The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

It's been a quiet start to the new year over here in the wild west which certainly cannot be said for the east coast of Australia.




The photos and videos are scary enough. So the reality must be very frightening indeed. And now a wicked twist has turned up. Over the last 20 years and especially since the advent of smart phones, the internet has slowly taken over everything. It has become the main source of news and information for so many people. That's OK as long as the lights are on and the mobile phone tower infrastructure is intact. But that is no longer the case in many of the areas affected by the fires. The fires have burned down many power lines and it is far too dangerous to fix them. So even if the mobile phone network is functioning, once the batteries are gone, it has become very difficult to recharge them


The ABC local radio is one of the major sources of disaster information for when apps no longer work but most folks these days don't have old fashioned radios but use their mobile phones for that purpose. So it turns out that one of the most important and resilient channels for information is no longer reaching its intended audience.

My trusty little transistor radio is now more snap, crackle and pop than crisp and clear sound and the Radio National channel to which it is almost permanently tuned is particularly sensitive to dead zones. Basically anywhere with a lot of electrical or electronic activities such as shopping centres or bus stations are veritable dead zones. So I resort more and more to listening to programs as podcasts where the sound is much better and clearer and never just drops out due to loss of signal. But of course audio just eats phone batteries.


There have been people driven to the beach to escape the flames, skies that are pitch black in the middle of the day and trucks and cars just picked up and thrown by the wind. That is how a firefighter died just the other day.

And now Scomo wants to have an all government meeting in March to discuss the catastrophic bush fires. Greg Mullins, one of the country's most experienced firefighters wanted to have a meeting with the Prime Minister LAST March but he wasn't interested back then. Too busy cosying up to his Murdoch mates

Scomo will soon discover that the economy is a 100% fully owned subsidiary of the environment. And when that goes down in ashes and flames, the economy will not be far behind.
Now that even for people who have not lost their homes and everything, the sense of safety and normality has been shattered, shopping and buying stuff is going to be the very last thing on their minds

Strange and scary times indeed

Medieval Madness

Saturday was the day of the much anticipated medieval festival. This is a must attend event on the serpent calendar ever since discovering it by accident way back in 2006.It was the best April Fool’s Day ever. Since then along with the odd cancellation it seems to have slowly slinked back in time to mid March. But it’s been jinxed ever since getting an ankle twisted on the way to this event back in 2010. Got to thinking about that today. Had booked the day off ages before the event so there was no need for the usual mad rush to the bus in order to be at the mad house for a 3pm start.
Back then had a good 500 plus hours of sick leave already accumulated. Got the dodgy ankle treated by the St John Ambulance mob who attend pretty much every public event. They had issued some pink little form. In spite of hobbling to the goblin office in a state obviously incapable of work and with this pink piece of A4 paper as written evidence, this was deemed as insufficient. Only a medical certificate signed by a doctor would be considered acceptable evidence as incapacity to work. Never mind that there’s at least a week’s wait to get a doctor these days. All those happy thoughts resurrected themselves in the emerald serpent skull today.
At least this time there was no need to put in a request for the day off several times and several months in advance due to the complete incompetence of the teflon coated cockroach in charge of the roster.

This year was going to be a bit different in that their usual 10-5 schedule would be tweeked for a 9pm finish. Most peculiar indeed thinks the serpent. But that means a quick peek at the so called international student festival before slinking down to visit the oldies. Last year this student thing was also on the same day. Turned up at 5pm and it was all over. So got there early and discovered that it was not worth the bother. Even the so called Global Food Village was a nonevent and the munchies were certainly not at student friendly prices. The plan was to spend about an hour there before going down to the medieval fair but it was so boring that it was worth making a deviation to the state library for a free 20 minutes on their express computers. The main purpose was to read emails and take a quick peek in Livejournal land. But Livejournal had turned into Deadjournal on this particular occasion. So no luck there

Since there was no decent affordable munchies at the so called student festival it was time to slink down to Annalakshmi which is not only kosher and very tasty but conveniently located very near the Supreme Court Gardens which is the site for the medieval festival

( Dungeons, dragons, swords and sorcery )

So for the day that’s in it - here’s a toast to exiled emerald serpents everywhere ;)

Izzie has survived the first evil nasty Goblin exam and has one left to go.
Strange thing is - just cannot help remembering this time last year. Not just because that was when the nasty Gryffindor Bitch next door stuffed Iz around with the fence but mainly because Iz was getting all excited about the big Potter parties and some very tasty birdies.
This year instead of having Saturday off making a nice extended break of 3 days (utterly ruined by the antics of that floozie with her fence) Iz had this Wednesday off work instead as the first exam was yesterday. So again it was 3 days off work and not much fun in the middle.
Hard to believe it was a whole year ago. And yet again - just like last year - all this stuff happened in the middle of the exams so that was always lurking in the back of the Izzie skull.

But strangest of all - it is a long way from back in June 2000 when I had my first lot of exams and was in a most peculiar sort of trance for about three weeks or so. Nothing bothered the Iz at all and not only lost no sleep over the exams but managed to get a 93 and an 88 without feeling the least bit exhausted at all.
June 2001 was not as easy and Iz will always remember it for the macabre reason that I had the first goblin exam the same day that Tim McVeigh was executed for his part in the Oklahoma city bombings. It is so so strange. Since September 2001, Oklahoma seems not just so last century but almost as if it was 100 years ago.

It seems so so long ago when the second term of 2001 started at the end of July and Iz still wearing her Hermione hat (but having not yet even heard of her) had obtained the unit outlines and horror of horrors - did the first two weeks of business statistics questionses before the classes had anywhere near started. In the process of being a good little Goblin and reading the text book over the semester break (Yesss - Iz definitely did NOT have a life in those days) kept coming across a most peculiar number that was raising its esoteric and most exotic curly head in the most peculiar and unexpected of places. After about five strange and seemingly unrelated appearances, Iz finally sent out the search party and found some very strange and most serpentine snippets - a lot of which did not begin to make sense until reading the adventures of a most peculiar wizard boy.
The problem was, once that Iz had traded mathematics and bean counting for myth and magic, it suddenly became so much harder to be motivated and things that the Iz used to find exceedingly interesting now became a matter of drudgery and yawning.
Playing around on the Izzie HP10 financial calculator with various scenarios "If the interest rate went up to so much..... if I paid the house repayments fortnightly instead of monthly, increased them by $$10...$$20 or whatever per payment..." which was Izzie's idea of an exciting way of wasting a few hours suddenly looked most boring indeed and only to be performed in cases of dire necessity - ie for calculating present and future values for finance assignments.

So Iz has now got to the stage that in spite of spending four - five hours a week for those randomly collected assignments that were worth five marks at the most - when it came to doing the revision and studying for a whopping fat sixty marks - which the final exams are worth - Iz just could not motivate herself and found all sorts of ingenious means of procrastination.
It was true what our tutor said -that if you did the readings and assigned questions every week plus your fair share of the group assignment - you should have no trouble at all in the exam. Yesss. It was a bit squeezed for time as all exams are but there were no tricks. Iz is expecting something between 65-70 but knows that if she had done the extra work and put in the time during the last three weeks, getting 80-90 should not have been too difficult at all.

Exams never used to bother the Iz that much but lately have been feeling so cranky and irritable and noticing that some of the bad old Myrtle-ish habits from back in the nasty nineties and 2001 are insidioussssly creeping back into the Izzie repertoire.
Instead of keeping the Dementors at bay, all those choccie are making the Iz lethargic and sluggish and fat and frumpish. Baaad Iz.
So so strange really. The little green lights are flickering and Iz just cannot seem to get them blazing again.
When Iz thinks that for nearly a year, was often going to bed after midnight and then getting up around 5.30am often because I wanted to rather than having to - and still feeling bubbling all over with oodles of energy and joie de vivre - and now have slowly slunk back to crawling out of the covers at mid day on the Izzie days off (Like Wednesday and Thursday just gone) and still feeling tired and totally uninspired - it just feels hard to believe that I was the same creature and wondering which is the real one.
It is so so strange that a thing at one time of your life fills you with excitement and enthusiasm, at some other stage is as interesting as watching paint dry. And it is not the thing itself but one's attitude to them that has changed.

It's strange that when the Iz was living in a one bedroomed flat with two gas rings, was making my own pasta from flour and stuff. When the Iz got a place with an oven, the next adventure on the agenda was making bread and cakes and all sorts of munchies. Used to absolutely adore baking and cooking and all that house elf sort of stuff. Iz still has the squillions of delicious recipe books and piles of stuff about plants, potions and poisons. Now even opening a can of beans is too much like hard work.
And Petunia still asks when Iz is ever going to get around finishing that big white fluffy teddy bear upstairs sitting by the sewing machine.