picked the time and date already and just need to write the "Dear Dursley" letter
Hell hath no fury like a serpent scorned
In the meantime, I can console myself with my almost accidental magical linking of his fate to Don the Con
When the Don goes down, vile Vernon Dursley will go with him

Roger Stone the coffee boy just got arrested so the WALLS are closing in around the spider at the centre

As for Izzie being nice from now on to nasty Vernon
NEVERMORE!


The Witch's Cauldron )
izmeina: a wicked witch on her broomstick by moonlight (Halloween)
Nanowrimo is over for yet another year and I reached the magical milestone of 50,000 words but added another 5,555 of my own in order to indulge my obsession with pretty and symmetrical numbers

The story that I intended to write was NOT the one that ended up on the pages. Like too often in the last few years Dursley dramas have hijacked any attempts to write normal stories

But there are no regrets. For this giant formless pile of words did not turn into a proper story with a beginning, middle and end but transformed itself instead into a giant Pensieve.

I joined the dots and found all sorts of sneaky but legal ways to get into trance states. The music of Lisa Gerrard is a particularly potent weapon for this purpose. I listened for the tiniest stirrings of the inner serpent and resorted to all sorts of devious means to bring the shy and retiring creature out of hibernation

And that is how the real magic happened. Just in the nick of time too. For if the inner serpent had not come to the rescue, it would have been a dark and difficult time watching Vile Vernon Dursley grandest plan to date to erase the last living trace of Petunia's legacy from the planet

So I have managed to turn the most bitter and sour of lemons into a very bubbly tasty potion indeed.
izmeina: (oro)
It has been a long time between hisses but it looks like this serpent has finally found her way back on to the broomstick again but this time with a bright shiny new Dursley repelling anti bludger charm

Been waiting 14 years for lightening to strike twice and it appears increasingly likely that this is exactly what has happened

With the help of assorted rituals including copious sniffing of Angel's Trumpet flowers, a Dead Can Dance soundtrack and hours devoted to squiggling in the Pensieve under the pretext of November novel writing, magic is finally happening.
The usual strange serpent pattern applied this time. Unlike most folks who are firing on all cylinders for the first week but then falter and splutter and lose steam during the dreaded second week before finally crashing into the wall in the third and never quite recovering, for me it has always been slow going during the first week. Simply meeting the daily quota is an uphill struggle but then in the second week the rockets start firing and magic happens. It takes that long for the muses to realize that this serpent is dead serious and only then do they finally join the party

Which is just as well because this would have been a particularly sticky wicked week without such serpentine intervention

What was supposed to have been a 50,000 word novel about a worker stuck in a dead end goblin job daydreaming of escaping the rat race and owning her own private detective agency turned into a giant Moaning Pages on steroids. To be quite crude about it, a sort of colonic irrigation for the soul. Getting all the toxic waste from the serpent skull on to the page has proven valuable in joining the dots and devising an effective Defence Against the Dursleys

Daisy Dursley has been doing this too and we have been both comparing notes. Her secret weapon is riding her broomstick and mine is writing words, lots of words. Then there is also planting weeds

Wicked wonderful weeds that grow and provide a heaven for feathered friends and other creeping crawling creatures. Green and growing things. For where there is life, joy and hope, vile Vernon Dursley dares not linger.

Green lightses are the best Dursley repellent ever.
izmeina: A skeleton playing a pipe (Mr Bones)
Such a pretty day on the calendar. I could not help but recall another 22nd November. Not the usual suspect of Friday 22nd November 1963 in Dallas Texas but rather Friday 22nd November 2013 at the Dome Memorial Cafe in Victoria Park. Just outside of downtown Dursleyville

It was a scheduled Nanowrimo write in and I had chosen to write about a zombie invasion of the city and a charismatic leader who declared that only he could save the city from the shuffling hordes
It was kind of creepy because once I got into the zone, this character Theodore Addams started giving stump speeches and rallying his rag tag army of lycra louts with words bearing an uncanny resemblance to the content of the Gettysburg Address. Not to be outdone, John F Kennedy insisted on his 15 minutes of fame too. All a bit peculiar since I actually based him on one Tony Abbott who had just won an Australian federal election that September.

It’s those magical moments in the zone that make all the drudgery worth while. The give away serpent signs often involve Biblical texts such as when the same character - a born again atheist goes to a fortune teller just to take the piss and she goes all Magnificat on him and his mission to vanquish the mighty and to raise the lowly to great heights. Suddenly he finds her very believable but still plots and schemes to get her tried and burned as a witch.

Musings and meanderings )
izmeina: tree and serpent lurking, permaculture logo (permaculture)
On Friday 19th November 1993 a plane landed in Dursleyville, Western Australia bringing a certain emerald serpent to the wide brown land of Oz

Sadly Slinking and thinking )
izmeina: (oro)
It’s Divali today. But I am way too drained to do any party sorts of things.
There are just too many Dursleyish dramas. Every time I manage to get back on my broomstick and flying again, the vile Vernon Dursley hurls a dozen bludgers at me and then I go crashing to the ground all fallen to pieces. And then he sends in his army of Dementors to finish me off. But not totally. That would be way too much like mercy.

Oh No. He would prefer to keep me as his personal Prometheus. Of course he does not even know any of those stories of ancient Greek Gods and mortals but that does not matter. He has the soul and the mind of a predator. No higher brain and all gut instinct. (Uncannily like a certain real estate developer on steroids who has delusions of being a president. Pity there are so many brown nosed sycophants fuelling this illusion. I had a snarky twitter blitz with one of them this evening. )

It is more fun to watch and wait as I slowly crawl into a corner to put myself back together again.
After curling into a ball and having a grand pity party it eventually gets rather tedious and a bit boring. Before long the broomstick is calling. The temptation becomes irresistible and then he strikes again.

He has even totally derailed the grandest of Nanowrimo plans. What began as a story about a tax clerk looking for a big break to set up her own private detective agency has slowly turned into a sordid tale of a Prodigal Father who rejects his own grown up children in favour of a gold digging hippy only to end up broke, alone and friendless and left begging at the door of his disinherited offspring.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!
izmeina: spooky shadowy squid (cthulhu)
Wednesday was a most magical day indeed.

The morning spent slinking and sniffing about in the garden, watering the weeds, planting the last cloves of garlic, and checking to see how the very precious saffron bulbs were getting along
The grand plans for this gorgeous sunny day included a visit to the Fremantle cemetery, especially the Lakes garden where Petunia has a little spot reserved for her ashes.

While it seems on the surface to be a most miserable and depressing thing to visit a graveyard, in fact they are the most precious sacred sites for this serpent. Petunia used to often remark on this peculiar obsession.
You will be long enough dead, so why lurk in such morbid places while still alive?

But graveyards are places full of trees, weeds, birds and other living things. They are also sites of memory and history and the perfect place for an old soul to lurk.

A grave mistake )
izmeina: curly green leaf spiral (spiral)
Last March the serpent had grand plans. It was time for a big fat hairy audacious goal and no better deadline than Tuesday 3rd April being the 20th anniversary of being officially declared owner of the Lair. Of course the Izzie had to tweek that a bit. With a Friday 13th just around the corner, that seemed so much more suitable a day for celebrating

So the grand plan was to mark this important milestone with a few achievements on the home front. Mainly a reasonably respectable Lair that would not be a source of embarrassment for potential visitors. A place for everything and everything in its place but most importantly some serious sorting of books and stuff and finally some attention to that grand permaculture garden project

Herb spirals, a teapot tree, scarecrows, a Hexen Ecke and an assortment of other interesting things were plotted and planned and jotted in little green spiral notebooks

But the gods cackle when serpents hatch plans.

In the end, a giant chunk of 2017 from April till October was spent either visiting Petunia in hospital, lurking around with Dudley or Daisy Dursley who came to visit twice or staying over at Number 4 Privet Drive and cooking her meals and stuff and generally trying to dilute the toxic influence of Vile Vernon.

That time period covered pretty much all of the growing season here so not only did very little get planted but the serpen't garden of Eden was very much neglected and quite a few of the weeds on the June solstice stock taking list are well and truly no longer around for the next annual stock take.

But today being the one day of the year when all the shops and pretty much everything is closed and the radio is all war, gloom and doom, it was the perfect day to do the giant garden blitz.

Planted some very precious saffron bulbs, some acorns in a circle around Petunia's new almond tree ( of course there would be no room for them all if they ever did sprout but the Izzie will be well and truly pushing up the daisies before that ever becomes a real problem) and planting out a big fat bunch of cardamon plants to go with all the ginger and turmeric. Of course it is not quite the right time of year but the way the weather is going lately, no danger of anyone getting frostbite

So in between planting, sorting and sweeping, took time to sit and linger and watch the geckos sunning themselves on the rocks.
Now there are no distractions or evenings spent over at Privet Drive which by now is probably a wasteland. There was already trench warfare going on over there just last week.
The Grinch wants to nuke some perfectly good peach and avocado trees because they get in the way when he is mowing the lawn.

Last year he did a hatchet job on the magnificent mulberry and Petunia's vegie patch has been all trashed and trampled

So now it is almost a matter of honor for the serpent to now leave a weedy legacy and to make a haven for birds, critters and green and growing things now that Privet Drive has become a monument to misery.

Got lots done but the biggest job of all - finding new homes for the 20 baby weedlings acquired at the recent garden festival, that will have to wait for another day.
Most of them are banksias and grevilleas which are veritable bird magnets.
But this time I will have to go out of my way to make sure that every single one of them is alive and well this time next year.
izmeina: (Dementor)
It is now five weeks since Petunia died. Strangely it was not the day she departed this mortal coil but the one after that was the worst one of all.
Once she was gone, it was over and at least she did not have to suffer any more and endure the soul sapping presence of the meanest nastiest most miserable Dementor ever to be incarnated in muggle form.

She passed the baton on to me.


Mad as a March Hare )
izmeina: (oro)
This serpent cannot believe that it is now exactly 4 weeks since Petunia departed this mortal coil. Four hellish horrid weeks. I can only hope that the next four will not be so ghastly

In the meantime there are assorted distractions on Twitter. Now the question for Izzie is - who will go into total meltdown first - Vernon Donald Dursley or the original of the species - Don the Con - without his Cohen
Lately it looks like the dreary Dementor Dursley well and truly got Trumped

If I were to shuffle the tarot deck for Don the Con, I bet that Justice and the Tower would turn up. and lots of very sharp pointy swords.

In the meantime, down in the Twitler Bunker


izmeina: A skeleton playing a pipe (Pied Piper)
One week of spookiness and sadness comes to an end and another begins



izmeina: Strange Spiral Clock (Time Turner)
It has been an unusually mild summer. Not one single solitary day over 40c when we normally get 4 or 5 of them
In fact I do not remember such mild weather ever since coming to Oz back in 1993
And then there was the Fringe Festival. 30 decadent days of freak shows and weirdos.
Got to see 18 shows this year. Had saved up a war chest for the occasion but kept on fringe bingeing even when it was empty. The old plastic fantastic to the rescue
But unlike previous years, barely a squeak about them because in spite of all these wonderful things, the best way to describe the last few months would be
“But apart from that Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”

The Elephant in the Room )
izmeina: A cute cartoon critter with a bag and a teapot on his head (jolly swagman)
At this rate, it looks like the serpent will never catch up with the gossip in Cyberia.
Been back lurking in the Lair since Saturday but hardly ever online with access to a proper big screen and keyboard.

This should have been the week for catching up but there was the distraction of the annual heritage festival. Missed many events due to events at the Dursleys but there were still a few tasty morsels left for this week. Notre Dame University put on far too many tempting evening lectures with titles such as "Journalists and the first draft of history", "Australia, Trump and the American Alliance" and this evening's offering "Heroes and Villains, crime and history" on the subject of celebrity criminals and Dodgy Donald didn't even get a mention.

I will have to pass on the annual ritual of the university guided tour due to work tomorrow.

It was a fun week of fake news, alternative facts and grovelling deputy sheriffs. Even managed to plant a few weeds in the Lair while listen to scary stories on the radio about the blasphemy laws in Pakistan and how even the laid back Indonesians are turning into a bunch of feral fundamentalists. That Saudi Orb of Darkness is leaving its trail of destruction everywhere.

So here is hoping that this month sees a return to the usual serpent abnormality. Funny. It took several week's absence from the Lair to realize just how much I miss it.

Got so much catching up to do with dusting, mopping and generally restoring some order to the crazy chaos. Who knows, I might even manage to invite Petunia over when she is feeling a bit better.
izmeina: (circle serpent)
A quick squiggle from Nanoland. This has been the strangest Camp Nano in the last few years and bears an uncanny resemblance to the adventures of August 2012

The map was all rolled out and ready to go. The path should have been pretty easy. Usually Camp Nano is the perfect occasion to get in a bit of practice in writing and brainstorming by grabbing a pack of Devil’s playing cards as writing prompts then churning through them slowly and steadily in the hope of generating as many ideas and leads as possible for the big event in November.

But this time I decided to do things a bit differently. Instead of laying the foundations for a new project, would devote this time to adding more words to last November’s zero draft. All the serpent needed to do was to add a whole bunch of new scenes and try to steer the story into some relatively coherent shape.

The Art of the Steal was about a devil doing deals and offering numerous political fixes in exchange for souls to fill his bright shiny Celebrity trophy cabinet.

It should have been so easy since Dodgy Donald and his minions have exceeded even the worst of expectations.
Between Twitter snippets and even just following the daily news here, there is bucket loads of raw material so it should have been possible to almost go in zombie mode.

But the inner serpent is not playing nicely.

Of course there have been quite a few distractions in the last few months.

Playing with the Pensieve )
izmeina: a snippet of Escher's circle of serpents (Default)
A certain serpent has been somewhat psycho of late. Not the axe murdering, baby munching, cat killing uncontrollable and sadistic sort of psycho but just plain neurotic and as mad as a hatter. Jittery and agitated and totally unable to snap out of such a crazy state. So it is simply pointless to go pottering on grand adventures as it is simply a waste of time and train fares. As there’s a rather large pile of mulch on the verge and and a botanical monster needing to be tamed, termite infested den of iniquity that it is, figured that it made more sense to linger about the Lair and sort this stuff out rather than go on any pottering, plotting and planning camp nano coffee crawls. Not quite coffee as that is well and truly off the menu but a pot of tea or two

Yesterday in a fit of nostalgia paid a visit to the Muse cafe located appropriately enough in the grounds of the state museum. It was exactly six months ago yesterday since discovering the place in its new incarnation. It used to be a quaint place selling crappy coffees and sandwiches at exorbitant prices. So it was hardly a surprise that it closed

The new mob are big into retro and the 1950s look but most importantly of all they have loose leaf tea in real china pots and cute cups and quirky spoons to match.

The very first visit did think that six silver sickles for a big pot was a bit decadent but chose to indulge anyway. But the whole ritual with the gorgeous china pots and a good four cups of real tea per pot made that six dollars most reasonable indeed. So been pretty much a regular since then.
That particular day had brought a stash of papers printed out the day before but waiting for a suitable occasion before a proper peek. These pages were several weeks worth of home work assignments for the Coursera “Introduction to Mathematical Thinking”

Spent a good few afternoons doing that stuff there as well as the crypto course homework. There is just something about sitting outside under the trees with a cup or two of tea rather than staring at a blinking computer screen that makes the old serpent green cells function a lot more efficiently
It was also an excellent spot for nano plotting, planning and squiggling and almost became an unofficial city HQ for a certain serpent

But it was a muggy day and the magic was just not there. It was not the bus ride but some phone dramas that had made the Izzie crazy and even cups of tea at the Muse cafe were not going to cast their usual spell. Did resort to pulling out the very same stash of maths assignments from six months ago and doing some of assignment 6 sort of served as a circuit breaker. But it is very easy to be reasonably calm when it is quiet and there are no distractions.

Crazy Izzie and the Chain Saw Massacre )

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izmeina: a snippet of Escher's circle of serpents (Default)
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