Posts by Islander
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Delighted the s.59 section will be altered/obliviated. and huge kudos to Sue Bradford (for bringing up the bill); Katherine Rich (for staying staunch -geez, as Labour/Maori parties supporters, she's the only one we'd be wary of), and to some sensible politco negotiations going on-
Anke, that was an excellent post BUT-
*advertised* ANZ is not the reality.
You surely cannot say that we (ANZ in general) have *a mask* if you /you've read our literature (say, over the past 60 years?)
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Picture my upstairs outside sundeck. It is 4 & a half metres up in the air. It has no railing - none needed, because the deck is 2 metres wide, and the stairway that leads to it is broad, and at a gentle slope.
There's a tall yet sprawling peppermint gumtree growing between a house-wall and the gum tree.
Now, picture me inside my house: it is 1992, late at night in late March, and I am totally miserable because one of my friends has recently died, I cant work properly, and life seems flat & hopeless.Hold on, is that a possum up in the gumtree?
Grab the .22 air-pistol (which is v. effective up to about 5m), throw open the ranchsliders, race up the stairs, spot it, aim, and fire.
And miss. Or rather, hit a small branch that is in the way.
Bugger.
The thing hisses and snarls at me.
Right, that's your last snarl matey - stepping backwards for a better aim-
the little snapping sounds are my pubic inferior & ischial rames breaking as I hit the ground on my hip.
And that loud raucous chuckling? The possum in high old amusement, all the 20 minutes it took me to drag myself back inside.
The outside stairs to my upstairs sundeck have had a railing for 15 years; my right hip and adjacent bones have had arthritis for the past 5 years, and the possum's greatgreat grandkids are still snorting & sniggering over the whole episode...the gumtree has no comment. -
So it goes...
some of the books that made a big impression on me in my teens & 20s,very much by then an experienced scifict/fan reader, were works by Kurt Vonnegut including 'Cat's Cradle' . I still look for Kilgore Trout references (they turn up as a kind of hommage in a surprising number of stories & books in the genre...)
Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
Haere e hoa, haere ki to tini i te raki-'so it goes.'
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Enjoyed the post (as usual!)
Personality and sibling order is something that has intrigued me for decades. I am the eldest of six - I have 3 sisters and 2 brothers (f/f/m/f/m/f). One thing I've paticularly noticed is variation in self-confidence, and social skills: I am very selfconfident, but a social retard. The sister next to me is highly socially skilled, but not all that self-confident. The next 2 have those abilities but not to as marked a degree as each shows up in their older sibs, and the youngest 2 have them in spades.
I think the 'second child' differences are much less if there isnt a long gap between kids (my first sister is 17 months younger, & the next 2 came at similar intervals. There was a 5 year pause - hell, our mother needed it!- before the last 2 came, and again there is roughly an 18month space between them.)
Jolissa, something to run away screaming from: at one stage my mother - who celebrates her 80th birthday this month - had four of us under 5...