thanks

The boil-water order has finally been lifted! A month and a half after the earthquake. We have been industriously boiling our water for weeks now. It's not so bad. But it's going to be very, very nice to return to normal habits of tooth-brushing and face-washing and dish-washing and water-drinking and so on.

In the spirit of celebration, which I feel has come upon me, I would like to mention some of the things that have cheered me up or helped me relax in the wake of the quake. There's quite a lot of things to pay tribute to. It will be a long list. In no particular order:

1. Thanks to the woman in the Otago Museum shop, when I visited with my two small nieces about a week after the earthquake. I was having a day of feeling particularly bad, feeling useless, and wishing I was back in Christchurch. When she found out that I was from Christchurch, and had brought my nieces down so my sister could work, she said: "I just think that what you are doing is wonderful. You're doing something so very helpful and practical when the rest of us just feel so helpless!" It really, really helped me! Thanks very much!

2. Thanks to Oscar, pictured below:

Oscar is a bichon frise-Jack Russell cross. He is happy and excitable and loves to be cuddled. When I was staying with my sister in Dunedin, I took him for a lot of walks and I found it very healing to be around such a simple, happy, faithful creature who took such pleasure in Life. Dogs are good for the soul, I think.

3. Thanks to a facebook page, You Know You're From Christchurch When... The idea is: light relief makes everybody feel better. It certainly made me feel better. Here are some of the best contributions. Here, also, is a photo added to the site which I thought was really cute.

4. A poem written about the earthquake. I thought this was amazing.

5. The memorial service on March 18 at Hagley Park in Christchurch, which I attended, had moments of sheer tediousness but also moments of loveliness. These were some of my favourites:
The unanimous, spontaneous standing ovations of the crowd for the search and rescue teams and the fire service.
The video montage they showed at the end of the service of people helping people, rising above the disaster. This is one of my favourite things of all.
Prince William's speech was unexpectedly touching. That is one promising prince.
A beautiful performance of Pie Jesu by Dame Malvina Major and a choir boy called Patrick Manning.
The haka at the start.
Hayley Westenra's performance of Amazing Grace.
It was also quite amazing singing the national anthem towards the end of the service. I felt just about as patriotic as I will ever feel. It was also amazing feeling the extreme appropriateness of our anthem's wonderful lyrics.

6. The song written by a band in Wellington as a tribute, all proceeds to the Red Cross fund. It's called Morning Light and I think it's rather beautiful.

7. The funny song written by a Christchurch resident. Rewritten from Tim Finn's "There's a Fraction Too Much Friction", it is called "There's a Fraction Liquefaction". (Liquefaction is the process by which hundreds of thousands of silt and mud appeared on the streets of Christchurch.) I love it when people manage to find humour in situations like this.

8. Another example of this is the website Show Us Your Long Drop. This was a competition for the most creative outdoor loos. Creativity out of necessity.

9. The skaters who have found opportunity in the twisted streets of eastern Christchurch.

10. Some of the cool ideas for rebuilding Christchurch. Creative and exciting! They make the whole horrid experience seem like an opportunity in disguise.

11. Feeling proud of my city, proud of my nation, for the way most of us have handled this experience. As this writer says.

12. No thanks to Ken Ring, the conspiracy theorist/weather presenter/author of "Pawmistry: How to Read Your Cat's Paws", who decided it was a good idea to predict a huge earthquake, even bigger than the ones before, on March 20. His prediction was based entirely on pseudo-science, but he managed to terrify a rather large percentage of Christchurch's population. A lot of us felt very, very angry at him and were jubilant when, of course, no major earthquake struck on March 20. We were even more jubilant when this video appeared, mocking Ken Ring, very successfully.



13. Thank you to Bruce Springsteen for his "My City of Ruins". Handel's "Comfort Ye, My People". U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday". Brooke Fraser's "Shadowfeet". Coldplay's "Everything's Not Lost". And many more. Music in general, really. On the day of the earthquake, soon after I got home, we were sitting around feeling absolutely miserable. We thought about praying but didn't know what to pray other than the simplest calls for help, and then we suddenly decided to get out our guitars and sing. We sang songs to God and they expressed everything we wanted to say, and it was a really powerful thing to be able to do. I don't think I'll ever forget that experience. So thanks to music. Thanks to my wonderful flatmates that I could do something like that with them. And thanks to God for getting us through this time.

14. And thanks to you guys who have borne with my slightly dark blogging style since February. It's hard to express how wonderful it has been to have support and prayers from all over the world in a time like this. I've heard an idea being tossed around over and over since the quake, since the nations of the world turned up to help us in little New Zealand, and since the quake and tsunami in Japan, and it is this: Why on earth do we bother with war, when working together is so utterly wonderful?

cookbook challenge #7

[About the New Years' resolution behind this]

From The Really Useful Ultimate Student Cookbook, by Silvana Franco, I made calazone. To be precise, I made two kinds of calazone - one with courgettes (zucchini), and one with cheesy potatoes. MmmmMMMM! Seven down, ten to go.

Franco has a way, throughout this recipe book, of taking a basic idea - like a baked potato, for example - and suggesting a number of ways to make this more interesting. It's fantastic, and really useful, just as the title promises. In this case, she suggests making calzone or pizza, gives you a recipe for pizza dough, and then has suggestions for toppings or fillings. I couldn't decide. So I made a sample of both, rationalising that we could use the leftovers for lunches.

I simply made the pizza dough in the breadmaker, using the breadmaker manual's instructions for this - multiplying the recipe by 1.5. Nice and easy, it smells gorgeous, and tastes beautiful, without all the hard work. You do need to allow about 45 minutes for the dough to be ready, however.

Preheat the oven to 220*C or 450*F.

Here are the instructions for these particular fillings.

For the courgettes, you will need:
About 3 small courgettes or 1 large one
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
4 tablespoons olive oil

Quarter the courgettes lengthways and then slice very thinly to make little wedges. Toss with the onion, garlic, parsley and plenty of salt/pepper.

For the cheesy potatoes, you will need:
500g potatoes, diced (I used a bit more to make it go further)
2 tablespoons milk
125g cheese, grated
1 small onion, finely chopped
a few leaves fresh basil, roughly torn
seasoning

Cook the potatoes in plenty of boiling salted water for 10-15 minutes, until tender. Drain well and mash with the milk until smooth and fluffy. Stir in the cheese, onion, basil and plenty of seasoning.

At this point, I divided the dough into five portions. I rolled each on a floury board into a large-ish rectangle. (For the cheesy potato calzone, Franco suggests grating some Parmesan and rolling the dough on this as well as on the flour. This tasted good.)

I piled the courgette mixture onto two of the rectangles, only on one half of each, leaving a small gap around the edges. I dampened the edges, and then folded the other half of the dough over, pressing with my fingers to seal. Onto a lightly oiled baking tray, and into the oven to cook for 15 minutes.

I piled the potato mixture onto three of the rectangles, on one half of each, leaving a small gap around the edges (as above), and folded over (as above). This also went into the oven for 15 minutes, until crusty and golden!

I sliced it, and served it with a green salad.

This was a meal that went down really, really well. We had an extra unexpected guest, but it served all six of us easily, with leftovers for our lunches the next day. It was tasty, the dough was a really nice change from pastry-type savouries, it was filling. It was a super-cheap meal, but didn't seem cheap, if that makes sense.

Next time, I would be a little more wanton with the amount of seasoning, and I would probably add garlic to the potato mixture too. And yet I feel very satisfied with this fantastic meal. I am sure I will come back to it in the future, to experiment and to reproduce.

excitement

Oh my word, I have just discovered the coolest shopping website ever, and had to share!! Warning: gushing ahead. For all I know, you've all known about this website forever, but I didn't, and I feel like I'm uncovering Tutankhamen's tomb.

Zenni Optical. An online spectacles company. Cheap glasses, anyone?

I wish I had known about it last year, when I bought my first pair of glasses, shelling out over NZ $500 for frames, lenses and an eye exam.

ALL the frames on this website are between US $9.99 and $46 (or NZ $12 and $60). Even its most expensive glasses are ONE TENTH of the price of my fancy Converse glasses from the local optometrist. (Don't get me wrong, I love my Converse frames, but I don't particularly love the effect they had on my savings account.)

And that's not all.

Because it sucks to buy something like glasses without trying them on first, you can upload a photo of yourself to Zenni and try the frames on virtually! Just imagine all the hours you could spend on this site playing with this fun wee toy.

Reading this through, I can see that you may be suspicious that someone from Zenni Optical has hacked into my account. I can assure you now that this is not spam. I am simply a little over-excited that I may be able to afford more than one pair of glasses, or that if I break or lose my current glasses it's not the end of the world.

sing-along

In about a month's time, my flatmate and I are throwing a Sing-along Chitty Chitty Bang Bang party! We are very, very excited.

You may remember that last year we hosted a sing-along Sound of Music at our flat. It was a pretty amazing experience - so much fun! I had been to a public version of this event once before, so I already had heaps of ideas from that for ways to encourage audience participation (e.g. party poppers to let off when they kiss, edelweiss to wave in the air, whistles to blow, etc etc). There are also heaps of ideas online for costumes, activities, party food and so on.

And there's something about The Sound of Music that is very easy to work with - all those songs full of random lists. Brown paper packages tied up with string; do, a deer, a female deer; a flibbertigibbet, a will o' the wisp, a clown; cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudel... and so on.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is rather different. My attempts to find anything online have been woeful. It is hard to believe we are the first people to do something like this who thought to chronicle the experience online, but nevertheless we are going to have to come up with most of the ideas ourselves. It's a fantastic, imaginative movie (did you know Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay?), and so there's plenty of material to work with. I am sure we'll do just fine.

But in the interests of future singalong-holders, I would like to announce my plan to provide the internet with a blog series about holding a sing-along Chitty Chitty Bang Bang party. Over the next couple of months, I will pass on to you the many ideas I am sure we will come up with, on:

1. Decorations
2. Party food and drink
3. Costumes
4. Audience participation: ideas and props
And more!

To see the progress of this idea, see all my blog posts under the label sing-alongs.

oops

I have been applying for lots and lots and lots of jobs. About fifty so far, and I have many more on the to-do list. My policy is to apply for anything and everything that could conceivably accept me. Now is not the time to be fussy. I know that I'm on the shortlist for one, currently, but I've got fairly used to receiving rejections. I've developed a philosophical attitude towards them - after all, the earthquake has delayed my thesis by at least a month, so it's quite lucky I am not currently expected to be working full-time as well as finishing my thesis.

The problem with my policy is that I feel like I'm getting a little blasé about the whole application process. I spent yesterday afternoon applying for about fifteen jobs. Writing cover letters, rewriting cover letters, making small alterations to my CV, firing through online applications, filing away the job descriptions and the date I applied for them. Quickly quickly quickly, so I can get back to work.

Turns out that in my speed I was not very careful with one of them. I received an email this morning from the HR person in charge of a copywriter/freelance writing vacancy saying "Hello, we received your application, but we are not [Insert Company here] nor do we need a [Insert vacancy here]." Obviously I had managed to forget to alter those crucial words in my cover letter, even though I had changed everything else to suit the position.

I groaned, swallowed my pride, apologised profusely and offered a corrected version. Response: "Well, if you seriously want to work as a copywriter, I'd advise you edit your own cover letter properly. Obviously, I can't accept your application. Sorry. You seem like a nice person."

Ouch. And touché, good point, and all the rest of it.

The pity of it is that I was actually quite excited about that application. That job sounded much more intriguing than the majority of the other things I have been applying for. It would also have allowed me to work from Christchurch, unlike most available jobs at the moment.

I have had other moments of embarrassment. I applied for a job as a proofreader for a magazine publishing company. Not particularly exciting so I haven't lost much sleep over that one. However, only a few hours after applying, I got a phone call from HR, who wanted to talk to me about it. Unfortunately, when they got to the inevitable question - "And what do you think of [Insert name here] magazine?" - I had to admit that I had never laid eyes on this magazine before, and didn't even have a clue what type of magazine it was. Cringe! Not a good look! (It was a lifestyle/home decorating magazine, as it turns out.)

Another experience: I had a phone interview for a local job in a library. I do feel I was slightly unfairly treated here, because they told me beforehand it was just a phone call to check things like the date I would be available, and then they proceeded to ask all the standard interview questions. Including: "Can you tell me about a time when you had a difficult experience with a customer?" I was flummoxed. I have NEVER had a bad experience with a customer. And I have worked several customer service jobs. I didn't know what to say, and it showed. (I've come to the conclusion now that I should simply have been honest. I haven't had bad customer service experiences, and that probably shows that I am good at dealing with customers. I shouldn't have to feel like it doesn't.)

I think the problem is that because I am already doing what is basically a full-time job (writing a thesis), a job that is by necessity absolutely consuming, I don't feel like I have time to take job applications seriously. I am also coming from a background of studenthood, in which I have paid people to accept me into their organisation! People in the real world, however, don't have to be fair, or consider everything about your application, or account for your mistakes. They can ring you entirely out of the blue and expect you to know everything about their organisation. They only need to see one single unfavourable thing about you and it will sour your entire application. I'm not complaining - but it's a mental adjustment for me to make. And it's scary!

cookbook challenge #6

[About the New Years' resolution behind this]

From a Foodtown magazine, I made broccoli and cauliflower curry with cumin seeds. Six down, eleven to go.

This recipe is vegetarian and also gluten free, which is great, considering I served it to a friend who needed the latter and a flatmate who needed the former. Unfortunately, it wasn't so good for another flatmate, who has a very very very low tolerance for hot food. I didn't even feel like it was hot, but even the tiny amount of heat in it was too much for her. Sigh. Someday I'll get it right for everyone!

You will need:
1 tablespoon oil
1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 onion, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1/2 teaspoon grated ginger
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
375 g /13 oz can evaporated milk
1 teaspoon salt
2 medium potatoes, scrubbed, diced and cooked
500g / 1 lb & 1 oz bag frozen cauliflower and broccoli
1 can (drained) chickpeas
1 tablespoon cornflour, mixed with 1 tablespoon cold water

Heat the oil in a large frying pan, add the mustard and cumin seeds and cover with a lid of some kind. When the seeds have finished popping, remove the cover.

Toss in the onion, garlic, ginger, coriander and spices and cook gently until the onion is soft. Add the evaporated milk and bring to a simmer. Stir frequently.

When the sauce is simmering, add the salt, cooked diced potato, frozen vegetables and chickpeas. Simmer until the vegetables are piping hot, then mix in the cornflour/water.

This should be served with rice. It serves four or five.

Verdict: Yeah, this is okay. It's a pretty good way to serve a big, filling meal without meat. It didn't seem particularly special to me, though. Maybe it was just that I had dined off the aroma of all the spices cooking, and so wasn't able to taste them as easily when I actually ate the meal.

All the same, it wasn't a bad meal at all. Even if not particularly exciting.

why the rules against split infinitives and final prepositions are silly

I have a bone to pick, so to speak. A grammatical bone. I have endured in silence - well, not exactly silence - but I have endured in blogging silence for some time, and cannot hold back my blog-rant any more. [Sorry about the probable boringness of what will follow.]

I do not believe that the rules against splitting infinitives or putting prepositions at the end of a clause have any kind of justification whatsoever.

Take that, eighteenth and nineteenth century grammaticians who had nothing better to do than make up rules that were completely inappropriate to the English language.

This breaking-point comes as I have received more comments from my supervisors on the chapters of my thesis. I am willing to admit that in some cases moving the adjectives or prepositions around may make for more elegant writing. However, the majority of the 'corrections' they have made sound unnatural, and much worse than the original sentences, even if they are correct according to the rules against splitting infinitives or placing prepositions at the end of a clause. And so, I bring to you an angry rant against two very stupid grammatical rules:

- These rules are utterly inappropriate to English. English is not like French; it does not have 'infinitives' in the same way. English is not like Latin, which does proscribe prepositions at the end of clauses.

The rules were made up by busybody grammarians in the 18th or 19th centuries who decided that English should be more like what they saw as the ideal (though dead) language, Latin. As Tina Blue says,

"Some of the 'rules' of English grammar that you learned in school were devised by pedants who believed that English was inferior to Latin and should be improved by forcing it onto the Procrustean bed of Latin grammar. But English is descended from an ancestral German dialect, not from Latin, and certain of the rules based on Latin grammar simply do not fit the structure of English."
[NB: English does have a relationship to Latin, especially in borrowed words - but Blue is correct in saying that the grammar of our language is descended more directly from German.]

According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the rule about prepositions seems to have been created in 1672 by John Dryden, and "repeated uncritically thereafter". The same goes for the split infinitive, although that was only debated for the first time in the 19th century.

- Every great author or writer has broken both rules (and many others) on numerous occasions. That is, unless they too subscribe to the ridiculous myth. For example, we can see the following authors splitting their infinitives:

"But I would come back to where it please me to live: to really live." - Ernest Hemingway
"Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride..." - Robert Burns
"Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows / Thy pity may deserve to pitied be..." - Shakespeare
"And so we proceeded to minutely examine them." - Bram Stoker
And then, of course, there's Star Trek's famous "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Thank goodness the writers of Star Trek were sensible. It sounds so much cooler than the alternative.

And, of course, most of us have heard versions of Winston Churchill's response to an over-zealous editor who wanted him to remove a preposition from the end of a sentence: "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put!"

As A Dictionary of Modern English Usage says,

"Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are 'inelegant' are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards." [quoted here]

- Most people who are actually qualified, intelligent grammarians refuse to accept the need for these rules. For instance, the Oxford University Press decided in 1995 that there is nothing wrong with the split infinitive.
Another expert, Edward D. Johnson, said in 1982 that the idea that a sentence cannot end with a preposition is a "superstition".
Meanwhile, the acknowledged expert in the field, H. W. Fowler, points out the fact that people who say the final preposition is wrong, when used as a phrasal verb, are actually just showing their own ignorance, because the final "preposition" in this context is actually an "adverbial particle"!
[NB: a phrasal verb is a verb that absolutely must have a preposition after it, in order to understand the meaning. For example, the verb "to put" completely changes its meaning when it is becomes "to put up" or "to put up with".]

- Of course there are times when using these principles makes a piece of writing better. But there are other times when the use of these rules simply obscures meaning or unnecessarily complicates a perfectly good sentence. Here is an example:

"The government expected unemployment to more than double in the next three years."

As Karl Craig points out, where else could you put "more than"?

- Because people push rules like this which don't matter, and which have no reflection in the language, it undermines the importance of other rules that do actually have some foundation, that actually affect the meaning of sentences.

- I can understand following these rules in formal settings, such as writing a cover letter for a job - just in case the person reading it is deluded into thinking your final preposition is bad usage and doesn't give you the job. However, I am starting to hate these rules SO MUCH that I feel we should all start making an effort to banish them forever. If the person who marks my thesis has a problem with my prose for these reasons, I'd rather contest his judgment afterward, explaining my reasons, than change something that is perfectly good beforehand.

- I just find it quite sad that children in schools are being taught silly rules, wasting their time, or writers who produce perfectly adequate work are being scorned for their use of these constructions. One of the coolest things about the real English language is its capacity for creative fiddling. I find it very, very sad that creativity is inhibited for no good reason.

Make the world a better place! Eschew these pointless rules! Long live the split infinitive! Long live the final preposition!

Here is something I did because I felt so mad!!!!!
Feel free to make it into a t-shirt or something :)

Sources I looked at:

General articles on grammar myths:
'Grammar Myths', by Karl Craig
Grammar Girl's 'Top Ten Grammar Myths'
Wikipedia on 'hypercorrection'

On prepositions:
The debate over Churchill's famous sarcastic usage of "up with which I will not put".
'Prepositions at the end of sentences: further explanation of why the "rule" is wrong,' by Tina Blue
'It's usually not wrong to end a sentence with a preposition', by Tina Blue
Grammar Girl on final prepositions

On split infinitives:
The Independent, on the OUP's decision to allow split infinitives, and the Queen's English Society's response
Wikipedia on split infinitives
"The so-called split infinitive"
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, on split infinitives