Dampen the area to be covered, which preferably includes a crack.
Tip most of the cement into the barrow. Keep some in the bag in case — as with icing — you make the mixture too sloppy.
Gloves are optional. I like drawing them.
Pour water by cupfuls into the cement, stirring as you go with a spade and, if you like, a piece of kindling.
To test for consistency, fill a cup with the mixture then invert and empty it, as you do a sand castle. The slurry should slump to half its original height. Add more cement or water accordingly.
Seize the ready moment and tip the mixture into the corner.
Pounce on it with your trowel. Shape and smooth the concrete into place. Admire its gleaming surface.
Hunt around the house for beads and buttons.
Sit in the sun beside the concrete puddle and idly stick them in. When your pattern is complete, poke the beads down a little harder. Let them be gripped.
It rained hard last night. We noticed the damp patch in the ceiling above the table but it was dark outside and the roof space too cramped for entry or even torchlight. This morning I realised I’d had a lucky escape. The laptop is still functioning. R. has been up on the roof. He’s bought and used a pair of tin-cutters. The builder has been summonsed
FB message of the morning: ‘Eat the day or it will eat you.’ I think it’s fair to say we ate each other. Here’s my small mouthful:
Starting with the blue thing and moving clockwise: that’s a recycling bin, bought this morning from the city council office, to replace the one we ran over several years ago (it worked but it was wonky). Also a roll of 100 city council doggy-doo bags, reputedly biodegradable (but not before you’ve carried them home in your hot little hand). I do think that wrapping dogshit in any kind of plastic is a retrograde step: it’ll compost quickly if flicked into the green belt or under a hedge. However, sometimes bagging’s the only way to go.
I collected 100 beautiful business cards (from Ezyprint Solutions) for Michael to hand out as the author of Road Markings. I sewed them into 4 cloth pockets in order to make the package flat enough for ‘letter rate’, and posted them off to the USA in a recycled envelope bearing its original potato-cut hearts (how to alarm an author).
While out and about I bought an article not shown here for someone about to turn a year older than me. In the same shop I indulged in another fine-nibbed pen, used for the above. Then I went to fill up the petrol tank. This cost exactly the same as 100 full-colour, two-sided business cards.
A. was here so we sat one each end of the table to do our drawing and colouring. He was making a vivid recruitment poster for a new Dunedin-chapter Harry Potter Club. I was trying to make eggs ovoid.
We ate egg and chive sandwiches for lunch then, for our sins, J. had to make a chocolate cake without eggs. It turned out moist, dark and flat as a pizza base. Good though. Outside the sun shone on Peasgood Nonsuch and trumpeting lily alike.
E. and Z. joined us all for cake and summer tales. We laughed and cried a little because life is both hard and good and you have to chew it up as best you can.
Our PM John Key referred to New Zealand on the radio today as a cork bobbing on the ocean, which I think shows a lack of imagination.
Polly went out on the smorgasbord tonight. She sneaked off and chomped her way around the neighbourhood bins and compost heaps. Tonight she’s stunned, rotund, and leaking queasy gases.
The new year is underway. We have little idea what it will hold. We have hopes and qualms, loose plans and quiet intentions. We will all be watching what unfolds and will play our part accordingly.
Tonight I made tom kha pad thai yum.
I heard Aung San Suu Kyi answer questions from a class of American students. I admired her dignity, intelligence, and radiance of being. At last in Burma, democracy looks possible again: that precious blend (to quote The Lady) of freedom and security.
Perhaps in order to prevent collisions with its plate glass windows, the local swimming pool has near-life-sized transfers on the glass, of young swimmers frolicking. This morning, we watched the window cleaner charge his squeegee and make the first bold sweeps.
I walked into plate glass once. We’d just finished walking the Milford Track and I went to soothe my aching feet in the bathroom of the tourist information centre at Milford Sound. Coming back out, I stared at the sea and mountains straight ahead and smack. This might have been the cause of my otherwise unexplained deviated nasal septum. They should stick dolphins on the windows, or something that trampers crave and would never walk right through, like a bowl of fruit salad.
I was poking around the sunny vege garden on Friday when I noticed I wasn’t alone. A black rat was also sauntering and sampling, grasping and nibbling on salad greens.
In fright, I leaped into the nearest room and snatched the cat from the bed. She sat where I planted her on the flagstone, dazed and befuddled and ten inches from the rat, who carried on munching. Cat stared blindly at rat. Rat stared at spinach. Then cat’s head jerked as her nose lifted and she sniffed left, right, straight ahead, then — ah! She raised her front end and fell on the rat. I turned away in shame.
Could I not have left the rat to its indolent vegetarian meal (and backyard breeding programme)?
Anyway, rat gave cat the slip and half an hour later cat was still weaving in and out of the beans, lettuces, spuds and long grass, hunting. At day’s end she ate jellimeat.
In the morning, though, I found her gift outside the bedroom door.
Of course, the cat might not have committed the crime. The rat might have fallen from a biplane. I sure hope not. I hope it wasn’t this rat.
Rich pickings from the blogroll this week:
Claire commits alchemy with Emily Dickenson and a cheese grater.
Talking of rats, Isabel’s miracle cat-in-exile makes a second comeback.
It strikes me, writing this, what a flimsy vessel a book is for recording the plethora of exploits Pat Deavoll has put herself through over the last thirty-five years. Nonetheless, in this handsome volume published by Craig Potton, Pat’s fine, unobtrusive writing makes vivid her favourite places on earth: wild, remote, very high places reached only by great financial, physical, and mental effort.
I met Pat when we were eleven or twelve, on her first day at secondary school. Her quiet and quirky determination to do her own thing and be her own person met with affection and respect. She got on and did things, sometimes extraordinarily; she was a voracious reader and brilliant at subjects that interested her, more or less ignoring (if I recall rightly) those that didn’t. My only claim to fame (besides my anxious resolve from day one that we’d be friends) is that I was there with Norman Hardie and Sal, trailing a little behind, when Pat made her first high-school ascent of Mt Binser in 1975.
Over the years I’ve been a watcher from the far wings as Pat has become arguably NZ’s most skilled woman climber — whether on rock, on Canada’s vertical ice, or on high and technically demanding peaks here and abroad. When she took a break from climbing in the nineties, she quickly became expert in extreme kayaking. Instead of going up, she made first descents of grade 6 falls and Himalayan cataracts.
The book opens with a whisk through Pat’s rural Canterbury childhood and youth, then lingers over the year or so when she learned to climb. She avoided the popular school-leaver’s route through holiday jobs then university, going instead to Mt Cook to take a series of climbing courses. That summer she became irrevocably embroiled in a life-long string of affairs with challenging mountains.
Most of the book’s themed chapters are shaped around a climb or series of climbs, and variously discuss: the critical need for the right climbing partner; learning to front-point up vertical ice on Canadian waterfalls in temperatures far below zero; the euphoria of climbing huge, remote Alaskan peaks; the tragedy of losing friends to the sport, and how, personally, to square with those risks; the history of women in the NZ mountains and why there are so few top female alpinists (biology or conditioning?). As Pat makes evident, women can manage extreme conditions as well as men, and often with greater courage and endurance.
There’s a chapter, too, about the black dog that’s followed her since her twenties, which she’s determined at last to speak about, rather than hide. Always the climbing feats (and occasional defeats) are woven through with Pat’s questioning of motive and worth — signaling the self-doubt that led to the eventual diagnosis of and treatment for depression. Pat’s willing to admit at last that as a climber she’s good … better … even best, but that knowledge — entwined as it is with her sense of self-worth — is very hard won and in the past could be entirely destroyed by a climb that didn’t turn out optimally i.e. with the summit included.
Around the middle of the book Pat ducks back to the mid eighties when she and husband Brian discovered India and Himalayan Asia. They spent months on end exploring, carrying huge packs to far-off mountains — living on reduced rations, will-power, and their love of wilderness. (Reviewer goes off to shuffle through huge plastic bin of old diaries and correspondence and comes up with the following from Kathmandu, dated 30 March 1985, the day before our Alex was born, the baby referred to in the letter as ‘?’)
In the new century, Pat rediscovered the mountains of Central Asia; she has made numerous forays and done some monumental climbing, including first summits, one in Pakistan — of Karim Sar— alone. Pat makes it clear that the hours spent creeping like a fly up exposed Himalayan faces are what the effort’s all about. The months of planning, training, earning, applying for funding, coordinating expeditions from afar, and getting there by fair means and fraught, are all simply preparation for the cold, exposure, terror, extreme toil and — hope against hope — utter elation of the climb itself.
The most intense passages in the book are classic fare of the sort I used to pore over in NZ Alpine Journals — blow-by-blow accounts that gave you clammy feet and heart palpitations. But those exuberant, meticulously narrated events often took place a few hours from home. Magnify the distances, heights and stakes to international proportions, add a dose of Pat’s stoical understatement and you get an idea of reading Wind from a Distant Summit.
I looked at an early draft in which Pat elaborated on her love of Pakistan and her grasp of its history and politics; in the interests of her own compelling story that seems to have been edited back to a few concise paragraphs, but she’s evidently chewing on the question of what she might contribute in years ahead to a region that’s has given her so much joy and satisfaction. Pat’s rightfully proud of all she’s done and is still doing in a body now into its sixth decade of hard yakka, but there seems no question that, even if it does wear out (did I mention the knee replacement, or the broken back?) to the point that carrying huge packs and making multi-day ascents are out of the question, in some sense Pat will always be ascending; for one, she has this great love for Pakistan and Afghanistan to work out, and it’s obvious from her story that she’s developed extraordinary mental and emotional capacities that can be steered along any avenue she chooses. Then there’s her writing — as stylish and riveting as all she undertakes. I look forward to the next book, whatever it tackles.
But I feel compelled to add, Pat, if you decide to curl up in a corner for the rest of your days with a cat, and a pile of books, cakes and knitting, you’ve totally earned it. Besides, you’ll be no less admired or loved if you ever choose to grow plump on a cushion.
The day started with a lit candle that I sat and didn’t look at while I tried not to think either.
A nice young man cranked my arm and shoulder into positions it was reluctant to adopt. However, progress is being made.
I blogged over at Rosa Mira Books, wondering where in a sex shop an author might position herself to deliver a talk about erotica in the old days, the bits that didn’t fit into her novel.
I proof-read the final chapter of Michael Jackson’s anthropological memoir Road Markings, which Rosa Mira will publish soon. The cover will be by a collaboration of daughters. And it will look a lot flasher than the image above.
These seedlings found homes today: beans beside path, basil in pot, pumpkin ringed about by rainbow silverbeet.
I admired the freshly painted doorstep and freshly oiled door.
Our son comes home tonight. The bed is welcoming but not wide. It’s all set up for early rising.
It was 27 degrees C here today. The vased peonies silently exploded.
Now it’s Key versus Goff. Glib and smug versus honest and earnest. Take your pick.
By these means we have bitten into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are changed.
The question’s being asked, who can take the place of Steve Jobs? I guess the answer has to be no one and everyone.
David Pogue says in his eulogy: ‘Suppose, by some miracle, that some kid in a garage somewhere at this moment possesses the marketing, invention, business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that that same person will be comfortable enough — or maybe uncomfortable enough — to swim upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision?
Zero. The odds are zero.’
In fact such multi-talented individuals aren’t uncommon; I know more than a handful. Uncommon is the person who develops and fulfils those talents and capacities and brings something of beauty into being; who brushes aside the extraneous, and flies quick and true toward the goal s/he has set for her/himself. Whether it be caring for children, setting up a business, creating a garden or tidying a bedroom, most of us sigh and prevaricate, look around and dabble instead of doing this One Thing Well.
There’s a groundswell these days, of talk, dreaming, experimenting and reaching for the concept of the ‘possible human’, which is to say the apparently impossible human who leads a life of high endeavour. The concept might have replaced contentment as the ideal state. (Although, I like to think that contentment and aspiration can walk hand in hand.)
Hundreds of books have been written about this; thousands of websites offer methods and courses for ‘neuro-linguistic programming’, ‘quantum jumping’, ‘integrated enlightenment’, and most of us know that we’re here not to live by rote but to apply ourselves to discerning and following the impulses that arise uniquely in each of us. We do this not for our own sake alone.
There was only one Steve Jobs.
But there are millions of us. We each have at least one particular strength. Many have potent visions. Surely it‘s best now if we look not for one person to save us, but find ways to put ourselves together; seek complementary components amongst our friends, colleagues and cyber-groups. Become the greatest human invention of all: a living web of affinities and abilities. Such is the vision that Steve Jobs and his kin have ushered, wittingly or not, into the realm of human imagination, and therefore of possibility.
I felt myself to be in skilled and steady hands with Laurence’s (6th or 7th?) novel. Boden Black is a young butcher who spends a formative few summer days in 1955 helping build a hut high on the flanks of Aoraki-Mt Cook. His consciousness is pierced by events — the relentless narration by a conscientious objector of his imprisonment during WW2 (its cause and consequences) and Boden’s own climb of the mountain with Edmund Hilary and guide Harry Ayres. Poetry is also at work in him.
Boden broods, listens, writes poems (none of which, alas, we get to read), cuts meat, ponders and occasionally converses, and we witness over decades the gradual accretion of character and motive as he, without haste, processes his life — from his lonely, troubled Fairlie childhood, to a maturity in which he is making peace with his people and his past, and with his calling as a poet.
There’s restraint and a deep calm at the heart of The Hut Builder, which makes for quietly impressive reading.
While in Australia I went out looking for wildflowers but it was too hot to snatch more than a couple. Well, that’s my excuse. All that foliage is a fiddle to draw. I chose simpletons.
I read only one book (and started another):
May Sarton writes in Journal of a Solitude: ‘… we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe or work can — if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough — be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind.’
We were given tickets for a dress rehearsal at the Sydney Opera House:
Add a pair of black leather underpants; pop snugly into all four items Teddy Tahu-Rhodes and you have Don Giovanni, Sydney style. Splendido.
We seem to be on a camera-free holiday (is it a holiday? perhaps a 75 percenter) but have a few pics from when we were here last year in the Bouddi National Park. I didn’t make it quite as far along the rocks this time — I had bare feet; the stones were sharp, and big black ants were running over my feet, pausing only to bite them. But it’s the same crew (mate and brother):
plus Barbie who took the photo. R couldn’t walk as much as he’d have liked to because of a flaring toe infection that puffed his foot up and took up several hours’ waiting in emergency rooms and the advice of five doctors before he was sure it was under control. Today we came back to the Blue Mountains where a ferocious wind inflated the machinations of an arsonist 30 miles west of here. Tomorrow we’ll have another bush-smoke sunrise before R and I get whisked into the city to watch the dress rehearsal of Don Giovanni at the Opera House. Woohoo!
Biddy’s deaf now. She can’t hear the cracked tones with which she asks for her dinner. Or the caught-a-mouse yowl that’s replaced her former mild enquiries. From being stand-offish and remote, she’s moved in close. Where I am, there Biddy wants to be. What could be nicer than a sunny table top with a lumpy pencil case?
There are so many deep and serious questions to ponder at present, in particular, which is also to say, in general, how to make the best response to each moment of life in this ravaged, beautiful world. However, I find that my drawing pen refuses sobriety. When it revels in absurdity, what can I do but abdicate responsibility and follow its lead?
It made me wonder how and why we’ve chosen particular physical traits to celebrate, covet, lust after, and even augment, and others to hide, banish, or reduce.
Why don’t we, for example, fixate on toes, and develop unguents for turning short stubbies into willowy beauties?
Why do we make a fetish of straight teeth, when elsewhere on the body curves and curls are far more interesting? With a little application we could turn them around, I’m sure.
And haven’t you ever felt bored by neat pink ears? Probably it would take only a sprinkling of this or that to cultivate a pair of lovely cauliflowers.
