Ruminations

Weekends where all you do is sit around or lie around doing not very much at all are just wonderful. I spent all day yesterday doing just that. In the morning I built up a mighty empire, led by Gandhi. I played Civ 4 - the empire is now on hiatus because I can’t decide whether to follow historical Gandhi’s pacifist ideals and subsume the world by the sheer strength of my rich and superior culture, or just rampage through and take over by brute force. (Ok, so historical Gandhi is unlikely to have wanted to take over the world by any means, but you get my drift.)

After that I spent the rest of the day reading, and finished the second part of book three in George R. R. Martin’s A song of ice and fire series. I read it in one day, despite it being a rather large and involved book. I’ve been reading this series since mid-January and have been enjoying it very much, although some of the brutality is disconcerting. I’ve read (and abandoned) too many stories where there are identifiably stereotypically evil and good characters, and it’s refreshing to read something with well-rounded but flawed characters. I’m now feeling a bit peeved because I went and read the author’s website and have just discovered that the series is going to consist of seven books, and not four books, as I’d thought. There are so many characters and so many twists in the plot that it’s going to be hard to remember who did what to whom and when over the next few years as the next three books are published. I should have just done what M does, and refused to begin the series until all the books were published…

For a change of genre and milieu I’m now reading Henning Mankell’s The man who smiled. This is the latest English language translation of Mankell’s Kurt Wallender books. I haven’t read any other Swedish authors, but Henning Mankell’s writing makes me want to visit Sweden.

This morning I’ve been reading blogs. I also finished the intro to my questionnaire, and have sent it off, so Kit, Morgan, Fiona, Ivan, Michelle, Laura, and Alison (I couldn’t decide which of your blogs to link to!), you should find something from me in your inboxes. Isaak I left a comment on your blog because I just realised I don’t have your email address - please contact me if you would like to participate! I haven’t emailed anyone else yet because I am, strangely, feeling a bit shy about contacting librarians I have only met via blogs. It doesn’t make sense because of the seven whose names I’ve mentioned, I’ve only met two of you!

* Lately, I seem to have lost all ability to give my posts titles.

Categories: games, reading, writing, relaxation

I forgot to mention yesterday that the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, made a visit to M’s and my place of work, Curtin University of Technology! He received an Honorary Doctorate from the university.

Obviously I don’t have a journalistic bone in my body. Early last week we were told about his trip, and I considered giving you all a scoop but it all seemed a bit hush-hush (for a few days there was nothing in the university’s media releases as far as I could see), and I didn’t know whether it was a good idea to blog it then - would I have been violating the confidentiality principle? Could I have been dooced? And then I got really busy and forgot all about it.

It was bad timing of behalf of Pak Lah, really, because yesterday was Guild Day, right in the middle of O Week. Guild Day is when the student guild arranges all sorts of amusements and organises all the student clubs and various university services and so forth to come along and provide information to new students - even the library has a stall. It’s like a fair and campus just swarms with wide-eyed school-leavers. Most staff were pretty preoccupied with getting the new students orientated and enrolled and so forth and didn’t manage to go and welcome such an esteemed visitor. I would have loved to have gone but I was in meetings all morning, and then I had classes to teach all afternoon, and I didn’t even think of the visit until M and I were in the car on the way home.

I wonder how the visit went. It seems to have been a pretty low-key sort of visit because I haven’t seen or heard anything in the Australian media about it (there was a small mention of it in a report in the Malaysian Star, though). There was a bit of gossip flying around last week that John Howard might be visiting campus as well, but judging from yesterday’s media release, he didn’t. It’s probably just as well, because the amount of ill-feeling some staff would have been feeling towards our PM would probably have caused a malevolent aura to settle over the campus. (Ok, I exaggerate, but I just wanted to write that last sentence. )

Categories: news