OOTD - Another new necklace!

I'm off to Caitlin's second dance concert of the week tonight and I'm taking my new fabulous fat necklace out for a spin

Tunic - Autograph

Leggings - Target

Shoes - Mathers

Necklace - Definatalie

I didn't get a close-up of the necklace in the outfit I'm wearing now, but here's the one I took the day it arrived in the post.

OOTD - I've been shopping edition

This week I managed to buy myself 3 new pairs of shoes, 2 pairs of shorts, 2 tops, a dress and a crochet poncho thingy. I won't show you everything at once because I'd look really strange wearing all those clothes layered on top of each other plus I've only got two feet and the shoes look very odd hanging from my ears.

Here's the first installment:

Dress and poncho - Autograph

Shoes - Zensu from Mathers

And here's what the dress looks like without the poncho:

The shoes have passed the test of walking all over Westfield for several hours, my legs and back are fine and there's only the slightest hint of a rubbed spot on one little toe. Not bad for the first time they've been worn. When I was trying them on another customer said she'd bought the same shoes and that they were really comfy, and they are!

OOTD - Necklace pressie edition

This whole post is really just here so I can show off the lovely pendant in the last photo, but hey, may as well get the whole ensemble on record as well.

There's that bloody hat again. 

Hat - Strand hatters

Necklace - gift

Top - Torrid

Pants - Target

Shoes - Colorado

I'll leave it to your imagination as to what elicited that look from me when I asked Adam to photograph the pendant.

My beautiful 40th birthday present from my brother and his family

Outfit of the day. No, no occasion, just because.

I got up this morning, started to look for my jeans and then changed my mind. I wasn't going anywhere special or anything but NEW SKIRT! So I wore it. It only seemed right to top the outfit off with the hat.

Apparently having Adam take photos of me brings out the goofy face.

Skirt - Torrid

Hat - Akubra from Strand Hatters

Top - Target

Tights - We Love Colors

Boots - Giovanna

Friday Fragments

Hosted by Mrs4444.

It's been a while since I did a Friday Fragments post and I've missed them! So here I am back again with the bits and pieces that have been rattling around in my head just waiting to be thrown together in a tossed thought salad and shared with all you lovely bloggy people out there.

I was pulled up at lights behind a cement mixer one morning and found myself reading a sign on the back of the truck that began like this:

"Attention Please!

Our drivers are instructed to leave the site immediately if they are subjected to verbal abuse or physically threatened in any way."

It makes me really sad that people have to work in environments that make a company feel it necessary to adopt something like that as an official policy.

On Wednesday I went out for dinner with friends I met when I joined a local mothers group after Tom was born. It was quite a large group to begin with but over time it settled down into a group of four of us who still occasionally get together. Very occasionally now as one of us went and moved to Italy! Anyway, Cathy was here in Sydney for a holiday and we seized the moment. I went to pick Cathy and Malyn up from Malyn's house. I was wearing a red t-shirt, Cathy came to the door wearing a red top too (identical shade even), I laughed and said "We match!" Then Malyn came to the door wearing, go on, guess...a red t-shirt. When we met up with Romaine at the restaurant she protested "Why didn't anyone tell me we were wearing red?"

We had a scrumptious Thai meal and talked till we got chucked out of the restaurant. I do not see these people nearly often enough and I completely failed to get a photo :-(

I blame the photo forgetfulness on the ear infection. I blame the ear infection on the weather but I'm counting my lucky stars because for once I did not get the ear infection whilst on a dark ages camping trip. No, this time it waited till we came home from the trip.

The trip in question being Beorgwic, which was wet and awesome as usual. Deb and I taught a glass bead making workshop, Adam helped out with the blacksmithing workshops, the kids played with fire all weekend and we ate and drank and talked and had a fabulous time.

Clara came too this year and had an absolute ball bolting all over the camp with her new bestest friend ever, a cattle dog named Ohana. When she wasn't bolting all over the camp and stealing people's breakfasts she was hiding in the tent from all that horrible wet stuff that kept falling from the sky.

"I'm not moving till you make the rain go away."

There's currently a very large huntsman spider living in my bedroom, probably behind the bookshelves. I know this because when my ear woke me in excruciating agony at 3am a few nights ago I saw it crawling across the ceiling towards me. I poked Adam and pointed at the spider. He rolled over and mumbled "kill it?" Now, I do not condone the killing of innocent arachnids and this one had not yet trespassed beyond the point of no return (ie, it wasn't actually in bed with us) so I considered the disruption to sleep that would be involved in trying to catch it and put it outside and decided that if I hadn't been woken by my ear I'd never have known it was there and that therefore the logical thing to do was turn off the light, close my eyes and pretend it wasn't happening. So I did. Well, I turned off the light and watched in the glow of the clock radio as it continued across the ceiling. I held my breath for a while then breathed again as it veered off to the left and went behind the bookshelf. THEN I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. I presume it's still in there somewhere.

In the morning I described the spider on Facebook as being a little smaller than my hand, Adam commented to assure me that it had in fact been somewhat larger than that. He's so helpful.

Caitlin's bedroom is all done aside from getting the new built-in wardrobe installed.

I actually got a bit dressed up to go out for Caitlin's 12th birthday party, we took 5 of her friends to teppanyaki for dinner. Then brought them back for pinata bashing, ice-cream cake eating and general running around like a bunch of 12 year olds hyped up on sugar before they settled down to watch Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog. Which they seemed to rather like. My work here is done, mwhahahahahahahahahaaaaa *ahem*

Outfit of the DayWeekMonth?

Dress and cardi - Sara

Tights - We Love Colors

Shoes - Colorado

Necklace - Made by Mim :-) 

And last but not least, the Fuckh8 campaign video (NSFW!)


FCKH8.com Straight Talk About Gay Marriage from FCKH8.com on Vimeo.

Now, off you go to visit Mrs 4444 at Half-Past Kissin' Time to check out all the other Friday Fragments posts!

On being fat and visible

This is something I've been meaning to do for a while, it's kind of my little bit of Fat Activism and the reasons for doing it have been written about by a bunch of other people much more eloquently than I'm up to doing at present (or ever probably).

The short version* is that I'm fat, I'm ok with that and I'm going to share pictures of myself because it helps to drive home the message that fat people are, well, people. People like me. People who are entitled to be treated with respect and dignity and not vilified, objectified and othered as we so often are by discourse in the public sphere and even sometimes by casual conversation amongst our friends.

And we also quite like having awesome clothes to wear, but DAMN are they hard to come by.

So, instead of always being the one behind the camera

I'm going to try and remember to hand it over to someone else more often

and then I can post more of this

sort

of thing

along with the occasional "look, I'm wearing something other than jeans and a t-shirt!" Outfit of the Day type posts.

Enough with the old photos, here's a couple of new ones. First up, just in case anyone missed the other places I've shared this:

New hat!

We went to Strand Hatters on the weekend because Adam wanted a new Akubra and of course, when one is standing around in a hat shop waiting for someone else to make a decision, one tries on hats. Once I'd put it on there was no way I was going home without it. It's the Akubra Jazz and I luffs it.

And secondly, today's outfit of the day.

Top and skirt - Autograph

Boots - can't remember where I bought them but they're Giovanna ones

Tights - We Love Colors

*The long version is a whole bunch of links to other people writing about fat acceptance, no reinventing the wheel for me today.

There are so many wonderful writers (and just all round fabulous people) out there in the fatosphere and I was lucky enough to meet a number of them a couple of weekends ago when I went along to the Art Exhibition and Spoken Word event ‘Bodies Abound’ that was held in conjunction with the Fat Studies conference at Macquarie University (which I didn't go to but really wish I had). There are plans afoot for another conference next year and there'll be no keeping me away from that!

For your reading pleasure:

Definatalie - "Ridiculous outfit, serious topic"

"I blog about my outfits (real and ridiculous) because I’m passionate about the visibility of fat bodies. I don’t care if people don’t like what I wear and I don’t care about trends – I blog because fat people are dehumanised and made invisible and if I’ve got a platform and an audience, I’m going to take advantage of it to normalise my body and bodies like mine."

The Rotund - "Low Fences; Why, Yes, FA IS Difficult"

"Y’all, I really do love Twitter. I love the immediacy of it, sure, but I also love the way the 140-character limit kind of forces you to be concise. You know I’m not really super at being concise but I try! And I managed, in my melatonin-assisted state last night (I take melatonin to help manage my low-grade insomnia), to say a couple of things that I think bear repeating.

Self-hatred cannot continue to be the status quo.

and

The response to “I hate my body” should never be “Have you considered weight loss?”

Split Milk - Talking about diet talk

"It’s offensive to talk to me about losing five kilos to be in a ‘healthy weight range’ when I would ‘need’ to lose forty. It’s offensive to talk about how gross your fat is, how ‘bad’ you are for eating, how desperately you want to keep from gaining too much weight in pregnancy, when you are standing right beside a fat person. You may not mean to disparage my body in pointing out the ‘flaws’ in your own, but you do. So don’t."

Spilt Milk - Acceptance is not "giving up"

"My body, today, is good enough to go to the gym or wear a new dress or dance or have sex or play on the floor with my kid or to run up the stairs at work, even if I jiggle and even if I sweat and get out of breath. (Thin people sweat and get out of breath, too, although it’s apparently only disgusting or humorous when fat people do.) My body, today, is worth taking care of and will still be next week or next year, whether I lose weight or not."

Fat Heffalump - Australian Fat Studies Conference: My Paper

"Collateral Damage in the War On Obesity
A perspective on how the “War on Obesity” affects someone who is obese, and whether any of those effects are of any use to the obese person."

The Discourse - Fat Stigma: We know it exists, but what do we do about it?

"It’s a no brainer that fat discrimination exists. There have now been a whole bunch of studies done, predominantly in the USA and Australia, about the prevalence of fat hate (sometimes called weight bias), people’s experiences of it, and how it impacts on their lives."

Fat Dialogue Blog - Control Top Underpants at 'Bodies Abound'

"I wrote the piece I've included below for 'Bodies Abound' about my fat body taking on a pair of control top underpants. I didn't write it as a humourous piece, but people laughed, and I got into the absurd poignancy the piece does pick out, and really enjoyed giving the reading.

Well....at least I hope the laughter was supportive!"