No more Letters from the Editter

My dear friend, who was ill for the last few months, has died.

I can't think of anything to add to that, except "Goodbye - I'm gonna miss you".

Our battery collection

For months now, I've been avoiding putting our used up batteries into the household rubbish - because somewhere, I read or heard that those things are full of heavy metals and ought to be disposed of in a special way. So I hung up a plastic shopping bag to collect them, fully intending to find out where they should go and then taking them there.

The bag has gotten pretty heavy by now, and the boy voiced fears that it can't be healthy having a big bag full of toxic thingamies hanging around in the kitchen. So I finally got around to going on the 'Net to find out what I'm supposed to do with it.

And it turns out that there is nowhere nearby that recycles them.

So into the kitchen bin they go.

lunch date

The boy asked me to look after TLM for an hour in the middle of the day today, and I thought, cool - I can take her out for a fluffy and then check out the Yayoi Kusama exhibition together.

It was only for an hour, and that hour went by so quickly -

She charmed the pants off my co-workers.

We had lunch at a nearby cafe (a fluffy and a sausage roll for TLM, a hot chocolate and a potato-top pie for me).

TLM insisted on climbing over every raised flowerbed.

She hugged each and every one of the koru (unfurled fern fond)-shaped pillars surrounding the Civic Square.

We checked out the polka-dotted City Gallery facade (it sooo reminds me of the Dr Seuss as Robert Lopshire book, "Put me in the zoo", about a spotted creature who can throw his spots onto any surface). But we didn't go in because the queue was too long.

TLM ran free and wild around the Civic Square, leaping about on the boat-shaped seating and frolicking on the grass.

Bliss.

When plus-size women can't be plus-size models

I read the other day about the tiny-sized Ralph Lauren model who was sacked for being too fat. She's a size 4, which means she's about a size 10 in New Zealand sizing. Now, you know and I know that that is not fat. And apparently the preferred dress size for a plus-size model is 8-10 (which is probably about a 14 in NZ sizing).

Apparently the reason models have to be so thin, is because the sample clothes that designers send in to be worn on the catwalk (and in the magazines) are so small. And the reason they are so small, is to save money on fabric.

Well, I have the solution.

Why doesn't the fashion industry just model all new collections on Barbie dolls?
The construction might be a bit fiddly, but they'd save a ton on fabric.

Spring coat sprung

Now that I've put all the buttons on (close-up of the buttons over on the right there) and worn it out a couple of times I have to say you were right, dear commenters.

I do like this coat. Although it definitely looks better on me if I don't button it up all the way - and better still if I don't button it up at all.

Also, the term "spring coat" is a bit of a misnomer. Because around these parts, the kind of coat you'd have to wear in spring is a rain coat.

I been exercising

On Wednesday evening, in between driving 'round to my mum's to dial up her insulin pens and having dinner, I managed a 20 minute session on the Wii Fit (and I did another 30 minutes tonight).

And I might be hooked. It's really fun, and some of it even feels like exercise (inasmuch as it works my muscles and I feel a little tired afterwards). With Wii Fit you get yoga, muscle workout, cardio, balance games and some other games which I forget what they're for.

My favourite exercise is still the yoga. But my favourite game is the downhill skiing. I still can't do the whole run without ramming into at least four flags.

The board records my every movement, so I know that my left side is way weaker than my right (which is interesting because I'm a leftie so my left ought to be stronger). It feels good that my balance is apparently pretty good and my lunges are better than the lunges of a middle-aged woman who hasn't been to the gym in four years.

Maybe the novelty value will wear off eventually, and maybe I'll soon reclaim these evenings for sewing. But I aim to make the most of that novelty for as long as I can.

I yearbooked myself

Can you see which one of these footballers is me?
No? Well check out the Lennon-ist on the right.

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.