TLM models her cardigan

In it's finished form, with two red functional buttons plus two decorative ones.

Here it is on TLM

And here she is with her most mental pose...

A day of one's own

Today I have been watching brain-numbing television, knitting, and surfing the web for interesting knitting patterns to use on my Rowan Summer Tweed yarn. Soon I'll put on some Buffy and have my lunch.

It would be a blissful day if I wasn't headache-y, feverish and coughing up unspeakable yuckiness.
I have TLM's cold - it didn't affect her like this.

The little shit - the next generation

Most of you weren't reading my blog back in 2004, when I wrote about the time a little kid assaulted me on the library bus (and I wasn't even trying to make him pay overdue fines).

But that's what the title of this blog post is referring to.
This isn't a sequel exactly. But there's certainly a little shit in this story.

The story, to cut a long one into a short one, is that TLM was punched in the chest yesterday by a little shit in her class. This little shit is the same boy who last year kicked another classmate in the groin so hard that she bled, and was off school for a week.

TLM wasn't so badly injured, and seems to be over it. But I've known about this kid and his propensity for violence and foul language for about a year. I can't give any details because it's all confidential, but the school has been trying to deal with the kid and keep him under some kind of control while still giving him a chance to change his ways.

Part of me (say, about 90%) just wants him out of my daughter's class (and preferably in a special facility with trained supervisors and lots of padding).
The other part of me thinks that, for a 6 year old kid to be this anti-social, he must have been raised in a truly horrible environment.

I don't have an answer for how someone like this ought to be dealt with. But there are about 20 kids in his class who need to feel safe.

Cardigan finished

You know that saying "the camera loves her"?
Well the camera has really got a grudge against me, because since adulthood the only two photos of me I haven't hated have been taken in low light and from about 10 m away.

Anyway, the cardigan's finished, just in time for our trip to the UK in their spring. I'll be wearing it over long sleeves of course, so protect my dainty skin from wool-irritation.

It will probably look much better over a black t-shirt rather than the shiny green thing pictured here.
If you want the the whole gory knitting story, go here.

non-knitting books I've been reading

It was a sewing book.

Just kidding. After a long stretch of narrowly focusing on that particular aisle in the public library which starts with interior design, moves onto cross-stitch, weaving and knitting before finishing with crochet - I decided that I had enough cardigan patterns.

So I read David Sedaris' When you are engulfed in flames, which I loved. It's one of those blackly funny memoir-type books which I would have loved to write myself (but my protagonist would not have been a gay American ex-smoker). I liked it so much I went back for another one - which title I forget, but it's full of animal stories (as in, there are no people but the animals are people, if you get my drift). It's also funny, bleak and makes me nod my head and go "yes, that's right".

I also have The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgekinson. But it's not as interesting because it's too simular to his How to be Idle. I suspect the author's a bit of a libertarian, as he's always going on about how the government is controlling the population. But he is also anti-capitalist, so that's alright. I can't help feeling though that his way of living only works if you are a free-lancer and if everyone else is still part of the "system".

On popularity

I've been worrying about TLM because, even though she's the nicest, cutest, most imaginative and  charming 6 1/2 year old I know, she is sometimes friendless.

At school TLM has tons of friends - no worries there.
But at Chinese School (which is weekly), if her cousin isn't there then she has no chums amongst her classmates.

After each Pippins meeting lately, she tearfully complains that the other girls won't talk to her. It hasn't put her off going, and it's probably due to her being the only girl in the group who doesn't go to school there. But the thought of her sitting all by herself while gaggles of girls giggle around her, makes me sad.

TLM also does a bit of Chinese dancing. And it's a really similar situation there. They don't all go to the same school or anything, but they are pretty clique-y. 

Probably, if I don't do anything, she will eventually either make more friends just by being her lovely self - or turn out to be one of those types with a really small number of wonderful friends rather than a hoard of casual friends.  She will probably be fine.

It's hard not to try to make it better though.

Is this how yarn stashes begin?

When I buy knitting yarn, I usually have a project in mind already - like a specific pattern I want to use. That way, I know exactly how much yarn to buy and what colours to use. It also minimises the risk of building a huge stash of yarns that I don't necessarily know what to do with.

But I have discovered Deramores. They have a subsite for New Zealand, so all the prices are in NZ dollars. And the prices are so low compared to local retail prices that it's hard to believe they are in NZ dollars rather than pounds.

It's very very tempting to buy just about everything, especially the Rowan yarns which are prohibitively expensive here (like, $18 for a ball of Rowan Jeans for example). But I want to support my local yarn shops and New Zealand yarns etc, so I'll try to stick to yarns that I can't easily get locally - like cotton or silk types. And Rowan.


It's so very very tempting...

You can tell it's the start of a new year...

The weekend of the 11th-12th February is going to so busy I'll need naps:

• On the Friday I have to go to Taupo to train some people and be back in time to tuck TLM into bed
• On Saturday I need to take TLM down to a school across town to enrol in music lessons
• On Sunday mid-morning her best friend from daycare is having a birthday dance party.
• On Sunday afternoon she's in a group performing a ribbon dance in the Chinese New Year Parade
• and some time before then I have to enrol her in swimming lessons...

I think TLM might need some naps too.

A winter cardie for TLM

I know it's the middle of summer here, but I reckon it will be very handy for when WE GO TO THE UK IN APRIL!! (yes that's right, the flights are booked, the insurance is bought and the UK family have been warned)

p.s. if you're a knitting nerd like me you can check out the progress on Ravelry (even if you ain't a member).

Better than Cosmic

Until recently, The Little Madam's favourite place to go was the Cosmic shop. It's a loud and funky place where a DJ plays music to nod your head by, and you can shop for a leopard-print fedora, an ice cube mould shaped like UFOs or a bong (but not the stuff that goes in the bong). It's bright, it's colourful, and the staff look like they love being there. They always give TLM free stickers too.

But now TLM's favourite place is the Marine Education Centre. I took her there last Sunday for one of their regular open days, and they have this high, shallow basin where rocky shore creatures live. You're allowed to touch them, even pick them up and stroke 'em like pets.

TLM was particularly struck by the sand dollar starfish, which she like way better than the hermit crab and the sea cucumber. She'd pick it up, put it on the back of her hand and let it's little feelers tickle her skin. She probably spent at least an hour there, perched on an apple crate and wearing one starfish after another.

My favourite bit was watching one of the (ex-household pet) turtles attempt to climb on top of another, lose its balance and fall over backwards, it's flippers waving around like it was doing a "dead ant".

Mushroom hunting in the shadow of Ruapehu

TLM loves going on holiday. That's probably because she associates it with staying in a reasonably comfortable motel unit and going on day trips with mum and dad.

 She was probably quite disappointed when we went to Tongariro National Park for our Christmas/New Year holiday and had to share a small bunkroom in a scout camp.

There were about 50-60 other people, all of whom where friends and family of the guy whose 50th birthday we'd gone up to celebrate. There were loads of children (and even a fellow knitter).

So despite the lack of privacy and sleep, we did have a very sociable time - maybe even more than we could cope with, being a small and normally quiet little family.

 We went for walks at the foot of Mt Ruapehu, shopped for thermal underwear (for the sudden and unprepared-for drop in temperature), and used our mushroom identification guide to name the various fungi that we came across.

But sleep deprivation won out in the end, and we came home a couple of days early. Just to show how much sleep I needed to catch up on, I slept in until 10am today - unheard of!

Dollhouse

Argh...we've been watching Dollhouse, which has taken this long (2 years!) to arrive on New Zealand television (but at 9.30pm when I'd normally be gearing down for the night).

I found it quite dark and sometimes a real downer because I hated the concept of men and women essentially being pimped out to rich people to fulfill their fantasies. It was also kinda confusing - characters seemed to disappear with no explanation and others changed from being bad guys to not-so-bad guys and back again suddenly.

If it weren't for the fact that I was browsing a Joss Whedon magazine (a run-down of every episode of every tv series he's ever done!), I would not have realised that the tv network has been showing us the episodes in a completely mixed up order. Like, Epitaph Two coming right after Epitaph One - when they are each the final episodes to 2 entirely separate seasons. That might explain all the sudden disappearances and character changes!

Now I'm gonna have to order the DVDs from overseas so I can watch them in the proper order.

Going public-er

I just spent an hour uploading my knitting projects to Ravelry. It was very satisfying to revisit my successes (my failures having nearly all been unravelled so there are no photos) and to have another brag about them.

Not that I'm saying you have to revisit them with me. Because I haven't figured out how you'd do that.

I think this means that the camera DOES lie

My recent passport photo has been haunting me ever since I first laid eyes on that horrid image. How could I have aged so much since the last one, taken five years ago?
I toyed with the idea that maybe I shouldn't have grown out my fringe after all.
And I should have done it on a day when I washed my hair, for maximum volume.

Then I decided to have 'em done again, only this time I went to the pharmacy where I'd got my photos done five years ago. See, this pharmacy doesn't insist on you putting your hair behind your ears.

And you know what? I think I look just five years older after all.

If Santa was a knitter...

I would get a year's subscription to Interweave Knits and Knitscene magazines, and every member of my family would receive hand-knitted expressions of love from me for Christmas.

If the boy reads this blog post there's a chance of the first one coming true.
And I'm working on the other one - this pair of heavily cabled cushions are for my brother and my sister in law. The colour of the yarn is more of a ginger colour than how it looks in the photo.

And this vest is for my mum. Yes, it is mid-summer. But she feels cold a lot.
The kids and the boy will be getting something non-knitted, because they prefer toys...

Surprisingly edible gingerbread dinosaurs

TLM brought home a wee notice asking for help with her school's fundraising sweet stall - as you do.
I didn't fancy spending 4 hours of my Saturday selling cakes and biscuits, because if it turned out to be a windy day my eyes would be bloodshot all day.
So I decided to use the dinosaur cookie cutters that TLM got for Christmas last year and make biscuits. The theory is, if you can make 'em look pretty they won't notice if they don't taste good.
Then, of course, I mentioned it at work and next thing I know there's an Alison Holst recipe for gingerbread men on my seat.
Turns out, it makes a very nice biscuit.

The photos are of the proportion I kept for home consumption, so you can't see that I made Tyranosaurus Rexes to go with the Stegosauruses (which, to be honest, look more like chameleons).

We went by the stall on Saturday (after voting in the general election), and it looked like most of 'em had been sold. A hit!

p.s. I won't copy the recipe for you because 1) it would probably break copyright laws, and 2) I can't possibly be bothered doing all that typing. But I think it was in last week's Dominion Post if you're interested.

a seedling girl scout

I really want TLM to learn self-reliance and how to survive in the bush.
I want her to have a wider circle of friends and I want her to have opportunities to go camping.

So last Tuesday evening I took her to a local Pippins group meeting. (Pippins is the section of Girl Guides for girls aged 5 and 6.)

(I did think of calling the Scouts too, as an alternative, since they take girls now. But in the end I was too lazy to make that extra phone call.)
And she loved it. They went tree-planting at a neighbouring school, sangs songs, went for a rainforest walk and a ride on a flying fox.

Apparently they don't do the knot-tying and camping until Brownies (for the next age group up) - which is okay - and it's not God-fearing as it would have been in the old days - which is a relief. They might even teach her to crochet animals (fingers crossed).

Never get your passports photos taken on bad hair day

We're planning on visiting the boy's family next year, in the UK. Hooray!

But then I realised that my passport, and TLM's have both expired (because the powers that be - bastards! - decided that NZ passports only last 5 years).

Which meant that it was time for my 5-yearly photo.

It probably wouldn't have made a difference if I was having a good hair day.

Maybe it's the harsh light, or the fact that I blank out anything truly ugly I see when I look in the mirror, or the fact that the photos are so severely cropped that there's absolutely no hope your fabulous outfit will distract the viewer from seeing your inglorious flaws.
But, ye gads I was shocked.

You know how certain sects recruit new members by offering free personality tests, whose purpose is to expose (or make up) all your terrible character flaws?

Well, I reckon if Botox-ers and cosmetic surgeons offered a free passport photo service, they'd become Bill Gates-level billionaires. Because when I returned to my desk I started looking up anti-aging products...

not so gross domestic product

I've been left alone at home this morning - the boy has taken TLM out for breakfast at McD's and who-knows-what.
I could have spent my morning cleaning the house, which is what I did last time they went out without me.

This time, I've been productive in a more enjoyable way - after patching one of TLM's may knee-holed leggings, I set about refashioning a jumper of mine.
There are actually two of them - same style, different colours - which I bought last winter when I felt like I needed a warm, non-itchy jumper. The only place selling them seemed to be Ballentynes, a place I've always felt seemed like an old-lady shop, but had the widest range of woolies in town.
These are 100% genuine acrylic - nothing flash but at least I can wear those next to my skin.

I loved the cabled neckline and the colour, but the length is pretty tragic on me, no? (Plus it's still creased from being folded up and crammed in my drawer)

 So I decided to experiment on one of them.
I cut off the ribbing at the hem, zig-zagged both raw edges and dyed it a different colour. I didn't really dye it another colour. This is just the other jumper...

 The ribbing makes a lovely cowl for next winter!
(It's probably more flattering than the jumper, even post-alteration.)
Genius!

Proof of my lack of fitness

It was our AGM and we had to be there at 9am.
I was running late.
"I'll give you a lift" the boy offered.
At the bottom of the hill I rememberd my cell phone was still plugged in at home, so we had to return for that.
The boy dropped me off at the bottom of the stadium steps and I thought 'Yay I'm nearly there!"
Then I got to the top of the steps and realised that about I was still about a kilometre away from the entrance...
I ran and got out of breath...walked a bit... ran and got out of breath... walked...I huffed and I puffed and I got all sweaty...

and today my muscles are sore. I even have shin splints!