buter's BABY blog

The waiter has a nice Valentime story, and I've shamelessly pilfered words from that for the title. But then, it's not like they're copyright, after all he heard it from a customer.

So anyway the whole Valencrime Hallmarketing exercise bores me to tears as I'm sure it does for most of my loyal readers. If you know D™ and I you know that we don't bother with it. Why don't we bother with it? Because it's foolish to save all your lovin' up for one day of the year, and then spend far too much money buying cheesy crap that you could get cheaper in the post-Christmas sales and then throw out in the post-Christmas cleanup. Besides we subscribe to Stevie's philosophy (I didn't realise we did so until I read about it today - but there you go, I guess everything's been done before. And posted on the internet.)

But the thing that truly bugs me about Valenschwein's day is the proliferation of "V-day sux" websites. Here's one for example. Frankly people, don't you think that posting blogs, editorials, what-have-you about how bad the whole thing is, would have the opposite effect to what you intend? Isn't the point of your rants that you want people to ignore the whole thing? And yet by posting such (sometimes) well-written rants you raise the awareness of the day all over again.

I advocate religious tolerance, which also includes tolerating random celebratory days for saints, prophets, boddhisatvas, diseases, what-have-you. But my own special brand of tolerance (which let's face it can't be unique, see above) is basically apathy. If you want to observe said celebratory day, I don't care, just don't force me to do so as well. And I'll choose which celebratory days to observe for myself. I pick Invasion Day, We-Lost-The-Battle-But-Not-The-War Day, and October-Random-Long-Weekend-Because-We-Needed-Another-Holiday Day. The people I work for also tell me not to come to work at assorted other times throughout the year. Who am I to disagree?

So in the end, I think if you disagree with any particular religious or secular or marketing "International Day of" then the best thing to do is ignore it and maybe it will go away.

But then, what would I know. After all I'm posting too! But technically my rant is directed toward the rants. It's a rant rant. Or an anti rant rant. Or something.

When we were kids, we would often spend at least one morning of the weekend at the local library. Once we started going to high school, though, there was either no time for the local library, or maybe we had enough books at school. I dunno. But it's one of the things I miss. Making the time to go to a library, and wandering round, choosing books, reading anything that looks interesting, seeing new books there and borrowing them to take home .. I really enjoyed that.

Nowadays we still don't go to the library. I'm all growed up, and still living in the vicinity of the same public library as when I was a kid. And although I still think about going to the library, I'm more likely to get my new book fix by going to the bookstore and buying whatever it is. Or getting the DVD ... I think I could probably save a lot of dollars if I stopped buying books and started borrowing them again. If I read it once, and think it's worth reading again, then maybe I could buy it, but otherwise I'm saving not only money but shelf space. The other day, D™ was stacking my Christmas present-load of books onto the bookshelf and we've actually totally filled it up. Double stacked.

So imagine my joy when my mate Hiren somehow managed to smuggle this into the country for me. I'd like to take the time to say WOW. For sending me a present, for managing to put an Australian stamp on it, for it arriving just in time for my birthday, all from Heidelberg. Give that man a pat on the back, he's pretty clever!

In other news, T-day is rapidly approaching and I'm dead certain it's going to rain. Bob said so.

p.s. Thanks Hiren, you rock.

Edit: Yay for the University of Michigan for supporting Google Print. It looks like one day I won't have to even go to the library to borrow books!

Happy Chinese New Year, for those of you who follow the tradition.

We had a nice gathering at my parents' place, dinner (massive) with relatives (many). A small selection of the dishes served are shown below, but trust me when I say it was all Fabulous and Filling!


Now that we are well into the new year (of the Dog) you should take the time to have a look at what your horoscope predicts for the year. For Dragons like me, it's a year of caution, rather than letting loose with normal dragon tendencies. Which corresponds nicely to the advice for Rabbits like D™ - which is to throw caution to the winds. Well, I think we will just forge ahead in our own way, and make the best of what life has to offer. It's too short to do otherwise.

So, 恭喜發財 (Gong Hei Fat Choi) - Congratulations and be prosperous!

Last night I dreamt I was at high school, and there was a large group of us sitting round a table which was possibly "study hall" except that "Study hall" is a term only used in American TV shows as far as I know, and had nothing at all to do with where or when I went to school - anyway I was in study hall and I was meant to do my maths homework (which had something to do with finding out what colour a peach was..??) only I was too stupid to do it so I was copying from a friend, and thinking to myself, I should be doing English instead of Maths because I find that so much more rewarding. But instead of doing Maths *or* English I was trying to come up with the final stanza to an epic poem where something had to rhyme with "clueless" - the poem was going to be read out at a wedding, the bride being one of the girls I went to school with (but not in my group of friends) and she'd asked me and 3 close friends of mine to do this poem thing. And the teacher was saying she didn't think the poem was appropriate and I was saying how I'd been asked to do it so too bad, and meanwhile I still had all this Maths homework to do.

The conclusion I drew was that it would be too hard to make a 4-line verse to finish off the poem so I would have to do a 2-line ending, and rather than stick "clueless" at the end of the line, I would stick it somewhere in the centre of the first line. No, I don't remember the rest of the poem.

Very very weird.

On the whole, I remember my dreams often, and they are very very vivid. Theory states that we all dream, it's just that not all of us remember what we dreamed. There are many theories as to why we dream but frankly, that one looks like random synapse firing. I never copied maths homework from someone. Ever. I was *good* at maths. *And* English, though looking back I have sometimes thought I should have studied higher level English rather than higher level maths, but there you go. None of my schoolmates got married while still at school. We didn't have "study hall". And my maths homework never had anything to do with colouring in peaches.

I still can't think of a rhyme for "clueless" though.