I remember when I learned music in school, my teachers drew stave lines on the blackboard with a handy little wire gadget in which you insert five pieces of chalk, parallel to each other, and hey presto! 5 parallel lines = music stave.
But times have changed. And now we use whiteboards instead of blackboards. And no one has a handy little wire gadget that holds whiteboard markers instead of chalk. Which means I have to draw them by hand because metre sticks have gone out. And it’s messy. Which offends my sensibilities.
Of course, if I had unlimited budget and a very short wishlist for next year I could look like that lady at the top and buy one of those boards that have permanent staves, except bigger. But I don’t have unlimited budget and my priority wishlist is looooooooong and my classroom is small and that’s just not in the cards.
They need to bring those wire thingies back. Sometimes, simple was it.
What would you bring back if you could?
- Jean AAR
Now, I know you can interpret the title two ways: One, I really need to get out more; or Two, I’m incredibly shallow. But the truth is plain and simple – a good haircut makes me feel like a million dollars. I was, literally, bouncing out of the hairdresser’s. I was doing the hair swish thing (see Prince Charming). I was looking in store windows to check it out. I was having my moment of supreme vanity.
The NYT used to be my go-to site for movie reviews, but of late I find myself bored with their determined cynicism. However, I do have to agree with Manohla Dargis’s summary of Pixar’s latest creation: Though the initial images of flight are wonderfully rendered…the movie remains bound by convention….This has become the Pixar way. Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art and the bottom line. Well, I’m not sure I’d totally agree with the last assertion, but I do know that the movie left me flat after a glorious beginning. 
Coming to New Zealand has been a wonderful culinary experience, amongst other things. Meat pies! Kumara! Pickle! Steak and egg burgers! (Only one of the above exclamation marks is sarcastic.) Most of these so-called discoveries are common to Commonwealth countries, I presume, but living in Canada many of the British influences have been submerged by our southern neighbour. So no flaky pastry meat pies. No pickle. No egg burgers.
When I have nothing to talk about, I can always rely on Lush.
Heather recently posted about things we don’t want to do, and quite a few replied that shopping for clothes fits neatly under this category. I’m going to expand on this theme and add that shopping for evening gowns definitely, undeniably, irrefutably stinks.
I would go to Antarctica. It looks so COOL. (Absolutely no pun intended. I swear.)
The first week of school holidays was entirely devoted to sleeping and reading, in that order. But the second week I got my hair cut, went to the National Army Museum, looked at my calendar, and realized I hadn’t ventured beyond 30 km of town and holidays were almost over. So I packed a bag and drove across the North Island to Napier. 
