Smokey the Magnificent

1. I found a pit in my allegedly pitted olive.

2. I schlped up a fly with the vacuum cleaner. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, but have been hindered by both the wiliness of flies and my tendency to not vacuum. But today I got sick of seeing bits of dry rice stuck between the floor boards, so I got out the vacuum and there it was, chillin’ on the lampshade. So I crept up behind it, and - schlp! It was this big. Do you think it died, or flew out again?

3. Speaking of flies, the snortlepig totally wigged out after seeing the corpus of a fly on the living room floor. She responds to seeing dead cockroaches on the ground in town with a gleeful “NASTY crocus!”, so I’m not sure why the tiny mortal coil of a mere blowfly filled her with such terror and sorrow. I had to give it a decent burial with the dustpan and brush before she’d calm down.

4. I made white chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate straciatella.

5. I bought two cheap bottles of wine at the supermarket, one white and one red, for experimental cooking purposes. Tonight was fish, which we had with an Italian tomatoey, white wine and olive sauce. It wasn’t the best fish I’ve ever had, but it was sophisticated as hell. Must have been a whole, what? 75 cents’ worth of wine in there? Earth has not anything to show more fair.

Actually more than five exciting things happened to me today, at least judging by the standards of the above. I cleaned the leather couch. This shouldn’t have been exciting, except that we a) eat dinner on the couch every night and b) have a one-year-old. Apparently the makers of the leather cleaner did not expect the couch to attain this level of filth. “Do not rub”, indeed. HOW ELSE ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO GET THE SWEETCORN OFF?

More excitingly yet, I discovered this blog: Sleep Talkin’ Man. It is simply a record of a man’s nightly unconscious ramblings, recorded dutifully by his ever-loving wife. Some of the things he says are not entirely decent, so I shall reproduce a few of the tamer ones here for those too moral to click:

“You’ve got to save the curtains! Save the curtains… They hold so many secrets.”

“I know it’s a shame that when I walk out of a room it gets just a little bit darker and gray. It’s a burden I carry.”

“Tea bags, see? Better be careful with the tea bags. They’re delicate creatures. Handle them with care.”

“Imagine waking up next to you every day… One chunder-bucket moment after another.”

“Legs time! Everybody get your legs!”

And my personal favourite:
“You know, it’s a human race. And you lost.”

So I suppose the seventh most exciting thing that happened to me today was discovering at least one person in this world is wittier than me in his sleep.

I am now an official scholar of the automobilial arts. I have a dodgy-looking temporary licence and everything. And while we’re on the subject, is it license or licence? I can never figure that one out, BA notwithstanding.

This weekend will be full of glamour and sparkle due to the annual Summer Festival, which is currently sitting soggily in the public gardens getting rained on. Assuming the lightning storm clears by tomorrow, Helpdesk Man and I will be moseying down at 9PM to watch Broadway on the Boardwalk, a collection of show tunes sung by the local operatics society. Then on Saturday the piggie and I will trot to a pantomime of Beauty and the Beast and a Food, Wine and Jazz festival - I’m not into wine and have no particular opinion on jazz, but the thought that there might be little bits of cheese to sample on toothpicks justifies the $20 entrance fee in my mind. On Sunday the main event will occur, the Sunset Symphony at which my own dear Helpdesk Man is performing along with his marvy young vocal collective. There will be fireworks, which I like muchly.

Add to that the zoo trip tomorrow, and I have four events for which I need to cook exciting snacks. Plus I have to finish a baby’s bonnet for a friend’s new baby today and go grocery shopping. It is an exciting time to be a Smokey.

I cleaned the fridge today. I can very rarely say that. Interestingly, I was expecting to find all manner of unseemly smeg lurking under mould, but I didn’t. There was a small ramekin half-full of chocolate moisse I don’t remember making, but it only looked elderly, not grotesque. One could say it had acquired a certain gravitas - think Patrick Stuart, as opposed to post-earring Harrison Ford. And there was a jar of REALLY old hummus that I only threw out on principle - smelled fine, looked fine, but could conceivably have been in league with the Commies back in the day and the last thing my fridge needs is to be overrun by the Red Menace, innit. So it’s a mystery. Either Helpdesk Man has been being cleanly behind my back or I need to give the fridge a raise.

Anyhoo. Practically my only sister Betty Scandretti has tagged me for a weedy meme, Happy 101, or Ten Things That Make You Put the Gun Down Once More, For Now. I’m then supposed to tag a number of friends, that being the sort of thing that makes memes happy, but a) meh and b) hello, Aspie, “friends”?

Here I go.

1. Having a clean fridge. It just makes me want to curl up inside it and - hold on, we’re out of cheese. When did that happen? I distinctly remember not moving cheese when I cleaned the shelves. We had cheese. What the blazes is my fridge up to?

2. The last page of The Grapes of Wrath. Everybody I’ve spoken to on the matter finds it creepy as heck, but I don’t.

3. Olives. Ha!

4. Playing poker with Helpdesk Man. More so if I’m winning, or at least not bleeding chips to the point where he shoots me a withering glare and asks me to recite the rule about pot odds.

5. The snortlepig saying “Kees eyes, kees chin, kees nose, kees ears, kees chin, okay!”

6. Sewing, on the rare occasions that the needle isn’t coming unthreaded and the bobbin hasn’t run out unnoticed halfway through a long seam and the pattern doens’t require a degree in hyperspatial engineering to figure out and the pig isn’t drawing on the sewing machine with a pink felt tip pen and the fabric is still pleasing one several days after having purchased it, making one go “ooo” instead of “hrmm”, and everything is snortly.

7. Helpdesk Man comparing my cooking favourably to purchased foodstuffs, whether from a restaurant or particular supermarket brand.

8. Rediscovering an old interest after getting into a rut. I don’t mean like Willow and Xander. I mean like cooking. In theory, I love to cook, no? Ask people to describe a Smokey, and once they’ve gotten words like “crepuscular” out of the way and mentioned my unnervingly mobile upper lip, they’ll say “she cooks”. And I do. But sometimes I find myself making the same eight meals over and over again, feeling moop about the entire process. And then, aha! I get a book out of the libe about pasta-making, and the spark is rekindled. I had practically my only small sister Ruth over the other night and we made tomato fettucine in a cream and basil sauce, and it was delicious. So there.

9. Not being dairy-free. I do not mean to exhibit smugness in front of any Gentle Readers who come over in suppurating pustules when schmeared with cream cheese. But it is the truth. It makes me happy. Sometimes I’m eating a bowl of ice cream and I think “Gosh, I’m glad I’m not dairy-free”, and then I grate some cheese on top of the ice cream and slather it in custard. Or at least, I could. Unlike some.

10. I saw an inchworm one time. It made me happy.

Committed a near faux pas tonight. I was sitting at the computer typing an impassioned diatribe about the Catholic position on birth control (long story) when an elderly couple from our church walked in, Bibles in hands. I had a moment of panic that they’d heard we’d taken up poker and had come to stage an intervention: but fortunately, before I could ask them to what I owed the pleasure of their company, they were followed by another elderly gentleman from our church with a Bible in his hand, and I remembered: this was our turn to host prayer meeting.

By what can only be described, given the circumstances, as Divine providence I had cleaned the bathroom this afternoon on a whim, and had a cake tin full of triple chocolate cookies. More fortunately still, I had not yet gotten around to hennaing my roots. I’m not entirely sure I pulled off the impromptu gracious hostess act as it is, but it would have been far more difficult with a plastic bag on my head and green eyebrows.

The panna cotta… I’m not quite convinced about the panna cotta. I think it was a little too firm: one expected to find a goldfish or similar preserved within for making specimens of. And I think milk chocolate might be more promising than white. Still, the panna cottas blooped out of their molds pleasingly like little volcanoes, and I spooned caramel sauce over them, and calories were ingested, and all was well. For my next project, I am going to learn how to make bagel crisps. I like ‘em. And they’re nearly five dollars a packet, which is more than my sorry life is worth.

What did the snortlepig do tonight? Counted to eight. I was confused by this, as I’ve never counted with her past five for toe-related reasons; but I think she probably picked it up from a vocal exercise we do at singing group. We count up the octave and back down. The snortlepig tends to leave out number 5, but I am impressed with her nonetheless. We should do a vocal exercise based on Roman numerals next, or the dates of kings.

Tonight Helpdesk Man took it upon himself as the spiritual head of the family to teach me poker. I’d only played once before, a game of Texas Hold’em  during a rather disastrous dinner party, at which I was so distracted with a screaming four-month=old snortlepig that I tried to win a hand with three pair. Tonight was somewhat more successful. We played for beans - literally. Kidney beans. We didn’t have any chips and playing for cash seemed a tad redundant given that we share an account. I won several hands, but no games. The pig sampled our olives, played very professionally with the Jokers and kept hiding our beans in her mouth. Anyway, I liked it. I like the faintly Freemason-slash-Star Trek vibe it has, with the jargon and the rapping on the table and the hats and all. Makes me feel classy. What with this and the olives, I have come a long way from the bumpkin of yore, no?

Remember the snortlepig’s security knickers? Well, she seems to have made a new friend. It is a small bottle of peppermint essence. She fell in love with it at the supermarket when I gave it to her to hold in place of the cream, having spotted at the last second that she had taken the lid off and was about to upend it onto the supermarket floor. That same day I made mint chocolate chip ice cream (not my most successful flavour - that was three weeks ago and we still have some lurking in the freezer), and had to wrest the essence away from a squealing pig with entreaties and promises to give it back. When it was returned to her, sans half a teaspoon, she carried it away in sobbing triumph and promptly hid it under the sofa where my clawing fingers and dodgy housekeeping would never find it.

Then a few days ago, the snortlepig’s tiny aunt discovered it under said sofa while searching for the snortlepig’s small wooden animals. I put it back on the shelf and thought nothing of it until today, when the snortlepig started dancing and pointing and saying “DA!” at the pantry. I picked her up, wondering if she’d developed a sudden taste for dried chickpeas… but nope. She’s been carrying the peppermint essence around again for two solid hours. Freak.

Interestingly, although the peppermint smell cannot be detected outside the bottle and although she almost certainly does not associate the two, the mint chocolate chip ice cream was her favourite flavour. She also eats olives. She’s classier than me.

Incidentally, shikakai? Good stuff. Exceptionally. If this keeps up I might be able to wear my hair down occasionally, although of course I would then have to navigate the perils of giving the snortlepig the milks without sitting on it myself or having said pig twine it round her feet and pull. Madonna never had this problem (the Blessed Virgin I mean, not the singer, although I doubt she did either).

I’m drafting a dress! It is harder than it looks. And invisible zips are evil. I will update you when there is good news: until then, don’t ask.

In other news… hoom. Helpdesk Man ate the first ripe tomato of the summer yesterday and his eyes watered a little. I am babysitting my small sisters on Friday, and we will watch the last 29 minutes of Toy Story 2 and the entirety of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I have an article due in six days that isn’t even remotely written. We watched Season 5 of The Office and are on to Season 6. I’ve been listening, goodness knows why, to wizard rock and have so far sifted only two decent songs from the dross - I Believe in Nargles and Accio Love. Both of which are, quite honestly, rubbish: but I have a small life. Also, the pig’s wet nappy reeks strangely of tuna, which we have not eaten for months. I’d better go change it before worse things happen.

Today my dear mother and I went on a mish to find op-shop furniture for the homestay student. We didn’t find any, but we did come across a rather lovely hospice shop which had piles of fabric. Piles and piles! I fossicked through it with embarrassing thoroughness and very nearly bought about eight lengths of crepe and floral cotton and the like; but in the end I restrained myself and only got some white and cream cotton. One can never have too much white and cream cotton.

Anyway it reminded me of my plan to colour-code the snortlepig’s wardrobe for fall and winter. So I started looking at colour palettes.

It is harder than one thinks.

One does not wish to age the snortlepig with overly sedate colours. She is only tiny, and one should wear clear cheerful colours while one can.

One also wishes to choose colours that suit her, naturally.

And they need to blend with each other, that being the point of the whole exercise; but they can’t all be neutrals, because if one uses up all one’s neutrals in the first season what will she wear in the second? Also, I do not wish her to look drab. People might sneer.

And it being winter, one feels one should choose warm and cheery colours to counteract the effects of the damp.

But one is currently partial to pale blue and grey, which are not warm and cheery.

And one should not go too pale in the winter, because nobody wants to wear dark clothes in the summer and again, variety.

And a lot of colours don’t go well with pale blue.

And I didn’t get much sleep last night, and the colours are beginning to blur before my eyes. And I have to make chocolate ripple ice cream and do an hour of housework. And colourlovers.com requires you to log in before you can make your own palette.

So… you tell me. Too cockatoid? Too nautical? Too drab? Too cheesy? Too girly? Too pretentious? Too… no, I think not. Too dull?

Bah. You do it. I’m just her mother.

Other children have security blankets or well-worn teddy bears. The snortlepig, it seems, has security knickers. They are mine. They are red. She dives for them the moment the underwear chest is opened,  wears them on her head and pings them around the room. Today I had to hastily remove them from around her neck, where she’d slung them like a necklace, because I thought the courier was coming. And I no longer wear them, because I am afraid if they go in the wash she will transfer her affections to another, better-loved pair of knickers and stretch them into oblivion.

What does it mean?

1. So I wangled a bunch of characters for my practice novel out of thin air, and half a plot to boot. This is well and good, but I need a villain, or at least some form of dramatic tension. Maybe some entity with a moustache.
2. I think I need to trim the snortlepig. I made her a lovely top which looked, if anything, too big in the making: and now it won’t fit over her squish. I am remedying the situation by lacing the back up corset-wise, but it is not ideal. I did, however, overcome the butterflies in my tum and attempt buttonholes for the first time. After many rippings-out I achieved a set of the sorriest-looking buttonholes ever to grace a garment; but at least the plunge has been taken.
3. The space bar on my keyboard issticking, which makes me want to KILL THEWORLD. See?
4. We finally finished the X-Files - including, against sound advice, the second X-Files movie I Want to Believe. Which was rubbish. And it could have been spectacular if they’d only continued with the bally arc (and omitted Mulder’s pedophile haircut and Scully’s greenish dye job and anorexic makeover, and so on, obvs.). So that was depressing. But I was a bit disenchanted with Scully ever since she had the baby anyway. It’s sad when shows leave one with a slightly bitter taste in one’s mouth when they’re over, but I really did enjoy the X-Files around seasons 5-7ish… so that’s something. We’re now finishing off Dollhouse, and thence on to catching up on a few seasons of The Office. It will be nice to watch something with fewer autopsies: the snortlepig has started saying “yucky” when Scully uncovers figures on gurneys, and will probably end up twisted in the head.

Somewhat to my astonishment, Helpdesk Man and I passed the police check for having a homestay student. The next step is to be interviewed by a nice lady called Loretta and have the student’s room inspected to make sure we aren’t planning on chucking her in a rat-infested hole in the floor. Which is a doddle in theory - well, except for the interview, which will probably prove us to be antisocial semi-loons with supralapsarian leanings - only the homestay student’s room currently contains fourteen boxes of junk left over from moving house, a large plastic bag full of used coffee grounds, and no furniture.

So I am once again scouring TradeMe. According to the terms and condishes of homestay-student-having one has to provide it with a bed with a Good Quality Mattress, a desk, a chair, a lamp, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. Privileged little blighter. I don’t even have a lamp. Anyway I was thinking of going for a vaguely shabby chic-cum-Anne of Green Gables dormer room kind of look, with a splash of French Country thrown in. Dusky pinks and greens and creams, kind of demure, an old-fashioned writing desk if I can get one, that sort of thing. We specified a girl homestay student, so hopefully the pink will not be a problem; and it’s a style I like well enough that when the room eventually becomes the snortlepig’s room, I won’t feel the need to rip it all out and start afresh. Hopefully.

Of course, the tricky bit is that one has to decorate the room before the interview, so if one fails one is not only out a supplementary source of income, but the price of a roomful of furniture. Still. We will prevail.

I had a cunning thought the other day. If I am to be making most of the snortlepig’s clothes from now on (and it seems I will, both because it amooses me and because I am Agin the clothing industry and hand-me-downs have slowed down to the merest trickle since she left the baby stage), it makes sense that they all match. Currently she has a pleasing conglomeration of handmade and bought items in varying clashing shades, and only about two tops go with two bottoms on a good day. So next time a new season hits or she grows out of things, I plan to go to Spotlight with a tiny colour palette in mind and buy five or so fabrics - a few solids, maybe some dottos or stripes and a floral - that all mix and match, and then make her clothing accordingly. It seems frugal. Plus, I can then look back fondly on her childhood photos and say “Oh yes, that was during your blue period”, and date contested family holidays by the hue of her trousies. And it’ll force me to make clothes she actually needs, as opposed to things I want to make (case in point: she is currently inundated with tops and rather lacking in bottoms).

Right. I now need to go and complete my hour of fiction writing for the week. I have successfully managed to do my hour of housework every day, even going so far as to do an extra hour the day before we went to the beach (more on that later). None of the editors I queried have gotten back to me about my print articles, though; nor have I utterly mastered the Road Code; and I totally forgot about the fiction writing thing until now. I should really use this time to work on My Novel, but I’m getting rather sick of it; perhaps I’ll start something new. We shall see.

Oh, yus. Question. If you were a nearly-two-year-old snortlepig, and it was going to be autumn/winter when you were twoish, what kind of colours would you want to wear for that season? I fancy dove-grey at the moment, but it might be a little drab for a toddler. D’you think? Dove-grey accented with blue or possibly maroon? Maybe I should save that particular combo for when she’s a sedate matron of four.