My new favourite movie of all time

When I get asked what my favourite movie of all time is, my answer is usually based on the movies I can remember - which is probably quite a small proportion of the movies I've seen and enjoyed at the time.

At various times my answers has been either "Don Juan DeMarco", "Zoolander" or "City of Lost Children" (the latter mostly for the weirdness).

It has taken multiple viewings of "Bend it like Beckham" for me to decide that - now - this is definitely my favourite movie of all time.  I saw it at the movies when it first came out and saw it again a couple of times when it was broadcast on the telly. But watching it tonight (on Maori Television)  has done it.

It's got the culture-clash theme, of which I am an extreme sucker. But there's also the impressive football skills, the larger-than-life Indian wedding spectacle, and the very, very pretty Jonathan Rhys Meyers. (And of course Parminder Nagra is just great. Since this movie I've only seen her in a handful of ER episodes. What a shame, I'd far rather watch her than Keira.) All the characters are wonderful, even the narrow-minded mums. Oh, and the music!!

It's probably the most feel-good movie ever.

As an aside, right after the movie ended the next show on Maori Television was "Monkey" - a remake of the old Japanese tv series about a Chinese myth, which used to be on tell when I was a teenager. I used to think back then how weird it was that the characters were Chinese but speaking English with Japanese accents. But the version showing tonight was dubbed over in Maori. Excellent!

Month-end catch-up

TLM's birthday was a couple of weeks ago - she turned 8.

8!

Still can't make her own breakfast in the morning and still takes a lot of nudging to sort out her lunch box, but then the bench is designed for tall adults and the girl takes a while to wake up.

Lately she hasn't been complaining as much about her friend-situation so hopefully this means she's getting along with everyone and isn't finding their games boring all the time.

We all went tree-planting last Saturday. I'd never realised digging grass-ridden dirt on a slope could be so physically hard...

Yesterday TLM did a face plant in the school playground. Thank gawd she's not smart-alecky enough to tell everyoneI beat her up - can't blame anything other than bad luck and inattention. Her face is like a mild version of Harvey Dent at the end of Batman II; pretty on one side, slightly scary on the other. Poor wee thing.

This evening I had an accident of my own, and learned that even if it's just a fruit knife - it's a Victorinox knife you don't clean it with your finger!

Ups and downs

On the upside, I decided I was sick of pretty leather-like bags that rip to shreds after less than 12 months of use, then promptly found a really good fake Mulberry Alexa bag which I loved and bought, not caring whether it was real leather or not. I've always liked this style and it has lots of pockets and stands up when I put it down.

On the downside, TLM is apparently at that age when girls learn how to make friends and negotiate the whole alpha girl dynamic that you find in groups of girlfriends. She like to do what she wants, how she wants. Although there are at least 10 people she calls friends, she sometimes complains that she's lonely at lunchtime with no one to play with. We tell her that she should try going along with what the other girls want to play and maybe they'll play her games next time - but I've no idea how much she does this and whether it works. I do know that she does have fun wither her friends and classmates sometimes.

Then one day she will tell me she's lonely and just wants someone to play with her. We parents aren't suppose to try to 'fix' this problem for her, she's supposed to learn how to deal with it herself. But it makes me so sad because when I've felt lonely at times in my youth it was horribly depressing. I hate for her to be sad and lonely.

a 6.5 earthquake, and I didn't even feel it

There's been a swarm of earthquakes and aftershocks over the last three days:
The one that hit on Friday made our office building shake and we all scamperd under our desks.
There were three early this morning, and I slept through two of them. The third rocked our bed enough to wake me up, but not so much to prevent us from going back to sleep.
The relatively big one was just after 5pm today, 6.5 on the Richter scale. I was in the car with TLM and we didn't feel a damn thing.
On the news it sounded like buildings in the city centre suffered damage here and there, and I heard that the power went out in a couple of suburbs.
But here at my place, and even at my mums place, there's little trace of the shake (except for my mum's nerves).
Lucky, I guess.

A history of the artist

In another attempt to rid my sensitive eyes of whatever's making them go vampire-red every day, I did a total spring-clean of my bedroom. This meant shifting furniture, pulling bits and pieces from wherever they'd been wedged in between furniture, and removing the rug. I mopped the wooden floor with hot soapy water, wet-dusted everything except the clothes hanging on my garment racks and even cleaned the windows (frame and glass).

The only parts I didn't do were the walls, because I'd only be able to clean the lower 5 feet of them.

At some time in the past, the boy had decided to wedge in my old paintings and sketches in behind my tea chest. so I dusted off the plastic folders and took everything out to see whether I wanted to keep anything.

Amongst the self-conscious scribbles from my art classes and my attempts at abstraction were a number of nudes which I'd mostly forgotten about, as well as a couple of self portraits which were a revelation.

In the end, I was happy to chuck out about 80% of that stuff. But I kept my favourite painting and drawing.

My knitted dress

I thought it turned out quite well. It's the cable panel dress from Designer Knitting magazine

Polar blast? Not today.

So I took a day of work today because I've felt a cold building up for the past week and last night I felt absolutely terrible (nose running like a tap, headache, stiff upper back, wheezing).

And I thought "It's probably a good day to stay at home, what with the gale force freez-ies predicted for tomorrow"(really - folks in the South Island have been shopping like the day before Good Friday, and preparing to hunker down for the next couple of days).

But...actually it's not been that cold. I turned off my heater just now when I looked out of the bedroom window, admired the lovely big rainbow in the sky, and noticed that I can't see my breath (there's no heating on in that room).

Also, I feel not too bad.Maybe it's the calm before the storm (cold-wise and weather-wise). I suppose I'll just have to wait and see.

Time on our backsides

You've probably read the news stories about how a sedentary lifestyle can be lethal - that is, even if you go to the gym religiously, the more time you spend sitting, the earlier you'll die.

The first time I read about this, I was on my lunch break. I spent the following hour bent over my workstation, trying to type whilst standing. Then my lower back started to ache, so I had to sit down.

Well, I've spent the better part of the last three days on my bum, all because TLM is sick with a constant cough and a forehead you could fry an egg on (but she wouldn't eat it because she doesn't like egg). She's been on her bum all that time too, except during those moments when she felt well enough to leap about like a well child. And the boy - he seems to have caught the lurgy, so is spending more time that usual saving the world through computer gaming.

I haven't actually minded this relative inactivity, because it's allowed me lots of knitting time - which I've needed, because I'm trying to knit a dress and have already ripped it back from hip to armpit TWICE after realising my sizing was overly optimistic. And I would really like to be able to wear it while it's still cold enough to.

I did go to yesterday's World Knitting In Public Day event, where there was a small but friendly group of knitters including a visitor from Cape Town and an art history professor from Idaho.

My weekend of exploded sinuses

I thought I was having my third cold in 4 weeks - when it suddenly dawned on my that my latest cold (at least) was in fact terrible hay fever. It's the kind that has me sneezing so hard that I almost hit my head on the floor, and kinda sounds like cannon-fire.

It wasn't helped by the fact that I spent a few hours cleaning the house yesterday and had decided to finally tackle the thick blanket of dust around the boy's workstation. It was blanketed, I tell you!

On the plus side, I went to a sock-knitting workshop in the afternoon, part of the Handmade festival this weekend. I went to learn how to knit socks, but also to meet fellow knitters. It turned out that the women I did speak to weren't quite as knit-obssessed as I, and I even had to help a couple of them with their stitching!

So now I can knit socks (at least,  one miniature sock), which means I can finally use that beautiful sock yarn I bought two years ago...

Choo!

A last hurrah for summer

One beautiful Sunday afternoon we decided to go down to the beach and check out the rock pools. It was awesome.

Some Neptune's Necklace

Sea anemone

View of the fishing boats with Marine Education Centre at left

sea kelp, with TLM for size reference

sea slugs

And then there was one...

In memory of Munchy the caterpillar

About two months ago, monarch caterpillars finally started to appear on TLM's swan plant (which she's had since Christmas).

First one, then another, and so on until there were five caterpillars of varying size, chomping their way through the swan plant leaves. We were so excited to be part of the monarch butterfly life cycle!

TLM named them Munchy, Crunchy, Punchy, Lunchy and Yawny. They munched and crunched (as you'd expect) until there were very few intact leaves left.

And then they started disappearing. Punchy was the first to go, and then Lunchy, until....there was only one left on the plant. The birds must have been picking them off once they got big enough to be noticed.

Then we found one dangling from the top of our wooden fence. Hooray, we thought. It's about to become a chrysalis!

But he didn't turn into one. He uncurled, and then just hung there until we realised that the life had gone out of the poor creature. We were down to just one caterpillar after all.

Every day we go and check on Yawny, hoping he gets to complete his life cycle and become a chrysalis and then a butterfly. Hoping that he doesn't become a bird's dinner.

Knitting round-up

A peaked cap for me...

...using two buttons I bought at the Underground Market

A slightly chunky-fying funnel neck top...

with an abstract design on the back which I made up as I went

A beanie for my mum, for Mother's Day

And a wool/mohair/angora tunic for TLM, who wins as this post's cutest model.

Within spitting distance of Jermaine

The other night I took TLM with me to the opening of an art exhibition, featuring a friend, his wife, and  a third person whom I didn't know at all.

We started with dinner for TLM at a Vietnamese place called the Mekong, where she enjoyed two types of spring roll (the "normal", deep fried kind and summer rolls) - I had to take a photo of her with both cheeks full and both plates bereft.

The exhibition was packed. There was live music played by my friend and, among others, two librarians I knew from our local library (including one keen knitter). They sang songs in Spanish and looked like they were having the best time.

Then I saw this tallish, hairy guy just in front of me and realised it was Jermaine from Flight of the Conchords. "Of course," I realised, he is my friend's nephew so of course he'd be there. In fact this friend was the one who recommended that I go see the Conchords a few years back (pre-US tv show).

But I did the Kiwi thing and pretended he was not an international celebrity. Some would say it's because we just aren't into celebrities in NZ. In my case though it was probably just shyness (I was just as lame when I had a chance to talk to my favourite NZ artist Shane Cotton, and didn't).

Besides, I prefer Brett.

Woolly weather incoming

You can tell the drought is finally over when our laundry is once more an unmanageable mountain of unwashed clothing. I was hoping to get a couple of loads up on the line today, but of course right after it was all hung up nature decided to make a liar of the weather forecasters (who hurriedly update their forecast from sunny to rainy) - and it all came down again. Towels too, they were - nice and thick and taking an age to do in the dryer.

On the plus side, it is occasionally cool enough for me to wear my new hat (also on Ravelry).

All cleaned out

We've had a skip bin sitting on our driveway all weekend, and we've been filling it with all sorts of junk. I'm astonished that we actually managed to fill 7.5 cubic meters - almost the size of our garage!

It contains:

• heaps of crap that we found under our house (when cleaning it out in preparation for under-floor insulation a coupla years ago) - construction materials mostly
• Old ceramic dinner plates (which I tried to get rid of on Freeview, but shortly after signing up my inbox was so inundated with irrelevant emails that I've never been back to check whether there were any takers)
• A bag of rags ( we produce enough old clothes to use as rags that there's no sense in saving them up)
• the old filing cabinet I put together myself, by hand
• an old glass cabinet passed to me by my mum (and it was secondhand when she got it)
• old pillows, synthetic duvets, wool mattress liner and curtains
• old back packs (including the packs which served me faithfully through two years of OE)
• an old oil column heater (which nearly caused me to fall out of the attic because it was so damned heavy
• lots and lots of weeds
• and my friend's surround sound systems, which I didn't even know we still had (Dave L, I'm really sorry - you were right and I was wrong) and which is still up the attic because the box is massive and massively heavy.

It was rather too exciting having to be the one to go up the ladder to get into the attic (the boy couldn't get through the hole because his shoulders are too wide. No, really!) But I did it and that's enough for the next few years.

At times (generally while throwing rubbish into the skip) I felt like Derek Zoolander having a go at being a coal miner (with less posturing).

Now I'm resting, fully fed by the boy's home-baked pork spare ribs and a very large slice of framboise, with a big box of tissues because my sinuses are going absolutely CRAZY.

Oven-cleaning

The boy said to me that I should never clean the oven - rather to let him do it because it's such a dirty job (almost as dirty as cleaning poo-covered knickers, back in TLM's toilet training days? I don't think so).

So I let him. Only I never saw him do it. So last weekend I cast a layer of baking soda over the floor of the oven and covered it with a generous sprinkling of vinegar. Then I sprayed a mixture of baking soda and vinegar onto the sides and top of the oven, where the element was.

The next day I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to wipe the grime and grit (and bits of broken and baked gasket (the rubber bit which seals the heat in when you close the door).

The sides and ceiling were another story, and I had a go at scrubbing the element - just for a minute or so to remove the unidentifiable black protuberances.

The oven racks were much easier, requiring only a metal scrub and a bit of elbow grease.

So, not a great job but it definitely looked less like a stone age barbeque pit.

Later on that evening...you know that joke about a derelict old house so ramshackle that the only thing keeping it from total collapse was the termites inside, holding hands?

Yeah, the oven has stopped working. (And if I'd known this was gonna happen I could've saved myself a lot of cleaning effort!)

on the beach

I put it down to the hours of fruitless searching online, for somewhere to stay over Easter weekend which is sufficiently holiday-like and didn't require hassle to get to.

There's no other way I can explain why I managed to pay in advance for two nights in a motel just off the main road, at least 30 mins walk from the beach.

It was the kind of place you stay at when you're on the way to somewhere else, rather than the kind of play you stay at for fun.

So we left after just one night, and I didn't even realise that I'd paid in advance for both nights until after we'd stayed that first night, put up with a terrible bed (TLM was in the bedroom on a perfectly good bed, we had a sleepless night on the awful bed with the motion sickness-inducing springs - in the living area), told the manager we were leaving first thing the next morning, wandered around the beach, tried unsuccessfully to get a place closer to the seaside and then finally came home so we could all remedy our respective zombie-like states.

So yeah, I feel a bit ripped off, even though our motel unit was otherwise perfectly nice.

On the upside, we did get to play at the beach, TLM and I collaborated on some fantastic sand drawings (including a satanic sun), and there was plenty of sunshine. Plus, being away made us appreciate our home more and for just a while I stopped wishing my house was such a dump.

It's raining today. Ordinarily I'd hate that, but at the moment I'm glad that our city's water reserves have been boosted (even if just little bit).

An imperfect 12

I don't know why, but I'm only now (after more than 2 years of knitting garments for myself) starting to realise that - although I may be a size 12 around the chest....I must be a size 14 around the armpits.

This means I have to plan adjustments when I knit, in addition to the ones I already do to petite-ize the length of the torso section and super-size the waist area...

Tight armholes, begone!

Seems it never rains in southern North Island...

So we are in the midst of a drought which has hit the whole of the North Island, and even where we live which is normally never short of water.

How liberating to be able to hang your clothes up on the line, knowing for certain that they will be nice and dry when I get back from work (and not damp from an unexpected downpour). How nice it would be if we were barbequing types, because we'd be able to organise an outdoor social event knowing we won't end up shelter in a bus stop instead.

But it's a bit difficult to fully enjoy the beautiful sunny weather, because there's a drought on. That means everyone's garden is brown and dusty (unless they've got one of those rain water tanks, or are organised enough to use pre-shower water or grey water on their gardens).  I feel I should be hoping for lots of rain, so that our farmers and growers don't go out of business (since they are apparently the backbone of the NZ economy).

But - hey! At least our local tourism industry is flourishing, because Kiwi families all over the country can go camping - and not have to pack up after 5 days of "unseasonal" rain and gale force winds.

And we are going away too, for part of the Easter holidays...to the beach!

Sweat-inducing clothes shopping

The boy is a wonderful man, he really is. Today he arranged for TLM to spend most of the day with her beloved cousins so that he could take me shopping.

And when I say "shopping" I mean that he took me to an upmarket department store, chose designer clothing items for me to try on - all of which was new in for autumn (i.e. full retail price), and bought the items he liked on me. (Is that a little bit Pretty Woman?)

This included an eye-wateringly expensive Jane Daniells long sleeve top and a gob-smackingly expensive possum-merino knit jacket (in biker jacket style, but - y'know, tasteful).

I love the jacket and one other item (black cropped jeans with heavy metal bling on the back pockets). And the boy loves the other ones (even if I'm not so sure myself.

But I am very uncomfortable with spending up so large on clothes, even if they are pieces I really like and even if I didn't have to pay for it myself.

And I can't help thinking that that amount of money could have gone toward doing up our decrepit bathroom.

I wonder whether women in TV makeover shows - the ones where you get a big wad of cash to spend on a new wardrobe - ever worry about whether they would have preferred to get the money and put it toward a new bathroom.

Probably not.