Entries Tagged 'Random thoughts' ↓

Since I’ve moved up to the more advanced class, our teacher kindly sends out an email reminder each Wednesday for the class the next evening. I guess now that he’s operating on a month to month basis he has to do what he can to keep attendance up.

Lately in his emails he’s started putting in little ditties, proverbs, interesting bits so I might keep them. They make me smile. Here are the ones from the last couple of weeks.

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What on earth do vegetarian meatballs have in them?

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A short selection from the recently announced IgNobel prizes:

• The physics prize went to a study of why pregnant women don’t tip over. Usually.
• The chemistry prize was awarded to scientists who turned tequila into diamonds.
• The veterinary medicine prize was given for finding that cows that have names make more milk than those who remain anonymous.
• The medicine prize went to a physician who, for fifty years, cracked the knuckles on only his left hand to test his mother’s contention that knuckle-cracking causes arthritis. His conclusion: mother was wrong, although his study was self-controlled and not blinded.

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When you wake up in the morning, what is the first thing that you say to yourself?

Pooh’s answer: What’s for breakfast?
Piglet’s answer: I wonder what exciting thing is happening today?

Pooh’s riposte : It’s the same thing.

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I started out with nothing and I still have most of it.

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If all is not lost, where is it?

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I’ve long thought that I’d like to be a person who always has champagne in the house. A couple of years ago we managed to stockpile to an impressive 18-bottle high when an unexpected box arrived but now the racks and fridge are bare. Oh if only we were rich enough to make popping a couple of bottles into the trolley (cart for my American friends) part of the normal weekly visit to the supermarket, but alas, that is just a dream.

So I will graciously accept bottles as gifts. Any size, any Champagne house. The tiny Piccolo and larger 375ml bottles taste just as delicious and are often more useful, thereby offering a range of price points!

Houses in rough preference order would be:

• Veuve Clicquot
• Taittinger
• Laurent Perrier
• Moet & Chandon
• Louis Roederer

The annual bill from AA for the car insurance has arrived. I almost don’t look at the premium amount each year any more, in fact I’m fairly impressed that it seems to remain the same each year, I just skim to the dreaded AA’s assessment of the car’s replacement valuation.

It’s so LOW! Way too low for the car. I phoned them once to ask why it was so low – they told me that they adjusted the valuation each year based on the make, model, age and market value for such a car. I can tell you, the value of MY example of that make, model and age of car is definitely worth more than their estimate!

So, if I were to have to replace the car I would be given money that would buy a much lesser car than mine. And I suppose that’s why the premium appears to be staying the same, the more worthless they think the car, the less risk it will get stolen or broken into so this keeps the premium ‘down’. It’s so frustrating! I wish they’d send an assessor around to see what it’s really worth. Or not if it would put my premium back up … it’s a vicious circle!

Will Twitter bring about some new kind of honesty? As it spreads and people get used to getting their point across in 140 characters there’s just no room for mincing words. You just say it. Perhaps our conversations in life will finally become like those we see on TV & movies, I know there’s not enough time to air the whole conversation but people just often seem to make a decision or say something in a conversation and get on with it. Not an hour-long chat or meeting that drags on with no outcome!

I think our lives are being reduced to a life-bite style as well. It’s not only Twitter 140 characters at a time, it’s everything. How many people nowadays just have no time to fit anything in? People rarely do lunch, Christmas cards, weekends away, phone calls, wash the car. Or maybe that just me. Phone calls? My phones rarely ring and for me that’s a good thing. Unless the caller has a question, gets the answer and goes, I have to admit to being rather frustrated that what could take 10 minutes stretches to an hour because I feel like I never have an hour! I’m always in the middle of the current life-bite (or string of them when it comes to work) and I just don’t have room for an hour-long interruption that wasn’t at my instigation. Which reminds me, I must find time to write a long email to someone I haven’t in a while that I used to write to every week. How did I let that slip?! Probably because it takes more than a few minutes in between something else.

Either some naughty person yanked this tiny tree out of a park somewhere and tossed it up onto the roof or it lives in/on that building and decided to leap off. A rather sad site out my office window.

Why is it so hard to find the time to go for a quick 20 minute walk? Even at the weekends? I suppose in 20 minutes there are many other things I could do – iron a few things, check the rounds of emails, Twitter accounts or general blog and site checking, clean the coffee machine, sort out the pile of bills, chip ice out of the freezer, get some baking in the oven, do blog post, sort out photos for my website etc etc etc! I guess the 20 minutes for a walk is me time and it so much easier to convince yourself that doing something else is more useful and beneficial to others. Must find 20 minutes to go for a walk! Sigh.

Parents are coming to stay this weekend and last time they visited in the winter they brought their nice warm hats to keep heads and ears warm around town, including a visit to my office in their hats … when people were there! So I emailed Father to hint tell him to bring a different hat this time … it was a bit mean really … I was just joking.

However, now being retired, they had plenty of time to get out hats this morning and play NZ Next Top Model to send me a whole lot of photos to choose something that wouldn’t embarrass me! They’re so funny and I *am* mean!!

Saw this great photo on stuff.co.nz just now – we have a few lonely big mountains in NZ and they look stunning when they stick straight up out of the earth covered in snow. This is Mt Taranaki – if this is covered head to foot then it must be really white in the South Island.

W H A T ?? Share price just gone up to 1.70 this morning!!

It’s a roller coaster – share price has gone from 0.67 to 1.13 in a week!