Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Blog quiz time

Found this one lurking in the sidebar over at Eternal Lizdom.

Your rainbow is shaded brown.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

What is says about you: You are a deep thinking person. You appreciate the roughness of nature. You feel closer to people when you understand their imperfections.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Love my friends award


I received an award from Libertine at The untamed thoughts on ... Autism
The Love My Friends Award is given to those bloggers who aspire, inspire and share the most beautiful of human attributes: art, wisdom and friendship. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more.
Art, wisdom and friendship...wow, thank you so much!

As I said in my comment over at Libertine's blog - what a lovely award - and now I get the fun of passing it on (easily the best thing about blog awards).

Ariane at Ariane's Little World- for many years of friendship, many 3:00am deep & meaningfuls, and the cutest of first knitting projects
Liz of Eternal Lizdom - Beautiful bloggy friend, wise parent and creator of culinary art.
Sophie of Sophie in the Moonlight - Haiku writer and blog friend, Sophie shares her stories of being bipolar with great generosity. My father and possibly my sister are bipolar and I have learned much that helps me understand them from Sophie's writing.
Lisa and Ligia of The Mom Files - I've been blog friends with Lisa for some years now and I'm very much enjoying meeting her friend Ligia through this new project full of parenting wisdom and great writing.
Penny at Walking Upside Down - if only I lived on the same landmass I might be able to take advantage of Penny's wonderful eco-hints. Scrapbooker, reader, librarian, parent and a great blog friend.
Natalie at Educating Archie - good mate, inspiring parent and fabulous writer.
Alix at Casa Hice - wonderful blog friend and storyteller extraordinaire.

(I'll do come fetch your award comments around the place tomorrow - too sleepy just now!)

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Bootstraps, I has 'em

Now I just need to work out how to haul myself up by them.

Some of you may have noticed a distinct lack of new content around these parts of late (go on, please say you've noticed?), poor old June has a mere 3 posts to its name! I think it's time I did something about that, don't you?

It's not like I haven't had time really, there have been plenty of hours during which I have sat with my laptop on my knee and wandered around the blogosphere thinking to myself "I should post a comment there" or "ooo! I should post on that too" and sometimes I click into the comment box or open a new post in Blogger and then sit there with no words coming until I click away again. Apparently my brain has been able to manage the intent to write but not the act of doing so.

Work has been busy, much busier and more overwhelming than I'd signed up for when I took the job, but I'm enjoying the work and the people in the office are lovely. Plus we've just got ourselves another pair of hands in to take over some of the stuff that Jen and I were simply not getting around to, so my to do list suddenly got a lot shorter.

Kid and school stuff has swallowed a fair bit of time and energy recently too. There was the Family Fun Day at the school weekend before last - rides, stalls, art show, raffle, auctions - a huge production and although I'm not much involved with the organising, as P&C president I try to be around and do whatever I can. The kids have taken turns at being sick on and off all term, David is at home coughing up a lung today, but luckily none of it has been anything worse than a bad cold (and, yes, they shared with me too).

This weekend we have Tom's Drama class performances of Midnite by Randolph Stow. It's a great book so I'm really looking forward to seeing the show. They do a 3:30pm and 6:30pm show and I've committed to cooking scones, serving supper at the first show, helping backstage at the second show and taking some of the costumes home to wash after the shows. Yes, I'm a twit.

Last week Caitlin auditioned for Annie, we haven't heard back from them yet but she seemed to have fun doing the audition, there was lots of smiling and hugs and her telling me she loves me and that I'm a wonderful mum. (Apparently because I took her to the audition, and possibly because when we came out of the audition and it was raining, I danced around singing "I'm singing in the rain..." in front of all the other kids and parents which she rather oddly seemed to think was ok and cool and not embarrassing at all.)

The dog tried to kill the small grey cat this morning. Unfortunately my leg was in the way so she ended up with a mouthful of my calf instead of cat. High speed staffy teeth hurt even when there's no actual biting involved, just a collision. Clara subsequently spent a good 20 minutes sitting on the landing half-way down the stairs wearing the most abject expression of contrition I have ever seen and begging with her big brown eyes for my forgiveness.

Here's what it looked like this morning, the bruise is developing nicely as the day goes on.


Just a few minutes prior to this incident I'd been admiring how well Clara and Jack were getting on as big brown dog ever so gently nuzzled up to huge fluffy ginger cat, tail wagging and politely asking if he'd like to play. Jack will now tolerate having his bum sniffed and will touch noses in greeting before wandering off again. Samantha turns into hissing, snarling, scratching hell cat whenever Clara comes in sight - hence the homicide attempt. Still got some work to do there.

The second unit of DVD shelves is in place and we have 6 empty shelves ready to accommodate future growth in our collection. Adam has also catalogued the entire collection on his laptop, we own a little less than 500 titles but a significant proportion of those are boxsets so there's well over 500 disks. Bit of a worry really...

As for the bootstraps thing, I figure I'd better stop waiting for the muse and just bloody well write something every day, mundane or otherwise!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The lounge room smells of varnish

Adam has been building stuff again. This time it's DVD shelves and we've just moved the first new shelving unit into place in the lounge room.

Adam doing some high speed re-shelving of DVDs

Speed shelving


He's made two of these, to fit one on each side of the fishtank. The bookshelves that were there before, that had been bursting under the load of our ludicrously large DVD collection, will be relocated to the kids rooms where they will hopefully have some tidying influence on their rooms (I'm an optimist).

I estimate each unit will hold almost 500 DVDs. Wonder how long it will take for us to run out of room again?

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Link-fest No.10 now with DUFC!

Stuff for you to read.

A whole series of posts at Hoyden About Town on the subject of the proposed
"Harmonisation" of Disability Parking Permit Schemes in Australia - for harmonisation read narrowing of eligibility criteria - and the need to protest against the proposal. There are open letters to use in adding your voice to the protests and a Facebook group to join.

I am Dr Tiller - "This website was created as both a memorial to the lifework of Dr. George Tiller and as a living testimony to the courageous lives of abortion providers."

The Mum Files - a new project from my lovely blog-friend Lisa and her friend Ligia, click on over and say hello!

JoGeek at Unapologetically Fat has been posting a series titled Sewing At Any Size which almost makes me want to haul out my machine and start creating. But only almost. I do, however, expect these posts to come in very useful when I eventually force myself to get some more re-enactment costumes made.



The 13th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up, this month it's hosted by Demelza at SAHM Feminist.

Point me at your interesting finds in the comments people!

Friday, June 05, 2009

Sorry, it's just a meme

The trick with this one is to type your first name followed by "needs" into Google and then list the first 10 results that pop up. I seem to have run into a bit of a problem with other Miriams having already done the meme so I'm exercising some editorial discretion and picking out the better ones. Here we go:

Miriam needs...
  1. Miriam needs a Productivity Buddy to help her stay on track - What an excellent idea!
  2. Miriam needs our support - yes, I need you all. Right NOW! Be supportive!
  3. Miriam...needs some help debugging her online shop - well, if there was anything in my online shop then maybe...
  4. Miriam needs a loan of 2000 soles that will be invested in the purchase of rice, noodles, milk and oil - she got it too, via Kiva and she's paid it all back, wonder how things are going for her now?
  5. MIRIAM NEEDS MORE TIME TO MOVE ON MANILA - um, I'm invading Manila now?
  6. Miriam needs to keep up with her staff - HA! Staff? I wish.
  7. Miriam needs funds to support her in school - I hope she got them
  8. MIRIAM NEEDS A FRIGGEN HAIRCUT - this is, in point of fact, true. My hair is currently driving me batty.
  9. Miriam needs a loan of $650 to buy materials like fabric, thread, bows, buttons, elastics - another Kiva loan, I'm thinking it might be time to add to my Kiva lending.
  10. Miriam needs one to hide her shame - one what you ask? A veil apparently, just like the one Moses needs to hide his glory. Pfft.