listed in: crafty, depression, home
March 7th, 2010

            

When we moved into the house, we agreed to give it a full year before making any changes. We didn’t quite stick to that; curtains in the living room and bedroom were changed at some point, basically because the ones the previous owners left us were a bit crap.

The blue that the previous owners painted the lounge, while it’s a pleasant colour in it’s own right? I really, really struggled with it last winter. Winter in Auckland tends towards the cold, damp, rainy, grey, wet, soggy, and horrid. Coming into the nice ‘warm’ living room that was a dark, damp, grey-blue sort of shade? I really hated it.

It seems like a silly thing to fixate on. It IS a silly thing to fixate on. But I just aaaaaagh blue blue dark wah cold wah damp wah wah. I lean towards SAD, and I hate winter at the best of times, and… and it’s officially Autumn in New Zealand now…

So, I repainted this weekend. I did admittedly have something of a misunderstanding with Tobermory regarding the distinction between “dislike paint fumes” and “find paint fumes headache-inducing-leading-to-migraine”; I’d misunderstood the latter to mean the former, and then assumed that subsequent grumblings about painting meant “Tobermory does not wish to help” rather than “Tobermory does not want to be in the house when it happens”, in that wonderful fashion I do sometimes have of assuming I know what he means instead of actually listening to what he SAYS.

Whoops. I am at least forgiven.

listed in: garden
March 5th, 2010

I started out well with the tomatoes and peas this year, but owing to chronic non-interest in holding a hose while the pots got wet, they kind of… died. They grew really well! Apart from the disease that the tomatoes got that I didn’t spray for soon enough. And the snails on the peas.

OK, so it wasn’t a complete disaster but I unequivocally proved that I shouldn’t have the care of anything that can’t yell at me when it needs fed. Cats have squeak’o'clock (human? it is the dinnertime? why is plate empty? Squeak?), plants just kind of wither and I notice about a week later.

Realising that this is really a character flaw, rather than a scheduling issue, I decided that I would shortcut the issue with technology.

As of about six p.m., the front garden and my two main pots now have watering hose buried in them (ie, that kind of hose with holes already punched in it). All I have to do is plug in a main hose, wait three to five minutes while reading a book, and turn hose off again. As I am lazy, I am hopeful that I will actually remember to use this option. It cannot get any easier than turning a handle on the hose tap.

The hose buried into the pots has a normal hose (ie, no holes) connected out the base. Said hose feeds through the garden (full of camellias and busy lizzie that I am unable to kill, even if I want to), plugs into a three-way water splitter, which I can plug into the tap by the spa pool. The hose in the front garden, all I have to do is unroll two metres of hose from the big long hose on the front tap between the garage doors, and plug it into the bit I left poking up from the buried hose in the garden behind a hebe.

I also purchased more hebes, in the hopefully not vain hope that some of them will survive my inept brown-fingered gardening techniques. And marigolds, as the cats don’t tend to dig up and shit where the marigolds are planted.

Admittedly, a lack of cat shit will more likely be attributable to the entire CONTAINER of cat repellent I also dug through the front garden.

Hey, I live in hope, alright?

listed in: cat!
February 25th, 2010

I outwitted Boomer’s nefarious Follow Mahal To Work Plans by waiting for him to ambush me outside the front door, cuddling him, and putting him back inside the house then buggering off.

I got down the street, round the corner, about to cross a road between me and my route to the bus. I look around for cars, pedestrians, etc. No car, no car, car not going to affect me, black shado…

Boomer. Dammit. Cat outwitted me.

So I bought him back home and now T is going to drive me to the bus stop.

Apparently I have to think harder to outwit the cat these days.

listed in: friends, girl
February 14th, 2010

I went shopping with Jexia today! I’d kind of gotten used to shopping on my own if it’s things like clothes, shoes, etc, because although I love Tobermory dearly, he is not a fun shopping companion.

So, we met up, nattered some, I ogled the babies and X, started trawling through stores. (Her husband kid-wrangled.) And it was fun!

Score of the day: a $190 jacket for $30. Business-style jacket, that is – I’ve been wanting one, and struggling to find any that fit over my bust and button without looking a) ridiculously tight at the bust b) ridiculously loose at the stomach c) silly at the shoulders. And this one fits!! Also found a pair of jeans, which is nice, as my last ones succumbed to fat-girl-pants syndrome of chafing-through in the top of the thigh.

It was a lot of fun. Simple fun, yes, but it was just NICE wandering around clothing stores being vaguely girly. I haven’t been shopping with another woman for a LONG time.

Having wandered the mall for several hours, and waved her off home when X was becoming difficult for M to wrangle (and then mall-wandering further, because it wasn’t worth driving home then driving halfways back to go to work) I purchased a large takeaway of Chinese and transported myself to work.

Where I have to remain until 2am. Sigh…

listed in: family
January 29th, 2010

Mum never actually intended to collect elephants. But someone gave her one, once; she had it on display, someone else saw it, decided she must like elephants, bought her another. Someone else saw the two, bought her a third, and soehow the word just spread…

So, Mum collects elephants. Over the years, she’s abandoned various parts of the collection as she goes through de-cluttering phases – for example, I have a magazine holder made of cane with an elephant face weaved into it. It’s part of my childhood, and although it looks a little out of place in our lounge, I still love it.

There’s only one elephant that’s really special to her collection, though. Mum loves jade; and thirty-odd years ago, there was a store in my hometown that had a Mexican jade elephant displayed in the window. Mum loved this thing on sight. But she and Dad were dirt-poor, they’d just moved cities, were renting, trying to save for a house, repair their car… there was no way they could afford it.

Every time Mum was in town, she went to look at ‘her’ elephant. Dragged Dad along a few times, too.

A few weeks later, the elephant disappeared from the window display. Mum was really quite upset, but tried to be philosophical about the fact that someone else had bought ‘her’ elephant.

Someone else had. My father.

A month or two after that, Dad bought it home. He’d arranged a layby with the store owner, who’d obviously thought the young bloke trying to buy an elephant for his smitten wife was sweet. And he’d quietly managed to squirrel away the money without Mum noticing (which, let me tell you, would be some feat). That elephant is about the only one that’s survived various purges of the collection; Mum loves it dearly. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t somewhere on display in the living room.

She’s been a widow 21 years today.