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[July 09 2011] |
a) Does anyone else have Google+ yet? I'm trying to decide what I think of it. Dis me. The page design is at least the opposite of cluttered, which is nice.
2)
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| Life is positive |
[July 07 2011] |
I'm sort of quite happy having a local/political/commentary blog. More than I thought I might be. I expect readership to be low and people aren't bothering to comment but I have it set up that new posts get tweeted on my account and those tweets have been retweeted a couple of times and people have said things to me on Twitter about what I've written. Also, I get to call out people and tell them off, which is always fun. It's sort of strange when I step back and think how many political people are on my list now but I like it, because really, I'm quite political myself.
And I really do like talking to people. It's something that's taken me a long time to figure out.
I'm also thinking of having a look at Google+ at some point, though at the moment it's still limited to invitations etc. I'm also on the very tipping point of tracking down a JP so I can get my surname changed legally and screw the hassles of doing it while I'm still living at home. My arguments are sound and it's something I've spent literally years considering. My tattoo, on the other hand, I will probably get done next February.
The other thing I'm quite happy about is gender presentation - I've been wearing shirts and ties and/or waistcoats to work, I have Underworks binders*, and even though I still get almost universally read as female I feel a lot better about it, aside from the slight annoyance of being treated as female while wearing (and sometimes while buying) explicitly male clothing.
*Though honestly a lot of the time what they do seems to be less hiding my breasts and more turning big breasts into small breasts.
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[July 01 2011] |
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Today was SO much better than yesterday at work. Yesterday I was actually in Payments rather than Contact Centre but after getting the payment run done I got some verifications work to do, outbound calling to get extra details from people, and omg, the last half hour. I did three calls. The first, the woman I was calling had died the day before. The second, circumstances were that she wasn't going to qualify. And the third was all fine except she was so emotionally wrung out that she was basically in tears. And then my shift ended and I went home and wallowed a bit. Today, no one cried on me! I was about to say "no one was dead!" too, but actually one of the first calls I took was a stay at home mother who was "so over" being stay at home and seemed to really want to talk to an adult, and she mentioned her son who had been premature and didn't even make it to his due date. :( I think that had been a while ago, but still super sad. She was pretty fun to talk to though. I have started to realise about myself that I actually do like talking to people - it just goes really badly with social phobia and not being that keen on phones! So I don't actually mind if a call drags on for a while, if I can see that coworkers aren't getting calls, which means no one else is trying to get through. I really prefer incoming calls to outbound, which is what we do when it's quiet.
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| Liberte-- |
[June 29 2011] |
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| Walking in mud |
[June 29 2011] |
Warning: this post contains references to WoW. Do not be afraid, I will use as general terms as possible.
One of the things I say sometimes about having mental illness, and knowing you have it, is that you know how it affects you. You know that your emotions can't be trusted. There's this cognitive dissonance where you're feeling something, like anger, but you have no idea whether it's justified, if it should be more or less or at someone else or at yourself, whether it's an actual emotion or if it's those wonky chemicals in your brain making things misfire.
It's the same now. I was healing a Zandalari dungeon with a group of guildies - it's a hard dungeon and you need good gear and good awareness of what's going on, though it's not a raid, which has more people (10 or 25 instead of 5) and even harder bosses. As healer, I have to react quickly and be aware of everything at once - what bad stuff is on the ground, where the other players are, what the boss is doing and what the boss is going to do, what spells I have available and which I can't cast yet, how much mana I have and what ways I have to get more, etc.
It was like thinking through a layer of dirty cotton wool. I could see that my reaction times were slower, not like my body was moving through thick air that slowed it down, but like my thoughts were. And every time something went wrong I could feel the frustration surging up. I have done this before. I remember doing it. I remember it being, while not easy, easier.
That is, basically, what quake brain is. Everything is harder, but you can remember when it wasn't hard, which is frustrating, and frustrating makes you get emotional and strung out and want to cry.
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| bunneh :x |
[June 27 2011] |
Yesterday when I was picking up Holly to give him a clean and brush I found an abscess on his hind leg. I managed to get him a vet appointment today, which was good, because when I checked him again after work it had opened up and was leaking pus (very slowly - rabbit pus is much, much thicker than dogs/cats/people, there's none of that transparent liquid stuff). So the vet cleaned it out and shaved away the fur from the area and gave him a shot, in decreasing order of rabbit-unhappiness. From now for the next few weeks I have to clean it twice a day and take him in for twice-weekly antibiotics shots. Which he's a dab hand at, this is the third time he's been prescribed twice-weekly shots! Poor wee bug.
Incidentally all the tweets kept bugging me so I started playing Echo Bazaar. >> So anyone who plays can invite me to stuff if they want, particularly persuasive or watchful stuff.
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| RESOLVED: wanted to talk |
[June 23 2011] |
(this is reposted from my blogspot, where I actually posted on the correct day.)
Post title is an actual log subject from work this week.
The organisation (I haven't named them here; I don't speak for them, can't speak for them, so it's easier to make a nominal point of anonymity even if a large proportion of readers know which org I'm talking about) I work for is currently moving the call centre down from Wellington. This week we get 50% of the call volume, next week we're going to 100%. I pulled the morning shift for the first three days of this week - Monday I then went straight into Payments to help with a pay run that was unexpectedly complicated, so ended up pulling a nine hour shift. I heard a rumour there was daylight that day, but couldn't say for sure.
Today, the 22nd, is four months on from February. From Twitter and from first-hand contact with the public, I can develop a picture of the emotional state of the city - perhaps not in high detail, but enough to make out the shape of it. And while psychologists are telling us we can cope, there are people who are questioning that. There are even some who've committed suicide already as a result of the ongoing stress and uncertainty. There's a peculiar phenomenon in human psychology - if you put two people in confinement (whether that be prison, solitary, a POW camp, whatever), and tell one that they will never get out, and refuse to tell the other anything, in many cases the former will be able to handle it better. It's not, strictly speaking, the situation itself that is proving so hard, though it certainly is extremely difficult. It's that there's nothing to look forward to. We don't know when it's going to end or how bad things are going to get.
I think it's not irrelevant to this that February wasn't even the beginning. Remember that we had that 7.1 on September 4th - February was six months after that. We are now ten months, not four, into the intermittent shaking, the questions without answers, the property damage and emotional stress, the loss of landmarks we had believed would always be there. We had thought that September was the worst, that after that things would slowly taper off - there would be significant aftershocks, sure. There was one in October, another on Boxing Day. But go back to January and ask any random person on the street and nobody expected any of what we're going through now. So now? We don't expect things will just calm down and stop. We can't. Last time we believed that, things got suddenly and unexpectedly worse by magnitudes (6.3 of them, to be exact).
The two big shakes last Monday (13 June) only reinforced that.
After last night's 5.4 and the dozen or more that followed overnight I was expecting a bad day on the phones today. It was surprisingly calm, with most people in pretty decent moods, and I had some really nice chats with almost all of them ending well. Yesterday was far worse, actually. It's a little inexplicable, but that's how things are now.
I will say, last week was the first time I wasn't able to say that I felt things were improving. Now? I'm not sure. I suppose they are. We're about to get some definitive news, proper long-term stuff of the utmost importance, and that's going to go a LONG way towards fixing some of the communication breakdown that we've been noticing lately. Some of us, at least, are going to be told when their release date is, and as much as the reparation money, the sheer emotional relief of that knowledge is going to do a lot of good. But beyond that, I can't say. My confidence in the future is, shall we say, shaken.
......YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! 8)
(Because hey, at least we can joke, right?)
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| amazing |
[June 20 2011] |
You know what the BEST day is? The best day is "boil water notice" lifted day. For the second time this year. We can drink the water!!!
(But sorry, I'm still gonna be depressing today - there are rural communities who can't, and haven't been able to for years. Eff National.)
I was supposed to work four hours this morning in contact centre, finishing at 12.30. Which, you know, I did, except then I did another half hour and then I went to payments and kept working until 5.30, so I ended up clocking nine hours without a proper lunch break. The weather was miserable so there was a group consensus to order in lunch, so that turned out okay, I took about ten minutes to eat some pizza at least. And coz payments is supposed to avoid overtime, it means I'll get Friday off instead of working the morning shift that day.
Contact centre wasn't bad. We had a couple of glitches in the morning since we never actually did a trial run, or this was the trial run, or something, but once we got those sorted it went okay. Had a couple of calls that ran 13-17 minutes, one of which was a guy who I think just really wanted to talk because I could have sorted him out in a few minutes otherwise, which I definitely understand. The other one was a lot trickier but we got a situation resolved with a kohanga that didn't have a landline. The most frustrating thing really was that even though last Monday's two shakes were pretty strong and there was a fair bit more damage, we don't have any general grants open, so there's people calling in to see if they can get help and all I can do is refer them to the Salvation Army or WINZ or someone. (And I loaded the Salvation Army's website to see what information they had, and it is... really, really overwhelmingly Christian. Like, seriously.)
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| do what the government won't? |
[June 18 2011] |
Guys, if any of you have even a little spare money, could you please consider helping out the Chch women's refuge? National cut NZ$840,000 of funding to them [nationwide] this year and they're in seriously dire straits right now with the ongoing stress from the earthquakes leading to increasing domestic violence. Only two of their safe houses are even open right now.
Honestly this week is about the first time since February I haven't felt like I could say things are getting better. We're back to boiling water, there's a high risk of gastro being warned for, and buildings are taking more damage faster than they can even be assessed for repairs. I'm trying to work on getting off the sickness benefit still - this month I have to go back to the doctor and will most likely officially be "working part time". The thing is that Red Cross is temporary and I don't know when it will end or how hard it will be to find a job after that. I need to stop spending money on luxuries so I can a) keep paying off my credit card and b) get to where I have plenty of padding in my bank account in case I end up unemployed for too long. Which means a lot less comfort food etc, it's pretty easy for me to spend $20-40 a week on crap because the only time I'm near a supermarket is on the way home from work, which is often before I've had lunch and if it's been a bad day I'm just like "gimmeh chocolate!" Or I go on Trade Me and buy in bulk from a couple of the people who regularly post on there, there's a couple I've bought from quite a few times. Coz, you know, if you're paying for shipping, you might as well get a decent amount, right?
So if I stop buying treats, and stick to doing 16 hours a week or so, maybe I'll be able to get out of debt with the bank by springish? I am at least lucky that I've determinedly refused to have my credit limit increased from $1500, which was what they gave me originally, so right now I've got just over 1k to pay off, but the interest is still killing me.
It's gonna be a really long winter. :/
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| lol |
[June 16 2011] |
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To note just how short I am - I just took 4-5 inches off my suit trousers. They're not long cut or anything, just regular trousers.
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[June 16 2011] |
Ballantynes was having their "we got stock out of the cordon now we sell it at ridic prices" sale so we stopped by after work. After finally getting inside (the queues were better than earlier in the week) we got to go through the fun process of trying to get goodstyle+correctsize+affordable. We only found one waistcoat in small enough size and I got it so I spent a while trying to find some shifts with French cuffs for Sass, except then she decided not to get any and only said after that she got depressed and decided she didn't deserve a treat. *facepalm* However I have netted myself $30 Keds and a $150 suit - I just have to rehem the trousers because I have really short legs and hemming suit trousers is easy enough.
I think there were more people with designer handbags there than I've seen in my life. We were in line ahead of a couple of women talking about the house one of them was getting built. Of course it has a double garage, you wouldn't want anything less than that, but the laundry is in the garage sadly. :( Not that you spend much time in there, and you could get some nice sliding doors to separate it out, but motherfucking first world problems, people!
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[June 15 2011] |
From @edmuzik: "The Bally's sale sums up #eqnz; the east don't have power & queue for water, while the west have SUVs and time to queue 4 Prada"
To be fair, we mostly have power back. But we're back to boiling water, and they've started tearing down the supermarket, and the roads are shit and there's dust blowing everywhere again and it feels like we've made barely any progress since February.
On a less related note, when I'm wearing a binder under men's clothing, carrying a men's messenger bag, buying a men's wallet and holding a bag labeled Hallensteins, I wish people wouldn't call me a lady. The Hallensteins staff are so good about not gendering me, then I go next door and get, "I'll just help this lady!" Boo. :(
I also have to make dinner and wash dishes tonight (with boiled water). All around a shitty day.
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[June 14 2011] |
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1 fatality
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| hey so |
[June 14 2011] |
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there were more big earthquakes yesterday, I was on sedatives for most of the day and my posts have gone to dreamwidth and livejournal but not here since that's two separate post mechanisms. If you wanna see what I was saying try http://keieeeye.dreamwidth.org - I think that has a link to my blogspot entry about it too.
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| look what I made |
[June 08 2011] |
I barely actually touched my computer yesterday - we spent most of the day-day at Te Awa o Te Ora doing harakeke. We were about the only young people* there so there was like aunties sitting there making pretty pretty things and older men wandering around, and waiata, and people playing pool, and we got to listen to people chatting and telling stories and ahhhh I love it.
*excepting a baby
Also because most people are, you know, Maori, there's sprinklings of Te Reo in the conversation which will help me actually learn it better. \o/
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| so what's been happening |
[June 04 2011] |
Night before last the news came through on Twitter - Glassons and Hallensteins (same company overall I believe) managed to get stock out of their closed stores and were having a clearance sale at one of the events centres.* Thrilled! We went there today on the first day of the three day sale and I got so much clothes. Men's clothing that actually fits me for far cheaper than retail? Hells yeah. Ended up with two pair dark jeans size 28/72 (inches/cm), two long sleeved shirts (one "small", one 36-37[cm neck] aka extra small), a 100% wool sweatshirt and a woolen blend (60% wool) coat.
* This was the CBS Arena, which used to be Westpac Events Centre or something, but most people think of as Addington Raceway. We also have a sports place that used to be Lancaster Park, became Jade Stadium and is now AMI Stadium. People, stop naming things after the company that happens to be sponsoring it. I know you get more money that way but it's confusing as hell.
There's money sitting in my bank account, and it looks like a decent amount, but unfortunately a chunk of it needs to be spent on supplies to build a more permanent rabbit run that will be easier to move. I know where to get the chicken wire but I have no idea about the specifics of buying wood, so I guess I'll need to ask my dad about that. It should also be more secure than the pen they have right now, which isn't a huge issue but is a big plus anyway. Apart from that, I'm wanting to hold onto money if I can - we honestly have no idea of the aftershocks that are still to come outside of general probabilities, and as we come into winter we're expecting power cuts and who knows what else. The water mains on my street are still aboveground, though they claimed they were going to dig them back under so they wouldn't freeze, so I'm not sure if they're going to get to that.
After reflecting, I decided to sign up for kink_bingo. I haven't been writing much but it is a long-running thing so I don't have a strict upcoming deadline, which will make it easier. And in WoW I rolled a toon on WrA which seems to be the most popular RP server among ~wow_ladies. I'm trying to get an idea of my character and have done her basic profile outline in MRP, and she's joined a tiny wee start up guild run by someone I ran into while questing in Tirisfal. I've also been a little more active on my Bronzebeard Horde toons, or at least one of them.
Speaking of roleplaying, since the new Torchwood is coming out soon (I assume at least from the increased frequency of tweets about it) and I'm not planning on watching it, I might as well confirm that yeah, I was behind @brbmakingcoffee. The only reason he's been active-ish recently was because the Joplin tornado made me realise I could signal boost the Red Cross from his account since quite a lot of people watch him (for some reason, considering how long since he was actually active).
And gawd, competitiveness for shifts this upcoming week was INTENSE. The guy who's the main Payments guy got on four minutes after shifts went up and got half a week's work. I got on nine minutes after they went up and there were two shifts left, one of which I couldn't work. I managed to get one other that someone clicked on accidentally and then put up for trade, so I do have eight hours, but I was originally planning to go for twelve hours this week instead. :/ They say that the week after this will be better, but I'm waiting to see. There are two new grants coming out so there's going to be more work, at least, even though they're not huge grants like the first one was.
However, I did find an amazing typo. It's magical. This guy? Applied for a "hardshit" grant, because he had no water or sewerage. :D :D
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| pix or it didn't happen |
[May 27 2011] |
The first two are obviously amusing but the last one just tickles me in a weird way.
Stole them all from my mum lawl.
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| On SlutWalk, and the F-word, and other things |
[May 27 2011] |
* There is not going to be a SlutWalk in Christchurch; council consent couldn't be obtained.
This despite the fact that DV stats have gone up considerably.
This despite the fact that harassment of prostitutes is becoming a bigger problem.
This despite the fact that a lack of bars means more people drinking in residential places, where it's easier to get someone isolated and there are no staff to cut off the very drunk or to intervene in unsafe situations.
This despite the fact that stress, the need to 'let go' or to 'take control' by engineering your own self-destruction (ie reckless drinking, not trying to get someone to rape you) make this city a perfect hunting ground for rapists.
This despite the fact that Rugby World Cup events in the city are getting extra funding while Women's Refuge (+ benefits, education, etc) are being cut and people are still homeless.
On a shallow level, I suppose I understand the reasoning. The atmosphere here is strange. But doesn't that also help make the case that we need it more? I have seen so, so many references to the effects of DV at work. Notes about restraining orders, particularly for the school grants. Women's Refuge being listed as a temporary residence. Names being taken off forms because the rest of the family is trying to break away from them.
On the plus side, the conversation about this on Twitter prompted me to look at what volunteer work the Women's Refuge has available - it looks like there are some things I could do. Fun fact: It costs about NZ$1mil a year to run the organisation. The government funds 40%. Just... do the maths on that. Look at your life, Parliament. Look at your choices. I know there's a lot going on in the world right now, but if anyone was thinking about donating to NZ funds, it'd be nice if you would go through WR even if just this once.
* I've been pondering gender and sexual identification
I pretty clearly identify myself as asexual and genderqueer. Beyond that though things are a little murkier. I've been saying I'm aromantic; I've also been saying I'm queer. I think the most accurate description would be agendered asexual with a romantic interest in women (or comfortably not-too-masculine genderqueer folk) who happens to be too broken for a relationship at the moment. Because I can totally fancy girls. I've never been in love, but that's presumably not that unusual. I need a lot of time for myself, but mostly in my past relationships I haven't been secure in my identity as being asexual, so there'd always be this undercurrent of tension with regards to what was expected, so being in their presence was difficult. No relationship can be healthy like that.
If I had to use shorthand, then, I would probably say that I was homoromantic, but I'm a little uneasy with that because terms like that are pretty binary about gender. hetero- the other gender, homo- the same gender. But what if they're both the other gender? Would that make me heteroromantic? I would be extremely uncomfortable with that, for many reasons. Panromantic is plausible, but probably implies I'd be open to a relationship with a man, and honestly, I don't think I am. Ditto biromantic, people will assume it means male+female, not female+genderqueer. Femromantic could work, I suppose.
Mostly, I think I'm just queer. It's by far the easiest term. It doesn't detail the particulars, but it encompasses me, with my desire for a body that just doesn't have primary and secondary sexual characteristics, my position in the big wide world of lust and sex and love, the way I don't really fit in to words that can be defined without a lot of verbal struggle and clarifications.
On that note... and I feel quite nervous expressing this, which as an emotional reaction could be tied up in all sorts of cultural conditioning... I would kind of like to start using gender neutral pronouns, specifically zie/zir, because while politically I will always argue women's rights, I do not want to be a woman, I'm not a woman, and at least on the internet I have some control over how I present. Big boobs and little waist and curviness and being way less than average height for a fully grown male don't define me here.
* The F-word, movements and allies
I am uncomfortable with identifying as a feminist. For so many reasons, and very different from the main reason I feel uncomfortable calling myself a womanist - ie, that I'm white, and it feels really appropriative. And this is something that naturally comes up if I ponder over gender too much, because I've seen quite a few discussions in which women have said that if you're not a woman, you can't be a feminist. I've seen others say otherwise, of course, because I suspect there are as many opinions on what feminism is as there are people who have heard of it. But often they have specifically being speaking on the subject of genderqueer folk. Namely that they can speak about feminist issues they have experienced, but they can't be feminist.
I'm not sure I actually agree there - someone who is always or almost always read as a woman is going to have many of the same experiences as a woman, after all (obviously it's very different for someone who's more often read as a man) - but I'm not exactly clamouring to be considered a feminist, so I think I'm actually fine stepping back and respecting that opinion, especially considering feminism's problematic history with issues of transgendered people and the like. (Philosophical question: if someone wanted to transition to a bodily sex that is neither male nor female, can they rightfully call themselves transgender? If one day I had the money and the access to at least get top surgery and, idk, low hormone shots, would I be ftn? Kind of interesting to ponder.)
I don't know what this does make me, because humanist and equalist both prompt instinctual reactions of RAAAAAEGGG, and women's rights advocate sounds like MRA which is even more RAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEGGGGGGGG.
Maybe I just support the liberal underdog.
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| A reminder, and some other stuff |
[May 24 2011] |
1) I know there's been casting news recently about the Hobbit, and people are getting kind of psyched up about it. Well, my opinion hasn't changed. The only reason I give a damn about who's in that movie? So I can hold an unreasonable grudge against them forever for being in a movie that had US film corps bullying our government into changing our labour laws practically overnight and giving them millions of dollars in tax cuts to keep them in the country in a deal pre-empting the recent fucking ridiculous copyright law amendments and the ongoing discussions over the TPPA that are threatening both international trade and half our health system. It's kind of a touchy subject. So, basically, I'll try not to harsh your squee in your journal if you don't squee my harsh in mine.
2) Today at work I came across a grant application for a same-sex couple who had the same name. It was awesome. :D Their email address was "two[name]s@domain". That kind of balanced out coming across the bereavement grant for the widow of someone I'm pretty sure was one of my GPs (I've had a lot of them), which had attached to it a news story about his funeral. Even people I've never met affect me like that sometimes - after we got power back, early on there were a lot of messages going around Twitter along the "if you've seen xxx please contact yyy" lines and some of the names got really familiar. Seeing them in the deceased lists was almost as gutting as seeing people you actually know.
3) It seems that there might be an arsonist operating around the road the Red Cross is on. Last week the Trimble building burned down, pretty badly, and apparently this last weekend there was an attempt on another building so they're investigating the link between them.
4) I have some cross-stitch stuff coming for one project I want to work on but first I'm working on something else that hopefully won't be as much work.
See how cool that is? That is cool. It's not as detailed because detail would require it to be really big, but it's hopefully gonna look awesome.
The Christchurch Tweet Cathedral is a gift from Kunst Buzz in the Netherlands. The image, of the silhouette of Christchurch Cathedral by night, is made from a random selection of almost 1000 #eqnz Tweets (approximately 98,000 characters) from around the world since the February 22nd quake. Although many of the tweets are from New Zealand, there are several international tweets, also in Asian characters. Composition and background of the artwork are inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece ‘Starry night’, which artist and Kunst Buzz CEO Jeroen van der Most felt fits quite well with the idea of this piece.
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| Let's talk numbers (I use too many parentheses) |
[May 20 2011] |
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mood |
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 angry |
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Beating on about the Budget, I know - skip past if you don't care.
It's the coverage that's interesting me right now. On the news, they say that for some the changes to Kiwisaver will make them better off. This is completely true.
For those not up with the nuts and bolts of Kiwisaver, as well as what you put in yourself, the government pays $20 every week, and your employer pays 2% of what you earn every week. Under the Budget, these numbers will be changed to $10 from the government and 3% from the employer. You can already see the problem - one has halved and the other gone up by 50%. Because they're in different formats, this means different things at different income levels. The point at which you break even is obviously when 1%=$10, ie when you earn $1000 a week.
Except, not. You see, they've also made employer contributions taxable. If you're earning a grand a week, you're going to be in the 30% tax bracket, so for 1% to still be $10, you have to earn $1000 a week after tax - $1428 before. (Taking 1k, dividing by 7 and x 10.) So to make a profit, you need to be earning upwards of about $1450.
Just for fun? The latest figures, from June 2010, list the average weekly income as $529. To improve the returns on your Kiwisaver under this budget, you need to be earning nearly three times the average weekly income.
Which brings me to something else. The newscasts also dwelled a little on the fact that the employer's contribution is, in fact, now taxed. They had done the maths themselves to show us how much tax was being paid on that 3% at various income levels - $50,000 and $70,000, and I think $90,000 as well.
If you're not that good at maths, the average weekly income of $529 multiplied by 52 weeks in the year is $27,508. You have to be earning twice the average wage (based on weekly income) before the news channel I was watching (I'm not sure which it was, but I suspect One) will show you a simulation of how the changes will affect you. (For the record, the annual income at which Kiwisaver becomes an improvement is $74,256.)
I know why the Budget is how it is. I hardly expected anything better. But it absolutely baffles me that the news coverage is focusing so much on the affects on high earners - or, I suppose, combined incomes in a multiple-breadwinner household of an undetermined number.
I tried to find a nice graph of income distribution in NZ, but the first decent thing I found was this article and decile listing. It's from 2008, unfortunately, but still gives us some interesting information:
"So, the median income is around the decile 5 boundary of $23,000 a year. But the median income for wage and salary earners for that year was $729 a week, or $37,908 a year, putting a median wage earner squarely in decile 7."
(this is due to not working consistently throughout the year, presumably, such as people who can only find temporary jobs or those with health problems or lifestyle issues that need working around like children)
78% of us don't even pay the middle tax rate, and the top tax rate is utterly irrelevant to 91% of the population. Remember that next time the government or the media talk about "middle-income" tax cuts - they're not talking about you, or most of New Zealand. Instead, they're only talking about themselves.
And those figures are per household, as backed up by 2007-8 figures here, admittedly on Wikipedia.
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| #budget2011 |
[May 20 2011] |
The new Budget was all over the local Twittersphere and blogs yesterday but I didn't say anything about it because it's such a huge subject. One summary of part of it was that the government is trying to encourange privatised saving so it can cut down on government assistance.
Which you might mean thinks "help everyone save now so they have a safety net", but does not. The whole Budget is short term solutions. Apparently, beneficiaries and disabled, the working poor, etc should be saving. To which I can only ask.... "How does someone who needs government assistance save?" They showcased a family on one of the news shows last night where the woman works three jobs and they're going to have to give up KiwiSaver because they can't afford it. *dons Right Wing hat* God, what a lazy bludger. Why don't you just get a fourth job, woman??
To put it mildly, I don't like the Budget. It will put some money into the health sector, but it will also move it around, leading to more redundancies. The civil sector is facing further cuts too, and while I'm cautiously hopeful about the claims that they'll be improving, among other things, disability services, I very much doubt it will be enough to fix any of the problems we have of access and affordability. IMO, this Budget will kill people. IMO that's what conservative right wing governments do - cut essential services and kill their own citizens through slow, creeping, normalised neglect.
Somewhat relatedly, when the Red Cross grants work dries up, I think I'd quite like to continue working in the social assistance industry. Just not quite sure how to go about that.
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| In the realm of "pretty damn special" |
[May 19 2011] |
A senior lecturer in internet law says the arrest of a Fairfax journalist over his receipt of an unauthorised Facebook photo "defies sensible explanation" and the entire matter exposes serious failings in Australian cyber crime laws.
Peter Black, senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said Australian laws on cyber crime were so broad that they criminalised much "ordinary activity". He said it was very unusual for police to spring into action over an alleged theft of digital photos.
( Fairfax deputy technology editor Ben Grubb was arrested by Queensland Police yesterday... )
tl;dr a journalist is arrested in Australia after writing an article about a security researcher bypassing Facebook's privacy settings on a charge that seems to be roughly equivalent to receiving stolen property, except the property is Facebook photos and the journalist was, you know, writing a story about a guy working to expose security flaws.
And we have just enacted laws here in NZ that are just as ridiculous.
*
In other news I've given up deciding whether days are good or bad. I've been emotionally wrung out, there was tension and friction last night, but today we got a luncheon at Red Cross because two of the staff are leaving - one's going home to America, the other got a teaching job in Tauranga. They're both really nice so it's sad they're going but good for them. I ended up staying there nearly an hour after my shift finished, talking about things like which side zips and buttons are on and why they vary, animal fur and how America always has to be different, and didn't get home until about 2.30. And then I had parcels! One I already knew about because the couriers delivered it at, get this. *drumroll* ....6.30 am. No joke. Rang the doorbell and got someone to answer and everything. The other came in the much more reasonably timed post and that was from Tatjna. Yay used shearing combs!
I have some photos of a building just down from the Red Cross that burned down the other day and possibly a snap of the TARDIS portaloo - I took it through the bus window and it looks like it's pretty small, but I haven't transferred it to the computer to have a better look and atm my e-reader's charging. So I'll do that later and fingers crossed it will be decent enough to share.
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[May 18 2011] |
Glancing back it looks like I was in a kinda bad place last time I was around, which, well, I do tend to withdraw, and at least I didn't delete my journal this time? For the record I am in most ways much better now - I mean, I'm working - though things didn't pan out with the anxiety disorders unit because apparently the messages I was getting from them were quite different than what they were trying to impart. However I'm getting involved with a group called Te Awa o Te Ora for whaiora ("wellness seekers", people with mental health issues) that's run by local Maori. They lost their premises in the first earthquakes last September and then it was completely red stickered in February but today we had a powhiri at the new place, which is amazing. I've been doing some harakeke (flax weaving) but soon they'll start up some other classes like Te Reo, marae etiquette etc, carving, life skills, cooking. Today was tiring because there were a lot more people than I'm used to and Maori culture is much more open and touch-y than pakeha, there was a lot of cheek-kissing and hongi among even people who don't know each other, but it was super cool.
On the other hand everything is pretty messed up by the earthquake, and the continuing aftershocks. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD require the symptoms to last longer than one month, which is much less than I'd thought - I was going to say that it was too early for anyone to technically be diagnosed with it, but went to double-check. So in that case, a huge chunk of the city probably has PTSD, and a lot of the rest aren't completely stable either. At the very least, we're no longer in an official state of emergency. But there's a definite surreality in the fact that with the whole global culture we have now with the internet, most of the world is continuing as normal, because to most of the world things are normal, but here I don't think anyone could really put into words exactly what it's like. I think, sometimes, I just start typing, which probably results in wordvomit and overshare - it's a little bit more normal here to talk about emotional things with people you don't know very well because you can tell they're going through the same things, and also I suspect there's a little bit this... not frustration, but a kind of penning up where you just don't understand how things can be normal to people, and... hnn. I'm really not sure how to explain. I do know that it was eerie reading some of the old BL stuff from the Gairloch days and realising that some of the emotional reactions would fit in completely here.
So, I have changed the things I blog about, quite a lot, and seeing as I have a permanent account here I probably should add it back to my update list, so I might suggest checking my DW and just giving it a skim and see if you'd rather just unfriend me. I don't have unfriend notifications on and I'm not particularly sure who actually has me friended still, so I won't know and probably wouldn't care anyway because a lot of it really is just easier to walk away from - it's my shit, and other people's shit is not particularly something you often care to have around, and if you aren't particularly interested than seeing regular updates about it will probably just annoy you. On the other hand, if you have me friended and want to keep me friended and I don't have you friended back, feel free to comment and tell me so.
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| ok |
[May 17 2011] |
I have undeleted all BL journals. (I also undeleted ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) iantoefingjones, just because, even though there's like nothing on there.)
I do exist and am contactable! I post on Dreamwidth ~keieeeye, Livejournal ~phaetonschariot (and ~thingsoncamels if you play WoW, but that's really just screenshots and commenting on comms), and I'm active on Twitter @kei_teina, though an awful lot of that is earthquake spam and local politics. (PS I can't stand the US government, don't take it personally, I know actual citizens don't get much of a say in politics.) Also I have gmail addresses under keisarmy and phaetonschariot and eridanusus, any of which should reach me. (The one this account sends to I haven't actually been checking.)
Speaking of, if anyone who didn't know how to contact me was wondering - yes, the February 22 earthquake in New Zealand was centered a few kilometres from my house. I live near/in the worst affected areas, and the house is damaged, but not severely. No one in my family was physically hurt, but we lost some family friends. After a little while when transport was more possible (the roads are pretty fucked) we went to volunteer at the Red Cross and ended up getting hired, so my sister and I work there now processing applications for grant aid, which can be a pretty fucking depressing job. Both of my rabbits are also fine since they live outside - if they were in my room, they would have been hit by something. As it is I only didn't because my floor-to-ceiling bookcase is secured to the wall really well.
So, uh, yeah, that's basically... where things are at with me. Playing WoW, lurking on twitter, working for the Red Cross, starting classes on harakeke/flax weaving and a bit of kaupapa Maori, living in a disaster recovery zone, anticipating a winter chock-full of power cuts and sewerage fuckery. And kind of hoping that if anything happens on May 21, it will be less the Rapture and more the Raptor. It would be an infinitely cooler apocalypse.
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| I'm alivr (I think) |
[July 07 2010] |
-I haven't been RPing for ages so there wasn't as much reason to be active here
-LJ still sucks so I mostly post to DW but it crossposts to LJ (is keieeeye on dw)
and I'm iun comms on LJ like wow_ladies and sf_drama and ontd_feminism
- I post some Torchwood stuff, some WoW stuff, some feminism and racial, and queer and lots of bunnies are cute type cool story bros
-still not working. still pretty crazy. I don't even know anymore.
- still on the waiting list for teh anxiety disorders unit. it's supposed to come up sometime in august. been waiting since december.
- my benefit went up $40 when I turned 25! it was so fucking excite.
-really rough right now. Blizarrd is being a cock and I might lose WoW as an outlet/social space. was already bad before that. been under effects of lorazepam for the last day and a half, started after my appt with my new doctor when I had to go over everything. ev.er.y.thing.
- I kind of miss people. and BL. and being more sane. and not feeling like any of my safe spaces could let me down at any minute. even criminal minds is being fucktarded. at least this season of doctor who was amazing but now there's no more for ages and apparently there's lots of character bashing in the fandom.
- getting hard to convince myself there's anything consistently good in the world especially with the oil spill
- QQMOAR
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| Nelthilta |
[December 29 2009] |
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mood |
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This is my new rabbit. I don't know exactly how old she is - I was told 12-14 weeks, so I'm splitting the difference and calling it 13. She's a mixed breed, mostly Dutch and mini-lop, and her body structure is very Dutch, so she's incredibly dainty and has short fur and skinny kangaroo feet. As you can see she took "half lop" to mean that her right side should be lop, so she has one fully lopped ear and one ear that sticks straight up.
At the moment she and Holly are being kept separate. Mostly they ignored each other but there was some chasing and he made little lunges at her twice. They're next to each other, so hopefully they'll get used to each other and become friends, but even if they don't I'm not going to give her away again, I'm prepared to just get a second hutch (though a smaller one, sorry Nellie) and love them both. I've given both of them cuddles today so Holly doesn't feel left out, because he's still my sweet boy.
As you can probably see in a couple of the vids, she moves really fast. She also leaps. Like an Olympic long jumper.
(The full album of pictures is here, there's a few really similar ones.)
( Pictures and vids )
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| Sick. |
[December 21 2009] |
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mood |
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Just a cold but it's the kind that lands me in bed off and on for most of the day. I'm just so tired. In between playing not-mindless-enough games on one of my pet sites because there's a daily play limit which doesn't roll over and I want the money. I have to think more than I do foraging but a) time, b) this is the busiest time of day for foraging, and c) they just released a new craftable Plush so everyone's madly trying to get all the components for it. If I'm awake tonight I'll have a go then.
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| I am in fact alive |
[December 14 2009] |
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1. My rabbit is totally awesome. Except when it's raining I have been spending a few hours outside with him, lying in the sun reading or cuddling him. A few days ago he climbed all over my copy of Watership Down when I was reading it in front of the open fence door and he got curious.
2. My sister's been dragging me out of the house - to the pub, natch. Sundays is 3-for-2 tap pints so she and a friend get their Guinness and I have a Speights and we're quite ridiculous.
3. My internet activity is totally old school. I'm playing my MUD again, I have a level 15 myrmidon in the temple of order, law and balance (warrior-mage, essentially, and in the later levels they can work with runes, she's badarse) and a level 10 cleric in the nature temple. She isn't quite as badarse, but she's no slouch either. ALSO I'm totally playing virtual pet sites again. I'm mostly active on http://www.wajas.com and http://www.khimeros.com. This is actually good because most of the sites have games and between them there's like mahjong, solitaire mancala, mastermind, minesweeper and that sliding-tile game where you have to rearrange them to form a picture in a 4x4 grid with 15 tiles. (Khimeros also has sudoku but it doesn't give you pretend money.) So they're all thinking games, and they're fun.
4. Fandom on LJ consists of me usually being very laidback until humanity sucks and I get rage. So, pretty much normal. I write things or put together video clips to music and people tell me they like them. It's a good arrangement.
5. Speaking of, I have rage.
6. I'm on the waiting list for the anxiety outpatients unit. The waiting list is nine months long. Story to be updated in September.
7. Animals are pretty damn awesome.
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