The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

These days I rarely darken the door of the room where the Big Mac lurks. I am usually too brain dead.
Also this room is facing west and the Lair has no air conditioning which means that it's a bit pickly in here lately.

Last time I was squiggling on Dreamwidth, I was relieved about the couple of mild days where the garden and the old green cells got a short reprieve.  But it did not last long.

Thursday 3rd February was yet another 40 and we had a few of those in a row. There have been 14 days over 40 celsius since Christmas Day which is double the previous record and at least another 14 days between 37C and 40C.
( All Red and No Green )

I am so so tempted to just become a grumpy hermit and vanish without trace. It has taken more than 10 minutes just to get to the Dreamwidth post page on the Big Mac. I have to wade through endless piles of evil spinning beach balls or just boring old blank pages that take an eternity to load. That partly explains why my visits are less and less frequent.

Often it will be 2 weeks between sessions. I can tell how long it has been because the calendar shows the last time I logged on and takes a while to update to the current time. This time it was only a few days for the simple reason that I had to fill in the census. I just assumed it would be a total nightmare trying to do it on the Tweet Stone so I wasn't even going to try. Also Dreamwidth is dreadful on the Tweet stone. I guess it is simply not designed for such devices. It is especially awful if inserting images or using HTML code for links and things. So this means of course that I have not been replying to so many juicy thought provoking comments.

( Dursleyville Dramas )

PS I hate the new look Dreamwidth posting rules.  It had been so long since I have posted that I don't even know when these changes were brought in.

I thought I was being clever  by going straight to Rich Text to solve the horrid spacing problem only to discover that it is much more difficult to do the cut text thing and that once you go over to RT  you cannot go back to whatever it used to be for the same post.

It took ages to even find the icon for cutting/ hiding text and then I found out the hard way that you have to put it in some special box and if it is shaded then you know that it will be hidden when posted.
This ancient serpent is not in the mood for learning so many new tricks so I guess I will stick to making short posts in future to avoid having to fart around with all this complicat4ed editing.

It is now just over half way through the month which means half way through the crazy challenge of Plastic Free July. The rules are simple - to avoid buying all forms of single use plastic for the month. This category is rather larger than you would think at first glance
That is precisely what makes the challenge so tricky

( Plastic nuttiness )

Today the wild west of Oz celebrates its return to almost normal while Victoria descends into lockdown again. For once - the isolation of this place which is usually regarded as a major bug has now become a feature.
At the stroke of midnight last night, we officially moved to Stage 4 of the Covid road map which means that customers can now have their drinks while standing up at the bar, alcohol can be served without meals, sports venues and stadiums can operate at 50% capacity and concert halls and live music venues no longer need to be seated only
There is also no longer any need for cafes and restaurants to keep a patron register. But every silver lining has a cloud. The Casino is also now back in business after having been shut down for nearly 3 months

( Getting back to business )

September is one of the most beautiful months of the year here in Dursleyville. It’s real Goldilocks weather. Not too hot and not too cold but just right. An added attraction is the wildflowers and weeds blossoming everywhere and driving the birds and bees berserk with all the tasty nectar.

( Green and Growing things )

In this bit of the world June 30th is the equivalent of Goblin New Year’s Eve. A time to make grand plans for the future, to get finances and savings sorted and all that sort of boring stuff. Due to a very ancient and almost anal habit of keeping a little black book to record every single silver sickle spent, keeping the money monsters under control has never been particularly difficult. I decided to go the whole hog last June and to switch over from using a normal calendar diary to a bright shiny new 2014/2015 Financial Year diary starting on Tuesday 1st July 2014.
Tonight it finally gets laid to rest while the promise of a bright shiny clean slate beckons.

( Strange Days )

On the eve of Camp Nano, it is amusing to think that Nanowrimo proved to be the first testing ground for the serpent on the art of creating rituals or habits for getting stuff done. The seemingly impossible task of writing 50,000 words in 30 days was not so daunting when done in itsy bitsy steps, slowly and steadily plodding along every single day.

It’s satisfying to know that it’s been useful training for so many other things even if not a single word from all those years ever sees the light of day.

It looks like the rain is here to stay. I can’t complain. It is winter after all and we need all the rain we can get in this bit of this wide brown land. But it did mean the odds were not in favour of watching a big fat full moon rising.

( Bad Moon Rising )

Yesss. I thought that was all ancient history. It must be the full moon. It brings out all those memories of madness.

Izzie has been slinking about and sniffing in the Garden of MOOC temptations. Once again there are so many tasty tempting fruits hanging from the assorted Trees of Knowledge.

Things have come a long way since the serpent's first visit to the Garden back in September 2012 (Courtesy of the Cat)
In those days Izzie was a serious serpent who did all her homework and assignments and participated in discussion forums and had lots of fun. That's not quite correct. Toadish dramas meant a couple of courses got ditched due to a complete inability to concentrate. But soon it was back to feasting and pigging out on all the online freebies.

Got to thinking that years ago I made do with Open University lectures on television Sunday mornings while living in Dublin. I was not actually doing any courses at the time but just had an insatiable curiosity about all sorts of obscure things. It was like going from plain cabbage soup to caviar. So many delightful delicacies to taste and to try.

It was necessary to learn restraint and careful selections of morsels from this buffet for eternal students. Also there's no need to fill one's plate to overflowing as repeat refills are not just allowed but actually encouraged. While the golden age of free access could not possibly last forever, more and more educational institutions would be jumping on the bandwagon and the trick would be to concentrate on the courses that are not offered on a regular basis.



The unexpected overseas adventures in December nuked a few of the courses I had planned to do or already started including Coursera's Terrorism and Counterterrorism
This course like many others is now available on a self study basis but I have found that without the commitment and regular deadlines of a class schedule, the chances of actually getting stuff done at one's own pace are remarkably low.

So then I vowed to stay away from online courses, concentrate on squiggling for Camp Nanowrimo in April as well as sorting out the clutter in the Lair. Was doing very well for a while but had neglected to get the serpent email taken off the assorted MOOC mailing lists with their tantalizing subject line "We have new courses for you".

So when tasty morsels with titles like "Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life" arrived in the inbox, they just proved too irresistible. Then another turned up designed specifically to push all my favorite buttons.
A Paradoxical Python

In the meantime, had long ago signed up to retake a programming course that I did not pass last time. More Python Puzzles I got 62% and needed 70% to pass. It has just started and for the last few weeks I have been wondering if it is best to just jump ship or to have a second attempt especially as it has been chopped up into two more manageable bite sized morsels. Now there are no more Statements of Accomplishment but only Verified Certificates (they've got to earn their money somehow) but that's not an issue for a dabbler and dilettante such as Izzie.

The course will be over in time for July's visit to Camp Nanoland.

It's taken just over a month to get cleaning and maintenance of the Lair on autopilot. Except for Monday evening which was spent over at the Dursleys, I've now got a 5 week unbroken run of cleaning and sorting rituals for 3 different days of the week. Such habits are not only brainless but the lack of thinking means that I can get more done in less time and feel a sense of achievement for finally escaping the years of CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome)
Now I guess it's time to adopt a similar strategy for dealing with all the assorted online temptations and online courses.

The other big adventure was today's visit to a gorgeous historical graveyard. Just the perfect place for reading monster stories and dreaming of dark grimoires. Like gazing at the stars in the night sky, wandering amongst head stones and noticing that more than 80% of them are dedicated to folks who departed this mortal coil much younger than you is a very good way to get your life in perspective.
But that is a tale for another day.

The serpent’s record in seeking out new knowledge has been abysmal of late. I ended up abandoning a fascinating course about terrorism and counterterrorism due to that detour to Amsterdam in December. I figured I learned my lesson and should stay away from online courses until the old grey cells were back in working order.

They seemed to have turned to total mush during that overseas adventure from the very first days. Balancing the books at the end of a day’s spending proved far too taxing for this old grey serpent brain as did adding up the scores for our regular games of Scrabble. It was like the numbers kept slipping through a sieve. I just could not hold them in my head.
Such a contrast from the games at the day centre where I would keep a running total of the score and be in agreement with the official calculator version more than 90% of the time.

I had decided to start with baby steps with the online courses and chose a computer programming course based on Scratch which is designed for kindergarten kids as well as another on Crypto more for nostalgia sake than anything.
It seems most courses these days are big on video lectures. I must say I prefer good old fashioned slides since they don’t nuke my meagre 4gb monthly ration and they are so much quicker to get through.
Downloading a video is a bit like buying a book. When you get in from a library the 3 week deadline increases the likelihood of actually reading it. Buying gives the sense of having all the time in the world.
So it did not take long to rapidly fall behind. No point in downloading a whole pile of videos if you don’t get around to actually watching them.

( Too many tasty temptations )

It was exactly 17 years ago that a certain serpent came into legal possession of the location known as the Lair.
Friday 3rd April 1998 was a good Friday for Izzie but Easter was actually a week later. It turned out to be a very wise decision despite all the chaos and craziness at the time. A year or so later the mob on the hill in Canberra made some sneaky goblin friendly reforms concerning capital gains which triggered a crazy housing bubble. There’s been the odd pop here and there but even the gloom and doom of 2008 did not knock much stuffing out of the over inflated market.
The days of a burger flipper or pot scrubber buying a roof over her head without too much drama are now long gone. The Great Australian Dream of owning one’s own home has become pretty much unattainable for most folks under forty unless they are prepared to sign up for 30 years of debt slavery.

( Weeds and Seeds )