April 2009 Archives

The rest of the slice, here

Today I ducked out in my lunchbreak and bought myself two pairs of jeans.

Now, this is a feat in itself and one that I'm quite proud of. Let me tell you why.

Well, it's because I only had a half an hour lunch break, and that in that miniscule amount of time I managed to find two pairs of jeans that didn't garotte my muffin top into two horizontal pancakes AND they miraculously slimmed both my thighs and my buttocks!

Huzzah!

However, what was truly noteworthy is that one of those new pair of jeans was black, and "*skinny" - a cut and shade of jeans that I haven't considered purchasing in well over fifteen years.

What I also reluctantly had to come to terms with was that my new black jeans were two sizes bigger than the last ones I bought, circa 1994.

Ah well, onwards and outwards...

*They're not skinny as in skinny, stovepipe skinny like all the young 'uns are wearing; they're just not as bootcut as bootcut jeans are. God bless Jeans West.

Click here for more of that Kodak Girl...

• Because a) it blew a gale and rained like a monsoon yesterday and b) every Tom Dick and Harriet in the vicinity were busy on the innernet, yesterday I couldn't even load a page.Not. one.single.page. All Firefox could give me was Page Error Page Error Page Error. Waaaah!
  
• This makes me want to have a large ranty tantrum and phone up Vodafone and give 'em a piece of my got-damn mind.
  
• To add to my frustration this also meant I missed out posting about Anzac Day for the first time ever. 
• I am on my second to last dark chocolate-coated marshmallow Easter Egg out of a pack of eight which is either a sign that I've gone off chocolate, or that I have extreme powers of self control.
• However, I have noticed these powers don't seem to crank in when there's a bottle of chilled wine sitting in the fridge.
• I am supposed to be studying Christina Rossetti's poetry, but keep loitering on Facebook. Again with the self control.
• Lately I've been waking up with sore, aching joints in my fingers. Gout? The beginnings of arthritis? Or just part of the "aging process"?
  
• Miss 8.7 and I watched Back to the Future on telly last night. Actually, she watched it (and thought it was really, really cool) - I nodded off and ended up snoring "like Boris" apparently. Yep, all class, me...
  
• Pippa and Max got into an all-out scrum with our neighbour's Blue Heeler on this morning's walk, almost dislocating my shoulder. Oh Cesar, where are you when I need you? 
• The electricity for the Beige Barn is going in this week. Four weeks and counting, tick, tick, tick!
• The Other Harf has informed me (in accountant mode, with his spectacles and green visor on) that for a 40th birthday present I can go to the UK later in the year - by myself. I have been thinking that as much as I'd love, love, love to do this, I'd really rather we all go to the Gold Coast and take Miss 8.7 to Movieworld and Seaworld and to visit all her second cousins in Brisbane.
• I need to go and stick the Sunday roast in the oven. Wee lambikins, fresh off the Geordie neighbours' paddock only a matter of weeks ago. Yum!
  
• Sunday bullet points, over and out....
  

...on a Tuesday

Over the weekend I was reading through my ancient blog archives (Kiwifruit is a whole five years old in September but I began blogging in June'03, so I've been at this blogging lark for almost six years. Does this make me middle-aged in the world of blogging?) and I couldn't help but think to myself, Carrie Bradshaw style, fingertips poised over my laptop, head tilted to the side: If I ever kicked the bucket my family can just hand this URL out and there it would be - an online autobiography: Fi woz 'ere.

I also thought to myself how awesome it was that there's a lot of commenters from way back then that I still connect with. Some still blog, albeit less frequently as they did back then (humph!) but many have abandoned blogging for the glories of Facebook and/or Twitter. One has gone on to choose Flickr alone, and has a dedicated presence there, with friends galore and comments trailing down the page (oh I wish I could Flickr like Barb does!).

And there is one blogfriend who has blogged consistently for almost as long as I have, and as far as I know he hasn't bothered with Facebook or Twitter. Hi Rob!

And there's others who have dropped off the face of the www. completely. For months, even years at a time we communicated, and then after a while there was a general fading away of posting by each of them, one by one, and then nothing. Some of these blogfriends I miss and wish they were still in my cyberlife. Others? Nah, not so much.

What I'm a little sad about now is that blogging seems to be last year's skirt length for those wanting to communicate online. Yes, Facebook and Twitter don't require the dedication, the application, the self-editing, the creativity of blogging but these new kid on the block applications are so much easier and quicker (oh that I could blog on my mobile phone - no, scrap that, I wish I could afford a mobile phone that I could blog on) and that's what we demand in this running race of a world that we live in.

But still, I love my blog the best, and even if I end up just connecting through other means and my visitors and comments dwindle to zilch, I think I will keep on writing this online autobiography of mine.  I hope I will, because as great as it was being able to read the thoughts and anecdotes and recollections of the thirty four year-old me five years on, imagine how wonderful it will be in twenty or thirty years time?

A gift from a much missed friend.

Eeek! Yes, this is a face only a mother could love. Max and Pippa spent at least an hour playing silly buggers on the front lawn this afternoon and I was diverted enough from gardening by their antics to nip inside and grab my camera to snap photos of all their shenanigans and the priceless expressions on their faces. Oh, those very silly dogs...

In other news, today the Other Harf hired a "splitter", which is basically a gigantic axe on a horizontal mechanical pile-driver. He and Dad spent most of the day feeding it bits of ancient stump which in turn it annihilated at the turn of a lever into perfect pieces of kindling, and now we now have a six foot high by eight foot wide pile of firewood all ready for the winter. Result!

And speaking of results, I took Miss 8.7 shopping In Town this morning, as she has totally sprouted in the past couple of months and all her pants/trousers are flapping round the bottom of her shins. Several swipes of the credit card later and she has three pairs of pants, some cool faded black jeans, skinny-leg of course (boot-cut is sooo 90's, schweetie), two long-sleeved tops and some black canvas slip-on shoes covered in multi-coloured spots. I was never this cool at 8.7 years old, I tell ya that much.

And tonight dinner is being "cooked" by Niece T and Miss 8.7. Their choice of dish is homemade pizza, which each person has to prepare themselves, so that kind of takes all the hard work out of the "cooking" as such, but the thought was there I suppose.

So that's Saturday, done and dusted. What did you get up to, or what have you got planned?

Just like Chris, over at Rude Cactus, there's a lot of things I Think I Should Understand But I Don't.

And there's quite a few on his list that I have to add to mine...

• Country music
• The Global Recession
• Adam Sandler
• The attraction of playing Playstation games that are not Buzz or Singstar
• Asparagus
• Matchbox 20
• Dungarees
• People who don't read books
• Caramel popcorn
• Carob
• The stockmarket
• Angelina Jolie
• Quilted and scented toiletpaper
• Wuthering Heights
• Mushrooms
• Gordon Ramsay
• Yoga
• Botox
• The practice of wearing one's jeans so low you can see one's underwear
• The longevity of The Wiggles
• Nostril hair
• Keira bloody Knightley
• Golf
• Bling
• Alice bands
• The Sims
• Orlando Bloom
• Touting religion door to door.
• Lost
• Fishing
• Oysters

Can you explain any of these to me? And what would be on your list?

More of tonight's sunset, right here...

My best friend L and her husband S drove up from Auckland yesterday afternoon to spend the night, and we ate far too much food and drank quite a bit of wine, and we caught up with their news and they caught up with ours.

This morning, after even more food (an Easter themed brekkie of hot-cross buns and scrambled eggs minus the pretty foil wrappers) we took Nephew T and Miss 8.7 to Ruakaka Beach, and after a swim L and I took a long walk along the beach and she talked about not getting pregnant after two years of trying and all the tests and how there was nothing physically wrong with either her or S and the specialist told her that they should just wait a little bit longer before IVF and how at the age of almost 40, she didn't want to wait; she couldn't afford to.

"Fi, I just wish people would stop saying to me, 'oh, it will happen eventually, you just need to stop thinking about it'. But how do I do that? I just can't!"

And I just listened, and hugged her when she started to cry, like a best friend should.

Happy Easter to you all. Today I am thankful for the following:

1) My wonderful, kind, generous, loving husband 2) My beautiful, happy, clever daughter 3) My home: it's everything I've ever wanted. 4) My extended family, despite the racket they make 5) My job and how lucky I am to have it 6) My friends (my best friend, who I mentioned in this post, is driving up to spend the night tonight - we have lots to talk about...)

But most of all, I am thankful for:

7) Queen Anne Dark Chocolate Marshmallow Easter Eggs! Yippee!

The Other Harf is wearing a dirty great big grin today, as after months of waiting, he was finally able to hand in his resignation.

Why? Because yours truly got herself a job*! WOO-HOO! I've been waiting almost a week to hear (after my second interview/interrogation last Wednesday) and yesterday afternoon I finally got the call.

The job is the same beancounting sort of role I did at my last job, but this time it's for a small local construction company instead of a large international publishing and media corporation - and instead of working in an office of 100 women and 10 men, I'll be working in a company of three women and 60 men, so some big differences there.

And it's a whole new role as the company is expanding so rapidly (which can only be a good thing in this grey, doomstricken era of Global Economic Downturn) and my new boss seems like a very cool lady.

I hope I'm going to like it....I think I'm going to.

It's been a fabulous summer and I'm grateful that I've been able to spend three months outdoors in gorgeous summer weather (as is our garden) - now it's time for my long-suffering husband to find a job that doesn't involve twelve hour days and working weekends, the poor love.

A thoughtful someecard that I received today from my lovely yet slightly cynical friend Edna. Bless her.

*A deal we struck - I really wanted part-time work but I wanted him to leave his job, which has been making him miserable for months now, even more, so that meant taking a full-time position instead as part-time won't support us if he's unemployed for a long period of time. Yes it is true, I am truly a wonderful wife.