Autumn Zebra

Well, RIGHT now, I'm listening to a piece of music on an online Polish radio station that sounds like they chucked an orchestra down a really long flight of stairs, with alarmed accompaniment on the trumpet*. It's "alarmed" accompaniment because it sounds like the trumpet* player is observing the disaster, but was not able to remove his instrument from his mouth before expressing himself or calling for help. The next piece seems to be "tuning up, played by a swarm of bees". *May not actually be a trumpet; I'm not good with brass instruments. Could be a trombone. Other than that I am trying to learn Polish by new and instinctive means, gardening a little bit, and studying a few things. Today I put some seedlings into pots and put them into the glasshouse - it is not-cloudy and not-raining today, which is a change from the last 5-6 days. I also poured boiling water on some weeds in the path in the hope of killing them and stopping them from growing back f...

A couple of years ago, I set up a search on Trade Me for the corset books that were generally regarded as pretty good, so that it would email me if someone was selling them. The likelihood that someone would first buy and then actually sell on TradeMe one of these books was low, but I was patient, and recently "Waisted Efforts" came up and I got it at a fraction of the price (like a half or a third) that it would cost to buy it from overseas, thus making it a price that I would reasonably pay for a book here if I really wanted it. Woohoo! It arrived today and it is thicker (fairly chunky), slightly bigger (about landscape A4), and a lot more readable than I thought it would be. I was sort of thinking of it more like a reference book only, but it looks like you could read through it rather than just flick to relevant pages. This is good. For some reason I thought it was written by a woman, and read through the overview and preface with this in mind, before seeing that the pref...