The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

There’s a lot to be said for starting new year’s resolutions on 1st December of the previous year. Enthusiasm gets you started but it is habit that keeps you going.
So far it seems that the stars are aligned for a pretty productive year. From the December solstice until today and including Christmas we have had the most beautiful mild weather. Probably the best in at least five years. Not the soul sapping icky sticky sizzling steamy 40s like last New Year’s Day and Christmas 2012

Planted tomato and sunflower seeds today before pottering off for the annual ritual of the fireworks on the river at 8pm. So that ticked the box of the often intended but rarely achieved goal of walking at least 3km per day. And then it was time to drink bubbles and polish up a bright and shiny new Pensieve for the new year.
The one black spot on the otherwise bright horizon was a series of notifications from the internet provider. By Christmas Eve had already used up 50% of the monthly data allowance that is supposed to last until 12th January. The youtube binge sparked by this tasty
Christmas Feast
was accountable for most of that. Thanks to all those evil Carols of Cthulhu had gotten to 85% by Sunday and now the nasty goblins inform the serpent that as of last night’s witching hour, the whole month’s quota is gone. All those months and months of not even using half of the 4GB allowance count for nothing at all

Lucky it is possible to keep tabs on the total running cost once over the limit but it looks like the next ten days will include lots of squiggling and a strictly limited online diet. Definitely no Google tarot card crawls and youtube is absolutely off the menu
Tomorrow will be off to the library to snaffle a copy of “The 5 elements of effective thinking” before slinking off to the arts centre (and former lunatic asylum) in Fremantle for the last day of a binge of musings, meanderings, plotting and planning and a certain serpent’s 12th birthday party

Friday will be back to business as usual at one of the day jobs. That’s the funny thing with the whole Christmas and New Year ritual. After all the celebrations it is almost a relief to get back to mundane muggle reality

A clever take on ditching those New Year's resolutions


Resolutions are made to be broken

But to make life a bitter simpler there's always the advice

Always keep your word
Never give it

After a very lazy first week of January decided not to give into temptation and spend most of a lovely sunny Friday in bed again.
Even left the Lair reasonably early on Thursday around 11.30am rather than some time in the afternoon

Planned a visit to the beach for one day off and the old lunatic asylum/ arts centre for the other.
Been a bit of a cheapie lately and decided to make the most of the two hours on the bus ticket to make detours enroute to our intended destination

Thursday was the gorgeous Analakshmi Indian restaurant on the river. It is run by an Indian cultural group and payment is by donation. The food is somewhat different than found in typical Indian restaurants - probably more like the stuff folks cook at home. It's a bit of a lucky dip. You never know what is going to be on offer. But it is always going to be quite kosher.
But the serpent was in luck this time. The potatoes had lots of garlic and onions in them, there was dahl and some very strange red coconut based curry with either mushrooms or eggplants in it.
For some inexplicable reason the serpent is seriously addicted to dahl in all its incarnations. Must really learn to cook it properly as it really is just about the cheapest, tastiest nutritious meal possible.
With ten minutes left on the two hour ticket, left the restaurant in the city and got to the train station.
Time for a coffee crawl on Napoleon Street, a visit to the book stores, news agent and the Singing Tree toy and book shop which after 15 years or so is closing down to be replaced by yet another yuppie jewelry shop
Funny how the small specialty toy and book shops are often infinitely better than the Toys R Us warehouses or Borders/ Barnes and Noble bookstores
Also visited the post office to post a parcel and figured it would be an auspicious time to buy the two nano note books for plotting and planning.
Starting early means being able to run two stories with two decks of cards and seeing which one produces the juiciest plot points.
More preparation, plotting and planning means much quicker squiggling once the starting gun goes at the witching hour at the end of Halloween Night. Well that is the theory anyway

Collins bookstore is always one of the first ports of call in this strange quirky street. For years and years it had three pale pages placed in the front window containing pretty much the whole Hogwarts text book list. But now it was gone
Izzie asked at the counter what had happened to it. Used to love looking at the list and drooling over all the cute and quirky titles
They decided to take it down after getting too many nutters seriously asking for copies of certain books on the list and getting a bit cranky when told they didn't actually have them.
They should have simply said that their last copies had been eaten by dragons or were not on sale to Muggles or some other such tall tale to take the piss out of these folks

The store just isn't the same without such quirky touches.
But one thing they did have was 2011 diaries at half price. Decided to take a quick peek in spite of already having a cheapie student diary and a resurrected 2005 model.
One of them was bigger than usual but very different. Not only did it have the usual appointment times for each day but columns for personal projects, business projects, family/ community projects, a little to do list for each day, a goals page for the whole year and one at the beginning of each month along with a whole bunch of productivity porn tips

There was even two special sections with 10 week countdowns - one for Christmas and one left blank for some personal grand project

Half price at $10 was much better value than most of the others on the shelf - pissy little things that they were. So yielded to temptation thinking that the indulgence is affordable and it ties in to the grand plan this year to make serious progress on that 101 list by actually putting times and dates on lots of items
The diary seems specially designed to concentrate on long term (year), medium (month) and very short term planning (day)
Already been putting in Wriye and Nano and prezzie posting deadlines.

Here's hoping it won't meet the same fate as previous attempts at being organized where the blank patches start appearing in mid February and slowly get larger and larger

It's going to be one of those 'kept next to the computer' diaries as it is too big to be carrying around all day except for the weekly days off with visits to sacred sites

Spent time peeking at it while sitting in a cafe before closing time at 5pm. Then went to the shops to get a bottle and nibblies before slinking off to the beach. At that stage got to thinking that maybe there is no point as it had gotten cloudy and there would definitely be no visible sunset that evening
But figures we would go there anyway as there's still the birds twittering at twilight and the sounds of the waves lapping on the sand.
There truly is something magical about watching the waves. It makes it very easy to get into some sort of hypnotic trance. Could literally feel the serpent batteries charging up with every passing wave.
Had a few 37 plus days since and its pretty obvious that it has done wonders for the serpent ability to repel negativity, noise and minor annoyances.

Friday was a visit to Fremantle and the old arts centre. In theory this would be the perfect spot for filling in this new blue book and doing a first reading with the bright shiny Victorian Romantic tarot.
But it turned out to be rather windy and it was an effort to stop the cards blowing all over the place. Kept losing track of which month each one of the 12 stacks in the circle represented. Had to keep counting the remaining cards to find our spot
Wrote them all down rather quickly in the big blue year overview section and quickly got them back in their box before they'd try flying off back to Finland via Prague
Had much better luck with the Bohemian Gothic which were made of much sterner stuff and did not blow around at all. Maybe those pewter edges are really made of lead
Looks like there's going to be lots of Major arcana drama with skulls and skeletons in cupboards and lurking around rat infested cellars
Also looks like it's time to learn the art of proper shuffling as the other lot turned up more than one third of pentacles

The two decks turned up very different cards but for some inexplicable reason September scored the seven of pentacles with both of them.

Next time will stick to tables inside coffee shops for laying out large circles of cards.