No place like home

Like everyone still on holidays after the Christmas period is officially over, I've decided it's more fun at home and it's time to head back there.

My three-post summer fling over here with Rita and Margriet (and their Bureau) has come to an amicable end (as summer flings so often do). I've packed the car and am ready to head back to my still ridiculously named but comfortably familiar The Dangerous Kettle.

So long Rita; so long Margriet. Maybe see you in the winter holidays (ooh! Maybe we can start a crochet blog then!).

Six Things I Don't Understand, An Occasional Series. Part 1: Why Do People Leave Their Cars Idling?

While I confess the names Rita and Margriet in this blog's title were randomly chosen, the idea of some kind of bureau was actually my new-blog-name starting point. But not, as the dictionary defines a bureau, as an office for collecting and supplying information. No. More a source of, well, attempted answers to my own essentially pointless questions.

You know the sorts of questions I mean, like when you're waiting for a train and you suddenly think, what did happen to the Democrats? Or Germaine Greer?

Not questions with answers that ultimately have any bearing on life, other than to make you think for that brief moment, "Oh I see. Ok then," as you go on with buttering your toast or cleaning the fish tank.

So this occasional series is a series of just such questions, and this first question, why do people leave their cars idling, has long occupied me on quiet Tuesdays and sleepless nights.

But not just cars; truck drivers are worse than car drivers at leaving their vehicles idling. Perhaps they think it creates fifteen times more greenhouse effect-accelerating exhaust to stop and then re-start their trucks half an hour later when they're ready to leave, rather than just turning them off when they arrive? Perhaps idling truck drivers aren't the world's most annoying people but in fact leaders in saving this cosy blue and green planet we call home?

Perhaps car drivers think that starting their cars and driving away immediately will lead inevitably to the painful deaths of small penguins everywhere? Perhaps by leaving their cars idling ('warming up') for fifteen minutes before they drive away they are in fact stopping or at least retarding such penguin death-related horror?

No, not at all. Leaving things idling doesn't do shit. As Tony Davis, self-professed car nut, states in his seminal work The Ultimate Book of Car Hints (which I bought for $1.95 from a remainders book shop), "Every morning in nearly every street motorists warm their car engines by leaving their motors running. With modern engines this is virtually pointless and the motorists could save time and petrol by using a different approach."

Yes! Yes! Exactly! Turn your silly motors off. And stop gassing everyone in the playground next to where you park, you bastards.

So the answer to the first thing I don't understand, why people leave their cars/trucks idling, is: because some people are very, very silly.

Merry festive season and happy new thing bit

Mr Kettle and I didn't do presents for Christmas this year. It just didn't figure on our list of things to do.

For the first time I just wanted to celebrate getting through the year. Forget what the ads were telling me to buy for my loved ones; I'm pretty sure Mr Kettle's feelings about me will remain unchanged despite the presence or absence of Remington Steel in our lives.

What did figure in our festive season was hanging out with people who bloody rock. Sparkling shiraz tastes so much better on 25 December with people you love very much.

And as this post descends into true sentimentalism let me say just this: when my darling son, who only has a small amount of functional language, turned to me today and said, "It's very hot today, Mummy," I thought it was the best freakin' present ever.

You rock, little man.

Let's start at the beginning

It's lucky we don't choose our own names, isn't it? Otherwise this blog may have selected something for itself involving books and politics and croquet, say.

Instead, I got to choose its name, and haven't I hit upon a pretty one? That fairly dances off the tongue?

Despite what you may, quite legitimately, be thinking, I did actually think for a long time and quite hard about the name. And all that thinking did me no good other than to help me realise that all the catchy, relevant names have been taken. My best choice (prior to 'Rita and Margriet (at the Bureau)') was 'kettle9_1604movies_blah@blogspot.com'. Now that's catchy.

So here we are at 'Rita and Margriet (at the Bureau)' and I couldn't be happier. What seemed at first like a bit of a random and slightly weird moniker has become, since midnight last night when I thought of it, the only blog name I can imagine living with for the next several years.

If you were kind enough to join me at my last blog (the similarly ridiculously named 'The Dangerous Kettle'), you will no doubt be noting the extensive changes I have made, including and limited to my radical adoption of the Courier font in the heading. This change has been a major design step forward for me, and I eagerly anticipate similarly futuristic advancements as this blog gets underway.

So here we are at a new URL at the end of 2010; you rock big time for coming here. Here's to a great first year at the Bureau with Rita and Margriet, and to you.