Gifts and Ghosts

Gifts

I got the last of my Christmas and birthday gifts today – the purchases I made with the gift cards I’d been given.

From Dad’s Coles Myer Group gift card for Christmas, I got:
- A prepaid mobile phone (I have a mobile already, on a plan, but it won’t work in Little Country Town which is on the Telstra “Next G” network, a special extended network for remote areas, and my current phone can’t roam on that part of the Telstra network. The fact that it’s on that network is ABSURD since it’s only an hour out of the metro area, but that’s a whole other story. So I’ve now got a prepaid that I can use up there for texting and emergency calls when driving).

- A cheap version of the iTrip, a gadget that takes the sound from your iPod and transmits it into your car radio so that you can listen in the car. I’m going to want this when driving to and from Little Country Town as there’s no radio station coverage for some of the drive. I tried it out in Mum’s car today and it was awesome!

- A pack of ’50 Family Movies’ which has a wide collection of old classics, including several Shirley Temples and a whole host of movies from other stars.

From Dad’s ‘House’ gift card for my birthday, I got:

- A stainless steel wok, and a ring to hold it upright. I’m totally rapt with my wok, I’ve wanted one for so long!

- A set of good quality electronic kitchen scales, which can switch between metric and imperial at the touch of a button and have a 1 gram graduation. They’re looovely.

- An awesome gadget called a ‘Cookie Gun’ which is basically a tube with attachments on the end through which you can force cookie dough or icing to get particular shapes and patterns. It has an attachment for Christmas-tree shaped cookies, for example. It’s totally frivolous but it looks like so much fun.

From Grandma’s ABC Shop gift card, I got a new Western Australia Travellers Atlas. I already have a Perth street directory and a Country Roads Atlas (which has road maps of most of WA’s country towns, Little Country Town included). This map book shows the connecting and rural roads in between all of the towns, along with all of the watercourses etc, and shows what services each town has. I had Mum’s old one of these, but it was very out of date.

From a Westfield card I got as a reward from work, I got a new watch. It’s silver with a white face and ornate links. It’s very pretty.

I also went into Wooldridges, which is THE shop for school stuff – it’s where the teachers get their resources and where students fill their booklists (well, most schools do a mail-order thingy so the parents don’t actually have to go to the shop, but it’s where everything comes from). They’ve just opened a new branch near where I live, so I went to see what was available. And nearly had hysterics. There’s so much to choose from, so many ideas, so many themes, so many choices of maths programmes . . . in the end I just bought one book, a Blackline Masters (ie stuff you can photocopy and hand out) book called “Me”. It’s activities for ~8-year-olds all about oneself – heritage, family, goals, etc. I’ll photocopy lots of the pages and make up booklets for the students as a getting-to-know-you exercise in the first weeks of term. Somewhere to start!

Ghosts

Last night it took me a while to get to sleep because I foolishly started looking at ghost photographs on the internet late at night, and spooked myself. This got me thinking about ghosts and the way one reacts to ideas like that.

Intellectually, I’m quite happy with the idea of ghosts. I don’t see why they shouldn’t exist, and I’m not worried by the idea that they may exist. I’m quite certain they’re not harmful, and I quite like exploring ideas around ghosts – I even have a childrens’ book planned about the ghost world (tying in archaeology as well). I enjoy reading theories about ghosts, and ‘real life’ ghost stories interest me a lot.

That’s how my conscious mind approaches ghosts.

But . . . my subconscious, animal brain is different. It KNOWS that there are ghosts, and it reckons that they’re SCARY, and when my conscious mind is casually and cheerfully exploring ghost ideas, my animal hits every panic-chemical gland in my body and makes the hairs on my arms stand up and preps my body for a fight with the BIG BAD MONSTERS THAT IT KNOWS ARE OUT THERE.

I wish it wouldn’t do that!