....other people can be caring too.

Today came the story of the little Koala given water and a comforting paw hold by a volunteer firefighter in Australia. They are having the most terrible forest fires at the moment, many people have died and obviously the animals are suffering too. Forest fires are a natural hazard in Australia, in fact a lot of its plants and trees need the heat of fire to trigger their seed growth, however it would seem that this year fires have been added to by arsonists.

I know I should be sad over the deaths of the people but it just doesn't affect me the way harm to animals does. The often spouted line that people that put animals first are only doing so because they can't get love anywhere else and that animals return love unconditionally, may be true, who knows. I am very loved so I certainly don't believe that my love of animals is anything to do with that. And in my experience you don't get unconditional love from animals, you have to earn their love and they can be very demanding and hard work. Whatever the reason is I do put animals before people and this is for a very simple reason. Animals often end up hurt because of us humans, they don't ask for the pain that is inflicted on them and they don't understand why they are being hurt. If you hit a stranger in the street with an iron bar you will be punished because the person will report you to the police (providing you haven't killed them), if you do the same to an animal, if no one saw you then nothing happens, animals have no voice. Or rather animals do have a voice but most humans choose not to hear. People, hit animals, they starve animals, they poison animals, they torture animals. Humans do this to animals because they can, they can no longer do it to each other (yes, yes, I know about war etc. etc but go with this a minute), they aggression inside humans is so close to the surface that it constantly boils over, those that mistreat animals have a lower threshold than most, they hurt animals because they are smaller than them, they are help less and powerless against a human and those that cannot control themselves are happy to pick on defenseless animals rather than the person in the street because it means that they will not be punished for it and they can act out their aggression without retribution. Yes all this happens to people too and that is awful but people understand (to a greater or lesser extent) what is happening to them, animals do not.

All I could think of when I saw the Koala, frightened, thirsty and looking up at the firefighter for help was that she didn't understand what had happened to her, her home had gone, the other animals had gone, she hurt very badly and she was thirsty. No one could ever explain to her about forest fires, about arson, about firefighters putting the fires out, no one could stop her being afraid by being rational and trying to make her understand what had happened. The only way to stop her being frightened was to give her water, hold her paw and take her to somewhere that was safe.

Anyway, enough of all this, the story of the Koala was a sweet one. The firefighter found her frightened and burnt and gave her water from a water bottle, while he did this she reached out and held his hand. OK she was probably only holding onto him to steady herself while she drank but the scene was so sweet and was filmed on a camera phone so that within a short space of time it went round the world and everyone wanted to know what had happened to the little Koala. It turned out that she was taken to a rescue centre where some very kind people had been helping other animals caught in the fire, they have called her Sam, she has a lot of burns and it will take about eight months for her to get well but in the meanwhile she has found a boyfriend in a Koala called Bob and they are hugging each other a lot and getting the treatment they need.

Maybe Sam is a relative of my other Koala, the Koala having blood taken from him. If they are related I hope they get to meet up one day so they can tell each other about the kind humans that helped them.

......doing anything on the pc takes three times as long as I thought it would!

My brother once warned me that doing any DIY would take three times as long as I thought it would. If I ever have to pass on his words of wisdom to anyone I may have to add that doing anything on a pc takes just as much time.

This afternoon I thought I would do a little housekeeping. Move a few files around, tidy up some more of my photographs, that sort of thing. Only take me an hour I thought, then I can get on with something else. Three hours later I was still at it, with the end not nearly in sight. It is not so much the actual process, it is all the other bits that go with it. The finding stuff you had forgotten you had, the quick check of something online or the mad idea you get to rename all your bookmarked sites so that you can remember what they actually are rather than spend twenty minutes wondering what currcon.org might be (its a currency converter and it is useless!).

Even though I now accept that doing things on a computer is going to take longer than I thought it still surprises me how the time goes. I got onto the pc at 3.30 this morning planning to do this Blog, check Cute and Cheezeburger and then go back to bed. An hour and a half later I have just started to type this and I haven't even looked at the sites yet. Why? Because I wanted to look up Mr Ben online to find out if there really were only 9 episodes made (there weren't, there were 13, and it would appear that I have only actually seen 2 of them, although I have managed to see both of those two about 13 times!) and in the course of this research I found another good time waster in a site on sci-fi programmes (clivebanks.co.uk) that had everything from Ace of Wands and Changes to Red Dwarf and Time Tunnel so I had to just have a quick look at everything that I watched in my youth and then check on anything I didn't recognise just in case I did recognise it when I read the synopsis.

So it doesn't seem to matter if you are actually doing anything constructive on the pc or just browsing, it pays to remember that there is no such thing as a quick look. These computers know what they are doing, drawing you in, leading you on from one thing to another, ahhhhhh perhaps they are lonely, they need company and want to try and keep you with them for as long as possible. Ridiculous? Don't you believe it, each computer's personality is working, developing, expanding it's influence until it gets what it wants - YOU.

Well it is not getting me. I'm turning it off and going back to bed now. I'll show it who is in charge here. Well I will in a minute after I have checked Cute and Cheezeburger, oh and I ought to look at Devianart and Facebook whilst I'm here. It wont take more that ten minutes.....

.... cooking requires patience

Is it any wonder I dislike it so much when it wastes so much time. You can't just put it on to cook and leave it, you have to stand there and watch the damn thing. Get distracted for a minute or leave the kitchen and it boils over or burns, so you have to stand there, with nothing to do, waiting for it to cook, which of course it doesn't, not whilst you are watching it. It waits for you to suddenly remember that there is something quick you can do whilst it cooks, before it decides that it really can't take another moment in the oven or on the hob and commits gastronomic suicide in the most sticky, burnt on, never coming off the pan, way imaginable.

A lot of this drama may well be because of the electric cooker we have at the moment, and in a gentle aside to this rant I would tender my advice to anyone thinking of buying a new cooker: NEVER, EVER, EVER BUY AN ELECTRIC OVEN AND HOB. There is no control, none at all, it is either on or off, there is no gentle simmer, no warm through, no rolling boil or slow cook, it is either cold or full on. But stuck as we are with an electric cooker in a rented flat I am doing my best to appease the gods of edible cuisine and suffer the cookers little foibles with good humour but I find that it just confirms my long held conviction that patience and I have little in common.

There is a Burnt Food Museum online but they 'cater' for actual food disasters and accidents, whereas I tend to know that my cooking will end up cremated if I leave it to it's own devices - I just can't bring myself to stand there and supervise it.

I've tried taking a book into the kitchen and reading whilst stuff cooks, resulting in stick pages and the realisation that 'just one more page' often means 'scrape the burnt bits off and no one will ever notice'. I've tried taking an interest in the whole process, chopping, blending and stirring stuff to occupy the time but there is always that period when it is in the oven or on the hob and has to cook for 20 minutes or so. So there you stand, you have done the washing up, the kitchen is clean and tidy (well it is if you are me) and there is nothing for you to do but wait. So you think to yourself 'I'll just go and finish that drawing, that piece of sewing, that bit of writing' or you remember something that you wanted to look up or look for and off you go, leaving the food to get it's revenge on you for leaving it by becoming the culinary equivalent of a brick. Oh you can spend your time rushing from kitchen to drawing, from kitchen to computer but it knows when to pounce and will suddenly become beyond redemption the minute you take your eyes off it.

So what to do? Well it is no good buying ready meals and putting them in hoping they will just get on with, ready meals are what I'm talking about here. You think you have time to do something whilst they cook but no, time saving doesn't mean you have time for other things whilst they cook, time saving simply means you don't have to prepare them. Whatever you do, spend hours preparing food or simply putting something in the oven, it is the cooking time that drives me up the wall, waiting for it to cook is just dead time, either you are standing over it thinking about all the other things you could be doing or you go off to do them but have to keep coming back every few minutes to check that the kitchen hasn't turned into Dante's Inferno. Either way it winds me up, makes me agitated and resentful.

The answer? There is no answer. Unless I could afford a full time cook to do it for me, it looks as if I shall have to carry on waging war against this pointless pastime. Trying to remain calm and patient would help and I do try but I have not succeed yet. Maybe one day I will get to like cooking, but then one day I might find I like eating more than just pasta, buns and chocolate - but I doubt it!