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.