NZ Firsts giving $78,000 to The Susan Couch and Crime Victims Charitable Trust (trustee: Brian Henry) instead of repaying the taxpayer the $158,000 of taxpayer money illegally spent by NZ First in the 2005 campaign.
What is even worse, is that the $78,000 isnt really from the members and grossroots of NZ First. The Vela Family donated $80,000 to NZ First in late 2007, to allow this donation to be made.
So what you actually have is a very wealthy, foreign domiciled, racing industry family has donated $80,000 to NZ First (whose Leader has forced the Government to pur massive funding into the racing industry) so they could give the money to the Susan Couch trust - and claim this is somehow paying the taxpayer back.
I joked at the time that they had probably donated the money to the Spencer Trust. Instead it has gone to a trust partly controlled by Winstons lawyer. Ms Couch will be Patron of the Tust which suggests she wont even be a Trustee herself - are there other Trustees?
To be fair to Brian Henry, he has been acting for free for Ms Couch in her fight to sue Corrections, and he is definitely on the side of the angels on this occasion for his actions to help Couch. While critical of Henrys statements and actions over Owen Glenn, I make no such criticism in regards to this issue.
But that doesnt change the fact that NZ First should be paying the taxpayer back, not making charitable donations on our behalf, and that having decided to make such donations they are ill-advised to make the major donation to a trust controlled by their lawyer.

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I am in the market for a new murse. My current bag is a $30 brown canvas messenger bag that I got at Old Navy. Its 14 wide, 12 tall, and 4 thick. It has one, large main compartment taking up most of the bags space, a thin compartment in front, and a small pocket in back on the inside.
The bag is absolutely freaking great. I love how it looks: simple, solid colors with no logos and no visible fasteners (its held closed by a magnetic button under the flap). Its comfortable as hell to wear, and the canvas doesnt make any noise, so I can walk quietly with it, something that I just like to be able to do for some reason and that I cant do with a nylon bag.
I have two problems with this bag, though:
1) Having only a big pocket, a little pocket, and a littler zippered pocket makes it really hard to keep things organized. I can use my books to brace smaller items in the main compartment to keep that section in order, but the other pockets usually end up getting jumbled around during the day.
2) I love the canvas, but I wish the bag could hold its shape on its own so I wouldnt have to carry the big organizer folder in it to keep it stretched out. The softness of the material also sometimes lets objects in the back pocket jab me in the back. Id simply not use that back pocket, but then I wouldnt have room for all of my stuff.

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I realise I may have put the spotlight on me to see what I will eventually get married in but please don't put your hopes up. There won't be a wedding in a loooooong time. Hence my confidence in discussing other people's weddings. He he he. But just for interest's sake, I'd most likely wear something like this. Well, I just like the collar. And that cinched-in waistline looks flattering. Of course I'd have my own design of gown but I'd steal a few things from these here pics on google. Like that gold waist on the gown on top. Beautiful. This is not about me. This is just to let other people think outside the box. Even a short wedding gown please? People please??? I'd like to see that. See, there are poeple out there with legs to die for but who hide them on the day they should look their most beautiful. Because 'tradition' dictates that we wear a long sweeping gown with a trail up to kingdom come. Ah well, maybe I should start designing my own wedding gowns and selling them cheaply to subsidise wedding budgets. That's a whole other topic.

Is it evident I've spent too much time attending people's wedding meetings? This stuff is getting to my head. Ok, one last picture and I'm out. Please don't ask me about why I'm thinking weddings, I just explained.

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I took a break from this blog, which stretched into six weeks as I got caught up in the end of the school year, and immersing myself in several writing projects. Now I think a different approach is in order, at least for a time. I will be posting three times a week, generally MWF, and keeping track of progress on the two books I am working on, other writing projects, my summer teaching, and other topics related to writing.

So, for an update:

POEMS: I had hoped to finish this chapbook, "Eucalyptus" by the end of June, but poems are sometimes slippery and sometimes as hard to move as a road crew, and this project is nowhere near being ready. "Eucalyptus" consists of about thirty poems I began two years ago when I was teaching in California. While not quite making a book, they do belong together, so I'm making a chapbook. There are also some newer poems which seem to fit the theme and spring from the same source as the California poems, so they are also included.

These poems almost got lost because I moved on to different projects as soon as I got back from California, and didn't know how to incorporate them. I have to say it isn't unusual at all for me to put work away for a long time before I think about what is worth saving and what held promise only in the moment.

Meanwhile, I have a huge sheaf of new poems from the past year--they pretty much go from October through April and seem consecutive, and rather preoccupied with winter. I am working on these as well, though not pushing them as hard as the California poems.

Here is one from "Eucalyptus". (This is one of the new ones. The alternate title was "Apostrophe to Eros" what do you think? It's in the voice of Psyche after she tries to find out who her lover really is and scares him away with a lamp.)


That In Me Sings No More

Thinking if he will change I can change, and the new life risked,
claim the jackpot and live like a goddamn tree
full of birds, you know,
always singing to the dawn. And if he comes
forward I will come forward as if it were a dare to say move
in ecstasy but only when we all agree and we step out
together in some crazy unisong.

Eros, I don't care anymore who you are. Return and lie
beside me, golden in the dark. You mystery, abide.
At dusk come nameless, visit my reverie by day, stroke my
imagining and leave nothing ordinary, nothing as ever was. Be thou
the enchantment and the peril.

Morning is lead without you.
I can't bear another day alone.
Thinking I can change when the season changes, thinking he
holds it, hidden, denies and must yield
his secret. Then there is
no secret. The world opens,
there beside me all the while.
Thinking nothing can change then it does.


I haven't sent out work in a long long time. I really don't have any ideas where I would send poems now. Well, June is not a time when anyone is reading anyway, are they? I promise myself I'll get some things in the mail come September.


PROSE:
Ah here is the project too wild and unarticulated to talk about. I am writing a second book about living in the dunes of Cape Cod. I don't have a title. I don't have an outline. I have a voice and a preoccupation, a repetition compulsion, and two hundred pages of writing like a vortex and I haven't found my way out.

The subtitle of the book is "A Hallucinatory Memoir". That should give you a clue to the difficulty.


From:"A Hallucinatory Memoir"

Wind takes the dunes away. They march forward, clumsy and stiff. Then grain by grain, invisibly, they are dancing, sand leaping up and up. The storm swallows up a cliff; a fifty foot sandbank collapses into waves. Lashing, biting. Where we walked, nothing there.

A place that is no place, imagined battlements in air. The wind flies over the missing place, through the space where something was. It flies through us, though we don't see it. Birds fly there.

Did we ever live and love, and make a world in that one bed, all those nights our voices a low fire in the dark? Emptiness, nothing begun or finished, change hastening to annihilation. A word is spoken, beginning us again. It breaks dry silence. A seed. Sorrow and suffering have an end, yet they begin again. Constant the raising up, the tearing down. Grass roots hang in midair where the bank was torn away. A quarter mile of ripped meadow. The roots dry up, die back. The seed flies to the broken ground. The seed flies, the seed flies--grass and goldenrod, flower and stem, it lodges deep; the swelling seed wounds the earth its leaves will heal.

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"Most of you will be receiving an official notice from M T Bank, mortgage division, in the next 24-48 hours concerning the bank's departure from the wholesale mortgage business outside the bank's "footprint area", which obviously excludes all the southeast.
That notice will explain procedures for existing pipelines, locks and necessary closing dates. All the AEs of M T in the affected areas will be officially dismissed on May 6th. However, as happened to me before at Sovereign Bank last year, I personally remain available to help you close any pipeline loans. The Montgomery office will function until June 30, 2008.

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Classes run 13 weeks at my conveniece, are held every Friday night and Sunday afternoon, and cost about 13 dollars per class hour. At the end of doing this, I can get certified in both animal care and training. Yay!

One thing I like about dog training in general is that it's a good business to go into because it's pretty much 100% profit. There's really no overhead because the only thing you are using is your time.

MONIES!!!!!

The other thing I really like about dog training is that I will be able to help other people keep their animals by providing solutions for particular behavioral problems. Dogs are individuals and have individual personalities and being able to help people resolve those problems rather than give up on the dog as a lost cause will do a lot for my self-worth.

I'm so excited. I don't know when I'll be starting (Gotta talk to the president of the bank, but she seemed amicable to helping me. Gotta love mom!), but I know I'm going to do this soon.

P.S. Lyla is making wonderful progress! Her threshold is now about ten feet if the other dog is non-reactive. Twenty or so if the dog is active/reactive.
I so proud of my doodlebutt. And, frankly, of myself. Consistency in training is hard and time consuming, and annoying as hell. BUT SO WORTH IT!.

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