5QF ~ July 19

Posted on 21 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Mama M from My Little Life is off on ‘lo-cation‘ this week – a location is like a vacation but in your own locality – so Five Question Friday is being hosted by Kate’s World…

1} What do you call them- flip flops, sandals, thongs, or slippers?

Well, actually, ‘jandals’ is the word we use so the rest of the world needs to get with the programme…slippers are in front of the fire, thongs bring up visions of Borat…and flip-flop is what politicians do…

2} Are you a “my kids can do no wrong” kind of person or a “Johnny punched you? Well what did you do to him first?!” kind of person?

Definitely – angels are only in the movies….

3} Would you confront a good friend that looked/looks down on your significant other?

Absolutely!

4} Biggest pet peeve?

I’m taking my cue this week from Mama M “…right now, I’m kinda the grammar police. Drives me bonkers when people don’t use “your/you’re” correctly...” so mine is people who can not master the difference between ‘s’ as something you add on to indicate a plural or ownership e.g. its or eggs, and tacking on ‘s as an abbreviation for ‘is’….

5} What’s your favorite take out meal?

Five Question Friday! 7/6/12

Posted on 8 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Is love at 1st sight possible?

Hmmm…attraction, yes, lust, most definitely…but love? Nope, I think that has to develop over time once two people get better acquainted and get to know each other before making any big commitments like ‘luff”…

How did you choose your pet’s name?

First time around, Mum told us kids we had a new pet coming and we should pick a name for it – it was all a big mystery and previous pets had been four-legged and woolly so us kids didn’t really put too much effort into it and selected the most foolish name we could think of (in the early 80s) which is our our spaniel got the grand monicker of Claudia.

Some two decades later, I made a casual comment that the new spaniel pup were selected looked a lot like the cartoon character Pepe LePew. Kirk, our current big dog, got his name because Carmen’s brother had a big Rottweiler named Khan and I passed the comment once that Kirk kicks Khan’s butt any day (Trekkies will get it). Lulu our rescue dog was Lulu when we got her, and Deeta the Rottweiler pup that we are fostering at the moment is Deeta although I see that someone is getting all googoo eyes over her so I suspect that she might be adopted by the time I gte home next week and be up for a name change…she’s less common Rottweiler with a tail which is good because we’ve never been fans of tail docking for it’s one sake but even as a puppy, that tail is already a lethal weapon that can clear a coffee table of everything in second when she gets excited…

Deeta who’s still just little…

What are you considering giving up (cable, home phone)?

Nothing at the moment…we cut back on a lot of things when I left the Army went for more of a freelance employment path and a lot of that was really just stuff that we didn’t use that much or really miss now…things like SkyTV and keeping the spa on year-round (we hardly use it any way once the novelty of having one wore off unless the twins are here or we have guests). I don’t have a personal mobile phone any more because I hardly used it when I had one and we’ve trimmed back on magazine subscriptions too mainly because it was getting to a read once then file away forever scenario…Google is your friend for most things…

I gave up drinking for a long time, initially because I was riding big fast bikes and didn’t need the distraction – I found that once I broke the habit of drinking, it was easy peasy to not drink at all…of course, Pepsi profits took a big dive when I gave up giving up about a decade ago…When I was posted to Wellington in the mid-90s, coming from an environment that ran on hot black coffee, I cold-turkeyed off coffee for a good three years…the imediate effects I noticed were sleeping better and thinking clearer and I became a real tea connoisseur but over time it crept back into my diet, partly driven by increasing difficulty finding good tea blends….

How much do you pay your babysitter?

We’re on the flip side of this now and starting to wonder if we should be charging for our baby-sitting services!! No, not really…it’s always a joy to look after them and they are better entertainment than anything on TV. On this one, I don’t think that the minimum wage is a bad start point for determining babysitter pay; then again, you might opt for the good old babysitting pool where a bunch of people share mutual babysitting services…

How “young” is old enough to babysit?

Or maybe…when is too old…? Young enough here is governed by the law which prevents any children under 14 being left home alone so obviously a babysitter would need to be older than this… personally, I’d be looking at at least 16-17 so that you can be fairly confident that they could cope with likely emergencies…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement

Posted on 7 July 2012 by SJPONeill

Anatomy of a shake

Well! That really wasn’t the sort of movement that I was thinking of when I saw the topic for this week’s photo challenge but this little sucker cooked off about an hour ago and the earth sure was moving!! Not the hard nasty jolts that happen down south but just a gentle rolling movement (imagine your house being placed on a waterbed) that lasted a good 10-15 seconds, although you can see from the table above that the event actually went on for the better part of quarter of an hour.

Like the big one centred off Taranaki on Tuesday night (I remember that because it was right after Hawaii 5-O) which was bigger at 7+ but way deeper (about 230+ km) this started slow, almost like a feeling of dizziness before you realise that it is actually the room moving and not you and started to build up to a point where heading for doorway or table seems like a good idea, then it just fades away to series of distant waves over the succeeding minutes…

I can also again comment with some authority on the old wives tale that animal have some sort of prescient warning of phenomena like earthquakes: it’s bollocks!! Kirk and Lulu were doing their standard floor mat impressions and did not so much as move let alone whimper or bark during the whole thing. And it’s not like it’s just these two…twenty-two years ago, a series of what were then thought quite nasty quakes (well, actually they were quite nasty – just not on the same scale and Christchurch) shook Palmerston North and the Manawatu/Horowhenua areas over a period of a fortnight or so. The last decent one was on a sunny Sunday and I distinctly remember my flatmates two dogs, dead to the world on the deck as power poles and light standards visibly pitched and rolled as the ground rocked…

Huh? Whassgoin’ on?

…and the final figures have just come in…after scientific review, this one has been confirmed as a 5.2 on the Richter scale and 91 km deep…and just to the side of our active volcano…

Five Question Friday! 6/1/12

Posted on 2 June 2012 by SJPONeill

1. What were you scared of as a kid?

The even stevens top three are…

…classic Doctor Who monsters, of course the Daleks but they’ve been rather overhyped since the Doctor Who renaissance since 2004 – worse than cockroaches, they just won’t die – but equally as scary were the original Cybermen…

Regardless of incarnation, the Doctors always had such crappy situational awareness….

….and the Abominable Snowmen – although now they kinda just look like decapitated Big Birds (in good old-fashioned black and white, of course)…

But being strictly honest, it was a Dalek that almost got me in the end…Dad used to right into squash and while he played, us kids would roam the depths of the squash court complex (which also supported a decent size badminton club). Can you imagine my sheer gibbering terror when I rounded a shadowy corner – right into an eye-level real live Dalek!!! Looking back from now, there is a slight possibility that it was just a super-size display shuttlecock….

Stingray hit the screens back home around 1967-8 – I used to watch it with Mum but mainly through my fingers and/or behind the couch as Troy Tempest, like most heroes seemed to have this innate ability to get himself right into the middle of a bad situation EVERY episode – why did WASP keep such a klutz on the staff? OK, so fair enough, he managed to recover things in thirty minutes…but even so….

And finally, there is the ID monster from Forbidden Planet – after almost sixty years it remains a classic that is totally not in need of a glitzy CGI-heavy remake…the whole idea of a an invisible monster that could crfeep in anywhere and get you took a long time to get over….

2. Do you sleep well in a hotel?

I hope so as I get enough practice at it!!! I think I spent two months overseas last year in one form of hotel accommodation or another – this year is a bit milder but still looking at four or five week in hotels – and that’s not counting other ‘alien’ beds as I travel around New Zealand for work…or my days on-base when I am not working from home. Actually, I have to admit that I don’t mind it too much as if there’s one thing you pick up from an infantry career is how to sleep just about any place and feel good about it…

Can’t really complain if this is the worst view I have this trip..!

Looking back, I think that the only time I have had trouble sleeping in a hotel room was one night I spent in the Crowne Plaza at Changi Airport where I checked in late in the evening and found that the first flight went out at 0534 in the morning as my room (directly overlooking the runway) rattled and shook…nothing like an early start to the day!

3. If you could meet any celebrity, dead or alive, who and why?

[Edit: Holy heck!! I skipped a whole question!!!]

I see that Mama M struggled with this one too…I’m not really too much into the whole celebrity thing nor whatever it is that might define ‘celebrity’…so often the public persona of an individual is so different from who they really are…the mighty(yeah, right) knowledge base, Wikipedia describes celebrity as:

A celebrity, also referred to as a celeb in popular culture, is a person who has a prominent profile and commands a great degree of public fascination and influence in day-to-day media. The term is synonymous with wealth (commonly denoted as a person with fame and fortune), implied with great popular appeal, prominence in a particular field, and is easily recognized by the general public.

And that doesn’t help at all…if anything that definition is of someone to be feeling sorry for that particularly wanted to meet for any reason – think I’ll pass on this one…

4. It’s a hot summer day. Do you prefer to be pool side or at the beach?

“It’s a hot summer day.” Ok, it probably is somewhere but it hasn’t quite made it here yet – although it is not unpleasant outside….if ‘at the beach’ could be stretched to include ‘lakeside’ then I think that’d be the preferred option with a pool the slow second option – there’s nothing quite like naturally moving water over the canned variety…

5. What is your favorite summer dish?

Hmmmm….this is a real toughie…after much very careful consideration, I have to opt for a cold chicken salad with lots of crisp salad, tomatoes, croutons, peppers, et cetera… accompanied by a tall chilled glass of genuine root beer…

Mainly faf–trans-Pacific movie reviews

Posted on 28 May 2012 by SJPONeill

Yep…on the ‘road’ again…I thought that Air New Zealand as a Star Alliance member would have a better entertainment menu but certainly this month’s was rather bland and I am hoping that heading home after the first of June will see a broader range available down the goats and chickens end of the plane…

This weekend’s viewing included…

the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-movie-poster

Faf for people too dumb, lazy or ignorant to read subtitles

I have been meaning to write about the remade Girl With The Dragon Tattoo since Empire released its cover story issue on it a few months ago – I held off because I hadn’t seen the new version and because I was just really busy – my gut feeling from the start though was that any remake would have to be pretty good to improve on the Swedish original and I was right. Unfortunately the Daniel Craig version isn’t the one: if you haven’t seen the original movie then this one is OK but only a shadow of the grittier and far more thrilling and gripping original….

A brief break for a Coke Zero and then…

Nothing stellar but fun…

I must admit that I quite like movies that Mark Wahlberg is in, even if the movie overall in a bit of a stinker…Contraband is a fun movie but nothing stellar – a rather implausible but fast-paced cruise to Panama while Mum, Kate Beckinsale, looks after the the kids and rues the day she didn’t push her younger brother off the fire escape…

I had a bit of a snooze but was really that sleepy so took a punt on Shutter Island.

Psychiatric Shaggy Dog story

Titanic aside, Leonardo has the opposite effect on my desire to watch a movie than Mark Wahlberg: as soon as I see his name in the credits, I’m automatically wondering if there aren’t any drains that need clearing or gutters than need cleaning. Shutter Island did nothing to persuade me that Leonardo offers anything meaningful to movie art…it doesn’t so much drag as charge towards one of only two possible endings and once the killer is revealed its all a bit hohum….

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Air Canada hop from San Francisco had an excellent range of movie entertainment but only a two hour flight to watch anything…

Oh, God! Make it stop…!

The Underworld ‘saga’ never really grabbed me like some other franchise series Resident Evil which is just good clean hyper-violent gory messy fun….Underworld Awakening screams for a a stake through its inner essence (if it had any). It is a sad example of what happens when money is short and greedy production companies want to flog a license to death, or un-death in this case. Production values are rock-bottom with poorly integrated low-resolution video game graphics mixed with blurry flash-back sequences and only occasional live-acting scenes. It’s unlikely that you will see this one in the bargain bin at Warewhare because the other bargains movies will keep hefting it out on to the floor…

I had angsted over a choice between Underworld Awakening because I suspected how bad it might be and the 1951 original of The Thing, another victim of remake-itis, although John Carpenter’s 1982 version remains a classic in its own right…and after watching this version again, I wonder how much Ridley Scott’s Aliens franchise owes to it as well…?

A true classic in all its monochromatic glory…

Wooden acting aside, this Arctic tale of terror is still enough to put any seven year old to cowering behind the couch of dark and stormy nights…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Together

Posted on 28 April 2012 by SJPONeill

…at first Ruby wasn’t too sure about the new dog in the yard…

Five Question Friday!! 4/27/12

Posted on 28 April 2012 by SJPONeill

Do you make your kids finish all the food on their plates?

As a general rule, yes…but sometimes a battle is simply not worth it…equally generally, they are pretty good about hoovering up whatever is put in front of them…(talking grand-kids here so the rules might be a little different…)

Do you give an allowance?

Nope…they have both left home and are on their own, despite occasional hints … but we still feed them when they come round home though…

Do you actually park your car in the garage?

That’s the general idea and , yes, there is a car in there…with winter coming down here, we will probably have to get our act together so we can get the truck in there as well – had a couple of windfalls with ‘in-theme’ windows for the cottage/sleep-out and the big box things are displays cases from the Te Rapa Payless Plastics that Carmen scored from their closing down sale last weekend…both items need a temporary home til we get round to shifting them to either the storage garage (no, that’s not it in the picture; that IS the car garage!) or installing them…

What is one food you will NEVER cook?

Kina aka sea urchin…looks like snot and not interested in investigating further before the zombie apocalypse strikes…

I rest my case…

Do you have anything exciting planned for the summer?

Not really…just being able to bask in the sun and enjoy the great weather we never got this summer…first summer trip will probably be Brussels but it’ll be coming on to winter there so not sure if that will count? Hoping for an Aussie trip before Christmas though…

There is no truth

Posted on 5 April 2012 by SJPONeill

…in the rumour that a crazed digger driver attacked the Lodge while I was away last week…the results look pretty damn fine…unfortunately we don’t have much in the way of a logical before/after sequence (will we ever learn?) but what looked like this…

Raurimu snow 009

Looking off the front deck…all smoothed out now – might be able to add a hairpin to the twins racing track…

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The water tanks all better now – a Boxing Day team effort….

Raurimu Mar 04 - 10 Rainy Day 001

Nasty tight damp back path and the BBQ on the edge of the wilderness….

Water tank 007

…It’s now looking rather different with clear access all a round the back of the house now and with the lawn extended past the punga grove….first rain should let us know if the ‘fall’ towards the pond and the stream is set up right…it probably makes more sense if you’ve been here and know how it all goes together….

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Above: what WAS a narrow path you you barely get through with an armload of washing….

Raurimu renovations 007

Above: A shot of the redeveloped (after Treescape and The Lines Company butchered it in 2005) punga grove – two weeks ago that was just a ditch with pungas overgrown with bracken and blackberry…

Raurimu renovations 005

Lulu looks a bit unsure about it all – there’s probably a good bone or two buried way deeper now than they were a few days back…

It will look better once it’s all green again…hopefully in time for Terri’s next visit….

Bullets and bouquets

Posted on 2 April 2012 by SJPONeill

When I’m on the road, there are usually some organisations that impress and some that don’t…my Qantas flight here last weekend was absolutely chocka – a sign perhaps that things are picking up economically, or just that more flights have been cut? – and I had the only video terminal on the whole plane that was dead as the proverbial doornail. A bit of a bummer really as long haul international flights are normally my opportunity to catch up on fairly new release movies that haven’t gotten to the Raurimu Multiplex yet…

The cabin crew did what they could and after rebooting the system a number of times came to the conclusion that it was no longer a going concern – I think I have have mentioned previously my concern that if the video system was done by Rockwell-Collins then hopefully the flight control system wasn’t by Sony – and apologised profuselyfor the total inconvenience to my enjoyment of the flight. They then offered me a bottle of champagne as a compensatory gesture and it would have been rude not to accept it. So far it has survived the trip and hopefully won’t have to be dumped tomorrow night if I am overweight…

Anyways, the dud video system gave me an opportunity to do some recreational reading on the B&N Nook that I picked up this time last year. I managed to chew through Bob Mayer’s Area 51 – a rollicking good yarn – before we landed in LA and had started on Rick Castle’s Heat Wave – as entertained as the series but way raunchier…

So that’s the bouquet…well done, Qantas…!!

And mention of the Nook brings me to a ginormous brickbat to Barnes and Noble…having researched my Nook purchase in some detail before purchasing it, I got it home only to find that I could only download Nookbooks while geographically located in the US. OK, I loaded it up on my next visit and intended doing the same this time…but…Barnes & Noble in its infinite wisdom, has decided to now restrict Nookbook purchases to only US-billed credit cards – not exactly something one can pick up on the street…gift cards also fail unless the giftee’s account is linked to a US-billed credit card…

To add insult to injury, in all the marketing spam that B&N send out, not once have I seen any mention of this change before or after the act. So now essentially I have a Nook that won’t be good for much once I finish my current load of books…watch this space for an account of my adventures softrooting the Nook so it’ll read anyone’s e-books – whatever I end up doing, it’ll be a high calibre solution. In the meantime, boo hiss to B&N!!!

And now, to the good people of America, here’s your big chance to get into the bouquet queue…I ma becoming very concerned at the manner in which retail supplies of root beer are slowly disappearing from the market…the 711 that was my life support in Crystal City only had baby-sized 20 oz bootles, and Burger King, McDs, Popeyes etc seem to have abandoned the cause altogether. This is not good enough!! It is bad enough not being able to get a good supply down under (overpriced four-packs of sarsaparilla do not count!) but it is simply not acceptable to land here and have to hunt for a simple root beer! I will of course be exporting some more root beer Sodastream syrup when I leave and a bottle is normally good for 3-6 months if I ration it carefully but it would be much appreciated if you could get this sorted before I come back….it’s not like I want F-35 to fly or anything silly or impractical…

Thanks…

Titbits

Posted on 19 March 2012 by SJPONeill

Pears in Red Wine

Tried this last night – it’s my fourth or fifth crack at it. Previous attempts have always resulted in cooked pears that don’t really absorb the flavour of the juice and yummy juice that goes down uber-well in a wine glass.

This time I skipped the raw pears and took the lazy option of just using a can of pear halves with all the syrup. Tossed this is a pot with a whole bottle of cheap red wine, 2/3 of a cup of sugar, 6 whole cloves and a two inch cinnamon stick. Took it to the boil and then simmered for 20-25 minutes before serving the fruit over ice cream. Yummy! The remaining juice was strained through a sieve and served up warm in wine glasses. Lights out!

It’s that simple

Yep…it’s called OPSEC in the modern world…and no, you kids DON’T have a right to use these toys at work…Michael is quite useful at times although he has once again poisoned his own well by grandstanding off the Panjwai shootings this week to promote his own campaign against US servicemen who may have threatened his life (no doubt with provocation, Mikey)…

Thoughts on Lex

If there is one lesson that can be learned from Lex’s accident, it surely must be ‘don’t leave til tomorrow what you should do today’…I used to read his blog daily but as I returned to work and the tempo ramped up again my visits became less and less frequent. I’ve been back a lot since the accident and read much of what I missed but it’s not the same…

On the accident itself, there is comment on the preliminary NTSB report at Instapinch

And finally some trivia…