Smokey the Magnificent

Today being Easter Monday, I counted it as a challenge-less holiday.  Although having been bit by the sewing bug, I did spend some hours this morning (and until 1AM last night) constructing a mockup of a shirt for the baby, which as it turned out wouldn’t go over her head without using stretchy fabric, and had something drastically wrong with the sleeves.  I’m not quite sure what, but something that made the snortlepig scream blue murder when I tried to insert her arms.  Too tight?  Wrong angle?  I dunno.  This is why I haven’t yet made a garment with sleeves… those things are scary.  I was about to give up and start on her polar fleece pyjama pants when I remembered reading scary things about what happens if you don’t pre-shrink your fabric, even if it doesn’t shrink.  (Essentially, you die horribly… manufacturers spray fabric with sizing and pesticides and stuff before shipping and by the time you’ve handled the heck out of it making a shirt for the baby you won’t be able to go near Spotlight ever again without going into anaphylactic shock and conceiving conjoined glow-in-the-dark quintuplets.  Come to think of it, can higher-order multiples be conjoined?  No reason why not, surely?  They can be identical - the Dionne quints were monozygotic.  Surely if anyone had had conjoined triplets I would have read about it on Mental Floss by now, though.)

So until my fabrics dry and a still small voice reveals unto me the secret of sleeves, my sewing is temporarily on hold.  That’s fine.  I have a lot of writing to do.  Have you noticed how I haven’t been mentioning Script Frenzy?  Well, there are two kinds of people who don’t talk about their creative projects.  The kind you know casually from Uni who seem like regular dull persons until you find out that they’ve spent three hours every night for the last eight years working on their novel, and the kind like me who procrastinate like fish.  Between us, Lizzie and I have just about hashed out four songs.  Of a musical which really need to be one and a half hours long, minimum.  And it’s what, the 13th?  Super.

Anyhoo.  This week I don’t have terribly many commitments - I’m going out for a walk with the family tomorrow afternoon and I have a friend coming over on Wednesday, but that’s about it.  Still, I have a lot of things to get done, namely I need to:

• Make the dude some winter tops
• Make the dude some winter pyjamas
• Make the dude a winter hat
• Finish the ruffley cushion
• Plant out basil
• Plant carrots, cauliflowers, leeks and onions
• Clean windows
• Clean out fridge
• Pack up snortlepig’s summer clothes and stow away in cupboard
• Return snortlepig’s library book

Hmm.  A lot of those items seem suspiciously familiar.  In three years’ time when this blog is (naturally) famous and in the process of being adapted into a major motion picture, you’ll probably be able to search for “clean the fridge” and find it appears with touching regularity every Monday.

So, then.  This week, every day, in order to accomplish some of the above to-do list, I will:

• Do something I’ve been putting off
• Do something potentially money-making (ie. queries, Suite articles)
• Do something domestically goddessy/Oosewifesome
• And do something outside.

One hopes that even I can manage that!

I made pumpkin bread tonight.  Homemade, mostly-whole-wheat pumpkin bread made with homegrown mashed pumpkin left over from making a pumpkin pie and milk solids left over from making ghee.  That ought to be worth a good six Oosewife points, no? That said, I have a long way to go.  If I were really one of the cool kids I’d have sprouted the grain and ground it myself, used a sourdough starter instead of dry yeast, and I certainly wouldn’t have poured the pumpkin cooking water callously down the sink; I’d have used it as the liquid.

As I was chastising myself for the latter, it got me thinking.  Of recent years I have slowly come to aspire to a life which is interconnected.  That is to say, natural, overlapping, organic… sort of a-hygienic.  For example, my ultimate dream (in theory) is to live on a homestead as self-sufficient as possible.  Which involves all sorts of bodily, germy, wild yeasty, fermenty processes - Perelandra rather than Malacandra, if you will.  Bread which is made from a living thing that needs to be fed every so often; a lawn that is “mown” by a cow who fertilizes the veggie garden and gives milk for cheese and yoghurt and (if I ever reach that height of coolness) kefir; vegetables which survive on rotting matter; bone broth made from boiling bits of beast; and so on.  It would have made me nervy a few years back; now I think it’s sort of weirdly wonderful.  Life as ecosystem.  Perhaps sharing breastmilk with a baby has helped me get over the bodily fluids thing to some extent!

But in other moments I think, who am I kidding?  I have a long way to go: I can’t stand most of the beetles and bugs I should appreciate for their vital role in said ecosystem, I really can’t see myself cooking up chicken feet (which make excellent broth, apparently) or organ meats; and if we were to rely on our veggie garden in its current state to sustain us I’d be prosecuted for neglect.  And the thought of not being able to leave the house for fear of upsetting the goat/tomato plants/sourdough is a stifling one.

Which is ironic, because how often do Helpdesk Man and I up and flit to Vegas as it is?  Never, is what.  And not just because we have a baby, which is pretty much the ultimate in interconnectedness.  We just don’t.  We are, in fact, pretty good examples of what Gerald Durrell was talking about when he said that man values freedom as a concept, but rarely uses it in practice.  If we were in a cage the size of Hamilton I wouldn’t have a clue.

Anyway… it’s an interesting thing to ponder.  Of course it’s possible that I’m only embracing the fertile, fermenting, wild nurturing world we live in as a subconscious way of reconciling myself to the state of the bathroom ceiling.  Will keep you apprised.

One of the neatest things about living in a media-saturated world is media referencing media.  Whether it be a throwaway pop culture reference (Willow confessing to writing Doogie Howser fanfic in Buffy) or a blatant see-how-this-encapsulates-the-theme-of-the-movie quotation (Marianne reciting Sonnet 116 in Sense and Sensibility), it’s cool… at least, as long as one is familiar with the reference.  And it’s a savvy thing for a filmmaker to do.  References say a lot of things - “I’m consciously anchoring this world in a specific time and place”, “This film is deeper than you think it is because Shakespeare said it first”, and “I’m so attuned to my fanbase that I know if you’re watching this you’ve seen The Matrix“, for instance.  Nor is it a recent phenomenon - a couple of centuries ago no respectable novelist would dream of starting a chapter unbolstered by the support of a few choice snippets from The Iliad, Canticles and/or John Bunyan.

But occasionally, through some marvellous alchemy, the reference is so perfectly placed within a film that it transcends the original source material.

Moby Dick in Star Trek: First Contact

It doesn’t usually take much to get me reading a classic, but starting Moby Dick cost me some trepidation for the very simple reason that I have a pathological fear of whales.  No, really.  I had nightmares for years after watching Free Willy… OK, in the interests of full disclosure, I still get nightmares from having watched Free Willy.  Horrible, ghastly film.

Nevertheless, I eventually came to the point of shrouding the cover in brown paper and diving in.  How?  What convinced me was Star Trek: First Contact, rightly hailed as the only Star Trek film a Trekkie can show to a non-Trekkie without apologising.  First Contact borrows thematically and literally from the Great American Novel, and the spine-tingling certainty of Picard’s Captain Ahab-esque “The line must be drawn here!  Thus far; no farther!” convinced me that the novel must be an emotional tour de force indeed.

Only it wasn’t.  Unless you’re into spermaceti.  Yep, the most elegaic and emotive parts of the book revolved around the joys of squeezing whale blubber.  And, while I have as many sensory issues as the average Aspie, I was really hoping for something a little more epic.  Like, say, a tortuous lifelong feud between Moby Dick and the slavering Captain Ahab?  But nope.  The fearsome Ahab turned out to be your common-or-garden grumpy old codger, and anything which could remotely be described as action was limited to the last page and a half of the book - the rest of the novel being occupied with more pressing narrative devices, such as describing in detail the inside measurements of a whale’s skull.

It was a disappointment, to say the least, and I’m torn as to whether or not Herman Melville can really be blamed.  One can imagining him whining “I didn’t expect this would have to live up to Jean-Luc Picard”, and he would be right.

(Warning: video contains bad language.  Star Trek bad language, but still.  Mother, you have been warned: this may offend your delicate tympanums.)

Put On Your Sunday Clothes/It Only Takes a Moment in Wall-E

I know Hello Dolly has its fans, but to me it belongs squarely in the “You had to see it as a kidling” camp.   But the clear-as-a-bell “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” is perfect juxtaposed with bright galaxies and neat garbage piles, and the helpfully pared down “It Only Takes a Moment” becomes a poignant and beautiful love story when used as EVE and WALL-E’s “our” song.

Jor-El in Superman Returns

Marlon Brando’s original performance was rather on the cheesy side: smooth, smug and spit-curled.  Superman Returns took his performance, digitally altered pretty much everything and made it into a grainy hologram; and in doing so, it gained lashings of class.  Superman Returns also improved on the original John Williams opening credits score… sadly, the new parts of the film weren’t as good as the recycled!

For a vaguely interesting look at how the effects guys did it:

“Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths” (W.B. Yeats) in Equilibrium

Now, I have nothing against this poem.  It’s one of my favourites.  But the reason it’s one of my favourites is because of a little scene in Equilibrium, in which Sean Bean reads the poem aloud from a forbidden book of censored poems.  He gets shot, of course, which is a bit of a downer; but still.  Boromir reading Yeats. In a movie about dystopian Fascist rule and gun-slinging martial arts.  Whoda thunk.

(Mother, this one might offend your delicate retinae.  Mebbe.  Difficult to say, I’m sure you have seen a lot more gunplay than I give you credit for.  But you didn’t like Firefly, so, well.  Don’t blame me.)

Circle of Life in Doctor Who

The opening song of The Lion King is good in the movie, better on Broadway and when quoted passionately by the last of the Gallifreyans, well, “That’s brilliant, that is!”, as the Doctor would say.

So, then.  Any other contenders?  I briefly considered Death of a Salesman in the Buffy episode Restless and Worf’s “Captain, I must protest.  I am not a Merry Man!” as being far more corking than the original works, but decided neither reference was sufficiently close to the source material to warrant inclusion even within my fuzzy rules.  I also think the transformation scene from Shrek beats the one from Beauty and the Beast, but I couldn’t find the appropriate YouTube clips (surprising, no?  A music video of The Phantom of the Opera set to “True Love’s First Kiss”, yes; the clip itself, no.  I love YouTube).

Today was supposed to be either Cooking or Gardening.  Oops.  My sister came down for Easter, so we spent the day working on our musical.  (We also made biscuits and popcorn, and I made pumpkin soup for dinner, so I guess one would have to categorise today as Cooking, but still… it is a sham, a hollow sham.)

It occurs to me that reading about my woeful attempts at Balance is probably less than scintillating, so I shall tell you a story instead.

Once upon a time there was a bunny who lived in the green green wood.  The bunny had fat brown haunches and a woffly nose, and hopped around the trunks of the green green trees, nibbling grasses and blinking with its big brown eyes at the daffodils.  At night it curled up in its soft snug burrow, and the sweet scent of dried grass -

You know what?  I cannot go on.  It is too grim, too desperate.  It would frighten the children.

Not much to report!  I sent off four queries, wrote one article for Suite, sent my editor an invoice for my latest article, worked a little on my Script Frenzy project and got distracted for some time on absolutewrite.com.  On the other hand, I finished the baby’s jeans and made arty rice-stuffed pumpkins for dinner.

I think I’ve been reading too many sewing blogs.  I started cleaning out my wardrobe and found a skungy old pair of jeans, and my first thought (after a friendly “Hey, skungy ol’ pair of jeans!”) was “Ooh, I could make this into an apron”.  Not this kind; this kind.  Only with a ruffle.  I can’t find the original pattern I saw months ago, but it’s sort of like this, only nicer.  It had gingham ruffles and the straps went through the belt loop, which I thought was pretty cunning.  I don’t have any gingham or otherwise suitable fabric right now, but what I could do is use the legs of the jeans to make jeans for the baby.  I used to have Opinions about babies wearing jeans, but then my sister sent some delightfully girly ones to the snortlepig from England.  She does this.  Not the worst sort of aunt to have, really.  So I figure if I use floral yellow fabric to trim the jeans they’ll look sufficiently cutesome to prevent her being offered dope on the streets.

Later

Oh, smeg.  I perceive now I made a tactical bish when I planned to do one obsessive thing every day.  I forgot that when I get obsessive, it tends to last.  (For example, Helpdesk Man nearly filed for a decapitation permit after I listened to the Wicked soundtrack and nothing but the Wicked soundtrack, and only certain songs on the Wicked soundtrack, for a period of about two months.)  So after getting into sewing mode on Monday, I was more or less doomed.  And I had sound reasons for going with it, as my being in sewing mode is a rare and short-lived occurrence, usually lasting only as long as it takes me to break two needles or unpick half a mile of errant seams, whichever comes first.

The upshot of all which is, I spent the rest of the day making tiny jeans.  They’re nearly done - I got distracted making an arty pocket on the back with frayed edges.  The blue trousies are done, though: I finished them this morning.  I was planning to be cunning and make a tutorial to show how I did the jeans, but the camera ran out of batteries after Step 2.  Which is just as well, as I spent some time painstakingly lining the pocket only to sew across the top, rendering it inoperable.  Poor dude.  Where will she keep her cigs?

Also, I have decided to make the jeans apron into a gardening apron, mostly in order to justify manufacturing a completely superfluous apron.  I like aprons in theory but I have several and rarely wear them nowadays, seeing as how by the time I make it to the kitchen the dude has already liberally coated my clothes in bodily fluids.  (So it begins.  A year from now I’ll be clad only in a rough surcoat made from my own dreadlocks, and my bedclothes will be shredded into a nest from which I will crouch and chitter at the social workers.)  Plus, I could put seed packets in the pockets, and use the ruffle to wipe my hands before heaving the dude out of the carrot bed.  Although why I bother, I do not know - a year from now she’ll be crouching with me in the nest, dipping locusts into her own suppurating boils for a snack.  I suppose Helpdesk Man will have eloped with the social worker meanwhile; he’s the fastidious type.

So anyhoo.  Today’s Wednesday, which needs be Writing because it’s Bible study tomorrow and have I answered my seventy questions about Malachi?  Not on your unacceptably-sacrificing nelly.

What is a nelly?  It sounds faintly obscene.  Oh, here we go.  “NOT ON YOUR NELLIE! (or NELLY) ‘Not on your life!’ An intensive tag, dating since the late 1930s. . . . Short for ‘not on your Nellie Duff!’; and ‘Nellie Duff’ rhymes on ‘puff’, breath of life, life itself”.  Will you look at that!  Faskinating.

Yesterday was Sewing.  The idea was to make some tiny trousies for the snortlepig based off some very fancy ones sent by her aunt from England.  I footled around for several hours trying to construct a pattern out of calico, which made me feel pretty cunning until I realised it wasn’t working at all.  So I went online and found this pattern, went Oooo!” and “Duuuuh” and went from there.  A lot of adaptation later, I ended up (or will end up, when I finish ‘em tonight) with a pair of bloomery objects with elastic at the back, gathered at the piggy’s snortly ankles and generally puffy and pleasing.  I’ll post a pic later if I can figure out how.

My only other sewing accomplishment was nearly finishing my ruffley cushion.  Not the most productive day, but the dude hates me sewing; the only way she can be placated is by letting her play with my seam ripper, to the great peril of her eyeballs.

Mum came over in the evening to give me sage advice about waistbands, and I attempted to repair her lopsided cultural education by introducing her to Firefly.  It was not a success.  Making people watch or read things you love is always fraught (remember that scene in How I Met Your Mother where Ted showed Stella Star Wars for the first time?).  I have in the recent past had my heart broken twice along similar lines: one friend who handed back The Dean’s Watch after trying to get past the opening chapter, and another who tried to read The Once and Future King after I enthusiastically recommended it, but hated the writing style to the point of anger.  (Actually that was about five years ago, but the scar still throbs in cold weather.  Anger.  Not just apathy or “meh, it was okay” - actual rage.  That’s kind of impressive.  Smokering the Magnificent of the Rage-Inspiring Book Choices.)  Anyway, I was a little dubious about Mother and Firefly to begin with… I’m not sure one can fully appreciate its uniqueness without having paid one’s clean-Enterprise-corridors-and-pips-on-the-collar dues, and the closest my excellent mother has come to Star Trek was objecting to my putting up a poster of Kirk and Spock on the outside of my bedroom door where, as she put it, civilised people would have to see it.  (In my defense, the inside of my bedroom door was already covered with a tasteful collage of pictures from my Fellowship of the Ring daily calendar; but being a dutiful and seemly daughter I transferred the offending Starfleet officers to my wardrobe door instead.)

Anyway.  Firefly.  Not a success.  Mother kept looking plaintive and saying things like “Is this the end?” and “I think I prefer Pride and Prejudice“, and the delightful humour of people being amusingly shot was entirely lost on her… in fact, I think she spent more time playing with the baby than actually watching the screen, which confers no favours on a TV program whose humour is largely based on visual irony.  And scintillating dialogue, of course.  Because it’s awesome.

Just for the record.

Thought: is it possible to dream about being asleep?  I have had nested nightmares before, but that was dreaming about waking up rather than sleeping per se.  If you were to dream about being asleep I suspect you’d end up in some kind of recursive and therefore comatose state, which would be restful.

Right; a new week is upon the Magnificent household (or the Man household if one must be a traditionalist about these things).  This week’s challenge is to spend a day on each of five categories, doing it with gusto and throwing Balance to the winds.  Viz:

Gardening/Outside

• Mow the lawn
• Water the snow peas
• Plant leeks, carrots, onions and silverbeet
• Clean the chickens’ cage
• Uproot the weeds from the cracks in the pavement
• Harvest a Jerusalem artichoke to see if edible (one website said they have a formic acid taste but added that some people don’t mind it, which makes me wonder about some people)
• Harvest basil
• Weed garden
• Turn compost
• Mulch garden
• Plant out basil
• Spread eggshells

Sewing

• Finish ruffley (ruffly? rufflesome? ruffleshous?) cushion
• Make pants for the snortlepig
• Make cunning hat for the snortlepig
• Make winter shirt for the snortlepig
• Finish tiny quilt
• Fix new skirt again, properly
• Work on hand-sewn quilt
• Finish daisy beastie cloth

Writing

• Work on Script Frenzy script
• Do Bible study homework
• Query magazines
• Write Suite articles
• Write bally Bride and Groom article which have been putting off for bally months for lack of a bally deadline

Cleaning

• Clean out fridge
• Remove masking tape from floor in living room
• Clean sliding door where an unidentifiable substance is congealing at snortlepig-height
• Clean mirrors
• Remove smeg from saucepan cupboard
• Valiantly deal with kitchen bin
• Hand-wash white shirt

Cooking

• Cook up large batch of pumpkin and freeze in pie-sized portions
• Make something dairy-free for sister-in-law
• Dehydrate tomatoes (if can’t find something better to do with them)
• Make minute quantity of basil pesto with basil from garden and freeze
• Do something with puff pastry in freezer

I’m sure I won’t get a tenth of that done, but it’s a guide.  I also need to spend some time every day doing Script Frenzy, for obvious reasons; and I should really invite an old friend over one day, given that I got her phone number when we ran into each other in he DVD store and I promised to call her with the sort of pleased enthusiasm that makes one feel like a cad and a traitor when one runs into such an acquaintance again eight months later and hasn’t.  I’ve decided to choose which activity I want to which day on the Morning Of, to allow for weather and such and make me feel important.

A wily reader may have noticed that the entry for Friday is conspicuous by its absence.  Friday was.. kinda not good.  I had one of those “Aargh, my article’s due today and requires 48 hours’ worth of work” epiphanies, and the snortlepig added her piggy charm to the proceedings by weeping piteously if I removed her from my knee at any point in order to type with both hands.  (Although actually, my one-handed typing skills are pretty leet.  Having a baby gives one some unusual skills… looking dignified in a top which has been pooped on is another, as is conveying complex sentiments with the eyebrows such as “I’m terribly sorry, babies, what can you do, would anybody big and strong help me lift this pram onto the bus, yes, she is cute, isn’t she?” to a dozen separate passers-by.)

In a crisis, I did what every independent cutting-edge journalist female does and called my mother.  Mother gallantly came over and removed the snortlepig while she went shopping; I typed using all ten fingers; and all was well.  Sadly, though, this didn’t leave much time for 30 minuteses of gardening or unpleasant-activity-doing.  (I did get the cleaning done in the morning, on the grounds that the snortlepig roared less stridently if I were moving about.  I wonder if she’ll grow up to have an unnatural resentment of computers?  Sobering thought.)  So the weekly challenge ended on a bit of a whimper, as it turned out.  To my thousands of fans, I apologise.  I have failed you.  I would commit seppuku, but all the good knives are in the dishwasher.

Anyway, today is Saturday.  So there you go.  We had a pretty good day.  Went into town to find clothing, where I gained 50 frugal points for finding nothing wearable in the shops and buying a $12 second-hand skirt instead.  I’m a little unsure about the skirt.  It’s excitingly gothy with bits of fabric trailing below the hem, and I’m afraid my Aspie nature will cause me to jump every time the traily bits brush my legs, until I end up biting them off in a fit of rage.  We shall see.  It’s also a little big, and I feel excited out of all proportion at the prospect of putting a few pleats or tucks or something into it on my sewing machine.

Saturday nights, ie. now, Helpdesk Man routinely deserts me to watch movies with his Single Friends and recharge for a life of domesticity.  I suspect there’s belching involved.  Sometimes I invite people over for dinner to prove that I have a social life too, but given that, well, I don’t, this doesn’t happen every Saturday.  So tonight I have decided to be virtuous and productive, so that my rows of home-cooked jam and sparkling doorknobs will accuse Helpdesk Man as he staggers in at 3AM, reeking of backgammon with a bit of blonde stuck to his shoe.  More or less.

So I’m typing with my head covered in henna (the dude tried to eat some; wonder if she’ll have an orange uvula?), and have done some further work on sewing a couch cushion.  If les enfant goes to sleep like a biddable pig I’ll finish the cushion and get started on her winter clothes; I also need to write a harem song for the Script Frenzy musical, empty the dishwasher, make something for church lunch, eat dinner and do as much cleaning as my heart desires.  Probably not a lot, to be honest.

Done!  I did end up grinding spices at eleven PM while dictating my Bible study answers to Helpdesk Man, but’s all’s well.  And today, by a Herculean effort, I managed to get dinner made and the house cleaned in time to watch Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Reduced Shakespeare Company.  If only the dude hadn’t trodden two entire hard-boiled eggs into the carpet and licked my guest’s shoe, I would feel quite civilised.

My article’s due tomorrow, so I expect I’ll spend most of tomorrow working on that.  It seems that Balance isn’t working out for me so well.  I think next week I’ll try to channel my obsessiveness instead - say, have one day devoted to sewing like a maniac, another to cooking like a fiend, another like gardening like a…. bunyip… and so on.  Given what the dude strewed all over the floor at Bible study, a day for cleaning out my handbag probably wouldn’t go amiss either.  (She also managed to get hold of someone else’s credit card, which shows a certain talent for discrimination as well as villainy; I’m very proud).

Ooh!  My buckwheat sprouted.  I thought I’d killed it by accidentally rinsing it in hot water during a contemplative moment, but nope.  My next question… what does one actually do with sprouted buckwheat? Anyone?  Having come this far I feel I should do something really hard-core with it, like making a paste by passing the buckwheat through a goat and fermenting it into a smoothie with the aid of my own spittle.