Ball's Popular Guide to the Heavens

On Monday afternoon I went into this little secondhand bookshop near Mehrin's work, and got a fairly old astronomy book for $12.50. It's called Ball's Popular Guide to the Heavens, and it was first published in 1892 - but I've got the 1952 edition:

I got it because it has really nice old star maps in it, and I want to use them in some art. This is what I've done this afternoon:

I really like using old scientific diagrams (like what I used for Dead Man Rising last year). I think it's because we often seem to think that we understand everything about how the world works, and looking at how we used to try to explain everything is a bit humbling, and allows me to experience more awe at God's creation.

Art (a.k.a. silliness)

On Saturday I rearranged my televisions:

Yesterday I made a special lunch for Uncle Smithamsy again:

Pain in the Arts is back in Credo. We'd been trying to have it on level 3, because we're setting up a studio there so that people can come and do art on their own when Pain in the Arts isn't on. There's not really enough space up there to have Pain in the Arts there though, and it feels too much like an office. Paul modified a library trolley that we got from Green Collect into an art trolley, so that we can bring some of the art materials down to Credo after Wednesday lunches, for Pain in the Arts:

(More modified library trolleys here.)

Waste audits

The last two days I've been doing waste audits with Green Collect, which means sorting though all of the stuff in an organisation's bins to work out how they can waste less.
I took some pictures of the city through the window fo the room where we had lunch today:

And I got Eco to pose for a picture:

Recycling at work

A couple of months back Steve Said wrote on Advoc8 asking people about what they do for work and why. I mentioned that one of the things I do is clean offices:

I don’t know much about the companies whose offices I clean, but I don’t think I agree with some of the stuff some of them do. But my job is just cleaning, and I don’t have any problem with doing cleaning. However, I am bothered by the fact that when I take the rubbish out I have to chuck everything out, even stuff that’s recyclable, because they don’t have any recycling bins, and I can’t really talk to them about it because I don’t have any way of communicating with them.

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about how we’re often willing to do things for a company that go against our own personal ethics. (They look at that a bit in The Corporation.) Today I decided that I’d leave a note at the main office that I clean, who chuck out an awful lot of paper, saying that it could be recycled. I also left the number for the recycling company that picks up our paper.
I don’t know if they’ll decide to get the paper recyled, or just ignore what I wrote. (When they leave notes for me they’re usually pretty rude, and when there are people working there while I’m cleaning they often ignore me if I say anything to them, and I assume that’s because I’m just a cleaner.)

Green Collect in Big Issue

Green Collect (where I work Thursdays) is on the back cover of Big Issue.

Working at Green Collect

Yesterday I worked at Green Collect for the first time. Green Collect is a recycling company that shares part of the church building with us, and where a number of people who come to lunch at Credo work. Started off getting cork, aluminium and steel that had been sorted out of the store room, and loading it into the metal onto the trailer to be taken to be recycled. Someone going to come to us to pick up the cork. I also organised all the stuff that was still in the store room (mostly plastics), and then spent the rest of the day sorting different kinds of plastic and answering phone calls.
Don't know how regularly I'm going to be working at Green Collect yet, or what I'll normally be doing, so I'll still be doing my cleaning job out in the suburbs, at least for a while. I'm only getting about four and a half hours a week of cleaning now though, compared to about seven hours a week when I started at the end of 2005.

Dataprojector

This afternoon Ali was taking some stuff out to Braeside for Green Collect, and I wasn't doing anything, so I went along too. There were a couple of dataprojectors, so Ali asked if I wanted one, to see if I could get it working. It had a sticker on it saying that it'd been tested in June and there'd been nothing wrong with it, so i took it home, and I've been able to get it working.

I have a vision!

I've got all my TVs going now:

Hard rubbishing

There's currently a hard rubbish collection going on near where Ben lives, so last night he took Ray, Ali and I out there, and we got a whole heap of people's unwanted stuff.

So now I have seven TVs. That's more than Elvis had.

Now I have to see if I can get them all going.

Here be pigeons

Yesterday I walked to CERES, to see if I could get a recycled bike. On the way there I stopped at a park, and sat down on the bench to check where I was in my street directory. As soon as I sat down was surrounded by pigeons, some of which I landed on me. It was all quite wonderful. I suppose they're used to people feeding them when they sit down on that bench.

When I got to CERES, it turned out that the bike workshop is only open Fridays and Saturdays at the moment, so I'll have to go back there some other time.