Tuesday 24 April 2012

In which Mr Golightly goes back to work...

And I put the sofa bed back, washed the sheets and pillow cases, and attempted to return the house to some semblance of 'tidy'.  Hah.  What a joke.  I'm sure I've alluded previously, Gentle Readers, that Mr Golightly is a hoarder.  Bank statements from the 1980's, essays from the '70's, school prizes from the '60's.... our house is not quite bursting at the seams with stuff, but the rooms where the stuff goes are looking a little full.  I've determined that I can get rid of a lot of it by taking it to work, loading it into the photocopier and scanning it, so that it appears in my inbox as a .PDF file, which means I can recycle the paper.  After all, who is ever going to look at those Bank Statements again?   Not Mr G, he just wants to have them.


Anyway, our dining table (which, I must confess, is rarely used for dining) is still completely covered with trip stuff.  Three hats, my raincoat, a bag full of ephemera, which we always keep, god knows why, various presents for people, not yet handed over... you get the picture.  And if you don't:






Yes, suitcases, a chair seat, a bag full of sheets, umpteen key rings... What else?  Oh yes, Mr Golightly chose to visit his office of employment today.  If I'd somebody fiddling down where he had somebody fiddling, I'd be staying at home as long as I could, waiting for the pain & swelling to go away completely.  Some interesting effects - the crackle of bubbles of gas under his skin, where they inflated his abdomen to they could get in to fix the problem...  


And I took a photo of the rain previously mentioned:





I'm not sure if you can see, Gentle Readers, the corner where the water is flowing down like a waterfall... our walls are not normally black, they're sort of a sandy yellow colour - but we've had so much rain they've gone black.  Time for the Karcher, I think.


And in other, crafty, news, I'm still working on the three-dimensional Bilby - it's testing my brain, not being a natural three-dimensional thinker, but I think I've got it now:




Not that you can tell from this that she's three-dimensional, but trust me.  Once I've got the hump out of her back, the legs a bit longer & the neck sorted, she'll look fabby.  Isn't it typical that I made the prototype out of my favourite fabrics?  I guess this means I have to keep her!


And so, with that, it's time for me to stop messing around with this box and go & do some sewing.  Ciao!

Thursday 19 April 2012

04:06:00

Hello lovely Gentle Readers.  It's been a while, I know, and it's also been a while since I woke up at 0340, wide awake, ready to get up and go to work.  Not really.  I've had a very disturbed few days, with various things happening, including trundling Mr Golightly off to hospital to have his (very small) double hernias fixed, and the spare head off his back (don't ask...).  He's at home now, sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room (close to the TV, doncha know), having some very bloated bits, and some very shrink-ed bits, some shaved bits and some bits covered in waterproof sticky plaster.  He's taking pain killers.  Amazing.  As long as I've known the man, he's never taken so much as an aspirin, and yet, here he is, popping Digesic like they're smarties.  Very sensible.






In other exciting news... well, there isn't any really.  We had a fabulous Easter in the Hunter, where it was by turns, warm, windy, warm, rainy, and I took some pictures (I think)... we ate some fabulous food here, probably one of the most enjoyable meals I've had in a long time (including Italy!) - we sat outside in the sun, Az brought amazing wines from the cellar, and we chose the 'A Tavola' option, which means "let us cook you stuff" - and it was fabulous.  We ate and drank for what seemed like days, but I'm sure was only 3 hours or so, and then crawled home for a nap (well, I napped)... 






Actually, I lied about the exciting news.  I rescued the house from floating away down the street today - we had a tiny weeny little bit of rain (around 80mm in an hour, that's quite a bit [there's 25mm to an inch]), and the drain on the patio became blocked - and of course, Mr Golightly had oh so conveniently incapacitated himself, so I had to roll up my pants and doff my shoes to go wading out onto the patio - it was lapping at the back door, Gentle Readers, and I very seriously considered getting the inflatable boat out... till I finally found the drain, stuck my hand in and cleaned out various piles of leaves, muck, wet spiders, and other assorted crap.  It drained pretty quickly, but I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn't been home - we have two doors that open onto the patio, so presumably, the water would have seeped in & met somewhere in the middle of the living room????  Right where all those electrical cables are for Mr Golightly's pet project???  Short circuit, sparks, fire, no house?  Ick.






And now, Gentle Readers, I am going back to sleep.  I'm working from town tomorrow, so I don't have to be up at Sparrow's to miss the traffic, I can actually do the civilised thing and get the bus into work, so I won't be getting up until 0630, and leaving at 0730 (wow!)... and so... ciao!



Sunday 1 April 2012

Oops she did it again

This was a delightful surprise last week; I walked into a daddy-long-legs web, wondered why, looked up and saw that our friendly huntsman had been back in the house, and left her latest offering.




Every one of those is a baby huntsman spider.  Yeehaw.  


I have not, shamefully, been back to upholstery school.  The thought of doing a 16 hour day so closely following on the heels of post-holiday exhaustion was just too hard to come to grips with, but this week, I promise.  Just in time for the holidays.  Hopefully I'll be able to catch up on the cushion sewing fairly quickly, but it's the hardware bits that'll probably be my undoing.  We shall see.  


The very lovely Chairy Godmother has just posted a fantastic looking chair rehab, which is well worth a look.  I picked up a chair from the side of the road during our latest Council Cleanup:





Mine is quite similar to this, but in that hideous bronzey-green 'sharkskin' vinyl that was so popular here in the 1960's.  I'm going to donate it to the Upholstery School so that somebody can have the joy of making it into something beautiful.


And speaking of beautiful, I made an Easter Bilby today - there's been a campaign going on in Australia for some time now, to help save the endangered Bilby:





Mine is way cuter....




I haven't worked out yet how to turn the two-dimensional pattern into three, but I'm working on it.

We're off to the fabulous Hunter Valley for Easter, and there may be some Easter Bilby giving, so if I do make some more, I promise I'll post pics.  I have Easter Tuesday off too, not really a holiday but it is for me - yee haw!

And now, the siren lure of pizza is calling me... Ciao!