One would think that getting hold of a comfortable office chair would be a simple matter, but it can in fact be a problem. I sit in front of my computer for around 12 hours a day so I am rather aware of the chairs I sit in whilst doing so.
Many years ago at the Rocklea markets I bought a quite simple office chair that had apparently been sold off by some government department. And we know that governments always buy the best. It is only the mug taxpayer who is paying.
And this chair was very good. It was upholstered in a fetching shade of maroon and was generally referred to as "the red chair". And I sat in that chair with the greatest of ease for around 20 years. It did however over the years become rather grotty so when something in the steel chassis snapped and gave the chair a lean, I decided that it was time to bid the red chair goodbye. I put it out the front and it disappeared.
That was a great mistake. I have never since found a chair as good as the red chair. To replace it I first went to Lifeline to inspect their offering of chairs and found one that seemed good -- costing me about $25. But it just was not comfortable enough so I looked around suppliers of new office chairs and found that sums of around $1,000 were being asked for a lot of them. No way!
So I eventually ended up at Officeworks. You would think that they would have a good range of office chairs on sale and they do -- mostly for around $200 -- made in China. So I bought one -- a "Bathurst" chair. And it was really good, just what I wanted. But after about 9 months something came adrift inside it and it developed a distinct lean. So I took it back. Officeworks is one of Mr Goyder's tentacles and he seems to have drilled it into all 200,000 of his employees that they must be cheerful, pleasant and helpful at all times. And they are. So I had no difficulty at swapping the degraded chair for another one. But I was not of course going to risk a second Bathurst chair. So I chose a slightly more up-market one and paid the difference.
But within a year, its casters seized up. They ceased to cast, if that is what casters do. So instead of the chair rolling it could only be dragged. That did considerable damage to my polished board floor, which later cost me quite a bit to fix, so I took that chair back too -- and chose yet another one.
And the third chair wasn't bad -- though not as good as the Bathurst chair -- but it too failed eventually. After 11 months it started refusing to stay up. I would be sitting in front of my computer typing away and suddenly finding that I was sinking down floorwards whilst doing so. I could only take so much of that so went back to Officeworks with that chair too. It was quite a heavy thing so Joe came with me and carried it. I suspect that he did more than carry the chair for me. Being tall, taciturn and well-built with short hair, he might have been mistaken for my bodyguard or some such. He wouldn't have looked like someone you would want to argue with!
Anyway, I was treated with good cheer and came away with another chair of the same model as the one that had sunk. One can only hope that I won't be back there again next October.
It was of course a "some assembly required" product but I am getting good at that by now so it only took an hour to put it together. Anne happened to be present so was fascinated to see me doing something with my hands for once. She is a nurse by trade so even adopted a nurse-like role -- things like handing me my Allen-key when I dropped it.
So wish me luck with my new chair. I suspect I will need it. Its casters run very well so I am pleased about that.
Also yesterday I got in the mail a DVD of Zar und Zimmermann -- a German comic opera written about 150 years ago. It took me a long time to decide to buy it but I thought it might be worth a go. It is Austro/Hungarian operetta from either side of the year 1900 that I like and this was composed well before that period in Germany. But I seem by now to have acquired all of the few available DVDs of Austro/Hungarian operetta so I thought I might branch out a bit. Zar und Zimmermann (The Tsar and the carpenter) is after all an acclaimed and popular comic opera that is still performed in Germany.
Alas, however, the humour was very low level -- clown humour just about. It had none of the quick wit and sophistication of Austro/Hungarian operetta. I just got bored with it and turned it off 1.5 hours into the 2.5 hour show. Maybe I will try to watch it again some time. Could the final hour redeem it? Who knows?
UPDATE: I have now watched the final hour of the show and have ended up more favourably disposed towards it. I even got a laugh out of the scene where the mistaken emperor Peter meets his girlfriend in his new role. The show as a whole was just fun with nothing horrible happening -- which I liked. I tried to re-watch the mentally ill "Carmen" recently but couldn't do it. It was just too silly. I gave that DVD to Anne. She likes conventional opera.
I was most taken with the scenes of Dutch shipbuilding, set in 1698. It was great to see the old hand-tools in use -- adzes, augers, two-handed planes and crosscut saws. I may be one of the few left who have had some contact with all that. I have seen a man use an adze and I have myself used a wood auger. It is downstairs in my garage as I write this.
And seeing the crosscut saw was very nostalgic. I remember my father setting and sharpening his big blue-steel crosscut saws. He used them to cut down big forest trees in the era before chainsaws. Yes: There was such a time.
And the very first Ray in my Australian family was a sawyer -- A central trade in building the old wooden ships. How do you get evenly straight planks without a circular saw? The old sawyers did it. The original Joseph Henry Ray came out from England to Australia as a convict chained up in the hold of a sailing ship -- an East Indiaman. So I almost could see my great-great grandfather at work in this show.
An excerpt:
YouTube sometimes does strange things when clips are called from it. You get the wrong clip altogether sometimes. If the above clip is irrelevant, the link to the intended clip is here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yat7RGaR9q4
There were actually some distinguished people in the show. The girlfriend was sung quite charmingly by the Slovakian Lucia Popp, whom the Austrian cultural authorities recognized as a Kammersängerin.
And the conductor was the distinguished Australian Charles Mackerras. There seemed to be rather a lot of Mackerrases around in Australian public life at one time.
The show was supposedly set in "Saardam", now "Zaandam". The production was from the Hamburgische Staatsoper, 1969.
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