Another year older

Apparently people at my work are allowed to take the day off on their birthday, but I didn't because I had taken so much time off sick already this year. Then on the weekend my thoughtless sibling told me I had to take my mum to her follow-up appointment with the eye specialist this afternoon.

So, my birthday today was full of joyful activities such as:

1. a long staff meeting, followed by a panicky hour of cramming work in and then
2. 2 hours of sitting, zombie-like, in a public hospital waiting room (for a 2 minute consultation) and then
3. feeling slightly guilty for not going back to work for that last hour of my working day, because all that spring air was giving me a sinus headache.

But the boy and TLM did give me some lovely artistic birthday presents:
1. a tiny wee dolly made by a ceramics artist (because I told him that I never had dollies when I was a kid)
2. a bright red t-shirt, one size too small (but with a beautiful screenprint on it - it just needs to be bigger and blacker, really)
3. a hand-made mug, to go with some bowls by the same artist that I got for Christmas last year
4. and a lovely hand-made birthday card created by TLM, who may or may not be an artist but sure has the right amount of flakiness.

Oh, and a birthday muffin (that is, a cake. Just in case you were thinking that was a euphemism).

Suspiciously chivalrous

When I was at school it was mostly only the rebellious kids who didn't give up their seats on the bus for adult passengers. These days it's remarkable when a kid does give an adult their seat. In fact, I still haven't forgiven those rude people who stayed seated when I waddled onto a crowded bus, 6 months pregnant and dying to take the weight off my feet.

So why did a young man offer me his seat on the bus this afternoon?
He wasn't doing to chat me up - because he didn't.

It's possible that he caught sight of my "mature" hands and - putting that together with my old-man newsboy hat, deduced that I was an unsteady old biddy.

Or, he saw how voluminous my A-line coat was (not the one I've been sewing - that one is only just big enough) and mistook me for a pregnant lady (where the hell was he 4 1/2 years ago?)

Hopefully, he did it because my oversized bag looked really heavy (it was - it was full of library books about women's fashion).

But I'll never know. It was nice to have a seat all the way home though.

A Dora bill

Oh yeah, and here is a photo of TLM in her Dora skirt - which she is wearing with Dora socks.

Should it stay or should it go?

I STILL haven't finished this coat yet, but right now I'm not sure I should bother.



What I have left to do is:

• Get three buttonholes put in professionally (or sew on some snap buttons) and sew the buttons on
• Unpick the lining hem and re-attach it so that the back pleat doesn't sag funny
• Re-do the sleeve hems because the sleeve lining is way too long

And then it will be finished.



I'm not thoroughly happy with this coat though:

• the back pleat doesn't sit right when it's on, though it looks fine on the hanger
• Most of the plaids don't match up from bodice part to skirt part
• the skirt part really sticks out
• the fabric is a little bit distorted, maybe because I machine-washed and line-dried it prior to cutting
• I'm not sure this style and pattern is very flattering on me

(Apologies if you're eyes are going a bit weird looking at the back view; it's just a blurry photo)



So anyway, do I spend the extra time and money on finishing it, or is it a dead loss?

It's not all bad though - I have learned enough that, if I were to make this coat again, the end result would be much more satisfactory (though I reckon I could find a more flattering style).

Like:

• stay away from any fabric that has obvious must-match pattern on it
• don't use fabric that is super-frayable and super-duper-snaggable (it makes unpicking really really hard, and the floor really really messy)
• be careful putting in that back pleat, and don't be in a hurry to undo the tacking that keeps it in place
• don't machine-washing a loosely-woven cotton tweedy fabric in the hope that it will tighten the weave.
• If you don't look good in high necklines, just accept the fact that you need to wear a scarf with that coat - then go out and buy a really nice one.
  

We don't do Daylight Savings by halves...

...but we bluddy should.

Right up until the night of the changeover, I had been waking up half an hour earlier than normal i.e. 7am. This gave me time to get TLM and myself ready for the day and also half an hour to just hang out.

But last Monday, I suddenly had to get out of bed half an hour before I was awake. So all week I've been late in to work, and still can't get to the sleep at the new bedtime.

I propose that in future we do Daylight Savings in two phases - the first phase is at the beginning of October, when we move our clocks forward by thirty minutes only. The second phase is a few months in, when we move our clocks forward by another thirty minutes. Taking it slowly will decrease the amount of tiredness in the first week of each time change, and indirectly cause greater happiness for everyone. Well, for me anyway.

I'd rather be scrutable

I went to visit a dear friend in hospital today who has cancer and probably not that much time left. It was one of her not-so-good days, when she seemed to barely notice all the people who'd gone to see her. So I put the flowers in the basin, said hi, and proceeded to ignore her for a good ten minutes.

I'm not very good during sad times like these. It's not that I don't feel anything, because I surely do. But I do have an awfully difficult time with saying and doing the right things. I want to tell her this is so unfair, what's happening to her. But I don't, because maybe she'd rather be cheered up. But it's hard to think of anything cheerful to say, and maybe it'd be inappropriate anyway.

Eventually I did talk to her about some inane stuff, and it did seem to amuse her at least for a moment. But I fear the awkwardness behind my chatter was clanging loudly in the background that whole time.

At times like this it would be really handy to have a religion.

Unfinished businesses

After months of fretting, wanting to cancel and then not getting around to actually cancelling, my mum finally had cataract surgery on her good eye. Of course, she's not exactly going around telling everyone how right we were to encourage her to get it done. But I know she's glad she didn't chicken out in the end. If only we were as successful in convincing her to try a hearing aid.

I have nearly finished my coat. Yay! Except I haven't been able to find suitable buttons, and until I do that coat is still a WIP and an un-photographed one at that.

So I moved onto my next project, which is to finish my man's dress shirt refashion - but because I used up all of my white thread in sewing the coat, all I could do was cut out the collar pieces (6 pattern pieces!). However in the meantime I did turn a badly-fitting work jumper dress into a well-fitting work skirt. But there is no photo because right after I finished it, I found some suspicious-looking stains on it and had to throw it straight into the washing machine.

The three of us went into town today to have a look at the Chinese Culture Festival. TLM thoroughly enjoyed the dragon dance - it was a sinewy creature that wove and wormed up and down and around, to a drum beat that would force a galleon slave to faint from exhaustion. But apart from that I reckon her other favourite things were going up and down the stairs one at a time like a big kid, and doing puzzles in the kids' area.

Shogun

The boy bought the boxed set of the Seventies TV show, Shogun, years ago. It had been a favourite of his when he was a boy, and no doubt he was keen to share it with me. But I was expecting something a little less culturally sensitive, so didn't make any effort to watch it with him.

For some reason, the name of the show conjured up a mental image of a hairy white man frolicking with compliant young Oriental girls in an overtly sexist and racist manner. (But actually I had been thinking of a scene in a James Bond movie.)

Now that we've been watching it since the weekend, I'm really quite enjoying it. Not so much the torture and the beheading, but the political intrigue, the religious conflict and the exotic costumes - and that's just the Westerners.

It shows a lot about Japanese culture at the time (the 1500's, I think) and is apparently fairly accurate, the author having spent many years in Japan and China. One thing that impresses me is that it doesn't take sides - the Portugese and the Japanese Samurai are equally ruthless; the Jesuits have their good and bad points and even the main character - the English Blackthorne - isn't totally a good guy.

The boy reckons that Richard Chamberlain, who plays Blackthorne, invented the I-smell-a-fart method of acting. After he told me that, I couldn't look at him (Chamberlain) frowning without giggling.

The wrong trousers

...or, skinny jeans don't make me look skinny, but wide-leg pants sure do make me look wide...

I really ought to get into the habit of trying on several styles at once, before deciding whether to buy something. If I had done that last winter I would not have ended up with a pair of wide leg black trousers that, on me, look like sturdy load-bearing columns holding up a pair of arms and a shrunken torso. If I had gone into the dressing room with those and a pair of straight-legged black jeans, I would have walked out of the shop with the relatively slimming and leg-lengthening jeans.

What this means is, if you're going to follow Trinny and Susannah's style advice then you have to go the whole hog i.e. if you want to wear the wide-leg trousers then be prepared to put a pair of high heels on your feet as well. Yay.

Anyway, today I bought the right trousers - dark, straight-legged jeans that are so soft it's almost like wearing maternity pants (which, by the way, I still have. They are awaiting a re-fashion).

More of a hypothetical sewer, really

I'm still progressing on my coat - just the buttonholes and buttons, the topstitching down the front and the back tab to do, and then it's completely ready for wearing!

However, now that I've spent so much time on this one garment, I'm not sure I'll feel like doing it all over again for the real winter coat. I'll definitely be moving onto simpler things for the Summer, before tackling anything that time-consuming again.

Anyway, I think perhaps I'm much better suited to thinking about sewing than actually producing anything. This is because for me, the most fun part of sewing is choosing the pattern and the fabric, and drawing little pictures of imagined modifications. All the rest is just hard slog.

In fact, if money were no object, I would probably just be designing my clothes and paying a professional to construct them for me.

Forever

I just got asked to go permanent today, at work.

It's good, because it means we have some financial security now.

I was looking forward to some down-time though.

Still, can't complain eh?

She's literate!

The Little Madam wrote down all the letters of the alphabet today! A couple of them turned out dyslexic-ly, but every single one of them was recognisable.

It's going to be one of the bits of paper that I'll save and put in my TLM scrap book.

Saving an egg from a pointless death

I have a problem with throwing away food, especially meat. As far as I'm concerned, some poor animal died so that someone could have steak/pie/meatloaf or whatever for dinner - so it seems wrong to discard perfectly edible meat (or let it go off and then have to discard it).

Plus, in good traditional Chinese fashion, I was raised to eat everything in my bowl (or on my plate) because there are starving people in the next village or whatever.

And that's why, when I bought a potato salad for lunch yesterday and then discovered it was dressed in eczema-exacerbating egg pieces, I ate it anyway. Though I did try to scrape off eggy-looking substances from my potato chunks first.

And then I spent the rest of the day being very very itchy.

The movie about the guy who was a character in a book

The boy and I watched Will Ferrell in Stranger than fiction the other night and we were very pleasantly surprised. Although I've enjoyed his performance in Zoolander as the man who invented the piano-key neck tie, I wouldn't normally watch a movie just 'cos he's in it.

But he was very good in this one. It helped that the story was intelligent and thought-provoking. What would you do if you started hearing an intermittent voice in your head that seems to be narrating your dull, dull life? What if you found out that the author who owns that voice is trying desperately to finish her possibly award-winning novel by killing off her main character (that's you). And what if you were that author, and just found out that all those fictional people you'd killed off over the years were probably real people?

As well as being a gentle romance about a man who learns to take risks, live life and find love, it's also a movie about defying fate - or not. It even made me briefly consider whether a life-changing novel could possibly be more important than an actual life.

I been busy

Thank gawd it's Friday. It's been full-on at work, keeping 4 students and a hubby gainfully employed and keeping them from adding any more spelling mistakes to the databases they are updating for us. Like, it's "language nest", not "langrage next" - and don't do it again!

That, plus trying to keep track of whose computer has which database on it, and which copy of each database is the latest one (when there's a copy on at least one of the team's computers, plus one on the USB stick, plus one on the server)...I'm sure I have new frown lines that weren't there on Monday morning.

On the plus side, it's such a pleasant novelty to have lunch with the boy every day. I sure do miss lunching socially. And I learned so much about hiring and training newbies, that I even offered advice to someone who rang me up as a reference for a potential new employee!

And just to end the week with a bang, the big boss has asked me to do a prototype of some informational content to go on our website, which means I get to research and write serious copy! For public viewing!

And...my coat is now about two thirds finished.

I been busy awright...

I'm the boss

I thought it went pretty well actually.

Aiming to get in at 8.30, to give me time to set up the work for the new temporary employees before they started for the day, I accidentally arrived at an eye-smarting 8.15am. (And then I had a shortened lunch break and forgot to leave early - so it was a long day for me.)

I co-presented their "induction" i.e. where the toilets and kitchen are, what breaks they're entitled to, and - crucially - how to do their job, and only made two unintentional spoonerisms. And didn't forget anything really important.

Then I got them to team up (the boy was left on his own, probably because he was visibly twice as old as the others and acted like he knew what he was doing) so they could get to know each other and also "spot" each other (spot each other's mistakes, that is). What a great idea that turned out to be. Pity I can't take credit for it; it was the boy's idea.

He called me Sweetie once, but I think we got away with it.

Who's the boss?

The boy has this little game he plays with TLM sometimes. When she starts bossing him around, he'll give her a look and say "TLM - who's the boss here?". If she points to me, the boy will smile indulgently and nod - and then ask her again until she points to him.

Well, for the next fortnight I will literally be the boy's boss. Yep, that's right. We've hired him to join the little team of busy bees for that little project I posted about earlier. He'll be a part-timer of course, since TLM is only in daycare for a few hours per day. And he'll have to keep a low profile and avoid acting like he knows a lot.

It's going to be interesting.

I soldiered on

I knew it was going to be a really busy day at work today, so I gobbled up my medications and packed some Codral as well (that's the stuff that makes your cold symptoms go away so you can attend your daughter's wedding / spend a day at the office / still take that beach vacation). And I had a good day of it too, with only occasional telltale coughs, sneezes and wheezes.

Most of the day was spent interviewing applicants for a short project we are trying to get finished. I've never really been involved in the hiring process before (except as an applicant), so it was really interesting how different an impression you can get about a person from their CV, from talking to them, and from getting them to do an actual task for you.

For instance, there was one application which looked only so-so; there wasn't much in it that told us she could do the job. But we decided to interview her anyway. And she came across as being potentially really useful, because she seemed to have done similar work before and said all the right things about the importance of attention to detail. But after we came back to check how she'd gone with the little test we'd prepared - what a disaster! It looked as though she'd never used a spreadsheet before.

So after 7 back-to-back interviews, a run through all the test results and a debrief, I had to sit through a long meeting and didn't get out of there until 5 (I normally finish at 4.30).

So I guess I have to hand it to the drug-making folks who make Codral. It sure did work today.

Breathless

"I've been coughing since June", I told the doctor. And I have, though there were moments when it seemed to get better - just before another virus came along and made it worse again. Lately, I've have been deliberately looking my worst when visiting the doctors', just to make sure they take my illnesses seriously. This morning I looked like a vampire, though not as glamorous.

The doctor listened to my chest as I tried to breathe deeply - I managed two before collapsing into the kind of scary-arse hacking that, in old movies, means you've got TB. Apparently it quite alarmed him (the boy was there to see).

So now I have a new, stronger asthma preventer, some cough syrup, antibiotics for the chest infection and another course of Prednisone. On the plus side, I already feel heaps better than I did 4 hours ago.

It's got me thinking that I really ought to do something about my asthma. I used to be able to blow a 700 on the peak flow meter, no problem. Now I'm lucky to get over 400. I can't afford the time or money to resume my pre-TLM gym regime, which is probably the thing that really helped me. And I can't kick the boy out of the house either (nor can I make him give up smoking, because really only he can make that decision). Maybe, when I'm better, I could try swimming a couple of times per week.

Or maybe I should just buy myself a packet of face masks and spend my sewing time cleaning the house. Ugh.

An early spring

For once, the skimpy dresses in floral chiffon that decorate every women's dress shop window, are not entirely out of sync with the weather. In other words, we've been having some pretty nice weather lately.

We are having an early spring. Apparently this doesn't necessarily translate to a longer-than-usual spring, just an early one - which ultimately means an early end to summer. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying the clothes-drying temperatures. I just love sitting outside on the step, feeling the warmth on my skin, even if it means risking a sunburn-induced cold sore. It makes me wonder whether I can do a goth-summer kind of look, because florals really aren't my thing.

There's one other thing. If it is spring already, then I have officially been sick ALL winter.

Saturday night in bed

...and not in that way, either.

I had hoped to spend the evening putting my coat together - I finally got going with the construction last week (which is why I've been silent on the blogging front) and wanted to make the most of this evening alone (the boy was going to go out and watch the rugby with my ex-guy friends - I say "ex" because I never see them any more). I reckon I'm about 25-30 percent done, which is not bad considering I'm working with a fast-fraying fabric which leaves the carpet looking like it's had a shave but no-one's bothered to come sweep up the cuttings.

But TLM got me up a couple of times last night, so I'm feeling really tired - and now I have a headache.

So I'm going to bed early. G'night.

Because nagging works

I may be a superb example of paralysis-by-analysis, or maybe just plain lazy, but it's nice to know that I can perform when the pressure is on.

So while I have been a prize procrastinator regarding cutting my spring coat, fixing my men's shirt refashion and fixing my denim shell-top refashion (have decided to find 2 more pairs of old jeans and turn it into a dress, then dye the whole lot) - it wasn't the case for TLM's Dora skirt.

When she accompanied me to Spotlight a couple of weeks back, I promised to get her some Dora fabric. Then I left it lying around with very little intention of actually sewing with it in the near future. But TLM was having a very at-sixes-and-sevens post-birthday-party sort of day and insisted that I make her a skirt RIGHT NOW, please???

So I measured her up, thought about how to do it, and half an hour later she is wearing her brand new Dora skirt. Thank goodness she is not as fashion-aware as she is fussy.

In case you're wondering (which of course you are), all I did was fold the fabric in half across, sew a seam up the side, put a casing in the top for an elastic band, and hem it up. Only a four year old cutie could look pretty in it.

Thankful for accidental protection

Last night the boy wanted to get some takeaways for dinner, so we had some lamb rogan josh delivered. But I'd had a couple of cream-filled brandy snaps (the boy does like to spoil me with yummy junk food), so I wasn't that hungry.

So I did the sensible thing, which was to eat half of my lamb rogan josh and pack the rest away for my lunch tomorrow. (Never mind that, an hour later, I was hungry again and munching on toast and leftover roti).

I put it in one of those sealable plastic boxes that takeaways come in, inside a supermarket bag for extra protection - so it wouldn't stain the inside of my nice work bag.

Only, when I took it out at lunchtime, I was horrified to discover that the oily brown sauce had leaked through the plastic bag. Oh no! I gingerly ran my hand over the lining of my bag, anticipating the slosh of grease on my fingers. But I didn't feel anything. So I shrugged, thanked the gods for small miracles and went to put my lunch in the microwave oven.

It wasn't until the end of the day, when I was reached into my bag for my spare packet of lozenges, that I noticed the discoloration on one side of the green Fisherman's Friend packet. It was slightly oily and golden brown colour.

Donut cake

Tomorrow is TLM's birthday and, as is customary, we are (or rather, the boy is) bringing a cake in to daycare so she can celebrate with her daycare buddies.

This time last year, I baked a big chocolate cake, covered it in a rich chocolatey butter icing and topped it all off with loads of coloured M and M's.

This year it's the boy's turn to produce a cake. And he is bringing a mass of mini-donuts, all iced and covered in sprinkles, and sort of rounded up into a vague cake hill on a plate. Apparently it was TLM's idea.

Progress on my spring coat

Over the course of a week, I have managed to wash and dry my fabrics, and cut out the lining pieces. And I've only achieved this by breaking the tasks into manageable bits that could be done in 30 minute chunks of time.

But I have been putting off cutting out the actual coat pieces, and this is because I did something kinda dumb - I bought fabric with a plaid-like weave, which means all the bits have to match up.
(It's over on the right - an Italian cotton black and white houndstoothy thing with subtle pink lines running through in a criss-cross fashion). I did consider putting the fabric aside for another project and buy something easier to work with, but I don't want to have to go out and spend more money and - hey - it was on sale for only about 6 bucks per metre. So I will persist.

Earliness is all relative

A friend and I are are organising a weekend playdate (for our respective kids, that is) via email.

"Is 9am good for you?" she asks.

Gawd, I think, that's a bit blimmin' early. So I suggest 10am instead.

And then I remember that it was not that long ago when TLM and I would be knocking around at 8am, looking for somewhere to go.

It's nice to know that we don't entirely lose the ability to sleep in, after having kids.

Soon to be 4

By this time last year I would have already booked a venue for TLM's birthday party, emailed invites to all her friends, decided on what food would be available, and possibly already have opened up the present that her Nanna sent from England.

But due to massive poorliness on my part, followed by yet more poorliness on the boy's part, nothing was organised - at all - until last night.

So, with only a week and a half's notice, we now know where and when the party will be. The boy has bought some invitations and party hats. Now all I have to do is decide whether I can manage the rice bubble slices and chocolate cake without coughing all over them.

Party pooped

There has been a run of kids' birthday parties lately, including two just this weekend. And of course, I have left the present-buying till the last minute.

So yesterday, I spent the morning buying a present for one of TLM's friends, plus groceries. Then we had a one hour break before it was time to go to the party. And right after that it was time to visit the cousins for dinner.

As for today, I spent all morning walking my mum around the produce market and supermarket at a soul-deadening pace, followed by a rushed half hour looking for a present for today's birthday party (because I was stupid and didn't just buy two presents yesterday). There was a 20-minute break for lunch, and then we were off for the next party. After the party, I checked the time and realised (with much joy) that I would have enough time to scoot off to Spotlight to look for the coat sewing pattern I want so much. But then the boy texted and asked me to get some rolls and stuff for tea. So we didn't get home till 5pm, when I discovered that I was supposed to also buy fags and wine for the boy ( who suffers terribly from withdrawal if he doesn't get his hourly smoke).
Which meant I had to go to the supermarket again.

Shattered, I was.
But then I picked up the new sewing pattern for my coat (not the one I really wanted, but one which will do), got interested and found some energy again.
Still, an early night methinks.

Perhaps I should be flattered

It's 9pm and we're watching Tuesday night's episode of Outrageous Fortune.

The phone rings. I curse, then get up to answer it.

"Hello?" I ask in my still-husky voice.
"Ah...could I speak to your mum or dad please?" says the voice on the other end.

!!!

"Um...no." I say.
"Oh, why?"
"Because..they don't live here. Who are you?"
"Oh, this is just a marketing call. Sorry, bye."

It was very slightly surreal.

I didn't buy the coat

Thanks for your opinions, oh wise readers.
I have decided not to buy that coat.
The boy thought it made me look like a little girl in an oversized grown-up's blazer. Not that I have anything about oversized as a fashion style, only it isn't so styley if the wearer is short enough to pass for an actual little girl (albeit not as smooth-faced or bright-eyed).

Also, although I like the green - it's not my preferred colour for a coat. I'd rather it was a deep plum or a bright violet.

And, to borrow from the Project Runway judges - it doesn't look expensive enough.

But it has given me the idea of sewing my own coat. I like these two - the orange one in the top picture and the pink one in the bottom picture:


Of course I would start with, say, a dark denim spring coat - then, if all went well, go on to a nice tweed winter coat in a similar style. By the time I got through all that cutting and fitting and sewing and re-sewing, it would be the right time to wear winter coats again!

Or maybe that is too ambitious for someone who has only made one good buttonhole in the last 20 years...

Should I buy this coat?

It's 100% wool, and is actually quite slimming when I'm not wearing it buttoned up over three layers of clothing (including a thick merino/possum cardigan). It's just the right length for me too - just above the knee. And the wool is lovely and soft. And once I get small shoulder pads put in, the shoulders won't look quite so wobbly.
It's at half price too (plus the cost of putting the shoulder pads in, taking in the belt band at back, and shortening the sleeves).

But even at half price, it'll still cost me almost 400 smackeroos.

The boy's idea of a joke

"I've got a present for you", said the boy, getting up from his chair. Usually when he says that, it means one of two things:

1. a cake, or
2. a DVD.

He seemed to be heading for the fridge, so I tried to guess whether he'd got me an apple slice, a cheesecake, a chocolate-iced banana cake or...something else.
Then he abruptly changed direction and headed towards the DVD shelves.

Ooh, I hoped that it was Project Runway Season Two!

But no. It was "The Librarian". The trilogy. I'd heard of the first one; it was released during the time I was studying to be a librarian (and failed - TLM was conceived). It sounded awful and I had no idea they'd made two sequels.

So, the boy's reasoning is that we will enjoy the movies because:

1. I used to be a librarian-in-training, and
2. he'd heard they were pretty bad in a good way.

We shall see...we shall see.

Maybe I should have stuck to the bag idea.

So, here is the shell top I made out of the boy's thrown-away designer jeans. It's pretty wrinkled, which doesn't help it's appearance.
Basically I used the bodice part of a dress pattern, New Look 6824, and extended the pattern pieces so that it ended at roughly hip length rather than waist length. I had to adjust it for fit, and omitted the zip because I was able to get it on and off okay without one. Then I made the mistake of turning the classic shell neckline into a v-neck, thinking it would be more flattering. But all I did was make it look less like a shell top.
The binding was there to prevent fraying and also to give me practice in using bias binding - but it doesn't really go with the denim does it? Although once it's on, you can only see the binding at the hem.

Oh yes, and because the jeans had holey knees, I couldn't get long enough pieces of denim to make the top long enough for me. So I tried patching two pieces at the front. On a thinner person, this might have been okay.

What I was pleased about, was that I found a good place to put the original back pockets. I think they give the top a bit of a flare (not flair).

Tragically, the finished product looks rubbish on me. Perhaps if I had picked a darker denim and if the jeans weren't frayed at the knees (so I could avoid that horizontal seam at the waist), and hadn't ruined the neckline - maybe then it would be okay. Or maybe princess line styles don't suit women with wide waists.

So I'm gonna put in back on the refashion pile until I think of something else to do with it.

Turning it into a satchel probably would've worked out better.

The coat that got away

A couple of months ago, when I was looking for a nice winter wool coat, I found a lovely one in violet (the colour). It had a nice silhouette - semi-fitted to the waist, then flaring out to below my knees, with slightly puffy cuffed sleeves. On the other hand it was too long (on a normal-height woman it would be above knee length) and the sleeves were so long that my hands disappeared into them. Plus, I wasn't sure whether the colour would be horrendously dated by next winter.

I also didn't buy it because I'd just spent too much money some fab black riding boots.

But my mind kept wandering back to that coat, and every time I browsed the Max online shop, I'd look for it in case it went on sale.

It went on sale - at half price!
But I only noticed when I went into the shop looking for a hat to wear home in the gale force winds. And they didn't have it in my size any more.

I must stay strong, and wait for the next really nice coat instead of settling for something fatteningly double-breasted or boringly camel or something that fits like a rice sack.

This time next week I might be shouting

I might complain a lot about my mum always ringing me up and nagging me to get back to the doctor's, but it works. The nagging, that is. I went back to the doctor's this morning, just for a follow-up to make sure that I really am getting better, and although my virus and bacterial infections are pretty much down and dusted - I still have a way to go with the coughing, wheezing and raspy hoarseness.

So now I have a course of prednisone, which I think is some super-steroid to help supplement my asthma medication. Hopefully when my voice returns, it will still sound female.

On the other hand, I've heard that many men are very attracted to women with deep, husky voices.

I miss my voice

Quite apart from (still) not being able to read to TLM or sing her songs at bedtime, I miss not having a fully working voice:

• It means I can't just shout "Thanks, driver!" when I get off the bus, which everyone does except for the really impolite and the non-English-speaking.
• It means I can't join in when Mr Finance Manager and Ms Admin Support are trading quips. I'm normally good for a laugh, you know.
• Quality time with TLM is pretty hard to achieve when I get home from work and by then I can only whisper.
• I can still smile if I'm feeling cheerful, but a good vocal blasting of a silly song just can't be beat.

On the up

I went back to work today, because:
1. I have taken about 14 days of sick leave
2. I haven't had the shakes in the last 3 mornings
3. My eyelids no longer look like small marshmallows (actually, small pillows might be more accurate)
4. I was worried that work would find someone to take over, who'd actually turn up.

Unfortunately the boy is now sick, either with a variation of my bug or with something new and exciting. This meant I had to to the daycare drop-off. By the time I'd returned the car home, I was all tired out. But I was all dressed for work so I thought, what the hell - may as well go to work anyway.

And it wasn't too bad. My co-workers cheered when I walked into the office, and only one of them visibly avoided getting too close to me and my germs. Although I did end up leaving early, because my head and throat started to hurt around midday.

TLM seems to have become quite used to having Daddy around all the time, instead of Mummy. she tends to call for him rather than me, and knows not to ask me to sing to her at night. It's only very slightly sad for me because I know that the boy had been on the vice versa until he was recession-hit.

Let the right one in

Finally, we got around to watching the Swedish vampire film, Let the Right One In.

It's about a lonely 12 year old boy, one of those sensitive and strange types who gets bullied a lot, and his friendship with a 12 year old girl vampire. Oskar meets Eli when she moves in next door with her dad (who seems to be human). Dad's a serial murderer, it's his job to bring home blood so that she doesn't have to. Only he's not very good at it any more and eventually Eli must go out hunting or starve. At the same time, Oskar and Eli become close and she encourages him to hit back at his bullying tormentors. When he does, it feels like he has crossed the line into a life of violence.

Vampirism is not at all romantic in this movie. When Eli brings attacks a local, it's like watching a big cat bring down a zebra. And even when her mouth isn't covered in gore, she's no ethereal beauty (like Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies) - she's just an anemic kid with dark, curly hair.

I also liked some of the vampire mythology, where it differs from that of Buffy (and other vamp stories), like what happens if you don't invite a vampire into your home but they come in anyway.

There's also a look at the darker side of school-yard bullying, where the physical cruelty is far worse than I would have expected in real life.

So it's a love story, one with a happy ending. Sort of darkly beautiful.

Home remedies

Ever since last weekend, when my mum's special cold 'n' flu remedy backfired on me so horribly, I've had to take stock of all the other "mum's own" type of health wisdom that I've grown up with.

Like :

• don't wash your hair when it's that time of the month
• wear more clothes when it's cold. No, another layer, and make it a woolly one
• don't let TLM play with cold water if it's a cold day or if she's poorly (obviously doesn't apply to me because I don't play with water)
• drink plenty of hot lemon and honey if you've got a cold (this, I still unreservedly believe in)
• don't let your head get cold
• don't have cold drinks with hot food

But, if I can't believe in my mum's own health fixes, whose can I believe in?

Over the last two weeks I've been sat on the couch in my PJs, watching home remedy recipes being demonstrated on morning TV. Some of them rely heavily on whisky, which would only make me go bright red in the face and then fall over wheezing.

The others make much use of raw onions, unbelievably large amounts of raw garlic, lemon juice and various spices. I don't know if I'd want to go down that route unless I'm sure they'll work - they may or may not boost my immunity, but no-one would be willing to stand close enough to me to expose me to their germs anyway.

Do you have home remedies that really work?

Notes from the sick bed

• We have had in our possession, a copy of the DVD Let the right one in. It's a vampire movie which is supposed to be pretty damn good and I am keen to see it. Unfortunately, I've been going to bed at 8.30 every night, and when I'm awake I'm sort of semi-sleepy. So we still haven't seen it.
• Apparently one of my work colleagues is just as sick as I am, which makes me feel better. Not because I want her to be unwell, but because 2 weeks is an awfully long time to be off sick and now I know it's not an improbably long time.
• TLM has been an angel. She tells me she misses me not being sick, and tries to entertain me. She only very occasionally tries to climb on me mid-cough.
• I saw in the Sunday paper's society pages, that the book launch I missed last week was packed full of relatives and famous (in New Zealand) writers. For a second or two, I wistfully wondered whether my mug should have been there along with Fiona Kidman, Patricia Grace and Alison Wong (whose book it was). Then I realised that I am neither famous enough nor photogenic enough to get my photo in the society pages anyway.
• Sorry I missed your wedding, Flying Kiwi. But even if I had not decided that it was too far to go without the boy and TLM, I wouldn't have made it anyway due to my super-lurgy.

And now it's back to the daytime telly...

I can't believe it's not swine flu!

Most of yesterday was spent sitting on the couch under a super-thick sleeping bag, drifting off to sleep when I could and feeling generally bad. Then the boy noticed I was looking dehydrated, and tossed me a large bottle of sports drink. A litre and a half (I think) later, I was actually walking around, feeling awake and even did some dishes!

I was much better today too (though maybe only as well as I was last Monday when I went back to work before promptly feeling crappy again). Then my mum showed up with an antique silver coin, a dozen eggs and a brand new bottle of eucalyptus and menthol oil. It had been far too frustrating trying to tell my deaf mum that it hurt my throat to talk to her over the phone.

It might have been a bad idea to let her rub that oil on me though. Soon after she left, the vapours started to burn my throat and cause my eyes to swell up. And then there was the stench of eggs and eucalyptus that took an hour to clear out of the living room.

But I know she meant well.

Time to think about spring already?

So, New Zealand's fashion designers have started unveiling their spring collections already.

Even if I weren't sick, I'd still find it incredibly hard to get interested in spring clothes, when it's still cold enough for Arctic (fake) furs.

She reads me bedtime stories

It's still hard for me to speak without straining my voice, so reading to TLM before she goes to bed hasn't been very easy. I did ask the boy do it once or twice, but he's also doing her bath and bedtime songs, so he's been reluctant to take on the bedtime reading as well.

But I have come up with a solution which is working really well right now - I ask TLM to read the stories to me. All of her library books have been read to her multiple times already, so it's no problem for her to recite - almost word for word - the entire 100 or so words in each picture book (she gets three).

It's really lovely being read to.

"work from home"

I must have overdone it yesterday. This morning I was in no condition to walk all the way down the road to the bus stop, let alone spend the rest of the day working and trying to cough *discretely*.

So I rang in sick again, and said I would try "working from home".

But to be honest, after a super-efficient Monday there wasn't actually that much work left for today. So I have probably only managed a couple of hours, max, of bona fide work-related activity.

The rest of the time I have been browsing TradeMe, looking for nice winter coats, cardigans, and vintage-y dresses.

So I don't know whether I'll actually get paid for today - I've already used up all of my sick leave until the end of the year!

Back to the coalface tomorrow

It's been well over a week since I left work early, feeling too virus-ridden to continue. And my doctor's certificate says I'd only needed to be off work until last Friday, so I kinda have to show up tomorrow morning.

I feel a bit anxious about going in to work - even though I didn't get any sleep-ins (due to the boy's vampiric body clock), I was comforted by the fact that I didn't have to shower, or make myself look nice, or act alert, or talk to anyone. Also, if I accidentally choke on my own spit and spend the next five minutes coughing up lung cells, then there's only my immediate family to be disturbed by it.

What a pity I hardly get to spend time at home when I'm healthy.

From fashionistas to the literati

Yep, still sick, though no longer feel like razor blades inhabit my gullet; still sound like an elderly alcoholic Rod Stewart impersonator who's been on 2 packs a day all her life.

But perked up somewhat when I saw the boy - most wonderful spouse who has nursed me tenderly all week and only occasionally complained about the snoring - had brought home Season One of Project Runway on DVD. Although a rabid fan from the first episode I saw, we didn't actually get around to watching the show until about two thirds of the way into Season One, so much of this is new and exciting.

Have hungrily watched the first two disks already (out of four) - interesting that Heidi sounds so much less robotic than in later seasons. Like she got her confidence and decided to just be herself?

Also, there is much more focus on the models in Season One. We even get to see the emotional reactions of the models who get eliminated at the beginning of each episode. I wonder if the producers stopped this because they couldn't find another flakey girl like Morgan to entertain us and frustrate the designers.

I'm hoping to go to Alison Wong's book launch on Monday. Though obviously if there's a risk of phlegming out the literati I'll just go home and ask her to save me a couple of signed copies of As the earth turns silver.

Too sick to surf

In the past when I've been sick at home, being sick hasn't stopped me from washing up the dishes or hanging out the laundry or whatever. But this time I wasn't even up to surfing the 'Net. The only activity I was fit for, was watching breakfast tv followed by Oprah and Dr Phil.

When I went to see the doctor (again) on Wednesday morning, my throat was so sore it felt like it was full of tiny little razor blades. And then my ears started to throb while I was still in the waiting room. I must've look quite pathetic, with my eyes all misted over with pain and self-pity. But I reckoned that I may as well look as ill as possible so I could get the rest of the week off work, so I didn't even bother applying any normalising make-up before I left the house.

So anyway, the cold that floored me had ushered in a form of strep throat. I've heard of it, but didn't know anything about it. So I Googled it, as you do. And guess what - sometime it turns into a flesh-eating disease!

At long last, something finished...

...but I don't yet have a photo to show you.

I was off sick on Friday, soon after I started sneezing so hard it left bite marks on my tongue (there were definitely a few times when I just about decked myself on a nearby table or kitchen bench).

There was a small window of opportunity to sew before I began coughing so ferociously I nearly asked the boy to go out and buy me a pack of Tena Ladys. And in that time I finished the shell top that I made from the boy's old pair of faded summer jeans.

But I will have to wait for the next window of opportunity before taking a to post up on this blog. (And it will probably be next summer before I will get to wear it.)

One thing I have learned is that, if I have a chance to re-design something that I sew, my approach to it is much like how I used to approach my painting. I do it in fits and starts, with lots of thinking and re-thinking (and sometimes re-doing) in between. Sewing like this is much more fun than picking something easy and just following the instructions, but it sure does make the project take an awfully long time.

Anyway, something for you to look forward to eh?

Bug of the month

It turns out that my co-worker did not have the swine flu after all, just a bad cold. If that's the case, then a whole week's quarantine has not stopped the rest of the office from getting it - and now it's my turn.

It seems I get sick with something every month. And I've still got my bum-sized elbow too (though it's almost fixed now).

An elbow the size of a bum

On Thursday evening I noticed a pimple on my right elbow. The boy joked about my having teenage elbows as I squeezed the pimple, careful not to aim it at either him or TLM.

On Thursday night I noticed that the area around my elbow was pink and tender. In bed, I couldn't lie on that side because it hurt my arm.

On Friday morning it had swelled up and felt like someone had lit a small fire under it.

Then I went to the doctor's, got a double dose of antibiotics and now it's normal size again. But it's still just the right temperature for a pocket warmer.

Thank goodness I'm left-handed.

It's all fun and games until Hollywood starts moving in on your culture

When my brother and I were kids, we used to watch Kung Fu - you know, that American tv show that starred a bald white man as a Chinese martial arts hero. It didn't bother us too much that it wasn't a Chinese actor in that part, and any historical inaccuracies went right over our naive little heads.

But when the boy and I watched The Mummy - the tomb of the Dragon Emperor, I was bothered.

It wasn't because the Chinese characters were played by non-Chinese pretenders, because - as far as I could tell - they weren't (though they may well have slipped a few Japanese, Koreans etc in there and I'd be none the wiser).

It wasn't because the story was all about a bunch of unwelcomed white folks saving the Chinese (and the rest of the world, presumably) from themselves.

It wasn't even because young Alex, the grown-up son of Rick and Evy, hooks up romantically with a mysterious young Chinese woman who will probably be utterly unmarriageable after he's dumped her (and he will - he's a young white man from the 20th Century).

It was because the film is set in a specific time and place that is frankly not a very pride-worthy piece of Anglo-Chinese history. It's after the Second World War and before the Communist takeover (okay, there's a really huge chunk of Chinese history that is not particularly pride-worthy), and China is basically owned by the English, the Americans and the French. Shanghai is beautiful and glamorous, but the nice bits are closed to the locals, who are mentioned in the same breath as dogs. Many scenes are set in a Shanghai nightclub; it's filled with foreigners and the few Chinese are probably "escorts".

Despite the lightness of the plot, the special effects and the relief that Alex's mother actually looks old enough to have a 20 year old son (Maria Bello, who took the part because Rachel Weiz knew she was - and looked - far too young), this film was not so fun for me.

I wonder what the Egyptians thought of the first Mummy movies.

TLM's first sleepover

I never know what to get the boy for his birthday, which is why I always ask him. And if he does tell me, and it's something I can get him, then he kinda expects another - surprise - present as well. Well this time, he decided it would be nice to send TLM off to the relatives for the night so that we could have one-on-one time with no pressure to get up early in the morning.

And we did.

We expected that TLM would be all for it. And we expected she'd be really excited about it and possibly not actually sleep at all. I really didn't expect that she'd let me go without at least a little cry of insecurity. But she seemed really okay with me leaving - maybe because she and her beloved cousins were busy making up her blow-up bed, and possibly planning midnight mayhem.

I'm just about to go pick her up now, and then I'll know how much sleep she got.
BTW, I got the boy a Wii Fit. I think he liked it.

Piggy pox

Is swine flu the piggies' revenge for their horrific treatment in battery farms?

We had a little of excitement at work today, when the big boss rounded us all up for an emergency staff meeting. One of my colleagues is off sick with suspected swine flu!

To be honest, I'm not at all convinced the poor woman has it. She sounded like she had a minor cold, and probably it was only her recent trip to Australia that alerted the folks at the medical centre. I hope she doesn't have it because she's pregnant and I wouldn't want her baby to be traumatised in utero.

But on the other hand, the prospect of being quarantined at home for a whole week - on full pay, I'd expect - is not exactly going to give me nightmares tonight. I wouldn't expect the pox to make me any sicker than that month-long cold I had not long ago. And the boy and TLM wouldn't have to stay at home with me - they'd get their Tamiflu and take off to the library or the shops or something, leaving me lots and lots of lovely sewing time...

I think maybe I could do with a holiday.

Rubbish is smelly when it's not encased in plastic

So I was at the supermarket with my mum, and I was toting 4 of those reusable grocery bags with me. And my mum asks me why I don't want the (still) free plastic bags that they give you at the checkout. So I try to explain to her that the world already has too many plastic bags clogging it's oceans and filling the landfills. And that is why the boy and I use the reusables.

But what do you use for holding your rubbish? she asks.

Um...the old supermarket bags that we still have from previous shopping trips, I tell her.
Well, if you've got so many then you can give me some. I have lots of rubbish and not enough rubbish bags.

And then I remember that we are actually running low on those very instuments of planetary destruction. And what will we do when we run out? Why, we'll leave our reusable bags at home on our next trip to the supermarket, that's what. Because we sure as hell don't want to start paying for rubbish bags, do we?

So...does this make us namby-pamby play-at-eco-awareness semi-lefty hypocrits?

The hang-onto-it society

I have had no luck finding "gems" in the op shops. The stuff in the Salvation Army shop is mostly ex-Glassons and other retailers that specialise in the cheap 'n' cheerful. The stuff in the Red Cross shop is more of the same (though I did once find a Robyn Mathieson dress that was, unfortunately, a terrible colour for me).

And yet, bloggers across America seem to unearth vintage pillowcases, antique lacy bridal gowns and 60's retro fabrics all the time - and for very little.

Either I'm just terribly bad at snagging bargains (which, I'll admit, I am), or New Zealanders tend to hang onto their stuff for as long as possible - before selling it off on TradeMe. If our car-owning culture is anything to go by (i.e. we hang onto a car until the bodies fall apart from rust, and them try to flog it off to a student for a few hundred bucks), then this is an equally likely explanation.

I think I prefer the latter.

Dumb...just dumb

I was reading the Sunday paper this morning, in between dropping my mum off at church and waiting for her to finish up, when I came across the dumbest newspaper article I've seen in at least a week.

The article was called something like "What will you do when the recession ends?" The dumb thing was not even the question.

The dumb thing was that, they must have asked about 20 different people this question - but no one of them was someone who has been directly affected by the recession. Like, why the heck didn't they bother asking someone who'd be laid off recently?!

The fruit of my loins gets the fruit of my labours

I found out about a discount fabric place just out of the central city, so I spent a couple of Queen's Birthday hours looking around there. Fortunately, TLM was quite happy to accompany me, even though there was absolutely no promise of Dora fabrics (there weren't any). She even went around giving cuddles to lucky rolls of fleece and silkys. She was very keen indeed on the costume section, and at one point I worried that I would end up buying a length of sparkly sequinned stuff for goodness knows what.
It's probably not surprising that I ended up spending far more than I intended to, but I did get quite a few items:
- 3 x 2m lengths of knit (including one of merino), from which I intend to sew at least 3 winter tops
- some white cotton and interfacing, for collars for the two refashions I am still procrastinating over (the bogan shell top and the mens shirt -->women's top)
- a bag crammed with trims of all sorts, which ought to be handy for all kinds of TLM-related sewing
- and a length of pink polar fleece for TLM's scarf.

We made the scarf that afternoon, based on some instructions I found in a library copy of Sew What! - Fleece. We cut a piece of the pink polar fleece, cut tassles into each end and hand-sewed some sequinned, pale green trim at each end. TLM chose both the fleece colour and the trim.

I think she liked it. At the very least, she doesn't have an excuse to wear my scarves now.

Sales, schmales

Due to the economic recession, there are big fat sales everywhere. Shops are discounting heavily in order to lure in customers and move stock. Airlines are offering dirt cheap fares and holiday packages.

Yeah right.

I have yet to find a shoe shop that is willing to sell me a pair of good quality black leather riding boots for less that $350. That's not a bad price, but it's not a discount price either.

And now it looks like I will have to miss out on going to a wedding in Aussie because the cheapest return airfare from here to there (and that's not including an additional internal flight plus a bus ride) is still around $600. I'm pretty sure that's the normal fare.

Am I just out of the discounts loop or something? Because at this rate it looks like I'll be staying home and sending a really big wedding gift instead.

Starr...trekkin'...across the univerrrrrrse...

TLM's best mate lives right across the road, and her parents are just as keen as we are, on the idea of baby-sitting swaps.
So TLMBFF's (TLM's Best Friend Forever - is that what BFF stands for?) mum is coming over tonight. And the boy and I are heading out shortly for dinner and a movie.

Once upon a time my ideal date would have been a swish dinner and an arty (i.e. subtitled) movie. But one time, my date took me to see a Japanese film with many awkward sex scenes in it. I thought it a bit much for a first date, though I'm sure he was as surprised as I was.

Therefore, I am perfectly fine with the fact that tonight we will go and see the new Star Trek movie. It will be a shot of nostalgia for me, and hopefully sufficient special effects for the boy. We might even get to have dinner somewhere nice, rather than at the boring food hall downstairs from the cinema.

I'm still trying to decide whether to go all out and wear some clean jeans for the occasion. Maybe even some lippy...

go on, it'll be fun!

I saw the poster a couple of weeks ago, advertising the Baby Pops - a one hour show for little kids, in which the local orchestra plays kiddie tunes like Twinkle Twinkle and Old MacDonald, and the audience are invited to get up close to all those bassoons, violins and trumpets.

It was mentioned on Thursday evening, and within minutes the boy had logged onto the ticketing website and booked two tickets for TLM and me. I reeled in horror at the $8 booking fee (almost a third of the total cost of the tickets), but figured it would be fun for TLM and only a once-a-year thing anyway.

And it was fun. The conductor was cheesy, the hostess was dressed like a young MacDonald and someone even stood by the entrance giving out conducting batons (plastic straws, actually) to the kids. We learned how to conduct ("Up...down...left...right...now faster...good!"), we practised our animal noises, we sang, we even had a chance at holding and playing a baby-sized violin. At least, I did all those things. TLM kept trying to hold my hands down and telling me to stop singing. I think she might have been embarrassed by me.

It took approximately 60 minutes to get out of the parking building, compared to about 15 minutes to actually drive home. If we ever get TLM to go again, someone else can bloody drive her.

Forgetting to be productive

I was thinking today, how handy it would be if there were pockets in more of my clothes. And then I thought it would be really handy to have a little zip-up purse-y thingy to hold tampons, lip balm and all those other things that I might want with me when I use the Ladies', but which don't easily and discretely fit into one hand (and which a pocket would be really useful for).

So in my lunch break I went into one of those beautiful-things shops, and saw some cute little zip-up purse-y things, and made tsk-tsk noises when I saw the prices of those things. I could sew one up myself and it wouldn't cost me anything, I thought. And as I walked home in the icy wind with multiple layers of fleece about me, I pondered whether to make it out of bleached denim or the lime green quilting cotton. In my head, I alternated between choosing a plastic zip, and the metal zip from the boy's discarded jeans (the ones which are halfway to becoming a corporate-bogan shell top), and tried to decide whether my purse-y thing should be cylindrical, cube-like or flat.

Boring as I am, I was actually excited about making my own tampon holder.

And then...I got home and completely forgot about it. Now it's time to go to bed and the most productive thing I've done is put TLM to bed and wash some dishes.

Hog Hell

I remember the first and only time I'd ever been in a battery piggery - I was in Yorkshire, staying with a nice boy I'd met on holiday and his mum invited me to go for guided walk around the farm. The smell was so appalling and clingy that afterwards I had to shower and put all of the clothes I'd been wearing, into the washing machine.

But the really appalling thing was the size of the pig pens. The pigs were penned up in small groups and even smaller crates. The sows were penned in so tightly they couldn't turn around - I was told this prevented them from accidentally squashing their piglets.

And I smugly assumed that piggies in New Zealand ran wild and free-ish, like our deer, sheep and cattle.

Then I saw some film footage last night on 60 Minutes Sunday, that made me realise how wrong I've been all this time. The pigs in this farm - and apparently it's not unique - were confined one to a crate, and the crates were so small they could not turn around. Some crates looked big enough to allow the pig to lie down in despair, others didn't. Sows lay effectively immobilied for years like big, pink piglet machines.

It was pretty much as bad as the hen batteries I've seen, only worse because pigs are supposed to be even more intelligent than dogs.

It was so upsetting, and this is all legal. I just don't understand why pig farmers aren't subject to the same rules of humane treatment as other livestock in New Zealand.
So, no more pork sausages on the menu. And we will get getting all our bacon from Freedom Farms from now on.

Edited 23 May - Sorry Antoinette, the TV show I saw this on was Sunday, not 60 Minutes (those hour-long current affairs shows all look the same to me). I couldn't find the show on Youtube, but I did find some similar footage - also received by SAFE - from another piggery in New Zealand (about a year old), here's a link to a news story following the screening and here's a piece about it from SAFE.

Just one of those senior moments

"Hello, Healthline. How can I help you?"
"I'm ringing about my elderly mother. She's got one of those pill organisers? Well my brother re-filled her week's worth of pills tonight, including the ones for today. And she must have seen all those pills in the Saturday compartment and thought she hadn't taken them yet. So...um.. she's taken her day's medication twice over."
"Oh, bless..."

It turned out to be okay, but I'm glad I'm not there right now, listening to her accuse her offspring of trying to off her.

M'am

TLM's got the pukes real bad, but I'm going to post about me instead. Because I, at least, am not sick (yay!).

The most appalling thing happened on my walk home from work tonight. A young woman called me "m'am".

I understand "m'am" is fairly commonly used in the States, but here in New Zealand it's not. And when a young woman calls me "m'am", I can imagine how it must feel to a not-quite-pensioner when a boy scout insists on helping her across the street.

First, I wondered whether my outfit made me look matronly - I was wearing a knee-length sheepskin-style coat over a bright green tunic dress and black top, black tights and black ankle boots. Was the effect a little too much like I was trying to relive the 60's (I'm not that old)? Or maybe, because I had my hood up, my face was in shadow and it brought out the dark circles under my eyes?

Anyway, it's a bit of a shock when, for the last 30 years, people have assumed I was much younger than I really was.

Mothers Day review - Pretty relaxing, overall

TLM and the boy got me a lovely pink Mothers Day card with fluffy bits on it (you can tell who did the choosing), and made me bacon and banana hotcakes for lunch. I'm still waiting for my Wii Fit, which was bandied about as a potential Mothers Day present, but all in all it was pretty relaxing and lovely. I even got to spend a couple of hours sewing, which is pretty rare.

I've been trying to refashion a discarded pair of the boy's Lacoste summer jeans, into a shell top for myself. It might all turn out horribly bogan and unflattering, but I can't fight the urge to make it anyway. Trying to find creative solutions to the lack of fabric (there's too much of me to cover, there are rips in the knees and the whole front legs are kinda worn, I don't have a "stash" to fall back on, and I don't want to go hunting around in the op shops because the idea of wearing another man's pants on my body (unless it's the boy's) feels a bit yucky) occupies my mind in an enjoyable way.

I didn't forget to get a card for my mum, though I'm ashamed to say that that's pretty much all I did. It's not like in my younger days, when I would lovingly hand-sew a pink elephant soft toy and watch her casually toss it on the sofa to be farted on at the next opportunity. Nowadays I want Mothers Day to be fun for me, which means not spending too much time with her (harsh, but sometimes true). Before you lambast me for the ungrateful daughter that I am, I have already volunteered my services on Wednesday - my day off - to ferry her to any number of banks, supermarkets and purveyors of very large sacks of rice.

We still haven't found any spots on TLM, but she was grumpier than usual - either it's that time of the month, or she's got another bug coming.

I am not one of the elongated people

Apparently, in fashion illustration you aim to draw people with quite different body proportions than you would in other kinds of illustration. (This one was swiped from the Cornell University website - I hope they don't mind.)

You have to admit they are hardly realistic, but I can see why they'd do it - to sell clothes. Everyone knows that just about anything will look good on a 2-dimensional version of a flat-chested Barbie.

But what I don't understand is, why do sewing books and magazines - aimed at people just sewing for themselves and their families - tell you to draw the same way? Surely it is much more useful for 5' tall, cello-shaped woman with a bit of a tummy to draw all of her design ideas onto figure drawings that are also 5' tall, cello-shaped and with a bit of a tummy.

spotty what

We had a worrisome evening last week when TLM suddenly got extreme shivers right after her bath. She felt too toasty to the touch and couldn't eat all the next day.

She seems fine now, but the folks at her daycare said to be on the lookout for measles. So we've been keeping an eye out for the itchy scratchies.

And now, I've just found out that her best-est friend is down with chicken pox.

Well, they always say that if you're gonna get sick it's best to do so when you're young and able to bounce back with nary a hacking cough.

Good bargain

I went to Arthur Toyes yesterday, on the off-chance that they were still having a half price sale on some of their sewing patterns.

There was a sign above the entrance announcing 50% off all New Look patterns, so I went through the whole catalogue and scribbled out a list of half a dozen potentials. They were, according to the catalogue cover, only $10.50 each. Score!

And then, after I'd selected two patterns to take home (and stash away for the day my cold gets better and I can think clearly enough to cut fabric safely), the nice old man behind the counter charged me only ten bucks for the 2 of them. He explained that the discount applied over and above the discounted price already there. Five dollar sewing patterns - super score!

And in case you're interested, the two I picked were 6824 and 6808. (Edit note: 6824 is the dress pattern below, not the one originally posted.)

Bad bargain

So, a while back we were in Borders and perusing the 3-for-2 table. And if you've been following this blog closely, you might recall that I settled on Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart, Bill Bryson's Shakespeare and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I really only wanted the latter 2 titles, but the Kiwi bargain hunter in me couldn't turn down the chance of a free third book, so I picked the Picoult even though she's not an author I've ever been attracted to.

Well as it happens, I loved the Bryson and the Diaz. But the Picoult is a total disappointment. Her book reminds me very much of John Grisham (of which I read The Firm and Pelican Brief and -yes, even a third book which was much worse than the first 2 and the one that made me realise what a waste of my life these books were).

And that is my conclusion - Picoult is the anxious parent's Grisham. One of the things I liked least about Change of Heart was its religious theme - priest suffering a crisis of faith, deathrow prisoner who performs miracles a la Green Mile, fat single female lawyer who can't find a boyfriend - oh wait, that last one's not religious...or is it?

And then the realisation that I've been ripped off. The 3-for-2 deal gave us the cheapest book for free. The cheapest of our trio was the Bryson, while the Picoult was the most expensive. If I'd just picked up the 2 books I wanted in the first place I probably would have spent less.

The deed is done

Today it was all down in writing, that from here on my working days will be 6 1/2 hours long (plus lunch break).
Funnily enough, TLM chose this morning to be clingy when it was time to leave her at daycare. It was almost as if she knew some changes were afoot.

The timing of my new hours could've been better, because I still have quite a fruity cough and I can imagine how off-putting it must be for my colleagues to hear me hacking away like a pack-a-day smoker or - no offense intended - a cystic fibrosis sufferer.

And I'm still pretty husky on the phone. I wonder whether some of the people I've been calling today, think I'm some sort of sexy, whisky-drinking Marlene Dietrich-y woman with a dark past. Or whether they just guessed that I have a cold.

toothy pegs

The boy took TLM to her very first visit to the dental nurse today. Apparently she was a model patient - sat in the chair, opened her mouth wide and let the nurse tinker around in there with her instruments of torture.

And TLM was given a badge of clean health - a big sticker that says "I have healthy teeth".

bacon come home

The boy, highly intelligent and useful as he is, is still looking for a job (so if you're looking for someone who is both super-geek and super-senior IT manager, let me know). Which means that soon we will be trying to live off half an income.

I feel I should be putting myself forward for full-time hours, and I know that my boss is keen on the idea of me being available for longer - rather than swanning out the door at 2.30 to walk home and pick up TLM from daycare. I have until Friday to sign and return my employment contract, and this would be the time to ask for increased work hours.

But I hate the thought of spending all day at work - even if I still take Wednesdays off - and hate even more the thought of whole days in which I scarcely see my own daughter. Also, if and when the boy gets another job, then we'd both be working all day and missing out on hanging out with our daughter.

So what I'm thinking of is this - that I propose increasing my work hours but still have Wednesdays off; getting the boy to take care of TLM during the hours she is not at daycare; and asking to re-negotiate my hours if and when the boy is working again.

Considering we are in what I would call an employers' market, do you think I'd have a good chance at getting what I want?

Better and worse

For a while there I had started to feel much better. On Sunday I even spent an hour cleaning the bathroom, including the bits I don't normally touch because I can't reach or don't ever look that far up. I even opened up the hot water cupboard and vacuumed out the cobwebs, though I have to tell you it was a task that was sorely overdue. The webs were so bad in there it looked like duvet filling for the damned.

But my doctor had told me to go and get antibiotics if my illness hadn't cleared up by then, so yesterday I started taking them. And now I feel terrible again - phlegmy, sneezy, coughing so hard that I simultaneously have to clench my head and my pelvic floor muscles. And of course when I talk I sound like I spent the last 24 hours drinking whisky and singing the national anthem in a nightclub.

But compared to the boy, who it turns out is sharing my germs, I'm at least on the way up.

The Little Madam is very well, thanks very much.

Mirror mirror

Although my phone has a very good camera, there's one thing it cannot do that my old digital camera did very well - and that's timed self portraits. Even if I were to one day discover a timer on the camera menu, there is no way I could get the thing to stay upright by itself. So, for now, there will be now more photos of my backside.


This is my finished Burda dress (I made the view illustrated by the brown dress in the link). Actually, I still have to trim the excess off the hem and I might redo the sleeve binding too. But it's more-or-less finished.
I fear that there is far too much skin on show here, so I might prefer to wear it over a more modest top, like so.

Do I like it? Kinda. I'm just glad it's finished really, because unfinished work always bugs me.

By the way, if you want to read the gory details of this garment's construction ("Make it work!") just click on the Pattern Review icon over on the right.

Not that this is an ad for Australian tourism, but

...where the bloody hell are ya?
I'm at my most insecure when I'm sick, you know. So when 3 blog posts go by without comments, that's when I start wondering why I'm missing out on the comment-love.
...sniff...
On the other hand, I finally finished the Burda dress that I started way back when it was still summer, and I'm gonna blog about it anyway. Tomorrow.

Cough cough

I'm still sick and I haven't been in to work all week. Thank goodness I get paid sick leave, as of the beginning of April.

But I feel a bit guilty about taking sick leave so soon after becoming eligible for it - while I was a contractor I never took any sick days except when TLM was sick.

The good news is that after going to the doctor's, TLM got a course of antibiotics for her 2-month-long cold. The disappointing news is that she's been acting sicker since starting the antibiotics, than she was before. The boy reckons this just means the medicine is working.
I dunno though.

The boy is in fine health though.

Motherly ministrations

After putting TLM to bed for the night, I go to my mum's house to set up her insulin pens (this is something my brother normally does for her, but this week he and his family have taken a much-needed break out of town). She hears me coughing and wheezing but - miraculously - does not tell me for the billionth time that if only I'd dressed more warmly I wouldn't be suffering from another cold. Then she offers to administer some fung yeow.

The stuff she's refering to is (mostly) eucalyptus oil, pungent and probably lethal to a range of small insects, sold all over Hong Kong in tiny glass bottles. It's her wonder-medicine that fixes just about every minor ailment. Partly to humour her and partly because I know it actually does help, I let her rub fung yeow all over my shoulders, upper back and neck.

There is a slight breeze outside, and when I leave her house it feels like someone left the fridge door open and programmed it to follow me around (fung yeow literally translates to "wind oil"). But when I get in the car it's even worse in the enclosed space. My eyes sting from the eucalyptus fumes and I drive home squinting (that can't be safe).

I imagine that, one day when I'm older and motherless, I get a whiff of fung yeow on my mum's clothing and remember that it wasn't all bad having her as a mother.

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao

I finished this novel of Junot Diaz's last night. Though when I say finished, I should admit that I didn't read most of the footnotes. The proportion of footnote to body text was so high that some pages were just footnotes - with a couple of sentences of body text added on for visual texture**.

There were a couple of other things about this book that I found a little annoying. One was the heavy-handed use of Lord of the Rings references, though I can see why it's there - it's because Oscar is a total geek and LOTR fan. The other thing was his liberal use of Spanish words, with no accompanying glossary at the back. True, I could get the gist of the meaning from the context. But I've no doubt that the subtler meanings were quite lost to me.

The good thing about this book is that it's a compelling story about a group of flawed characters whom I couldn't help but feel empathy with - Oscar, the overweight and constantly lovelorn geek; Lola, his Amazonian sister; Beli, their bitter and disappointed mother; and La Inca, Beli's adoptive mother. Basically, it's about a Dominican family enduring three generations of horrible luck, beginning during the terrifying reign of the dictator Trujillo. There is no happy ending as such, but it's not utterly depressing - just very sad.

The chapter that really grabbed me was the one about Lola, her desperate need to get away from home and the destructive influence of her mother, and her inability to sever the emotional tie. After that I was sucked in until the last page.

**Footnote about the footnotes: it's from Diaz's footnotes that you learn about the political environment that is the setting for this novel. They are a pretty unhappy read.

worshipping at the alter of chocolate

We like Easter weekends at least as much as most un-religious people in New Zealand i.e. we might end up going to hell for non-believing, but we sure do enjoy having a 4-day weekend, whatever the reason.

TLM went across the road to play with her new best friend this morning, and came back two hours later with a massive chocolate egg gift set. I'm sure she'll be okay to share it, but if she isn't then I suppose we can always hide it at the back of the fridge and dole it out in small pieces. As if that weren't enough, she's going back there this afternoon for the Easter egg hunt. I expect that it won't be a finders-keepers kind of thing, more of a find-and-deposit-into-the-communal-container deal.

My mum has been trying to get us all to go visit Dad's grave this weekend, but synchronising two households' worth of weekend intentions was all too much - they've gone without me. That's just as well; I have finally caught one of TLM's continuous colds and the last thing I want is to wander the chilly hills of a suburban cemetary, pockets stuffed with tissues and head stuffed with snot.

Stuff that makes ya go "Ooh!"

I'm betting this woman is on the slim side, because I can't see myself being able to make a whole jacket (albeit a tight-fitting one) out of a pair of my boyfriend's old jeans. She did though and it's pretty amazing. Here's another shot.

Not that I'm fashion police, but

I reckon if you have really large boobs, then - unless you're wearing a magnificently cantilevered brassiere - you shouldn't wear a high-waisted skirt. It just makes you look like your boobies have dropped.

In case you're wondering, I didn't come by this snippet of style advice from looking in the mirror. Because I hate having a waistband that comes up to my armpits. But I do look at what other people wear...

You better watch out!

So much for retail therapy...

With Daylight Saving ending over the weekend, I've been able to get in to work a little earlier than usual i.e. I had time for a proper lunch break. I had this plan to check out the half-price sale on sewing patterns and fabrics over at Arthur Toyes, or the new stock at Global Fabrics, or maybe even the full-price clothes at half a dozen of my favourite clothing shops around town.

But it was not to be, because when it comes down to it, I'm a lousy spender.

How I spend money follows this pattern - I get a pay rise or new job, and am flush with money. I continue to be careful with money for several months. Then something clicks in that part of my brain concerned with buying stuff, and I become comfortable with the idea of splurging. Then our financial situation changes and I have to cut back on spending. Only after I have endangered the household grocery bill several times, do I re-learn healthier spending habits.

Somehow, this cycle clashes violently with the sales, with the result that when there is a sale I don't want to buy anything, but after normal prices resume I am suddenly stricken with a desperate desire to buy a pair of black, knee-length riding boots or designer wrap dress.

Such is my version of consumerism.

The Fundraising Angel strikes again!

There I was, contentedly avoiding taking on voluntary work at The Little Madam's daycare centre, when **ring!** the leader of the fundraising team calls me up and asks me to take over organising our quiz night. As much as I wanted to no thanks, I'd rather spend my precious free time watching television or blogging or starting new sewing projects - I couldn't really.

It didn't start getting stressful until about a week before the big event, and we only had maybe 20 people sign up for it - out of a hoped-for 50 or 60. The fundraising team leader ended up moving things along at that point, which was a relief. I really prefer to work in a team, bouncing ideas of each other, that kind of thing - or else just being told what to do and getting it done. No leader am I. (Okay, and maybe I was a little slack because there is sooo much less pressure to fundraise at this place compared with TLM's last place.)

Anyway, it all turned out pretty well in the end. The bar where it was held, was really generous, the participating parents were relaxed and - importantly - knowledgeable, and no one minded too much when two of the big raffle prizes were won by the same woman.

The highlight, I guess, was when two teams tied for first place and it had to be resolved by a dance-off. You know that scene in of the early Desperate Housewives episodes where Lynette, who has recently returned to work, has to take her boss for a girls' night out and ends up naughty-dancing on a table? We had something like that last night (it wasn't me by the way - I was a sober driver).