After looking through old photos of myself and my sibs when we were kids, I have come to the conclusion that we must have worn the most ridiculous, daggy swimmers you could ever hope (not) to see.
Now I myself only saw my mother sew once, when she sewed my bridesmaid doll a dress and cape. But these definitely have a home sewn look to them. And we seemed to wear them for years.
Take me here for instance. Determined to get to the beach. And nothin', not even those baggy daggy swimmers is going to stop me. I mean mother, you could've taken in the legs a little. I bet if I keep looking I'll see one of my sisters wearing these before I got them. Probably both of them.
And one of my favourite photos. Emjay, the oldest, with our brother and sister. Sporting a very unfashionable blue suit with a matching home done fringe trim.
And here she is again, what maybe a couple of years later, still wearing it.
Move forward another couple of years and my other sister is now wearing it and Emjay has a much nicer, yet still loose fitting pair of swimmers on. As you can see I'm still wearing the same pair I had on in the beginning. Because I had penty of room to grow into.
OMFG. And I was right. Even though I was only half joking. Here is Min, wearing my baggy pink swimmers. I wonder if I ever owned a new pair.
I have this vision of my mother, searching through her wardrobe every year the day before we went on our summer holidays, pulling out a bag full of atrocious old faded swimmers and handing us each a pair. Mind you it wouldn't have been a very full bag. We seemed to last through our childhoods with three of four pairs between us.
`
With us all diligently slapping hand sanitizer on our hands to kill 99.99% of everything that might make us sick..... where do all the killed germs go?
These have nothing to do with dead things on hands - I just thought they were pretty. Taken on walk around the neighbourhood next to ours on the weekend:
.
Because I think I bought the wrong size. Or it doesn't match the rest of my decor.
This is me after a day spent in the attic. Yes, I'm wearing a bandanna, goggles, dust mask, and a head lamp. It's fricking dark up there. And eerily quiet. And full of moon dust-like insulation. And pixies. But I wasn't supposed to tell anybody about the pixies.
Oh, right, what was I doing up there? Installing ceiling fan braces. There are few home features I hate more than wobbly or rattly ceiling fans, so I believe in attaching them to serious braces fastened to the studs with heavy deck screws. Also, I love ceiling fans. I'm installing them in the bedroom, the office, the living room, and the kitchen. I'd install one in the dining room, but that just seems like overkill.
To prepare for this adventure, I loaded up my backpack with all the tools I thought I might possibly need for the adventure, including my newly purchased cordless drill. I don't own 200 feet of extension cord, so I figured that would come in handy. I should have taken snacks.
The kitchen was easy. I had to enlarge the hole in the ceiling a bit to accommodate a 4-inch electrical box, which is standard for ceiling fan braces, but the brace went in easily. From there, I crawled to the pantry, where I installed a new electrical box, and ran the wiring to the light switch. Then I schlepped over to the office, dragging all my supplies and my plywood platform with me. (Because squatting on joists for hours at a time is unpleasant, it's better to have somewhere to sit.) Once again, the hole in the ceiling had to be enlarged via drill and hand saw. Then I had to shim one end of the brace to make it level, but it went in easily enough.
After that I slithered over to the bathroom to repair a hole in the ceiling and install a new electrical box. Seeing a trend? Yes, most of the light fixtures in the house had been attached directly to the ceiling without the benefit of a box. While doing that, I realized I'd forgotten a box to install in the hallway. And it was getting dark. And the dining room light fixture opening was in the wrong place. I wasn't going to be able to get it all done in a day.
Still, I was dead-set on getting all the ceiling fan braces installed, so I persevered. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. I crept toward the bedroom, but as I felt about with my foot, digging through layers of blown insulation looking for the next ceiling joist, I found ... nothing. No joist. Not where it should have been anyway. In most modern houses, joists and studs are installed at 18-inch intervals, or sometimes 24-inch intervals. Things are slightly less predictable in old houses. I once lived in a house with 21-inch center studs and joists. How I discovered that, it's a long story.
This house, though, this house ... it mostly has 24-inch centers, except where it doesn't, namely in the bedroom and living room. There, the ceiling joists are 36 inches apart. Too far to install a ceiling fan brace. So I get to plan another day in the attic and this one will be a doozy. I'll have to drag a bunch of lumber up there and sister in some more joists, close enough together to support ceiling fans, and to provide a bit more stability in those ceilings.
Am I starting to regret buying this project house? Oddly enough, no. I'm kind of looking forward to the project. As sick as that is.
Are you prepared in case of a natural disaster? What do your plan and preparations include?
lol, what a strange question! Are we expecting one then?
I'm obsessive compulsive enough thanks. If I start worrying about potential natural disasters I'll be a nervous wreck.
Although, we are going to Thailand at christmas time, and I must admit that the thought has crossed my mind as I run on the treadmill each morning, that'll I'll be right to run a long way up into the mountains if a tsunami hits. Maybe even carrying one small child on my back. Which rules out my kids because they're all much bigger than me. Which is good because I won't have to do the Sophies Choice thing.
Remember when everyone was freaking out about the Y2K thing? I said to Daz, maybe we should stock up on food. And when the year 2000 clicked over with no problems I looked in the laundry and we had stocked one bottle of water and a 4 pack of baked beans. It was a pretty piss poor effort really. We'd have lasted a morning.
I think to be prepared for a natural disaster the best thing you can do is forget about supplies and just stock up on weapons. Lots of guns and ammo. Thats your best bet, because you're going to have to kill a lot of crazy desperate people to get to the supermarket and the bottle shop. Maybe even zombies. I'm not sure what sort of disaster we're talking about. Oh yes,there they are, I wasn't looking properly. No zombies, so that makes it a bit easier.
And nail polish. Stock up on nail polish. Because new nail polish always makes you feel better.
My new bottles arrived in the mail the other day.
I'm wearing blue at the moment. But I'm wishing I'd picked Calypso.
Not that my proclivity towards nigh-arrogant ranting and circuitous introspection demands any apologies*, but I realized this weekend there are some significant though well-concealed advantages to being a self-absorbed navel-gazer.
You’re going to need me to back that one up, aren’t you?
OK, let’s start with this brilliantly clever circle graph that received its fifteen minutes of fame when it landed on the front page of HuffPo last Friday.
To some, this may seem like an outright insult to Christians on a national level. To others, it comes off… well, it comes off exactly the same way; it’s just that this group of people delights in the insult instead of taking offense to it. It’s why we have wars, you know.
But what if the philosophical implications of this graphic are deeper than either of those cramped assumptions? Isn’t it possible the obvious joke is only there as an appetizer for your brain? Could there be something beyond the glib comparison of three movie monsters to the Messiah?
And if I can get you to see what I’m pointing at, can I then use the same similes and metaphors to confuse things and diminish the entire thing back down to a trite GraphJam entry?
Only one way to find out, I guess.
So anyway, being an artist by profession, I have an appreciation for color that perhaps my non-creative friends lack. Nevertheless, most people who see the above image would take note, albeit to varying degrees, of what could potentially be the most significant aspect of the illustration: that the hues change tint as they overlap. Oh sure, it’s done primarily to distinguish the individual circles while avoiding the clutter of each circle having a black stroke around it. But if we’re willing to assume a respectable level of intelligence for the graphic artist, we can very easily contrive some other, more important symbolism in this design.
For example, considering the person’s artistic nature, we can decide that the three circles are a subliminal color-mixing palette. Voila! Instant Philosophical Proposition! We are now conveniently positioned to make the symbol represent whatever we want simply by piously stating, “The final question is this: do you see God as additive or subtractive?”
The beautiful cleverness of this is that we’ve now opened up the argument for what defines something as additive and what makes something subtractive. Further applying these parameters to an omnipotent being keeps the idea immortal by giving rise to mutually exclusive factions, each with its own specialized and unequivocal interpretation of the image.
The Three-Circle Purists say the underlying message merely reinforces the graphic’s original idea that God is the culmination of all monstrosities to the point of becoming the blackest monster of them all. They refer to the very manner in which the tints darken as they progress towards Jesus Christ as their evidence. Declaring him to be a subtractive deity, they give God the name “Simmik” (spelled cmyk) and dub him the Bringer of Blackness.
The Paradoxicals, however, insist that the diagram represents Jesus’ tendency to spend the majority of his ministry in the presence of the most misguided, baleful sinners and that the choice of colors is intended as a subtle testament to that necessary irony. They claim repeatedly – almost to the point of recitation – that it is light from which God and all good things are born and thus, just like light, God must be additive. To them, the completeness of God results in a clean, perfect whiteness. He is given the title “Regrebloo the Pure”. Countless hymns are composed rejoicing in the promise of that glorious day when all colors will come together to form the most perfect White.
Of course, the cynical 3-CPs are all over that with shouts of racism and accusations of a religiously driven eugenic agenda. Science fiction novels begin to be regularly presented as oracular tomes. PK Dick and Isaac Asimov become revered as great prophets.
The Doxies then issue a collective sardonic snort by taking out full-page ads and erecting billboards likening fundamentalist 3-C doctrine to that of the Church of Scientology, citing as fact the very arguable notion that L. Ron Hubbard was also a science fiction author. This campaign fails miserably, however, as does their droll attempt to humiliate their adversaries by referring to them as “C-3POs”.
The battle rages for decades. Nonsensical self-help books emerge with titles like I, Robot. U Can’t Subtract! and Paradoxicals Do It With Guile. Passion becomes petulance and devotion turns into duress. A purist menacingly holds a 2x4 like a baseball bat and a doxie pulls his handgun…
Then, only after countless lives have been lost to the argument, does the illustration’s creator (by now aged 106) finally issue a public statement declaring that he is, in point of fact, completely colorblind.
And just like that, the sum of time and energy dedicated to either side of the debate is fully devalued. All the stock placed in both ideals is instantly obliterated. Every measure of strength and motivation imbued by the conflict is just as effectively depleted.
There was really never anything more to the illustration than an insensitive jape…
…right?
*In fact, some people actually like that sort of thing. I simply provide a service – an abrasive but oddly arousing service. So do hookers, but unlike a prostitute, I service you free of charge.
~
I am scared of squirrels. Irrational I know and I'm annoyed at myself for being afraid of such a cute looking little thing.
I'd
never seen a "real" squirrel until my first day here and when I saw
them I raved over their sweet little faces and bushy twitching tails.
My second day here I met a kamikaze squirrel. Instead of running away from me it ran straight at me and stamping feet and noise did not deter it. It only stopped when I ran away and then, looking over my shoulder, I swear I saw it smile.
This fear is especially pathetic as I come from the land of more than a few of the world's top 10 deadliest snakes, the small Funnel Web Spider and the Blue Ringed Octopus. I have a healthy respect for these but am not particularly terrified of them.
But squirrels... I give way to even if it means walking onto the roadway; I give wide berth to trees where I spot a squirrel and I never stand still in a park!
We don't have any squirrels in our little yard; I suspect because of all the pepper (chili) plants we have around but yesterday I noticed a neighbour is actively encouraging them .... I would never be able to leave the house if this was at my front door!
This little girl was having a feast. Of course this was taken from well back on the sidewalk!
I admit to being a Denise Austin fan. Even though she never shuts up. And she always lies. But you get used to that. I now know that when she says
just one more
She doesn't really mean just one more. She means just that one more then a few more after that.
I've been doing the Fat Blasting Yoga dvd. Its pretty strenuous. And just when you think its over she brings out the stability ball and does another 15 minutes.
When I first started doing it a few weeks ago my legs would be wobbling and shaking from the effort but now I'm pretty good. My thighs feel like they're packed with cement actually. Jem was feeling them the other night and said I'll be able to crack coconuts with them. Which I guess could come in handy someday.
And I've lost 5 kilos which is also pretty handy. 4 more to go. But my aim is really firmness. I want to firm up all those bits that start going soft after 40. You know where they are. Triceps, back fat over the bra, thighs, well lots of places really.
And I made this magnet a couple of years ago when I was trying to lose weight and I think its time to put it back on the fridge to help the cause. Because she's 52 and looks pretty damn fine. And firm. Thats my aim. To be fitter at 50 than ever before. So I have 5 years up my sleeve.
No, it's not the name of a new Disney after-school TV series. Sorry to disappoint.
The title of this post is actually referring to a couple of super-awesome photos from Amanda's recent trip to Colorado, where she enjoyed the rare and thrilling experience of having her face tasted by a full-grown wolf. Not many can say they've done that, you know, because usually they are dead or unable to form words through all the scar tissue...
blooming outside my garage. Can you say unseasonably warm?
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I'm still doing my photos but I always forget to post them. So to the week that was whenever it was.
This is a little bottlebrush that grows in our front yard. Its a pretty little thing. The flowers just curl out of the buds over a day or two.
Lol. This is something that I think Kimba made for me about 12 years ago. I sent them to pottery classes over one lot of school holidays and now I have all these strange pottery creations about the house. This one sits in the kitchen. Always gives me a smile.
One day I woke up, turned my calender and found this. It really wasn't enough information to know what I was meant to be doing. I can't remember what it turned out to be.
Bacon is always good.
Betty having a nanna nap
The cook at the old peoples home I volunteer at makes the most beautiful cakes. She has two lucky sons. I think Lloyd would have liked to have grown up in that kitchen.
And this was yummo. It was a strawberry/kiwi fruit salsa that we had with salmon fillets.
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quirky wall art, ceramic tile coasters, vintage photo art...
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My florist friend, Erwin
