Author: Rita de Heer

Writing is what I do. What I think about. What I meditate on. What I dream up. Listen to. Imagine. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I eat. And I walk. Pull out environmental weeds. There are a thousand more things I do, though writing comes into a fair few of those things too.

Lol, Cat Litter

We definitely have not yet hit our goldilocks moment with cat litter!

Who knew there would be so many brands and types available. I started with my usual arrogant save-the-world attitude and bought a large 10kg bag of recycled newspaper pellets. This being possible because someone else was carrying it to the car and from the car to my apartment. Newspaper pellets go sludgy.

Second was hemp pellets, left overs from the process of producing hemp for rope, hemp-crete and other products, this was another product that was going to save the environment. Hemp pellets disintegrate into a fine dust difficult to clean up and very bad for my allergies.

Third was a gravelly product made of tofu and pea flour. It is meant to ‘clump’ and so be easier to keep the litter box clean. It does clump but is also easily transported into the rest of the house by sticking between the poor cat’s toes, and is nearly as bad as the proverbial Lego block to stand on when walking around on bare feet. And why wouldn’t I?

Fourth is a tiny vermicelli-like extruded pellet made of coconut fiber and charcoal. This was probably the worst purchase yet. Very sharp, and I soon picked up a piece in the sole of my foot. Have been wearing a big band aid for a week. Apart from that, the stuff ‘clumps’ only reluctantly. The one thing going for it, it does work wonders on odors.

Above, a mix of fresh litter containing all four of the recalcitrant litter types. As by then I’d been buying a new sort every time I went shopping, and since I can carry home only the stuff I can fit on my walker, the average bag of litter weighs 5 kg.

At the present we’re trying out the mix of sawdust and wood-splinters. And when I go shopping in a few minutes I will probably–out of sheer pernickety recalcitrance–buy yet another of the still untried possibilities.

Having to send untold bags of used cat litter to land-fill is also not ideal. Before, when I lived in freestanding houses, the used cat litter went into the compost bin, or was buried in the garden and helped to build up my low-lying yard. I’ll be asking Brisbane City Council why apartement blocks don’t get green bins. It’s not as if we don’t produce any organic waste!

There has got to be a better way!

Golden Trumpet Trees

The Golden Trumpet Trees along Bamchory Court are a glorious spectacle as I come out for my walk

I typed this on a parkbench, too difficult to get the Latin name , wikipedia will have if you are interested

There are a dozen and they have been flowering in batches.

They are a South American Tree and it seems like every country there has its own species. The leaves are like hands with five fingers … new growth

The noisy miners crazy about them and ensure, by pollinating them, that we get to see the seed pods too. I had to pick one to ‘see’ it properly instead of confusing the camera with a pencilthick object against the humungous blue sky. Furry as you can see …

HTTP 404 pages

I’ve been a fan of HTTP status codes, and in particular 4xx client errors, since I discovered this April Fool joke one year when I was directed to a “418 I’m a teapot” page. See quote below from Wikipedia …

418 I’m a teapot (RFC 2324, RFC 7168) This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETFApril Fools’ jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers. The RFC specifies this code should be returned by teapots requested to brew coffee.[18] This HTTP status is used as an Easter egg in some websites, such as Google.com’s “I’m a teapot” easter egg.[19][20][21] Sometimes, this status code is also used as a response to a blocked request, instead of the more appropriate 403 Forbidden.[22][23]

From there it was only a short distance to HTTP 404 pages, some of which are great advertisements for their parent sites, some have games you can play, and others are just plain fun. A few for you to try … (Don’t be surprised if some don’t work) … LOL, so far, I’ve only ‘experienced’ a few 404s and the one 418, but my ambition is to see examples of all of them over time …

http://wildlifeqld.com.au/bird-conflicts/plover.html

https://www.pixar.com/404

https://www.netflix.com/NotFound?prev=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.netflix.com%2F404

https://www.cloudsigma.com/404-error

https://hotdot.pro/404/

https://www.kualo.co.uk/404

https://pointepest.com/404

https://thisjungianlife.com/404

One of the best I’ve seen was on Ecosia but cannot find it again to show you. They get cagey when you try to catch them just for fun …

The Build 4, Days 11 – 13

Thursday 12 September, day 11 of the build, there were two excavators on site … one that began ripping out concrete in the northern corner to the side of Carinya.

Just visible behind the tree, filling up one of the trucks with chunks and slabs.

The second excavator squated desolate in the upper section apparently suffering a break-down.

The operators here seen washing the great steel animal down, as if thinking they might as well use the down-time for something useful.

A little later they had a repairs truck on site, the doctor coming to see the patient. There can’t have been any resolution because it sat there all through Friday ( day 12) and was left behind when the working machine was carried away at the end of the day by low loader.

Saturday morning it was also taken away.

Leaving just a spare scoop sitting by the side of the access road. And that was that for the week.

Tagging My Fish aka Content

in this, part two of yesterday’s topic, I’ve been Tagged … I’ll be discussing the Questions to do with blog content.

On a totally different topic for a minute, Moggy and I have had a rough beginning to our morning, along with every other resident on Levels Two and Three of our building. No power from 7 a/m to 9.15 a/m. Though we were told beforehand and had prepared–with a thermos of hot water for example–nobody knew that the alarm units in every apartment would be telling us that … “mains supply is interrupted” … every ninety seconds for the duration. This to happen again on Friday. Not much of an imposition, I know. Especially when we were forewarned.

Moggy was so weirded out by this strange un-embodied voice spouting its refrain that she retired to the far corner under the bed and re-appeared only when the lights went back on and the voice was silenced.

What surprised me about this event was how ‘in the moment’ I had to be just because I couldn’t engage some of my early morning routines. At one point I realized that the ‘net’ metaphor I used in the previous post can definitely be applied to routines. Making in this case the routines the net, and the-new-and-interesting-things-to-do the fish. Something like that.

I’m chortling at this point. After last night’s success at ‘prompting’ (explaining to the resident AI to what pic I needed) I wanted to see what the AI (I’ll need to find out its name) made of this … “Smoky furred cat with white underside and white paws, black nose and black lower jaw.” Nothing is the answer. The message was the image could not be found due to network problems. Ri-i-ight. The AI is stumped?

Q2 If your blog was a person, fictional or real, who would it be? I’d have to say my blog would be a fictional person because she’s a digital entity, existing only in bits and bytes and only online. She’s a ghost in the works. One of millions. It’s as crowded in her world as it is in the consensual ‘real’ world.

It does actually surprise me sometimes that we–me and my digital identity–can connect pretty reliably. Part of the reason is probably that WordPress keeps her safe. She doesn’t have to wheel and deal out in the hot hard world of the world wide web.

Although, not too many entities are out there on their own anymore. I’ve certainly noticed a change in my online experiences from when I first got online in approx 1998, in that nearly everybody I want to talk to, is now in some kind of gated community. It’s difficult now to ‘surf the web’ in the free-wheeling and easy way we used to. All the gated communities still provide that for their members but anybody else first has to sign up and often pay down real money.

Q3 What helps you create new content when you need inspiration? This question follows naturally from the previous one. ‘Creating new content’ is writing or photographing, painting, sketching etc about new ideas I happen to trip over. New ideas provide the ‘inspirations’.

Having to pay everywhere makes it harder to find and produce new content. It’s not only $$$ that stop me finding good stuff. Substack, for example, has this full page thing that they flash at me every time I go to read some of my favorite commentators, where I’m supposed to mark three things that I like to read about, and they’ll be able to steer more of the same my way. I’ve been skipping out every time I see it. It’s such a creativity killer to be shunted into the same byways every time I get online.

WordPress, in contrast, has introduced a ‘discovery’ application that I’m happy with, as I’m able to range further into the domain, and have already got a few topics of interest in my stash. Eg, last week I stumbled across an article on ‘hypovolemia’ which is now sitting there brewing. When I find more info about it, I’ll copy and paste that in there too. With four or five points I’ll have plenty to write about.

My Drafts is where I keep my stash of topics I might post about some day. Usually I’ll copy a link and open a new post, and save it in there. I usually have five or six drafts on the go–waiting for more info, energy, and or time. Any that get too old and stale, I’ll delete. Recently, an Apple mobile phone update provided me with a ‘Journal’ app where I’ve also been noting interesting topics.

In my actual life I keep a bunch of journals. Health diary. Art Journal. Dream School. Bosley and Co’s stories. They also all provide me with grist for the inspiration mill. The picture following is from my art journal, it’s a sketch for a larger painting. A sketch is where I try out techniques, perspectives, colors, even the framing is an experiment. Washi tape. I’m showing it unedited.