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It's wild, wet and windy here - a good day for staying in at the computer. Though I am also determined to make Bernard do his 2007 tax this weekend, which may requite standing over him with a large stick.
It's also sale weekend at Designer Digitals.
Everything is store is 30% off, and the sale has started now.
I have lots of new stuff in store:
And I've been working my way steadily through the trip photos:
I came across this page by Katie!
Journalling reads:
I was so lucky to get to meet Lynn’s daughter on our trip to
Florida. I don’t know what I expected from this child but
this little angel completely melted every inch of my heart. She
was the most purely delightful, genuinely sweet soul I have ever encountered and my life is better for having met her.
Apologies to those of you still snow bound and shivering, but it has been absurdly hot here. We have a reverse ventilation system which draws cool air into the house in the evening in summer and in winter draws warmer air from the roof space. The useful thermostat on the wall tells you what the temperatures are in the house and the roof. On Friday it was 41 (105.8 F) in the roof space and 30 (86F) in the house. Outside it was somewhere in between. Apparently it was the hottest day since the 1870s but worst of all at night it got up to 100% humidity.
As a result I think my brain was melting. I was on my way to toss Daughter-One's black clothes into the washing machine when I spied some navy shorts of mine on the floor, so I grabbed them too. An hour or so later I was about to leave the house and looking for my cell phone. Quite odd that it wasn't in it's usual places and when I tried to ring myself it just went to answerphone. Where did I have it last? With a sinking feeling I realised that where I had it last was in the back pocket of my (you guessed it) navy shorts.
I needed it because I was on my way out to walk to Mt Eden for a massage. I woman I occasionally get a massage from emailed me with a "New Year's special" so I thought I'd treat myself. I think she has invented a new alternative health treatment. She works out of her cute Victorian wooden cottage in Mt Eden, in a converted hallway with a skylight above. Since it was the middle of the day, I lay there bathed in full sun on the hottest day since the cottage was built. One you got used to it, it was actually quite relaxing. A cross between a sauna and a therapeutic massage.
It would have been wonderful were it not for the CD she had playing of pan pipe versions of well-known songs, such as "My heart will go on", "Do you know the way to San Jose?" and "My Way". The concept of a pan pipe version of a Celine Dion classic is bad enough, but it also meant I lay there thinking "what IS that song, I know how the lyrics go, what's the next line ..." etc etc. I was just about to jump off the table and rip it out of the CD player when, after a rendition of "When a Child is Born", it thankfully came to an end.
Afterwards I shook myself awake and weaved my way rather dreamily through Mt Eden on the way to collect Daughter-Two from school, taking some photos as I went.
Despite the phone disaster and the heat induced hopelessness, I am trying to be more organised. I was always the sort of person with homemade frozen meals in the freezer, the bills paid as soon as they arrived and a place for everything. But working full-time from home while living with the human whirlwind that is Daughter-Two (and two other people who are oblivious to mess) has changed all that.But new wonder drugs that have meant I no longer have a splitting headache every second day have helped, so I am determined to stay on top of the chaos. For example, for a year Daughter-Two has been missing the knobs on her toy cupboard. I had one knob and screw I had found rolling about on the floor, plus another lone screw. But finally last week I gave up on finding the missing one, threw out the lone screw and ordered some replacement knobs off TradeMe (NZ's ebay equivalent). I told Bernard "I just bought knobs from chikmagnet". Despite his username, chikmagnet sent them promptly and they arrived on the very day Daughter-Two came to me holding a knob (without screw) in her hand saying "look, I found my toy cupboard knob". Sigh.
Then yesterday the weather suddenly changed and it became cold and wet - just in time for me to have to take DaughterTwo to her art class on the other side of town. Bernard had taken the car and gone to "Foo Camp" so we had to take two buses. While she was in class, I wandered down through Ponsonby in the rain. At a street corner a young guy was complaining to his girlfriend "I've never been so cold in my life". How absurd, what a wimp I thought. Until I collected Daughter-Two and gave her my jacket to wear. After waiting ten minutes for a bus to Newmarket, shopping for fabric for the doll she wanted to make her then waiting another ten minutes for a bus home I was absolutely chilled to the bone. Even after half an hour in a steaming hot bath I was shivery. Then I had to spend an hour making the doll, based on one Daughter-Two saw in a shop in Georgia and hasn't forgotten.
Yes, it has green hair. As per her request.
It was also a relatively productive week scrap-wise.
New in store at Designer Digitals are:
I even got some scrapping done. And I even got off my butt and submitted (and sold!) one to a magazine as soon as I finished it, which made my week. I need to do more of that.
And I've been adding some previously published layouts into my gallery finally (These are all pretty old):
It's been a scorcher of a Waitangi weekend. We spent Friday (Waitangi Day) by the pool with some distant relatives of Bernard's. Daughter-two spent hours in the pool, begging various adults to join her at different times. She was well lathered up with sunblock but after five hours in the pool she was looking a little pink and the freckles had come up on her face. Not sunburnt but definitely "sun-kissed" for the first time ever. I doubt she will go the slightest bit brown though. She seems destined to be the colour of milk.
Today we drove out to Bethell's beach and walked down the river to the lake there. We have been there before but never all the way to the lake. It took about 45 minutes.At one point the riverbed was completely dry. She had a great time throwing herself into the water at the lake, and covering us with handfuls of black sand ("look a seagull has pooped on your shoulder") from the lakebed. We walked back across the black sand dunes, which resulted in slightly singed toes for me in jandals.
Not surprisingly I haven't been in the mood to create winter kits. These are new in store at Designer Digitals this week:
I've been too busy to scrap, although I have been pressing on with the trip layouts when I get the odd few minutes.
I see there is yet another "charity kit" drama brewing up over at DST.
It appears a designer may have "run off" with the proceeds of a kit intended to raise money for another family's injured child. Is this worse than the woman a couple of years ago who claimed her child was dying of cancer in order to get sympathy and cold hard cash from the digi-scrapping community? I thought that was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I have no opinion I want to share on this latest drama, but I do find it intriguing that people keep saying "I am so shocked", or "I know her well and ..." or "I would never have thought she would do such a thing". I guess some of these people may have actually met her face to face but it does always make me think about how one-dimensional a net relationship really is and how people forget that.
Because, lets face it, you probably don't really know her. And if you are not a family member or old friend reading this blog, you don't really know me.
I say I Iook like this:
But in actual fact I could look like this:
Or maybe even this:
Actually, on a bad day, I kind of feel like this:
That's all I'm saying.
PS Actually the exception to this is all the wonderful girls at DD, because when I met them (brief as it was to my regret) they were all exactly as I imagined them and just as lovely.
Moving on ..... some more trip layouts:
I had to go into the city this week with Daughter-Two to sort out something at Daughter-One's school. Luckily I took the camera along, as the Chinese New Year decorations were still up.
These photos were all taken from just by Daughter-One's school. I think it will be great for her being in the city - when she has a break she can walk down the street and get sushi for lunch before, hopefully, heading into the library to work ...
We went back into town on Saturday when my mother came up to visit, and that was fun. A really nice girl's day out (since Bernard was away).
I also love it when she comes up because she always brings with her a big pile of magazine's passed on by my sister. Nothing like a bit of mindless reading in the bath. However, you can only take mindlessness so far and one of these magazines seems determined to push it to the extreme. It has a "pet psychic" column where the unlikely-named Amanda de Warren can pass on messages from the beyond from your passed-away pets. Presumably she must also have Doctor Dolittle type abilities since these messages come through in perfect English. The letter I read was from a woman upset at the death of her poor goldfish. She must have been greatly relieved to hear via Amanda that Nutmeg and Ginger (who was apparently "very outgoing") were happy in the afterlife. I am not quite sure what an "outgoing goldfish" is like, but apparently this one is "still around" and was listening in to her former owner talking on the phone to her mother the other day.
I'm sorry? We are talking here about a creature with a brain that weighs 0.097 grams. And I don't know about you, but I don't think I would want the ghost of an outgoing goldfish eavesdropping on my phone conversations. I'm funny like that.
What I really want to know is - just how stupid do these magazine editors believe their readers are?
Moving on ... I've started scrapping the photos of the trip, using the templates I created before we left. I packaged them up into an album for the store as well:
Here are a few of the pages so far:
Also new in store this week are these:
