Smokey the Magnificent

1. Tiny Miles has acquired a tooth. So begins Phase Two: Weaponisation.

2. We are Moved In. More or less. Blimey. Words cannot describe. Moving house seems to be more of a major production every time we do it. Helpdesk Man and I have solemnly agreed not to move again until we wax rich and we can build our dream homestead/castle/commune out in the country.

As it now stands, the kitchen, living room and pig’s bedroom, are all nearly painted, and the hallway is partly painted. Nothing is entirely painted, a state of affairs we must remedy soon, before we get used to it and leave it masking-taped and blotchy for the next ten years. Still, the house looks vastly better. One small section of skirting board in the living room is still its original green, and it catches the eye something fierce as soon as you walk in the door. A whole room of it would probably have made Helpdesk Man run amok in a matter of days.

Speaking of running amok, this is the ideal place for it. We went on a recon mish the other day and snooped round the orchard. Not only is it far bigger than I had imagined… it is awesome. We kept coming across odder and odder things - a decomposing shed with a decomposing dinghy and kayak inside, a stagnant lake with a hide, a delightfully eerie sawmill, steampunky rusted contraptions of unknown purpose, with valves and dials and levers, skulking under apple trees; a small flock of rosellas; a creek with waterfalls; an abandoned van that looks like it belonged to the Lone Gunmen; and a bright red telephone box, falling apart in the middle of a field. The whole place is just begging to be used as the location for a gritty Kiwi film about hillbillies, zombies, raptors or (ideally) all three. And there’s convolvulus.

3. The wildlife here is equally fascinating. In addition to the rosellas and the resident sheep, we have discovered a kingfisher, a bird of unusual design dubbed Dennis the Quail-Bird, a hedgehog called Hapless, a rat named Howard Harley (the pig named him - I dunno), a creature called Mighty Mandible Moth, which bit Helpdesk Man when he tried to evict it, and a large spider which builds beautiful orb webs on the porch every night. At least, she used to; her latest few efforts have been a bit patchy. I think she lost the will to create after we accidentally destroyed her web for the fourth time, walking through it.

There have also been two slugs, but we shall not speak of those - they give Helpdesk Man the heeby-jeebies. And looking out the window, I see there is a cockroach on the porch. One moment while I bellow for the man of the house.

4. You should see the pig’s room. It is pretty neat. The pink and cream stripy wall pleases me more every time I look at it. I found an old round mirror I bought ages ago off TradeMe (only to have Helpdesk Man take one look at it and say “Ew… you bought that?”, whereupon I shoved it in the shed for two years) and covered the frame with cream ruffles. Then I covered a Styrofoam ball with folded circles of pink satiny fabric, to make a ruffly ball thing, and hung it above the pig’s bed on a ribbon. Sophisticated as hell. I’m going to do more of them, in cream satin and lace net, but the first one took a lot out of me - I had to cut out 116 pink circles, traced around a mug. The whole thing took two days. Still, it pleases me. And when I’ve covered the pig’s corkboard in green floral fabric, and made cream curtains with four layers of ruffles at the bottom, the second-bottom-most being pink, and found some vintage knobs to use as curtain tiebacks, and bought and distressed a desk and bookshelves, and made a teepee with thick dowelling, and finished the pig’s summer quilt, and put a cream ruffle around her mini-trampoline, and replaced the light shade, and made a nightlight… well, it will be the cutest wee room you ever did see. And then I shall take photos.

5. The garden is growing apace. We’ve been eating zucchini ever since we got here; we missed one, and it is now the size of Miles. I’m torn between leaving it, just to see how big it can go, or harvesting it before it gets too watery and making a bunch of zucchini loaf or soup or something. And I harvested a colander-full of basil the other day (the colander was lying around the back yard, being awesome) and made pesto. So there.

6. We have a wedding to go to on Saturday. Do I have anything to wear? No, I do not. Neither does Miles, but I’m making him a sweet Ottobre outfit - pants, a button-up shirt and a cute little short vest. We went shopping yesterday and I tried on five dresses, and fell into a deep depression for the rest of the afternoon.

7. Our internet, as the cunning among you will have surmised, is back up. This took some doing. Helpdesk Man threatened Xnet with litigation. Handy tip: it worked. Being without the internet, daily trips to my parents’ to check emails notwithstanding, was actually rather pleasant. I pulled weeds out of the front lawn and everything.

That said, I am now going to read a week’s worth of XKCD. Excuse me.

You know what phrase is beginning to haunt my waking dreams?

“A quick coat of paint.”

There’s this insidious myth that painting is a swift and easy panacea. “Quick lick of paint, she’ll be right.” “Nothing wrong with that house that a quick coat of paint won’t fix.” “Lovely well-made piece, just needs a drop of paint.”

It is LIES. Helpdesk Man, myself and my stalwart younger sister have been painting portions of our new house for three days straight - three rooms, to be precise. None of these rooms is entirely finished. Either we’re doing it horribly, horribly wrong, or Big Pigment has some kind of stranglehold over the media. For the record: painting is a mammoth, horrific undertaking. Perhaps it’s quick compared to putting up wallpaper, a particular form of torture I vaguely remember Mother engaging in during my childhood; but that’s a little like saying World War One was “the nice short one”.

And the indignity of it is, one spends so little time painting. Most of it’s preparation and cleanup - laying drop cloths*, hunting for the masking tape, washing out the rollers - and, in our case, passing back and forth a baby who is beaming and contented, but nevertheless undeniably there. Naturally it is important to mask one’s windowsills off accurately, but I always feel a bit impatient with the non-roller-wielding parts; just as I get peeved with the non-stitching parts of sewing (ie. the vast majority), and the non-seed-planting parts of gardening (also the vast majority).

Anyway, it is Getting There. The kitchen is a vaguely French dull yellow, of which Helpdesk Man and I are very proud because we conquered much Aspieness in choosing it. The living room is cream with a feature wall in a kind of purply blue, which we’re not entirely sure about, but it is a vast improvement on the previous hue - a rather lurid green which at the time of writing is still present on the skirting boards, shocking us whenever we look at it. Then the pig’s room is cream as well, with a dusky pink for the wardrobe doors and - thank you, Pinterest - wide vertical stripes on one wall. These are pretty neat, even though I was envisaging a sort of muted, dusky Victorian look and instead got an aggressively cheerful candy shop. Still, we feel skilly, and our enthusiasm was only slightly dampened when the landlord, upon being asked for his opinion of our colour scheme, grunted “Oh well, you’re the ones who’ll have to live with it.” (Well, my enthusiasm was slightly dampened. Helpdesk Man suffers from very little self-doubt, and immediately concluded that said landlord must be colour-blind.)

Oh, smeg. It is nearly midnight. I have to get up early tomorrow to paint again while the chaps load up the truck. My clothes aren’t packed. There is undoubtedly some awful evidence of my slovenly housekeeping hiding behind the fridge or under the couch, ready to shock the nice man from church who offered to help us move. I packed the peanut butter and can’t find it. One of my hand-written cookbooks is missing. The Christmas tree is still standing, half-decorated, in the corner of the lounge. I am covered in paint, but don’t know where the towels are. The freezer is defrosting itself all over the kitchen floor, because I couldn’t face it. Two of our ex-flatmate’s socks were welded to the bathroom floor behind the washing machine. Helpdesk Man hasn’t even started packing up his office.

I am going to bed.

*Helpdesk Man insisted on calling them “throw rugs” for a while; now he’s taken to calling them “drop bears”. They all have holes in strategic places.

Is everyone familiar with the Handmade Ryan Gosling meme? For some reason, I find it incredibly amoosing. I don’t even know he is - at least, I know he was in The Notebook, but I haven’t seen it. I read it, and I’m still picking schmaltz out of my ears. It was the same chap who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, I believe, only this one didn’t even have double-amputation to dilute the sappy.

Anyway, the Internet being the vasty and inscrutable place it is, some bod got it into her (certainly “her”) head to find photos of Mr Gosling and caption them… thusly. (Yes, I couldn’t resize the photos. I’m not… Wonder Woman. Scroll across, it’ll be fine.)

Or:

There’s a whole website of them. And they make me go “heh”; while at the same time, driving the point sadly home that Helpdesk Man (and indeed, surely all actual men) is unlikely to ever truly appreciate the difference between a store-bought duvet cover and a lovingly handcrafted one, or feel genuinely buoyed upon putting his mugs in a cupboard ModPodged with scrapbooking paper. This is OK. One can and, according to feminists, should do these things for one’s own satisfaction and fulfilment; but one should not endeavor to shoehorn them into the Good Wife category, any more than Helpdesk Man should claim that his proficiency at double-tapping virtual alien hordes makes him a Better Husband; because in fact, though I would like to feel crafting is vaguely morally superior, our hobbies are probably about equally as relevant to each other’s happiness (ie, neutral at best, and an irritating waste of time in less cheerful moments).

But he lets me do it, and does not complain when I spend ghastly sums on quilting cotton; and I watched the pigs for three days while he was at a LAN this week. So we tick along. And I have finished all 25 of the nine-patches for the snortlepig’s summer quilt. It was supposed to be 21, but by the time I got around to counting I’d already done 22, so I just decided to tack another row down the side and make it a square seven-by-seven, instead of a seven-by-six. The proportions are unlikely to correspond to any standard bed size, but the pig’s toddler bed isn’t standard anyway - it was handmade by someone’s grandfather, and we got it off TradeMe - and anyway, when she gets big enough for a real bed I can make her a new quilt, and this one can be a lap quilt.

The nine-patches were surprisingly successful. My usual method with quilting is to be careful and precise for the first ten minutes of every session, then go “Ach, she’ll be right” and fling needles and rotary cutters wildly about, with the result that my corners don’t match up and I spent the last half of the project wondering what I was thinking. I thought for many years that when I asked my mother (who is an excellent quiltress) the secret and she said “Oh, you have to be very accurate and careful” that she was holding out on me. It turns out, though, that when you actually do it it works. Who knew. I wouldn’t exactly call my nine-patches the apex of the craft, but I could show them in public without blushing, and that is a great improvement.

Heh. Heheh. (Look, it beats “Keep Calm and Carry On”, alright? Those are just getting ridiculous. People aren’t even trying. The Hermione “Keep Calm and Marry Ron” was kind of funny, but “Keep Calm and Have Coffee”, with the whole font? Please. Let it die.)

*Squafts is what the pig calls crafts. She also refers to skydiving as (the infinitely more awesome) “skyfighting”, and the Star-Spangled Man anthem from Captain America as the Speckled Man song. It is an awesome song, incidentally - Mother, you would like it. Here it is:

Today the pigs and I were chillin’, and Tiny Miles let out a belch to wake the dead. The pig had been jumping about, not paying attention, but stopped and said “What was that, a growl?”

“It was a huge boip,” I said.

The pig started jumping again and said with satisfaction, “It was MIRACULOUS huge!”

So anyhoo, yup, that was awesome. Also, it is now 2012, an uncannily futuristic date. And this year I shall be 26. Soon I shall be dead, And Tiny Miles will be one, which is just absurd.

I celebrated New Year’s Eve with a shindig, at which I served ice cream sandwiches and won a game of poker. My method for success is to sit out most of the hands in order to milks Miles to sleep, thus preventing myself from frittering away chips; and then to come back and go all in on a straight. I recommend it. Sadly, everybody left the party at 11:30, and the pig woke up at midnight having flashbacks to ‘Nam from the fireworks, so it wasn’t a terribly auspicious beginning to January.

Nevertheless, I am full of new-yearly vim and resolution. I started piecing an Irish chain quilt of the pig’s, the fabric for which I bought two years ago. I made resolutions in a nifty list. I bought a diary (after the New Year, for the discount, though it pained my soul to wait) and filled it with reminders about church lunch, birthdays and the need to pull weeds out of the garden. I joined a challenge online to complete 52 crafting projects. I bought a new dress, in order to swish through 2012 chicly instead of slobbing around in an ex-maternity tunic that doesn’t allow me to breastfeed in public. (On second thoughts, I should probably have bought two dresses. I am extremely short on clothes.) I chose a colour scheme for our new interior walls in two seconds flat with Helpdesk Man, although I am now having second thoughts. Colour is not my strong point.

Also: we watched Green Lantern. My word. It was awful. Usually halfway through a terrible movie I can relax into a resigned torpor and just go with it, but not this time. Even five minutes from the end, I was casting longing glances at my sewing machine. It was almost as boring as this one time Helpdesk Man bought cable ties.

Also, I have discovered a new principle of life: there is no foodstuff which cannot be used as a term of endearment for one’s baby. Helpdesk Man and I have been testing it out, and it’s utterly true. Miles is my wee pumpkin muffin, my tikka masala, my little pierogi, my wee scrap of biltong, my fat wee haggis, my little can of beetroop, my schmear of cream cheese upon a bagel, my little stack of hotcakes, my fat moussaka, my wee chipolata sausage, my tiny crock of kraut, my suet duff, my little dob of wasabi, my boysenberry, my snickerdoodle, my little TV dinner, my hybrid tomato, my little garlic naan… I could go on. I defy any of you to come up with a foodstuff that doesn’t work. Venison pasties? Pan-fried dumplings? Carpaccio? Sashimi? See? It just cannot be done. Gape with awe.