It’s a good thing that wasn’t a big earthquake. Because there’s no way I was going to get out of bed and go downstairs and stand under a doorframe at six in the morning.

I am abandoning all my other plans for the day and going to Hanmer for the day with my Dad. I shall write that exam tonight and make that DVD tomorrow. You can do stuff like this in the holidays.

How it is with Conferences of the Post Primary Teacher’s Association is this: there are Conference Papers, and the Conference Papers have recommendations at the end of them, and everybody votes whether to implement the recommendations, then they go home. Altogether, it takes about half an hour. Or it would if it wasn’t more complicated than that.

Because not everybody is going to agree on all the recommendations. So the people who wrote the Papers give a little speech for each recommendation. And then people who disagree with the recommendations make little speeches about what’s wrong with them. And then everybody votes according to how people in their part of the country wanted them to vote and they go home. Only it’s more complicated than that.

Because if somebody kind of likes one of the recommendations but they think it could be better, they can move that it be modified. They do this by talking to the people who wrote the Papers, and if they’re lucky they will agree that the modification improves their Paper and they’ll change it straight away. But if the people who wrote the Papers don’t agree the people with the modification can wait until everybody starts making speeches and then move that the modification be made. And people have to vote on whether to make the modification. And when that’s all done they can go home. Only it’s more complicated than that.

Because sometimes a whole lot of people want to make more or less the same modification, only they all have slightly different ways to say it. So before anything else happens, the people all go to workshops and tell each other what modifications they’d like to make, and if a lot of them are more or less the same all those people consult together until they have just as many modifications as they need. This was apparently an innovation for this year and it’s rather good because it makes things easier when you get to the voting part. So on the face of it that would make things less complicated, and hasten the time when everybody can go home. Only it’s more complicated than that.

Because some of the recommendations are constitutional ones which require a two-thirds majority, and the others are regular recommendations which require a simple majority. And people can make procedural motions to do things like going into Committee, or disagree with whether or not the President understand how complicated things are really supposed to be, or make everyone stop talking so that they can vote on whether everybody should stop talking and vote. That last one is called “Moving that the Motion be Put” and it is why I didn’t end up making a speech about the faulty logic in one of the Papers. And after all the speeches have been made and the motions been moved, everyone can go home. Only it’s more complicated than that.

Because a bunch of people come to give special speeches about how the Council of Trade Unions supports the PPTA a great deal, or about how people in unions in Australia have a lot in common with people in unions in New Zealand in that none of them like John Howard very much, or about how they’ve written a good book about the history of the PPTA or about how they’re the Minister of Education and they think there won’t have to be as many arguments with the PPTA next year as there were last year and what if there was a special test to see whether some of the teachers deserve the money that everybody agreed they deserved until last year when the Ministry suddenly changed its mind. And since all these people have come to give special speeches, there has to be a special dinner with a big pavlova for dessert, and dancing afterwards to a lot of music that was written before I was born.

And that is why PPTA conferences are so much fun. You should go to teacher’s college and become a high school teacher and join the PPTA and get elected as a delegate so that you too can have that much fun.

Oh, and there are free mints. And they give you free pens and paper so that you can draw pictures during the speeches.

The sky is at the top of the garden, between my house and the kowhai tree.

Kowhai has cool leaves.

These flowers are blue. Probably they are bluebells, because that’s the name of a blue kind of flower.

Daffodils fill you with the joy of spring. It’s a known fact.

Like many plants, this one is green. I am not very good at names of plants.

The White Camelia I know, because it was the symbol of the suffragette movement. If more flowers were the symbols of progressive movements, I’d know the names of more flowers. White Camelias bruise easily in the rain, which is not the case with real suffragettes.

Tui considers taking photos of the garden just one of the many perplexing and pointless activities that humans get up to when they are not fulfilling their basic function as ambulatory cushions. Note the piece of garden behind her that I haven’t weeded yet. Actually, don’t note it. Then the illusion that all my garden is ordered and lovely will be complete.

By popular request, the two pictures I bought in Wellington. Actually, only one person requested them, but I’m sure she’s very popular.

Dharma Punks is from the comic by Ant Sang.

Kahukura is by Gordon Walters, a famous guy.

Last night we set up a website for my brother Ari, which you should now be able to see at ari.freeman.org.nz. I am impressed by the commitment Ari has put into actually learning to write HTML with a text editor instead of looking for a non-existent easy way out.

The rest of Armageddon was rather quiet. We sold more issues of Funtime Comics, and I bought comics off the other artists.

I had lunches with a couple of people I didn’t know very well – on Sunday with Shenya, who reads my journal and whom I knew vaguely when she lived in Christchurch, and on Monday with Craig, who’s the partner of Leonie, in whose house I used to board and who couldn’t be there due to influenza. Both were Good Lunches, with none of the cannonfire, screeching howler monkeys and mangled carcasses somersaulting through the air that so typify the Bad Lunch.

Also on Monday, but somewhat earlier than the Good Lunch, I went to visit CWA New Media and discovered that I was instead visiting Te Kete Ipurangi across the road. Fortunately, I had been furnished with an address and a name and I was dimly aware that Te Kete Ipurangi is an educational organisation and that CWA New Media did their website for them. Education is a funny business, and more so in Wellington where the relationships between organisations seem to be rather fluid. It turned out I was able to brainstorm some ideas, and my project has not been very rigourously determined yet. Essentially they have a website for primary students and they’d like to do something similar for high school students, but appropriate to the age level. Should I be short-listed for the Fellowship, it will be to determine whether I’m a good person to do a project, not whether I’m a person with a good project to do. And that’s the sort of useful information you only get if you meet people in person.

Later on Monday, but still earlier than the Good Lunch (which consisted of a bagel with cream cheese and lox and a lemon meringue pie) I bought a reproduction of Gordon Walter’s Kahukura which I had wrapped in bubble wrap and brown paper with orange warning stickers, and which I carried around downtown Wellington for a while. This proved an interesting exercise, as it was slightly too large to fit under one arm and required two hands to carry. Thus I held it before me like a shield and ploughed through the bemused pedestrians of Lambton Quay.

I also bought Interface by Neal Stephenson and his uncle George, previously published under the pseudonym “Stephen Bury” until Mr Stephenson became so famous that the pseudonym became pointless. Besides which, it’s kind of hard to hide his particular writing style. It’s a fine combination of media politics, neurology and cyberpunk, and I’m going to read some more of it now. When next I return, I shall regale you with tales of the Post Primary Teacher’s Association conference, and all that occurred therein except that of which I cannot speak because we were “In Committee” at the time. But if you want the short version there were many motions and amendments, an endless supply of complimentary mints, and we were requested not to wear our duck masks during the Minister of Education’s speech.

I’m back from Wellington. There will be several posts discussing my exploits, for I had several of them.

Firstly, a couple of things I wrote at the Downtown Backpacker’s. I’m sticking these in the extended body of this message, and for those of my beloved readers on LiveJournal, well… we’ll just have to see how this works.
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I’m going to Wellington to meet Chewbacca. Then I’m going to meet some people who might have already given me a job but I won’t know for sure. Then I’m going to hear the Minister of Education make a big speech about teachers which won’t make them happy.

If you’re in Wellington, I’ll be staying at the Downtown Backpackers on until Tuesday, whereupon I shall go to the Brentwood Hotel until Thursday. If you want to get in touch, leave me a comment and I’ll read it tomorrow.

Otherwise, see you in a week.

The most razor-sharp satire I’ve seen since the “I’m Sorry” speech in The Games.

It is satire, right? It’s so evil in so many ways.