Me and my contraception.

This started out as a quick note to tell you I am still alive, and turned into…. well.

I haven’t knit for three weeks.  Well, I’ve done a row or two, but nothing that really counts.  I just haven’t really had the urge.  Partly because I haven’t had the time, and when I have, it’s been sit-and-stare-at-the-wall time.

Work has been a bit mental the last few weeks.  Mostly good mental, although not every day.  Last Thursday (not yesterday) I went over to Emma’s house for dinner.  My arrival went something like this: hiemmaihavewinebutit’snotcoldi’mputtingitinyourfreezerdoyouhavenaycoldwine?

It was one of those days. 

Add to that the fact that I have had a social engagement or other activity every single night this week.  I seriously fail to understand how this is my life.  I am boring!  And Old at Heart!  And don’t like people!  How did I acquire a social life?! 

I went to the Random House Roadshow the other week and they had a bit about movies that were coming out that were based on books they’d published.  And they had a trailer for a Jim Carey movie (which looked surprisingly un-shit, actually) called, imdb tells me, Yes Man.  It’s about this guy (that’d be Jim) who always says no to stuff.  Then he goes to some guru or has a life coach or something and he starts saying yes to everything and his life is one big adventure.  Hoorah!  Except I was sitting there going ‘Say ‘no’, Jim!  You know you want to!’  I feel like that is my life – I had started to get really good at saying no to stuff I didn’t really want to do.  Then people I like started asking me to do fun stuff that I want to do.  It’s awesome… and exhausting.

If you asked some of the people at work, they’d tell you it’s because I’m on the cusp of travel-loving, need-new-experiences Saggitarious and stay-at-home, who-moved-my-socks-they-were-alphabetised Capricorn.  Then they’d tell you about how Mercury is rising, and how, if you squeeze your ankle, you can tell if you’re ovulating (I’m not making that one up)

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I am soooo tired.  And not just from running around being a social butterfly.  I think it might be partly hormonal.  The next bit might be a bit TMI, so… forewarned and all that.  See, I got my implanon out last friday. 

I have had one in since I was… um… 19?  And I loved it.  Unequivocally loved it.  (Even though I freaked myself out a bit reading some links just then.)  I’ve realised I really liked knowing that there was no way I could conceive.  Not at all.  That I was off the market as a baby-making machine.  It was the sort of thing that I didn’t realise was a part of my mental landscape until I had it taken out.  The idea that I could get pregnant is really weirding me out, actually.  I mean… ah!

Anyway.  I wanted to just talk a little about my experience on it and also why I got it out – in case anyone is ever interested, and also for my own future reference.

I originally got it in because I needed some form of contraception, and that seemed to fit best with my life and what I needed.  I used to have trouble swallowing pills (psychosomatic, but still a thing) and I was a poor uni student, so the idea of 1) not having to pay for the Pill every month and 2) not having to think about it for three years, really appealed.  A few of my friends had one in, and so it didn’t really seem weird – I had already heard them talk about some of the side affects and how it affected them, and I felt like I knew what I was getting into.  I figured that if I hated it I could just have it taken out.  Plus, I read The Gate To Women’s Country as a teenager, and it seemed so cool and future-tech.  (Good book, you should read it.)

Anyway, I got it put in at SHine, in the second year that they were allowed in Australia.  the implanon, not SHine.  The doctor who did the intitial consultation was really good.  She didn’t push me either way, or suggest that I didn’t know what I was talking about - she listened to what I said about what I wanted, made sure I had done my research, and helped me figure out what questions I still had.  I have been really impressed with SHine every time I have been.

The first few months were… interesting.  (This is where the TMI really starts) I had a bit of spotting, which is normal – not too much, though.  I know a few people who had them out after two weeks because they just couldn’t stand the spotting.  For me, this only lasted a few weeks, and wasn’t a big deal, but if it hadn’t stopped, or if it had been heavier, it would have been hard to deal with. 

In general, I found the whole period aspect of it great.  I never had much period pain before, but what I had went, and my periods were lighter.  The longer I had it in, the lighter they were, and the less frequent, too.  I think I only had two or three in the last year.  Which is a little weird, when I put it in writing, but also awesome.  The only downside is that they are obviously not regular, so you get caught by surprise sometimes.  But since they were so light, it wasn’t hard to cope.  Having to constantly have pads etc on me is bumming me out, now.  Plus… it’s gross.  I’m sorry, you can talk all you want about natural and the beauty of the human body.  I completely appreciate that in the abstract.  But IRL?  It’s gross and uncomfortable and I didn’t miss them even a little, tiny, abstract bit.

The hormone thing was interesting, though.  I remember Katharine, one of my friends at the time who had it in, telling me about it before I had it done myself.  Since your periods are irregular, you don’t know when they’re coming, and therefore don’t know when you are supposed to be PMSing.  Katharine said that she would often find herself being a mega-bitch – yelling at her boyfriend, being cranky at work… and then, a week later, she’d get her period, and realise what that was all about, and have to go around apologising for being unreasonable.

At the time I thought she was kind of exaggerating.  But she was right.  I would find myself on huge PMS rage binges – I would be thinking all this unreasonable stuff, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it from popping out of my mouth.  Where normally I was completely chill, for a week or so I would snap or cry at the littlest comment.  It seems pretty obvious now what was going on, but at the time, just emerging from puberty, not really knowing my body or my emotions terribly well… well, frankly it was a bit frightening, until I realised what was going on!  And even then…

I can’t emphasise this point enough – it didn’t matter that I knew what was going on.  I could almost literally feel the hormones in my system, but what I thought about it didn’t seem to matter.  For that week, my body was not my own, my mind was not my own.  And as annoying as it was for other people to live with, it was worse for me.  To be stuck somewhere inside, thinking ‘wtf is your problem, lady?!  he just asked if you were feeling ok, because you looked tired!  That’s no reason to cry!!’ and not being able to do anything about it.  It was scary!  At least once I figured it out I knew I wasn’t going mad!  But if it had kept going, it might have been a deal breaker.

However.  It didn’t.  As my periods got fewer and lighter, the hormone rush did, too.  One of my current friends has commented that she knows three people who have the implanon and love it.  One is me, and the other two are remarkably similar in personality.  We are, as she puts it, her ‘bitter friends’.  I don’t think that the implanon makes you like that (well, not that much anyway – more on that in a sec) rather, if your hormones/personality/world view are already set up a certain way, the implanon and the way it affects you is easier for you to deal with, and fits into your life better.  In my unexpert opinion.

That said.  The hormone rush didn’t just get less during PMS time.  It got less overall.  No mood swings.  Sounds great, doesn’t  it?  Well, sometimes it is.  But other times… I lost a lot of the lows, but I lost a lot of the highs as well.  And turns out, a lot of the stuff that makes you unhappy doesn’t come from the hormones, anyway.  It comes from your brain – or mine, at least.  It’s just that when I am hormonal, I deal with negative thoughts less well.

I got it out because I needed to know what I was like when I was just me.  I don’t want to talk about My Hormones like they are an external influence.  I don’t think you can separate things out like that – you are, in a large part, what your body makes you.  Your hormones, how much sleep you’ve had, the shape of yourself, what your body can do.  It changes how you interact with the world, and that’s what makes up who you are. 

I think that that was the most valuable thing that I got from having the implanon in.  (Plus all the money I saved on sanitary products… oh, and the hot, worry-free sex…)  I know it added hormones in, but it sort of felt like it took them away, too.  I got to learn who I was without being able to blame it on mood swings, or anything else.  I got to learn myself.  And I learnt to cut myself and other people a bunch of slack.  Because there’s only so much you can do to talk yourself out of a grump when you are awash in a hormone cocktail of doom. 

It taught me, in that visceral way that only direct experience can, that I am not in control, or even aware of, all the things that make me me.  It taught me to appreciate that and to deal with the end results better.  I feel like I am much more accepting of who I am, much more forgiving of myself.  I guess that sounds a bit self indulgent, but it’s true.  Part of it might just be getting older, too, but it defnitiley helped to take me out of myself, so to speak – to give me that distance from my emotions that I needed to be able to see them for what they were.  Which ones are important, which ones are real, which ones are useful and which ones need minimising.

I am hoping that that will serve me well when the first PMS hits.

Try not to rub my face in it too much when I fail, will you?  I don’t know that I can be held accountable for any violence i may wreak.  Hormones, donchaknow…

It’s 5.30am and I’m blogging. About privilage.

Why?  Because I can’t sleep.  Why?  Because I was having one of those dreams where you do the same simple thing over and over. 

Sometimes my brain does this because it hates me and it wants me to die.  Today it did it because I was worrying at this thing.  Let me explain the situation (I swear, it’s relevant.  I think.  I mean, it is 5.30)

It’s pretty simple, when isolated.  I was making a flyer for a male colleague.  I made the flyer.  There was some to-ing and fro-ing, but nothing unusual.  The time came to send the flyer out electronically.  I’ve built it in Illustrator, and I’ve used a couple of fancy fonts – our standard fancy font and another one specifically requested.  This means that I can’t just pdf the sucker, because, because of the complicated nature of copyright (go read BoingBoing or something, if you are confused about this.  And want to be more confused.  And then angry.  And then confused again… maybe don’t read BoingBoing.) the fonts can’t be packaged.  Thismeans that if I pdf it as is, and you don’t have Frutiger and DIN light on your computer, you won’t be able to read it properly at worst, at best it will not look the way it is intended.  (Frutiger is ok, it usually just defaults to arial.  Some fonts will turn up as gibberish, though.)

So, ok, I do the usual, I convert type to outlines, which means making the computer think it’s a shape, not a font.  This is great, but it also means, for most san serif fonts (and Frutiger especially), that the lowercase ‘l’s will all lookkind of bold.  It’s a thing.  No way around it.

So, I send it off to Male Colleague.  He comes in: the ‘l’s look funny.  I explain why.  He expresses his unhappiness at this fact.  I tell him I can send him the not-outline one for internal use (most of us have Frutiger, it’s our official font.  Just to make life easier for everyone, we picked a stupid one) but that if he sends it out, a lot of people won’t be able to see it properly.  He likes this.  I send it to him. 

He sends that one out as the official flyer. 

A female colleague at another site who works on approvals, and with whom I often discuss such things, puts it into Illustrator again, makes it outlines, and resends it out, with a friendly note to me pointing out that I probably should do that, next time, so that everyone can read it properly.

I was disproportionately upset about this.  Part of it is the context of the last couple of weeks – Thursday and friday everythingI did just seemed to be a little bit wrong.  You know?  Nothing big, just little, niggly, stupid mistakes.  And a similar thing had happened earlier on this flyer (I suggested a design tie-in, Male Colleague didn’t want to go in that direction, I did the flyer, Female Colleague pointed out that a design tie in would have been nice, MC had no memory of the conversation I had had with him about it). 

And I am getting really, really tired of being treated like a retard.  And I am even more sick of being one.

This is what I woke up at 4am thinking about.

I know, it’s not even that big of a deal.  Except it is.  In my head, this is how it goes:

MC: There’s a problem.

Me: <explains problem and why it can’t be fixed the way he wants it fixed>

MC: I’m not really sure that you know what you are talking about.

Me: Hmmm, me either.

Me again: Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing.  <Does something that proves this.  The other way, though>

FC: Um.  Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

 

So, yesterday I was angry at him for not listening, for making it look like I made a rookie mistake…

Until I realised (at 4am, did I mention that?) that I had made a rookie mistake.

If I had forgotten to do this, I would be angry at myself.  I should know better than to have let him have the not-outlined copy.  It shouldn’t have even occured to me as an option.  So why did it?

Partly because of our relationship and dynamic.  Partly because of the day I was having(busy).  Partly because of the week I was having (busy – the same reason for the stupid mistakes last week).  Partly because I wanted him to go away and let me get on with other things – I was finished with this flyer, already!Partly because I didn’t go to design school for three years and sometimes I still feel like a bit of a fraud in this job (which I am NOT.  Doesn’t help with the feeling, though, knowing that).

It didn’t even occur to me that gender roles might have played a part.  But I think they might have.

Not a big part.  But a crucial one.  An unconscious one.  One that made it ok for him to think that maybe he knew more than me about my job, and for me to think that too.

To put this in perspective, our site boss asked about the same thing the other day, I explained it and she said ‘ok, it’s not a big deal, then’.

Now, the place I work has a very high female:male ratio.  It is very privilege-aware.  So is this particular male colleague.  I am definitely not calling him a sexist pig here.  that is plain not true, and he would be offended by it – rightly so.  Actually, he was offended the other day when I pointed out that he is part of the Patriarchy (ain’t we all.)

One of his things in Narrative Therapy, and I wanted to know a bit about it, so he had recommended some books from our library for me.  And I stared reading one, and I found this bit.

[F]eminists have demonstrated how patriarchal attitudes permeate social institutions and popular thought, and how these assumptions lead to injustice.  As a result, in some social circles traditional narratives about the ‘essential’ – and subordinate – nature of women are no longer taken seriously, although I believe that these ideas are often demonstrated by those of us men who think of ourselves as liberal…. I imagine that few counsellors of any persuasion agree with male chauvinist, racist or similar beliefs, but the emphasis in narrative therapy on the need for continual vigilance against their more subtle manifestations is particularly emphatic.  White* values feminist analysis of the patriarchal assumptions embedded in established psychologies, and acknowledges that feminists have alerted him to subtle ways in which sexism and chauvinism may be demonstrated by male therapists through vocal tone, dominance of conversation, marginalization through vocabulary choice, unverified assumed capacity for empathy, and assumed cultural and gender norms.  White insists that these manifestations are impossible to avoid altogetherbecause male therapists live in a culture in which those attitudes are embedded.  However, he believes that by critical self-monitoring and regular checkingout with persons**, therapists may go some way towards minimizing these factors, and that to do so is a moral obligation.

(Payne, M (2006) Narrative Therapy second edition, Sage publications, page 22 emphasis added)

*this is Michael White, co-founder/inventer/whatever of Narrative Therapy, and my fellow Adelaidean – well, until he died earlier this year.  An unfortunate name in the circumstances, perhaps

** their term for ‘clients’

I tagged it, because the MC in question in this story sometimessays stuff that I know he thinks is joking, but… sort of isn’t, really.  I mean, he means it to be.  But this privilegething…  It’s insidious, you know?  In fact, about 5 pages later, after that quote, the author does it himself.  He gives four examples of people struggling with ‘thin’ narratives of their lives (society telling them they are no good, essentially).  One of them is a primary-school aged boy.  The other three are female.  Why?  I don’t know.  I’m pretty sure the author didn’t mean to make it look like only women and children have these problems (classic Victorian strategy.  The era, not the place.  Although…)  And when I pointed it out to MC, he protested along these lines – of course it’s not intentional, it’s not a big deal, don’t be silly, etc etc.

But that’s not the point.  The point is, that privilege is SNEAKY!  It gets us coming and going.  We don’t mean to show it, but with subtle language choices, with body language, with all kinds of non-conscious clues and hints, we reinforce it – both the privileged and the un-privileged reinforce it for each other, ourselves and those around us.  It’s not just the men who live in the culture that feeds them assumptions about women – women live in it too, we breathe it in every day.  You can’t avoid absorbing some of it.  Why do you think things like sexualised dolls are such a big deal, why capital F feminists object to sexy video clips.  It’s not the things themselves, it’s the ripples they leave in people’s self-stories, in their sub conscious, in their innate awareness of how to be and act, what’s acceptable and what’s not, what’s normal.

That’s why it’s important to have real diversity – not just token ‘others’.  I go past a school every day on the way to work, with a mural out the front that the kids have done themselves.  It shows kids playing.  All the ‘normal’ looking kids are clearly boys, through my cultural eyes.  All the figures that are girls are exaggerated – huge pigtails, big lips, eyelashes, etc.  What does that tell those girls, every day, without them knowing?  That to be noticed, to be a girl, they have to be exaggeratedly feminine, to be over the top.  They can’t just be ‘normal’ – only boys are normal.  to be a good, proper part of our society, they need to change their behaviour, their appearance and themselves.

And I think that’s part of what happened to me yesterday.  I bought into someone else’s privilege.  He wasn’t trying to make me.  But we were part of a societal script.

The thing is, that there’s no point to all of this.  I mean, essentially, so what?  What is the big freaking deal?  It was a tiny incident, and I’m way over exaggerating it.  And even if it is about gender, It doesn’t matter.  It is almost as bad to always make it about gender (or whatever) as to never make it about that.  I am positive that gender played some sort of role in this.  But it shouldn’t have.  And that it did is as much his fault as mine, since we both bought into it as much.  Me maybe more: I should have pushed back.  If i am the strong woman that I like to pretend I am, I should act like it, I should work on myself to make sure that Idon’t buy into those cultural norms – if I’m doing it to myself, who ese am I doing it to?  And how can I expect others to self-examine if I won’t?

I am not sure if this was just a thinly veiled excuse to blog about what woke me up, or to make it seem more important or more glorified.  I do know that this incident and my own problems with gender are insignificant in the scheme not only of the world, but of my own life.  Comfortable middle-class existence, and all that.  I am thankful for that. 

But it has made me think about the way I relate to privilege.

White woman, like men of colour, have a special advantage if only we will use it.  We get to see privilege from both sides.  We get to see it interacting in complicated ways.  We get to examine our own position to privilege, our owning of it and our lacking of it.  How it helps us and how it trips us.  How we can use it against someone else without even meaning to.  How what we think are innocent words and actions can hurt other people directly and indirectly.  It’s precisely the small nature of this incident that highlights to me how important this is – even here, my workplace that I consider one of the most fair and considerate places in the world, this tripped me up.  I had to argue with MC for about three minutes before he accepted that there even might be something wrong with all those earlier examples being female or children.  (btw, am I overreacting on this one?  Input appreciated)

It’s hard to step out of things and see it.  And sometimes, like this time, it’s not even a big player in the situation.  Other, more specific things, require our attention and deserve their own weight.  It needs to be more about the personal relationships than the gender ones, for example.

That doesn’t mean that the privilege isn’t there.  And that it isn’t harmful.    Sneaky bastard.

Tolerance goes both ways, you know.

I was thinking about my blog post last night, and I realised I might have been a little rude.  You see, I made a throw away comment about God (“Dear ridiculous-father-figure-deity-in-the-sky”).  And I was thinking about it and I realised that Science Girl, who tagged me for that meme in the first place, is religious.  Has faith.  Whatever, however you want to put it.  I don’t know what she believes or how, but I know that God is someone important to her and her life.  I wouldn’t worry too much excpet that we’ve only just stumbled accross each other in blogland, and without any context it looks pretty rude and disrespectful.

So instead of a babbling apology or running back the other way, which would mean nothing and also not be true to my own beliefs and whatever, I thought I’d do ‘6 things you don’t know about me: the religion edition’.  Here goes:

1.  I was brought up Catholic.  Both sides of my family are good Irish Catholics going way back.  My parents were sort of hippies, in that churchy way.  They were involved in the rock mass congregation when that started.  I don’t know if they knew Sister Janet Meador not.  Must find that out.  (Great, now I have the Lord’s Prayer in song stuck in my head.)  My year 8 Music teacher was one of the people who wrote the rock mass.  He left halfway through that year to go to a more progressive school.  He was awesome. 

2.  My high school was a Mercy school (not the one linked to in Adelaide in that article).  I had pretty much lost most of my faith before I hit high school, but I still have a lot of respect for the Mercy sisters.  They had chutzpah.  And did truly good works.  There weren’t many nuns left at the school by the time I got there (there are none now, the convent is used as classrooms.  Although there are a couple who come in and help with special needs kids) but the ones we had contact with were great.  They were kind and nice but still real human beings, you know?

3.  I hate the new pope.  I miss John Paul II.  He was the pope all my life, and even though I didn’t believe in his religion by the time he died, he was my pope.  He got a lot of stuff wrong, in my opinion, but he got the essential humanity right, something I think that Pope Benedict could learn from.

4. I had my first communion late because about the time I was supposed to start it, I watched a documentary about the human body.  My family were pretty science-and-knowledge focused, and documentaries were something we would all gather around and watch.  When I was in China, I bought all the David Attenborough DVDs I could find, because they were a comfort thing.  Anyway.  I watched the bit about how babies are made, and I remember the picture in my head, it was one of those teeny cameras and it was of a woman’s fallopian tubes, and then there were similar shots of an embryo.  And I remember thinking ‘wait a second.  That’s not what they said!’ 

See, parish politics was complicated in the Adelaide hills.  The small town we were in had a reasonably progressive congregation – or at least very lassaiz faire.  And the parish priest when I was growing up was reallytouchy feely.  But the because of low numbers, it was a big parish, and the main base of it was in a pretty conservative town, and they got to teach the kids, see.  So what they were saying was pretty dumbed down and also really old fashioned.  While I, at home, was always encouraged to think for myself and make connections and was often told the complicated version, at church they would say ‘God made each and every one of us’ which seemed a little inefficient, at the time (I also thought that heaven was underground.   mean, it made sense.  You get buried, not shot up in the air, so it just seemed logical).

So, I was conflicted about it, the two stories, biological and spiritual, didn’t seem to gel.  My parents, to their very great credit, answered every question I had and said that I didn’t have to take any sacraments until I was sure I wanted to.  I ended up taking it two years later, and I can’t say it was a great experience – I had to go to lessons at another church, because there were only about two of us at ours, and the teacher was not very child-friendly.

5. Sometimes I think that being a lapsed Catholic is just as much of a religion as being a Catholic.  I still have a relationship with God – it’s just that ‘God’ is a voice in my head, not in the great beyond, and it’s a pretty quiet voice these days.  I used to envy people who had faith.  It seems easier, somehow, and how comforting would it be to know someone has things down, no matter how bad it might look for you personally or the world in general.  Someone is in charge.  And I still believe, have to believe, that there is some kind of natural order, there are rules and patterns mysterious and grand enough to be considered ‘divine’ (whatever that would mean to our mortal brains).  But I don’t, I can’t, believe that that comes from some beardy guy lying on a cloud.  I know that’s oversimpifying thousands of years of complicated philosophy but still…

Also, once you study European history, you realise how much of what us Westeners believe to be the Word of God is just tradition, or work arounds, or political manouvers.  That’s not to undermine the essential message(s) of the bible – but isn’t that the point?  That the messages don’t need the particulars to be true?

Anyway, back to being a lapsed Catholic.  I still have an ambivalent relationship with the whole religion thing, and I still have a really ambivalent relationship with Guilt.  I can wrap myself up in a really good guilt trip pretty easily.  As a result, I’ve learnt to ignore it.  It’s a pretty useless emotion.  I mean, either don’t do it, or don’t feel guilty about it.  But I have to wonder what that does to the way I relate to the rest of the world – I know it makes me seem harder, and maybe it makes me actually harder, too. 

Even when I couldn’t face the idea of going to church anymore, I still knew it was useful.  I mean, an hour a week where you reflect on life and morality and how to be good?  I think everyone could use that.  And I try to squeeze something like that out of every week, but it’s hard when it’s not ritualised.  It’s much harder to be a good person by yourself than with God at your back.  Although maybe not, looking at some people who think they have God at their back.

6. I still think Jesus would be a Dude.  I would totally love to hang out with him.

Some Knitting and Some Nesting

I am feeling a bit swamped with the knits at the moment.  I have too many things on the go, too many things I want to do, too many things that are halfway through and no end in sight, and have reached the fiddly bits, so that they’re hard to take places.

This weekend I have had people over every night at my new house.  This was sometimes pleasant, but made me a bit cranky this end of the week, since I feel like I haven’t done anything – nothing around the house, nothing on my knitting, and the headway I’d started to make on my podcasts (down to 5.5 days of audio in my podcast playlist!  Yay!) is loosing ground.  In fact, I feel like the unpacking and sorting is going backwards, since I cleared out the second bedroom last night so that my sister’s stuff could start being moved in before she herself moves.  This is a Good Thing, as it means that I don’t get used to using it as a dumping ground, and it feels more like a two person house, which is something I want to maintain so I don’t get a rude shock.  But it also means that there are books in piles in the living room, and DVDs in boxes taking up one whole wall of same.

The trouble is, I don’t have enough furniture – I need a chest of drawers and maybe a wardrobe for my bedroom and bookshelves for the living room.  But I dont’ have the money to buy them at the present time – this is my second fortnight of paying double rent, since I broke the lease on my last place, and all the bills with the connection fees are starting to come in.  Ouch.

It’s not that I can’t afford it – but there’s not a lot of extra cash floating around.

That said, I got rid of what extra there was, this last weekend.  I was at the Port Adelaide Fisherman’s Markets, at Mel’s stall, and I had a wander around afterwards.  Last time I was there, Emma and I found areally nice tea pot that I dithered about, and then decided that I’d go back for.  I wanted it for my Birthday do, which is going to be an afternoon tea, of the refined sort.  I have been slowly collecting odd cups and saucers, napkins, and the like.  Anyway, when we went back it wasn’t there.  But this time:

A miraculous reappearance!  Not the best photos, but they were last-minute mornign snaps.  I’m sure you’ll forgive.

It was only $12, so I bought it, on the theory that if I didn’t, I’d be kicking myself.

Bought with a similar point of view was this:

I’d just walked past a really really nice and perfect mirror for $99, which there is no way in the world I can afford right now.  And then there was this, for $10.  Snapped up!  The astute among you will notice, from the colour of the wall, that it is in the kitchen, and not the hall as I have been scheming.  It looked weird there, what with it being my its lonesome, and also saying ‘kitchen’ on it.

Besides, the kitchen is the most together room at the moment.

Check these out:

The far right canisters I have had for a while.  The middle ones were bought on the last cousin op shopping trip.  They are aluminium and I was originally scared that they might give me brain cancer, but then I decided that if I am going to get brain cancer, I’d rather get it from my canister what I love than from my deoderant, and so I’m using them.  But my favourite ones are the ones on the right which are, as Jac points out, Shiny.  I bought those at the Fisherman’s Wharf Markets, as a substitute for the teapot, that other time.

See the tags on them?  Since some of them are not filled with what they claim to be (third from the left, for example, says ‘tea’ but in fact contains rice) and others are duplicate (three types each of flour and sugar) and I apparently have dementia (hello aluminium canisters) and can’t remember my own name, I labelled them.

I used these:

They are from Print a Day and they are PERFECT.  See?

But even this project, simple as it is, is only half done.  Yeesh.

I also printed out the list ones of the matrioshkas and also the toadstools (SO EXCITING I LOVE THESE I AM YELLING WHY AM I YELLING?)

SUCH a terrible photo, I do apologise.  Also, I need a better magnet.  Or maybe I’ll get a clip and a magnet and clip them.  Or, I saw a thing on craftzine about making pieces of paper into a pad using special gum or jsut regular glue.  Anyway, it’s exciting.

Also exciting is the fact that I am up (down?) to the waist on Sahara.  I basted the neckline and tried it on, and it fits.  I took some photos because I don’t have a mirror I can see all of myself in, and I needed to look at it.

I’ve since sewn the neck up properly and although I need to redo it because the seam is not very neat, it does sit a bit better than this.  I think I shall sew up an inch or two of the split, as well.  I knit it a repeat wider than the pattern said, because I was concerned about the fit and if it would stretch accross that opening properly.

As you can see, it does fit.  I’m not sure how neatly, though.  Here it is without the front sewn up.

The shoulder sit better like this.  (ooooh, look at my canisters in the reflection!  Hello, shiny canisters!!)

The thing is, usually I do short rows, which would make it sit a bit better.  I didn’t on this because 1) where I would do them, there is lace and shaping 2) top down short rows hurt my brain and, most importantly 3) I started doing them, right after neck split bit, but they were really really obvious in this yarn.

I probably should have investigated side dart, but it’s in the round, and I’ve never done it before and, well… it’s HARD.  I think it will be ok, although not perfect.  You can’t really see it that well here:

Or maybe you can.  It’s a good half an inch shorter at the front than at the back.

I am thinking that what I will do is knit it an extra inch longer at the waist, and an inch longer at the bottom.  That should account for any undergarment peeping, which is the worst result of my usual hemline dilemma.

Does anyone know any different, or have better advice?  I wait with baited breath…

(Can you see my camera in this?  Never knew apples could make such a good tripod, now did you?)

Tagged!

I’ve never been meme tagged before.  How excitement!

The Science Girl tagged me for six things you didn’t know about me.  This is tough because, as she pointed out herself, the longer you blog, the more you share.  Plus, most people who read this know me in real life.  There isn’t much I won’t blab about, and what I won’t is… well… private.  So, I guess that leaves us with the trivial!  I’ll try not to be too trivial.

1. I am really weird about texture in food.  Anything sort of grainy/squeaky I can’t eat.  This means green beans, tofu, oysters, seaweed, some fish (sushi is a nightmare) that kind of thing.  I also really hate biting into corriander (cilantro) although I love the flavour of it infused.  These two weird issues combined mean that I can’t eat cold rolls unless I make them myself – surprise cilantro?  No thanks.

2. I am obsessed with maps.  But I am not very good at geography, unless I have a story to go with the place – which is why I was a history major, I guess.  I only started to know where things are in Europe once I studied its history.  Although, I probably know the map of Reformation era Europe better than today’s Europe – the other day I caught myself wondering if Austria was still a country!  (PS, it is)

3. Whenever I am going over a bridge or sitting next to an open bus window, and I have something precious in my hand (iPod, wallet, keys, etc) I have to grip them extra hard because I have this weird urge to throw them over the edge.  I cannot express how devastated I would be if I did this.

4. I don’t and have never owned a hairdryer.

5. I love Doris Day.  Yes, I do, and I don’t care how ridiculous Calamity Jane is,  still love it, and my favourite song it is even ‘A Woman’s Touch’.  And that bit where she confronts Katy and Bill shoots the barrel to teach her a lesson and she runs off and Bill comes after her?  Makes me cry every time.  I’ve felt like that a fair few times.  There is nothing you can say to make me not love that move, or Pillow Talk, although you can have Lover Come Back (favourite moment in that? After a big dinner that she cooks for him Rock Hudson: Would you like me to help with the dishes? Doris, with no trace of irony whatsoever: Oh no!  That’s woman’s work!)

6. I am straight.  But My One True Love was a girl I went to high school with.  I know, I know, I was 16 but I really truly did love her, with everything I had.  Nothing ever happened – by the time I realised that I was actually able to be In Love, and with a Girl, too, she had moved on.  It took me years to get over her properly – Adelaide’s pretty small, and I bump into her every now and then.  Last time I was fine, but the time before that I cried every night for a week afterward.  I haven’t been in love since, although I have loved people (not in the same way, though, really).   I don’t love her anymore, but only because I am so much a different person. The part of me that is still that person, is still 16 (and 17 and 18 and 19 and 20) loves her.  Thankfully it’s a pretty small part these days.  But if she turned up on my doorstop today, I’d still probably give her anything she asked for.  (I don’t mean that, you smutty people)

 

Ha!  Got you with that last one, didn’t I!  So much for being trivial.  Dear ridiculous-father-figure-deity-in-the-sky, I hope no one I know from then reads this, because they will definitely know who I am talking about, too.  Well, whatever.  It’s not really a part of who I am anymore except as a fact.  (she says, blithely)

And now I am not going to be lame and say ‘whoever wants to can do this meme’  I hereby tag:

1. Emma
2. Vellan
3. Carol
4. Sooz
5. Jac
6. Bek