Smokey the Magnificent

The snortlepig and I have broken a cup each this evening. I wonder what it portents. Thirst, probably.

You know how one occasionally buys a kitchen appliance and then never uses it? I have personally moved the majority of the food processor attachments from house to house three times, while being absolutely convinced I will never use them. Yet somehow, I can’t bring myself to break the set by chucking them out. What if Helpdesk Man loses his job, the snortlepig requires a brain transplant and I have to sell the food processor on TradeMe in order to afford a pair of nifty wristlets?

Beside the point. Where I was going with this is that our new ice cream maker (Helpdesk Man’s present to me and vice versa for Christmas) is not one of those items. We’ve had it for ten days and have already used it five times… seven by tomorrow. I love it dearly. Lemon sorbet, frozen Coke, vanilla ice cream, butterscotch maple ice cream and strawberry sorbet so far… and another strawberry sorbet and some mango sorbet are in the offing. For the record, sorbet is an excellent answer to the question of What to Feed One’s Vegan Sister, as well as What to Feed One’s Lactose-Intolerant Friend.

Speaking of lactose, the snortlepig has finally mastered the word “milks”. Until today, I had thought that this was a good thing - arguably more subtle than clawing at my chest, would you not think? Only today I was sitting on the piano stool at church, eagly alert for my cue to play “I Stand Amazed In the Presence”, when the snortlepig eluded the clutches of Helpdesk Man and ran up to me shouting “Milks!” Helpdesk Man had to carry her down the aisle as she shouted “Mummy! Milks! Mummy! Noooo!” in full-blown tragedy voice. The congregation was most entertained. I think I’ll pack a cosh in my handbag next week.

You will be happy to hear that so far, I have not broken any of my New Year’s Resolutions. On New Year’s Day, despite the fact that it was a public holiday, I put in my time and did my hour of housework. And didn’t I feel smug! I have also made some progress on the road rules, although it may come down to working the psychology of the multi-choice quiz rather than actually knowing the rules. The test is kind of passive-aggressive, so when it says things like “How fast can you drive if you see a school bus letting off wee cherry-cheeked urchins?” and the options are A) 20 km/h, B) 3o km/h, C) 40 km/h and D) 50 km/h, you can just tell it’s waiting for you to tick D and then scream at you “FIEND! BLACKGUARD! WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!” So you tick the holier-than-thou-est answer listed, A, and lo and behold, you are right. (Don’t even get me started on its smugly leading questions about the Effects of Alcohol.)

Tomorrow Betty Scandretti, as she is known to her adoring fans - Uncle Bizzy, as she is called by the snortlepig, and practically my only sister - is gracing our township with her presence. The plan is to watch Up while Helpdesk Man and Betty’s somewhat male nattily dressed counterpart go out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. This is partly a Plan B occasioned by the inability of the snortlepig to behave in a movie and the inability of my mother to babysit said pig, on the grounds that her home became inundated with fleas while they were on holiday (!) and has to be fumigated. However, let it be noted that I am also not attending “Sherlock Holmes”* because, if the trailer is any indication, it is a travesty and a farce and should be boycotted by all right-thinking people. K? (Uncle Bizzy and I were going to see The Lovely Bones, but it is not to be. Up is smashing, though.)

Then the following night, several of my dearest friends (a phrase virtually synonymous with “only friends”, for the record, meaning “ones I can run into without having to say things like “Hey, didn’t you have a baby?” and “So are you and, um, still - no? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Oh, well, OK then!” “) are coming over to eat nachos and watch Star Wars. As little as watching Star Wars needs a reason, we actually have one - my belly-dancing friend codenamed Perdita, it transpires, has never seen it. Can you imagine? And I met her working at an arthouse theatre, of all things. So this is very exciting. We have managed to work her into a state of cautious anticipation, and will do our best to avoid peering at her avidly and nudging her in the ribs to make sure she takes in all the good bits. From time to time I feel a moment of panic, thinking “What if she doesn’t like it? S– from the movies didn’t like it. What if she thinks it’s rubbish?”… but then my inner Yoda calms me, replying “S– is dead inside, and Harrison Ford will work his magic. You are trying too hard. Do, or do not. There is no try.”. And then I am calm anew.

Do you remember the first time you saw Star Wars, then? I will always associate it with Raro, a repellent powdered drink mix, because I first saw it on TV with the Raro logo popping up at vital moments. It wasn’t as earth-shattering an experience as the first time I saw The Fellowship of the Ring or even The Princess Bride, mostly because I initially watched half of The Empire Strikes Back late at night and didn’t have a clue what was going on, and had to get my friend’s little brother to fill me in weeks later on who was doing what. But it was still pretty awesome. And much more memorable than my first taste of Star Trek. (”Dark Page”, the one in TNG with Deanna’s dead sister. I mostly remember a lot of shots of people climbing down Jeffries tubes… not exactly the stuff of legend.)

Also, I am making the snortlepig a pair of shorts. And the mango sorbet is almost done, and tastes pleasing. And that is all.

*I usually italicise movie titles. This is not an inconsistency. Those are scare quotes, meant to indicate a withering sneer at the thought that THAT film is worthy to lick the boots of the great detective himself. K? K.

There are a couple of children roaming our garden outside the house. I can hear them talking and clattering things, but I cannot confront them because a) I am not wearing a shirt, and would half to walk past the open front door to get one, b) the piggie is sleeping on my lap and c) I am a pansy. They’ve been round the house several times now, and I am afraid they might try to wander in or something.

Awkward.

Maybe I’ll sic the pig on ‘em. She can get mighty cantankerous when roused from a nap.

So I made a punk dress (pics still pending). All would have been well - but as is my luck, I got inspired and wanted to make more dresses. And I had just been invited by my dear friend April to a picnic which would involve a few fairy-obsessed friends. So I thought, why not? A fairy-inspired nursing dress. Transgressive.

So I started filling numerous bits of paper with anatomically wonky drawings of myself wearing a fairy outfit - sans head, of course, but I like to think I got a lot of personality into the shoulders. (Side note: it is surprisingly difficult to fairfyfy linebacker shoulders. I googled “how to minimise wide shoulders” and got about seven conflicting articles supplemented by yet more conflicting commemts sections, mostly involving wide-shouldered women who strenuously disagreed with the articles’ authors that spaghetti straps/halter neck tops/cap sleeves/dolman sleeves/raglan sleeves/boatnecks were good/evil, and anyway look at Jessica Biel. Which, yup. She does. Katee Sackhoff too, although it could just be the fatigues.)

Then I came to the reluctant conclusion that the dress simply wouldn’t look right without a corset. So off to Craftster to read a 100-page thread (really) about corsetry. Then a complex process of drafting involving gladwrap, duct tape and cornflour (don’t ask), and finally a mercifully clear tutorial on teh intarwebs. Intarwebs, how I loves you.

Then, as I looked remorsefully at a bodged-up half mockup from the duct tape incident, made from an old leg of denim overalls, it occurred to me that a denim corset might be a Good Thing to make before attempting the fairy version, being casualer and more sturdy and able to be artily ripped and covered with zips and paint splashes and bits of dead possum and such if the worst came to the worst.

So then I was making two corsets and a fairy dress. Only then I remembered this corset dress online, which I have desired very much for many months, but which is $450 US and you’ve gotta be kidding. So I thought, why not extend the lines of the denim corset  pattern and make a corset dress? Why not, indeed. So then I was making a corset, a fairy dress and a corset dress.

I then ran into a snag, because I had already spent all my allocated fabric money on bits of gossamer and moonshine for the fairy biz. Before I’d finalised the pattern. Because I’m daring. So I coaxed some more money out of the trembling fists of Helpdesk Man and sallied forth today to buy Stuffs and Fixins.

Unfortunately, none of our sizeable town’s fabric and craft shops stock spring and flat steel boning, which according to all reputable corsetieres is the only thing that will do. Plastic? Polypropelyne? Riligene? We pff at it. Dave’s Emporium, enterprisingly, went so far as to inform me they had it before I trekked in and was triumphantly told they did not. I pff at Dave’s Emporium, also.

Sadlier still, nobody had non-stretch medium-to-heavy-weight denim either. Or duck. Or cotton canvas. Or twill. Or small brass eyelets. The world is conspiring to keep my squish uncompressed. (Yes, Spotlight probably has it, but I can’t get there on the bus. Well, I probably could, but it would take two buses and three hours and probably damage my calm. Bussing with the snortlepig on a hot day is not for the faint of heart; neither, for that matter, is browsing in fabric stores.)  I visited one craft store, one fabric store, one sewing store, one tailor’s and one bridal shop, and ended up only with a small packet of silver eyelets and some thread. Pfft.

So I am currently in that tantalising and frustrating condition of itching to begin a project, but lacking the raw materials. It saddens me greatly. I just finished putting on a bit pot of chicken soup, despite the sweltering heat, as a hysterical displacement activity. I shall next start hunting out an online source for flat and spring steel boning, and after that the evening stretches before me as a vast, dark, corsetless void. I could keep tweaking the design for the fairy dress, but it’s at the stage of simply frustrating me and causing me to ponder overmuch on the unshapeliness of my legs. I’ll probably end up cleaning the house… heaven help me.

Or “Off Which I Cannot Pull”, if you prefer.

• Catching car keys. Usually I flail and miss, and on the rare occasion I do manage to catch them I stare at them blankly in my hand for a minute, giggle and say “Cor”, thus eliminating any possibility of sprezzatura.
• Ebonics.
• Calling people “honey”.
• Saying “I love you” without using a silly voice. (Stunted childhood, prolly.)
• Wearing makeup of any kind.
• Giving people other than Helpdesk Man and the snortlepig hugs of greeting or farewell. Most people I know are undemonstrative or possibly think I pong, so on the rare occasion an acquaintance swoops in and kisses the air around my cheeks I tend to go into fight-or-flight mode and end up squishing them, getting their hair up my nose or doing something otherwise non-apropos.
• Bohemian/grunge/thrift store chic dressing. I’d love to be able to don a cheese hat, a vest, three pairs of holey tights, a tulle petticoat and combat boots and saunter down the street wearing earrings made out of soft drink tabs and toting a hatbox, but I’d just end up sidling close to the shopfronts, picking at my hair and hoping nobody saw me. Which is a sad thing.
• Dressing appropriately for weddings.
• Looking earth-goddessy, glowing and full of verdant feminine power during  pregnancy.
• Babywearing.
• Matching shoes, handbags etc to my outfit.
• Scarves, either chunky or floaty.
• Berets.
• High heels.
• Clothes in general, in fact; but also, unfortunately:
• Nudism.
• Casually acknowledging celebrities in a way that indicates classy recognition and a quiet, non-intrusive tribute to their talents without outing self as a ravening fangirl or causing said celebrity to inwardly wince. Fortunately, being New Zealand, this isn’t an issue that comes up too often.
• Karaoke.
• Easy-going friendliness towards other people’s small children.
• Buzzcuts, I’m pretty sure. It’s one of the main reasons I did not star in V for Vendetta.
• Saying no gracefully to telemarketers, door-to-door evangelists, collectors for dubious charities and those people at the mall who squirt Dead Sea minerals on your hands unless you studiously blank them.
• Closing in Prayer.
• Weeping subtly and attractively during sad movies.
• Dealing with crocuses in an efficient and capable manner when there are people younger and nervier than myself present.
• Presenting my ID without trying to distract the IDer’s attention from the identity photo.
• Doing any form of banking without preemptively apologising to the teller for my incompetence.
• Watching Star Wars without beaming in a slightly defective way whenever Han  Solo is about to say something witty.

Yesterday:

You know what? I will probably never learn to speak French. A semi-sobering thought. I’d like to speak French - more accurately I’d like to be the sort of person who learns French for kicks, which the evidence suggests I’m not - but meh. It has tenses. I’m  agin ‘em. I have a friend, though, who taught herself German simply by visiting a LOTR message board. But she’s Aspie - proper Aspie, not just vanity Aspie - and therefore cooler than me, as so many of my friends are. (Case in point: most of them can drive.)

You know what else? I remembered the other thing I had to do this week. It was volunteering at the toy library. Two weeks ago I didn’t turn up when I shoulda, and one week ago I did when I shouldn’ta. If I flake again this week they might start asking me nasty questions about the missing piece on the activity table the snortlepig borrowed a month ago. Must get up tomorrow morning.

I also have to get up in order to make a Shin of Beast, a task which now seems faintly glamorous as I just watched Julie & Julia with my mother. Meryl Strep is marvellous. You think “Oh yes, Meryl Streep, she’s marvellous”, and then you see her in another film and realise yup, she really is. I have that experience with Hamlet, also. And, upon occasion, soft-boiled eggs.

Today:

Got to the toy library on time, thank goodness, and spent a pleasant hour and a half chatting about childbirth and counting 150-piece toys into buckets. It’s a heady power trip, saying to cowering mothers “You do realise there’s a goblet and two trapdoors missing, don’t you…. maggot?”. Collected some used coffee grounds for compost, visited Helpdesk Man at work, then trundled home. Right. I now have the unenviable task of persuading a Tupperware lady to demonstrate this Saturday at a baby shower. And then I need to attack that Shin of Beast and do some long-overdue gardening. Pip pip.

Yawn. Moop. Well, we are finally more or less absolutely moved in. Pretty much. Kinda. A woman off Freecycle is coming to collect the empty likker boxes for her house-move tonight, which will make the kitchen look considerably more respectable. And I have been seasonably afflicted, as usual, with veggie gardening fervor, so the back entrance to the house is littered with wee pots and dribbles of potting mix exhumed from them by the snortlepig, who is apparently anti-veggies.

More impressively, we have a raised bed. Slightly raised, anyway. More of a token raise than a legitimately rheumatism-saving waist-high raise; but a raise nevertheless. It was a bit of a mission , nevertheless. The raised beds on TradeMe go for ridiculously inflated prices, and after seeing a few dead simple four-plank affairs go for over $100 my Scottish blood revolted and I said to myself, How hard can it be? Which is a thing one should not say. So I called upon my mother to take me to Bunnings, which sold cutesy little prepackaged veggie-bed-building kits with planks and nails and the like for $129. Puh-leeze, thunk I, and trotted off to the loose lumber. Four planks of that turned out to be going for a good $50, which by that stage I was meekly prepared to accept; but my mother is made of sterner stuff. “Dreamin’”, quoth she and drove me to a place I had previously only known as a legend: Demolition Traders.

What I knew is that it used to be Mum’s favourite shop and you could buy old French doors there. What I didn’t know is that it’s essentially a decayed urban Disneyland - a tumbleweed-blown, dusty Main Street USA and the perfect setting, if anyone’s interested, for a student horror film. It isn’t a shop at all, it’s an enormous lot filled with old houses transported onto the site - some of which were cannibalised from other old houses - and filled wit bits of yet more houses. One is filled, as Mother predicted, with French doors; another with bathtubs standing up against the walls like a hotel for hygienic vampires; another with amputated taps. One warehouse was full of whole kitchens, extracted neatly from houses and standing around just  chillin’. And just to add a ghoulish Western B movie effect to the place, the legitimate goods for sale are intermixed with ancient carriage parts and wagon wheels, as well as seats made out of bathtubs a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s totally uber, and if I were left there alone after dark I’d very quickly end up gibbering in a warehouse, probably under the rowing boat named Titanic.

Anyway, an old chap eventually emerged from the gloom to help us sort through the piles of old weatherboards and such, while the pig courted tetanus playing amongst the gravel and rusty nails. To our request for H3 treated timber he snorted derisively and pointed us to H4 - apparently H3 rots like tissue paper when placed in contact with soil, and whose advice had we been taking? (Dad’s. Never trust an infralapsarian in the matter of treated timber.) A slightly younger and less picturesque individual cut the timber for us and manned the EFTPOS machine, clearly resenting us as lightweights who weren’t planning on hauling away any kitchens in our teeth. Nevertheless: wood obtained. $30. My ancestors would be proud, in a “Couldst thee not have cut it thyself from yon kindly greenwood, feeble wench?” kind of way.

Making the bed was likewise a heavier task than expected. I gave it my best effort with a hammer and galvanised steel nails, moving from one plank to the next to avoid the fingers of the snortlepig, who kept trying to hold the nails as I pounded ‘em. (She also had the disconcerting habit of waiting until I had nailed them in to - I thought - a considerable depth, and then casually reaching across and plucking them from the wood. That dude has fingers like biceps.) I got a few in straight, but the vast majority buckled and wilted and had to be extracted by Helpdesk Man. Fortunately he was so repulsed by my incompetence that he finished the bed himself, thus demonstrating that he is surprisingly manly. I want him to build a pergola next.

Anyway, the raised bed is now wobbling danergously on the back lawn waiting for a trailerful of dirt to stabilise and strengthen it. At least, that is what I’m hoping it will do. As it happens, however, we are now too broke to afford dirt (poetic, no?); so I’m making do in the meantime with $6 worth of supermarket potting mix and some seeds scrounged off a friend. Life remains snortly.

In other news, I am abandoning the Points system. My Suite101 earnings have better things to do for the foreseeable future, such as buying chests of drawers and bookshelves and stuff; and my tally marks got lost in the move. Instead this week’s Challenge will be as follows:

• Henna hair
• Write one article a day
• Query one article a day
• Do one thing every day to make the new house look more homelike
• Do one organisational thing a day
• Do Bible study homework
• Do singing group practice

Peanut butter at one house, bread at the other, plates packed in a box… this is all very disturbing. I was at the new place today packing and shivering with cold, and it took a good twenty minutes for me to think of unpacking a sweatshirt from a box and putting it on. It felt faintly illicit, as if the new house should not be used for such profane purposes as dressing.

I also had a horrid experience last night while unpacking a box of kitchen iems. There was an enormous cockroach chilling in my brand-new mini-ramekins. It was probably from the house. That’s probably the reason the previous tenants moved out, you know. Every night, millions of tiny feet marching, marching, until the sounds of the roaches softly moving hammered themselves into their brains and caused them to gibber. Super.

Also, it is prayer meeting here tonight. I am trying to psych myself up not to apologise to people for providing only one type of homebaked cookie. Normally I would do lemon muffins as well or die in the attempt, but we’re out of sugar and flour and most of my baking stuff is elsewhither. And we have no microwave, so if anyone needs butter melted or a wheatie bag heated up or a hamster inhumanely killed they’ll just have to lump it. The situation, not the hamster. Or both; whatever.

Is there an internationally-recognised protocol on the correct place to keep the fly spray? And would you rather move into a house with roaches, or one in which the previous owner had offed herself in the laundry?

Well, yesterday was the end of an era. As the snortlepig looked on in silent outrage a slightly creepy vanful of homeschoolers loaded up Bridget and Saffron into cardboard boxes and drove them away. Farewell, useless chickens. I miss you very, very slightly.

Yesterday was also the day we got the key to the new house. We walked a box of sewing fabric over in the pram and inspected the house, rather nervously as we’d only seen the place once. The paint was a little bit skungier than we remembered and the bedrooms a somewhat more awkward shape, but we also discovered a couple of arty features we hadn’t noticed - namely a sloped ceiling in the spare bedroom and storage under the window seats. So it was OK. The snortlepig loved it, mostly because there was plenty of room for playing dead frogs on the floor.

Inspired by this I planned to spend today trundling back and forth with the pram, unpacking things. Unfortunately today was also the heaviest rainstorm since the deluge. Fortunately the Internet conked out, so I was forced to be productive and ended up packing half a dozen more boxes. Can anyone explain how we had 7 ice cream containers in storage but 15 lids, when we hardly ever buy ice cream in any case? Very odd. Anyway my dear friend Eva is coming around this evening to help me take a carload of boxes to the new place… a somewhat mixed blessing, as Eva has formidable housekeeping skills which force me into de-smegging the house before she gets here. I hate it when people are tidier than me. Thing is, they usually are…

During a break in the rain showers the pig and I went outside to scrape weeds out from the cracks of the path. I ended up amazing myself by emptying out two metal buckets, making drain holes in the bott0ms with a hammer and nail, and planting capsicums. Somehow picking up a hammer still seems immensely empowered and transgressive - pathetic really, as I sprang from the loins of a woman for whom knocking down walls and upholstering furniture is all in a day’s work. But my usefulness has traditionally been strictly limited to the kitchen, so there you go.

Or is it Auntie? Aunty Smokey. Auntie Smokey. Aunt Smokering. Hmm. Anyhoo. Helpdesk Man’s sister was induced sometime yesterday, and gave birth to a nine-pounder at 9AM today. Horrific really, fancy being in labour all night. She must be dead to the world. Anyway, we don’t know the name of the dudeling yet, which is odd because they apparently decided on it months ago. Maybe it just didn’t look like one of whatever they chose. Or perhaps they plan to beat the recession by allowing visitors to each submit a name and a bribe, with the honour going to the highest bidder. In which case, kudos. I wonder if our budget would allow me to spring for “Calvin”, just to shake things up? But these are unworthy thoughts. Mazel tov, sister-in-law-person-and-small-nameless-snortlepig.

I like packing books. With the exception of the theology books I keep mine uncategorised, so stacking them in boxes reveals a delightful cross-section of personality that would probably intrigue posterity if I became a sculptor or blew up a bus or something. The Silence of the Lambs nestling next to Winnie-the-Pooh, for instance; Reader, I Married Him cheek-by-jowl with a misshelved copy of a tome boldly entitled PREDESTINATION.

Kitchen items are less fun to pack. They are asymmetrical, breakable and require much thought. How many baking dishes can I live without for the next two weeks? Will I suddenly burn with the desire for a lemon yoghurt cake if I pack my bundt tin? (I chanced it.) What about my mini-muffin tins? No, too risky, I’ll want to use up a lot of lemons before we leave, so I might make lemon muffins. Should I get rid of my dodgy-bottomed springform cake tins, even though I used the bottoms several times this month to shape pizza and pavlovas on?

Worst of all are the contents of the bathroom cupboard, which I have started packing in self-defense as the snortlepig likes to unhaul them from the cupboard anyway. I was on a skincare kick for awhile, exacerbated by a free-samples kick, which left me with dozens of sample bottles and wax strips currently made obsolete by my anti-chemical/eco/natural kick. Part of me cynically wishes to keep them for when I backslide, but the other half views them as cancer in a tube… so you see the dilemma. Had fun seeing if I could make one half of my lips bigger than the other using Sally Hansen’s Lip Inflating Cream, though. I couldn’t. They just went tingly. With the tingles of cancer.

Last night’s dinner with Helpdesk Man’s family was a success, incidentally. I made a huge basket of flatbreads and grissini which we had for starters with dukkah, pesto and olives and such foibles. Then dinner was creamy sundried tomato chicken strips on a bed of corn risotto, with roasted carrot and kumara spears cooked in brown sugar. Sister-in-law made milktart for dessert and I added pecan tartlets and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. During dessert the snortlepig disappeared and was discovered in the living room with the remains of the bread basket, diligently and enthusiastically dipping all the breads and licking them. She is a sweetcheeks.