discoveries

You will probably remember how much I loved this angel tombstone in a cemetery near my father's house:


And you will probably remember that I was sad to discover that she had sustained quite some damage in the Christchurch earthquakes.

Today I started browsing the Christchurch Art Gallery's online galleries, and particularly their large collection of William (Bill) A. Sutton's work, which can be found here. He was an artist from Christchurch, born 1917, died 2000, and I've always had a thing for his work.

I was SO EXCITED to find among his sketches that he too liked the angel tombstone!

Here she is. Taken from this page on the gallery website.

It's a little hard to see, so I sharpened the picture here:


I admit I do wish he had been able to do something more with the sketch, but the fact that one of my favourite artists wandered round my city too, and liked the same things I like - that's cool enough as it is.

mastering the arts

This morning I found out that I officially have a Masters degree in Arts.

And yes - that means that from now on, it's Master Allie to you.

It was a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions.

For one thing, it was a good solid mark, so I was pleased. I will now be able to say that I have a Master of Arts with Distinction. But it was also not quite as high as I would have liked - let's face it, I'm never going to be over the moon with anything less than A+ - so I was a little teensy bit disappointed. But I went for a walk, processed everything, thought back over the last few years and came to the conclusion that:

(a) I was being a little bit silly. I've done very well!

(b) I have learned Huge Things about how to do research. Anything that was not A+ about my thesis is an opportunity to improve next time.

(c) I've made it through rather a crazy two years by the grace of God - this is like a certification of that - and for that I feel a little over-emotional and proud and grateful.

job-hunting is so much fun

So, I think it's time for a little update on my employment prospects.

I have now been rejected for 81 jobs! Huzzah!

I think I'm doing pretty well so far at keeping my head held high amidst a constant stream of rejections... I regret to inform you ... we found other applicants matched the requirements of experience more closely than you did... et cetera, et cetera. (That's if they reply at all.)

I could become rather cynical and question how these applicants ever got experience - but I try to avoid thinking too much about it and just write Better and More Persuasive covering letters.

Fortunately, I have two part-time jobs which have covered my bills so far but I will need to find something else in the immediate future as one of them is winding down.

I've had two interviews for a "proper job" so far - I didn't get either but one of them gave me some excellent feedback, and it was good practice. I also got to the point of taking a personality test for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After which they too rejected me. I think being rejected on the basis of your personality is slightly worse than being rejected because you "only" have a strong postgraduate degree.

Oh, isn't it all so fun?! I have had a few weeks of sheer apathy, refusing to even look at job applications, as it all seems hopeless and then I give myself a virtual slap, and start applying again. The funny thing is that when I look at some of the job descriptions, I KNOW I would be fantastic at them. The only thing I need to do is convince the employer of that.

So I beat on, boat against the current, borne ceaselessly into ... who knows where?!

one year on

Today, it's one year on from the first major earthquake in the Canterbury region. When it happened, it's safe to say I had no idea how much things would change in Christchurch over the coming year. As you will probably be able to tell from reading my first earthquake blog post.

As I have probably said before, I'm a bit sceptical about the whole idea of officially remembering things based on an arbitrarily-selected portion of time. Also, it was really the February quake that turned things upside down.

Still, everyone else is doing it, and there's something about experiencing the sudden onset of spring at the moment that makes it easy to remember how things were a year ago.

And there's no denying that it was the September quake that made earthquakes a part of our consciousness. By the time the February quake hit, we'd been through thousands of miniature ones, almost every day. We'd seen our city closed to us, and we'd seen it reopened, and I for one had gained an entirely new perspective on the preciousness of my city. I remember sitting in the courtyard of the Dux de Lux sometime in January or early February looking out over the Gothic Revival architecture of the Arts Centre, a cold Pimms in hand, thinking how lucky I was to live in such a pleasant city and how close we'd come to losing it.

I can't remember all that much about the September earthquake, except that I was shaken awake, and it was very dark because all the streetlights went off and I thought vaguely to myself, wow, this is quite a reasonably sized earthquake. I wasn't even sure if it was worth getting up and checking on my flatmates until I heard them stumbling around in the dark. One of them was beside herself and I felt slightly frustrated with her, especially as I was still half-asleep and couldn't really grasp what was going on. One of them slept through it, which is kind of unbelievable in hindsight, but true. After checking on her, we sat around in the dark with candles on (apparently that's a big no-no) for about twenty minutes, I decided it must have been the Alpine Fault and hoped the people in the West Coast would be okay - has no idea that it was actually far closer to us. "Oh well," I said. "Let's go to bed."

The power stayed off until about 10am, and only then, when we were able to turn on the TV, did I start to realise what was going on.

Since then:

• we take less for granted, and we plan for everything that could go wrong.
  

• our social lives have become much more home-based. There are just far fewer places open.
  

• "quaking" is one of the largest labels on the right sidebar of this blog.

• we have a whole new vocabulary: "liquefaction", "munted", etc.

• we are never at a loss for small talk or for conversation starters.

• we have shaken our way through more than 8,000 sizeable quakes. It's a part of life now. And who knows when it will stop?
  

• we have had to put up with a new mythology growing, outside Christchurch, of "resilient Cantabrians" or "tough southerners" when in fact so many people feel fragile, under siege, and would like the rest of the country to understand this.

• having said that - I've personally learned a lot and come to understand myself a lot more.
  

• we've started noticing when bad things happen abroad.

• we've lost some people, some places and some things we can never recover.
  

halfway down the stairs: we all fall down

The September issue of Halfway Down the Stairs is now published! The theme is "We All Fall Down" - which, I believe, has been one of the most interesting themes for us in terms of the submissions we have received.

Of course you should devour the entire issue! ...

... but, if you only read one piece, it should be The Red Dress, by M. B. Wallace. I really loved this story. One of my all-time favourites from the 'zine. (This is speaking from the point of view of a fiction editor, of course!) Go read it now. It's short, it's beautiful.

But there is plenty more: we were also very pleased to receive submissions like Leah Browning's Punch, and Jeff Wood's Ketchup. And there is quite a small but glittering section of poetry, and one really nice nonfiction selection.

This time, my contribution was a book review of a novel by one of our previous authors.

let them eat cake

It was my flatmate's engagement party on Saturday night, and we were all supposed to bring a dessert. So I decided to make an engagement ring cake!!! What a great way to procrastibake.

I started by making a buttercake from the Edmonds cake mix. I feel ashamed even admitting this because I don't usually like using packets for baking, but there's no denying it's a reliable and simple way to make a cake for decorating. (It's not half bad as far as taste goes, either.) If you are above packet mixes, try this recipe.


It's fairly easy to manipulate this kind of shape into an engagement ring, obviously:


The recipe I used for the icing was the Vienna Cream recipe:

125 g/4 oz butter at room temperature
1.5 cups icing sugar
2 T milk

Place butter in small bowl of an electric mixer and beat until it is as white as possible.
Gradually add about half the sifted icing sugar, beating constantly.
Add milk gradually.
Then gradually beat in the remaining icing sugar.
Mixture should be smooth and easy to spread with a spatula.

My flatmate's ring is white gold, with a sapphire in the middle and a diamond on each side of it. So it was easy enough colouring the icing for the stones - not so easy for the silver-coloured ring. I ended up choosing "gold" colouring for the ring, which turned out more yellow than gold. But never mind!


And then I made it more beautiful:


I felt pure happiness looking at my cake. I was also very proud when my cake was first choice for a number of children at the party.

survive history

Apparently, ASTONISHINGLY, the phrase "surviving history" did not originate with me. I've been playing on Google, originally because I'm so vain that I wanted to see where my blog appeared on the list of websites containing the phrase "surviving history"...

... except I don't think I ever found out. I got distracted by some of the intriguing entries that (deservedly) appeared well above me on the list.

Surviving History: Portraits from Vilna
This blog is about a project which is documenting the experiences of 10 Holocaust survivors in Lithuania. It talks about the exhibition currently touring outside Lithuania - read more about it here. It interviews survivors like Gita, and it talks about the problems they faced after the Holocaust and still face today. It talks about Lithuania's problems with anti-Semitism, Holocaust revision and the ultra-nationalists, and it discusses why this stuff still needs to be discussed. It links to info about other crimes against humanity around the world. Very impressive.

The Hebrew Bible Contains the Oldest Surviving History
Unfortunately you can't read the whole article unless you're a paid-up member, but the start of it is fascinating all the same. It challenges our perception of writing our own histories as an obvious thing to do across cultures. Interesting notion!

Surviving History: the TV show
Well, I don't know about you, but I didn't realise this show existed until now. History Channel crossed with Mythbusters, exploring the different ways humans have tortured or attacked or killed each other. Charming. Here is a clip about the history of hanging as a method of execution. I wish people didn't have to do this thing where they construct a safe, fake replica of something horrid from the past and claim to be finding out exactly "what it felt like". No. No, you don't. Hopefully you will never know what it feels like to be hanged or tortured or executed in any way.