Blogmeet

A blog-meet with a difference this week - a blog-visitor from overseas! A group of us met in a cafe in Federation Square and enjoyed a very pleasant brunch.

Seeing as it was Pea Soup organising there was an invitation to bring our knitting. So I did. Which felt pretty cheeky given my novice status; mixing it with clever knitters like this and this and this and this. Anyway I managed a few rows on my purple fluffy hat, and admired the far more complex work of the experts.

It was lovely to meet everyone - the chat was lively and the kids were cute. I had a rare indulgence - pancakes for brunch - and Sueeeus and I chuckled over an unexpected cultural difference : the serving of ice-cream with pancakes. We do it, Americans don't. Sueeeus is off now to meet some Sydney bloggers I asked her to kiss them on the cheek from me.

No photos taken as far as I know which is why I gave you my boys in a box instead. (Climber did ask me how to spell Bertie properly but clearly vagued out halfway through the process.)

Shula and I will be catching up Friday morning ...

Toy Library Fair

I've been..

Getting my new t-shirts ready for sale.

Making props...

...for tomorrow's performance with the Tap Kids.

Watching some balloons fly low as I drove to the chiropractor.

Meeting our new neighbours at their little girl's spooky party.

Now we're off to a family restaurant with our old neighbours.

The Nose Knows

What is this? Looks a bit reptilian, don't you think?

Not so snake-like in this pic, though. But still mysterious.

Don't worry, I'm not going to tease it out. In the interests of public health and utensil welfare, I'll tell you.






It's one of my u-beaut magnetic measuring spoons.

See, magnetic spoons and metal cake tins have this attraction for each other. In this case the attraction was so strong it caused this little 1/4 teaspoon measure to commit harikari in my oven.

I really should not have ignored that smell of burning plastic. Always trust your nose. The lives of little teaspoons could be saved.

Gal-livanting

Fixit went back to work yesterday after 2 weeks of holiday; time spent lounging around with me and the boys. He got to see Cherub's kinder and swimming class (he shook his head and asserted Cherub was definitely the dunce of the swim-class. Just because he's not putting his face in yet, after a whole 4 classes; fathers are harsh sometimes aren't they?), he attended assembly at Climber's school ("little bit boring", apparently, so I can stop feeling guilty for always missing it to go to aerobics) and encouraged me to drink way more coffee than usual as we moseyed our way in between child pick-ups and drop-offs.

We haven't officially heard "fail" about the medical so we're assuming that means "pass". Now he has to have an aptitude test but I'd be VERY surprised if he failed that. All being well though he should start the new career in 2 weeks.

Meanwhile, I have escaped eating Stomper-food for 3 consecutive nights this weekend, which was fun for lots of reasons, and not just because I am completely bored with my own cooking.

• Friday night was my Mothers' Group Kids-free Night Out for the Grown-up Girls at a yummy middle-eastern restaurant. Good company, good food, and nobody fighting, stealing toys, whining or shouting. Actually, we may have done a leeetle whining - to each other - and we did have to shout because that restaurant is a particularly noisy one, but we absolutely did not steal each other's toys.
• Saturday night home delivery Vietnamese with Fixit and Nell.
• Sunday night out to groovy Brunswick Street with Crafty and visiting blogger Kirsty from Two Lime Leaves. We admired lots of wares in shop windows (I've now got a terrible urge to go shoe-shopping) before deciding on a Japanese restaurant. We were the first to arrive and the last to leave so I think that gives you a good indication of how well we got on. I took a photo but have since realised I didn't actually check with the other two if they were comfortable having their mugs plastered across my blog so I've compromised...
  

I've always thought when I read Kirsty's blog that I would like her in person and I was right. (I already knew I liked Crafty in person because she used to live next door to me.)

The thing about.

The thing about Waterford crystal mantle-clocks for 10 years service is that they are probably not worth as much on ebay once your soon-to-be-ex-employer has engraved the bottom of it.

The thing about a forthcoming crafternoon is that it is a motivating force to try a new project from the lovely knitting book my sister gave me for Christmas.

The thing about the prescribed "Show-off" wool called for in said pattern is that it has changed since the book was published and instead of having pretty rainbow inserts it is now hairier than Austin Powers' chest. Which makes it a complete cow to knit with. Especially for novices like me. I cannot tell AT ALL what I've knitted, so when I suspect a mistake I have to pull the whole thing apart and start again. Five times so far! If it wasn't pretty and purple I would have junked it by now.

The thing about buying a brand new motorbike is that occasionally one of them will have a warranty issue that will take up an owner/mechanic's every waking thought because it needs to be fixed - by him, natch - before he stops being a motorbike mechanic.

The thing about medicals is that they take a while to let you know the results.

The thing about having a son who is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine is that even if you relent and buy him - as a little treat - the train he says he really wants, there is always another train that he Just Needs.

The thing about letting the kittie sleep on your bed is that while the purring cuddly part is lovely, the 4am pouncing-practice session is very annoying.

The thing about having long red hair is ...
1. if you moult it is super easy to identify you as the culprit.
2. your future Mother In-(common)-Law will have a fair idea of what you look like before her son has even let on that he has a new girlfriend. Just by washing his socks.
3. the way you find out the kittie has ingested your moulted long red hair is really disgusting.

You spin me right round

I have stuff I could blog (awards to pass on, challenges and memes to name but some) but unfortunately this week I've been having attacks of vertigo and it's made it very hard to think straight because my head keeps spinning around. It feels like my brain does a rotation inside my skull. Slightly nauseating but mostly freaky.

Certainly put a dampener on the romantic St Valentine's Day breakfast planned for Thursday. The doctor calls it benign positional vertigo which means there is nothing sinister behind it, and that the attacks are brought on by positional changes. He thinks most likely a 'blockage' in my balance centre. My ears are fine, so it could be the back of my neck or the bit in between the shoulder blades. This is what I do with any tension apparently. I store it in my back. A couple of years ago this storing-my-tension-in-my-back behaviour caused my whole back to go into a full agonising spasm, virtually paralysed myself with the pain. Now that my lovely chiropractor has got me breathing and self-adjusting so I don't do that any more, the tension has found a new way of making me acknowledge it. Hello, I'm your tension, and I'm going to make you fall over. I can tell you that teaching the kiddies tap class this morning was pretty hard work, lots of positional changes going on there, not to mention actual spins which were no help to the imaginary spins.

* * *

Some very ace bloggers gave me this award. Which made my day three times over and they make my day anyway just by blogging. I have to pass it on to ten other bloggers, which feels like a lot and a little. So I picked these ten blogs: Peppermint Patcher, Two Lime Leaves, House&Baby, Only Books All The Time, My Float, Six Impossible Things, Badger Meets World, Aunty Cookie, Melinda, Aunty Evil, and everyone else on my sidebar is a really really close runner-up and I hated leaving you off, but the rules said I had to. I'm too dizzy to link them properly, sorry. But there you go. I did achieve something.