Smokey the Magnificent

Last night my two small sisters came over while Helpdesk Man was out gadding. We watched The Truman Show, made a kind of faux pie thing with fruit salad in it and fettucine carbonara, researched the Great Exhibition and started making a kimono top for the snortlepig. Great larks.

I finished the top this morning. I’m not entirely sure about it, but it was very quick to make and covers her delicate wee neck and arms from the blazing sun better than my shirred tops do. And after all, if she ends up with a freckled decolletage before she even has a decolletage, her chances of making a profitable match are slim to nil. And who will support her during her bitter long years of barely-respectable old maiditude? Muggins here, that’s who. So I was thinking of doing another kimono top in a nice lineny colour, with slightly darkish red bias binding and some chunky appliqued flowers on stems. Thoughts?

We wandered over to the Gardens this afternoon for the shots.

I include this last not because it shows off the top, but because it is one of approximately three photos in existence in which the snortlepig and myself occupy the same frame. If I ever had to prove she was my daughter in a court of law, this could be an issue. In other respects it is probably a Good Thing, as I photograph about as well as Elijah Wood (no, really. Candid shots? Hoo boy. He does OK if you tart him up with lights and discreetly applied eye makeup, but slap him in a crowd full of fans and he tends to look geekier than they do. Which is endearing really, if anything, but presumably must be a trial to him as an actor. Interestingly, after I saw Sin City he has looked retroactively creepy in all the photos I took from the Return of the King premiere. Not that I look through them on a regular basis or anything; we were moving house. Still, though. And actually, my photography has improved somewhat in the intervening years… most of the premiere photos were of my thumb. And even my thumb is unphotogenic. It’s not the most Herculean of thumbs to start off with, me having dropped a ladder on it in my youth; but on camera you can practically see it squinting and holding its mouth funny. Quite fascinating. I wonder if it’s pathological.).

Other items of note:

1. I just discovered the best craft blog: Ruffles and Stuff. Lots of clothing recons, adult-to-toddler stuff in particular, and a lovely Victoriana twist to many of her projects which I can pretend is steampunk, not that she uses the term.

2. Helpdesk Man’s best friend mentioned the other day that he wanted to see our wedding video, and a cold chill ran down my back. Not just because of the oddness of a human voluntarily signing up to watch someone else’s wedding video - he was the best man and made a speech, so it sort of makes sense - but because in the three-years-in-November we’ve been married, I have been unable to bring myself to watch it. Is this common to brides, I wonder?

3. A flounce is like a ruffle, but instead of being gathered at the top which produces a bulky and textured top section, the flare is created by sewing the concave portion of a curved (as in gently U-shaped) piece of fabric to a straight piece of fabric, thus creating a smoother line. I learned that today. I learned what a peplum was the other day too, but I forget the finer points. Jackets have them flaring gently over the hips, sometimes. Not in my wardrobe, though.

4. As of the tail end of Season 6 Mulder’s hair has gone distressingly poofy. I hope this is a mere two-episode aberrance, not his new look. It’s practically a pompadour. Incidentally, does it not seem to you that hair in TV shows tends to get worse rather than better as the shows progress? Not universally - Friends comes to mind - but look at Cordy in Angel. Or Willow’s Season 7 look. Or Felicity, of course…

5. November starts tomorrow. NaNoWriMo. I feel distinctly uninspired.

I currently have 43 article titles jotted down for my NaNo challenge. Of course, now I have them I keep wanting to write the articles, which would be counterproductive, although still ultimately useful. This is the problem with challenges. Too often the artificial constructs suppress creativity or cause one to look for weaselly loopholes.

We’ve been sick again this week. Helpdesk Man took two days off, and I spent many hours languishing on the bed while the snortlepig pulled long strings of gore for her nose and then freaked out because her hands were “yucky!”. Sweet child, not too bright.

Well anyway, I think the sickness caused my brain leach out my ears because I can’t think of a thing worth blogging about. Saw 500 Days of Summer… made a tiny apple pie… saw the best episode of The X-Files yet (season 6, the one where the alien pretends to be a Black baseball player, and Scully and Mulder indulge in  witty tofu-related banter)… sent the pig to visit her grandparents, but she came home early in disgrace after tipping her bowl of dinner upside down… bought two wooden crates off TradeMe that were meant for storing jeans in (an oddly specific function, I felt) and planted punkins in ‘em… made cupcakes… you know. Nothing uber. Nothing that would sway a slightly conscientious gunman from shooting me in the head. Well, I washed my hair. No, that probably wouldn’t do it. Maybe I’m still suffering from residual sickness-related Moops?

Anyhoo. I did finish two tops for the snortlepig, so here they am! I apologise for the lousy photo quality, and by “apologise” I mean “blame Helpdesk Man”. Any time nice photos appear on this blog, they were generally taken by my small sister. Photography is one of those talents I admire from afar, marvelling with some fear at its technical aspects. Similarly, synchronised swimming.

I wasn’t too sure about this one when I made it - it has a few rows of shirring at the waist (if the pig had a waist) as well as the bust (ditto). I kinda like it on, though. It bulges pleasingly around her midriff.

The colour isn’t great in these photos, but I’m very fond of it - a deep chocolate brown, with pale pink for the straps and what the snortlepig calls the “dottos”. I shirred this top out of a remnant, which turned out to be a wee bit too narrow to wrap around the pig; so rather than stretching the shirring, I added a vaguely corset-laced affair on the back with some rather nice chocolate and pink double-sided ribbon. I’d hoped to find pink ribbon with dark chocolate dottos, but this works too.

My next project ought to be finishing the baby quilt, given that the baby in question is now a week old; but I have been smitten with the desire to make the snortlepig a bubble dress, so we will see. It’s odd; up until now I didn’t even like bubble dresses (or skirts, or tops), but I suspect the pig would look pleasing in one. Perhaps I am compensating for my own lack of fashion sense by wishing to dress the pig according to the latest trends, thus perpetuating the cycle of slavery to fast fashion and bondage to The Man while bypassing it myself?

Today we took the snortlepig to the zoo. She enjoyed it, although not (as one might expect) because of the animals. She pretty much ignored the monkeys, gave the reptiles a funny look and was only vaguely interested in the ostriches. She did, however, light up when we came to the tapirs. “DU-CKEE!” she cried, and sure enough, there was some exotic kind of goose. Never mind that it was camouflaged in the grass in middle distance and two tapirs the size of buses were lying at her feet in full view - the snortlepig has only mastered the word “DU-CKEE” in the last few days, and apparently intends to make full use of it. So she strode around the zoo searching for duckies, and in between amused herself with the other great highlight of the trip: gravel paths.

That’s my mother-in-law. I cropped her head out not because of malice, but for privacy reasons. (She’s wanted for arson in several burroughs. No, not really. At least, not to my knowledge. It hasn’t come up.)

I tried to get an arty snortlepig-with-kune-kune-pigs shot, but it was tricky; she wanted to climb in with the pigs and had to be restrained. So this is the best we got:

So Deb tagged me as a Kreativ Blogger - and I’m with you on that, Deb, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Here we go, then. Deb’s blog is Green V-Neck, a literary endeavor I am happy to endorse because a) her header contains the phrase “foundation garment” and b) just this week she blogged so eloquently about her child throoming on her Blackberry to its ultimate destruction. Plus, she tagged me and them’s the rules. And we all know if you ignore memes, ten of your love ones will die. (And what with the cancer thing and my sister getting hit by a car the other day*, this is no time to take chances.)

Seven Things I Love:

1. Vanilla essence.

2. The high note Tracie Thoms hits at 2:58 in this song:

3. That feeling you get when you really, really really need to finish a book but it’s too late at night and you can’t keep your eyes open, and when you wake up in the morning you try to reach for it before your eyes are open, and grudge every minute of extra sleep you need in order to keep reading. I haven’t had that for a while, unfortunately; used to happen all the time when I was a kidling. Of course I’m currently reading “More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave“, which, while in fact very interesting in its own way, hardly inspires the sort of die-hard fanaticism that afflicts one as a youth discovering The Princess Bride for the first time.

4. Job 38-42.

5. Maple syrup.

6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

7.

I’m here supposed to pass the meme along to my seven favourite blogs: but you know, I’m not entirely sure I have seven favourite blogs; I don’t read any on a fanatically regular basis, and those I do are mostly big swanky ones like Pioneer Women who probably eat memes for breakfast. So, tough. If my loved ones perish, they perish. ** (Should I read more blogs? Is this like the thing where websites tell you you can win a trip to Tahiti if you sign up ten of your friends, and you count them up and realise you can only summon about six who would greet you in the supermarket with anything approaching genuine enthusiasm, and four of them you haven’t been in contact with for a year and might possibly have had a baby in the interim, you think you recall hearing from your sister who knows these things, even though she lives on the other side of the world and wasn’t in their class at school?)

*Sprained her ankle, apparently. Not the same leg she recently broke by tripping on a pebble on the beach while getting lost trying to find the ferry; the other leg, because a car “wasn’t there and then suddenly was”. I have sympathy, because I’m a noble and beneficent person, but at times I start to wonder if the gene pool is trying to tactfully crowd her out.

** Sorry, Mother.

When baking muffins, it is imperative not to let the quietness of your snortlepig fool you into thinking she is being good. She is not. She is doing this.

What a piece of work is a pig!

How noble in reason…

how infinite in faculty…

In form and moving how express and admirable!

In action, how like an angel!

In apprehension, how like a god!

The beauty of the world…

the paragon of animals…

…but you don’t even want to know about the foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Wanna see my knee-bruise? Of course you do.

Innit!

This week I have decided to be virtuous. No news really, it’s rare I enter a Monday planning to be lax and dissipated; but there you go. In the interests of which, I have made a shocking Challenge: this week, no non-work-related internet. Except emails. And my blog, of course. But nothing else. I can look up nineteenth-century hairstyles for the purposes of writing Suite articles about them, but the minute I get distracted looking up old Empire interviews with Colin Firth or Googling photos of UFOs, off to the hot rack and the Iron Maiden. K? I have cold chills just thinking about it.

In other news, last week I discovered the disconcerting fact that my usually respectable mother would consent to having a sapphire prominently embedded in one of her front teeth for a million dollars. Would you?

And… this little piggy came home.