Yes! I am Your Average, Irate Consumer!!

I do not like this new blogger interface. (Except for how you can move the photos around after you've uploaded them!)

[ No, actually, after having tried to move the f*****s around, I also hate that. (I have now deleted them and will try again).]

And what is worse, this is the second time I have had to deal with this in three weeks.  You see, over at facebook, they introduced a new format called the 'timeline'.   
Have these people never heard of the old adage, 'if it ain't broke'?? ????                                                                                                                                              image credit

What piece of puerile market research suggested that your average, linearly thinking Joe needed their facebook profile page to be split up into a weird sideways alignment which forces you to jump, visually, from one side of the screen to another? I mean...my MOTHER reads facebook!!!! We have only just got her ON there! And now these bastards come along and make it completely confusing for her to look at!!!!!!

Grrrrrrrr *steam*..........

And what TOTALLY p****s me off about the whole thing is that you innocently press the button that says 'TRY' the new timeline and voila! You are STUCK with the b******!!!!!!!!!!
I think these d*** brains that sit about on their spotty behinds thinking about new ways to make themselves useful, might like to review the concept of CHOICE!!!!

And to make matters worse I have fallen for the same trick over here at blogger. 'Try the new interface' they spruiked! No mention of the fact that if you don't like it there is no button that says 'revert to previous'!!!!!

I gotta say, you f******* young leopards who hold our social networking life in your hands....you really need to take a good look at yourselves. I mean, I know flexibility is an asset, but come on, how many people really deal with change that well? Let's face it, the whole psyche of the human species cries out for consistency and security. What makes you think that your friggin 'area of expertise' is an exception??????????

Here's a 'heads up': give me more functionality, but leave the original functionality in the same effing place!!!!!!!!!!! I mean...what EXACTLY are you achieving by shuffling it all around?

*le puff le pant le phew*

So now, enough of that. I am afraid I will be struggling with this new interface for some time so please bear with me. To be honest, I don't even like the look of the new blog 'skin'. I'm sure that with the help of my talented husband I could probably edit the size of everything to make the proportions more aesthetic but really, when does he have that time??

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cigar ash is still falling.



 Here is my beautiful new balcony setting, given to me by my beloved Sister on her recent visit to Aus. How pretty is that?









I asked for an independent setting as I did not want to share my morning coffee/bacon and eggs with Himself and his cigars. Indeed, after several years of cleaning up the mess, I have drawn a line across the balcony :-)








So imagine my confusion , and horror, as I espied this blemish on my 'beloved' last Sunday!!

WHAT IS THAT????? I toyed briefly with the idea of mud splatter or caulking compound.

Pah!! On closer inspection, the root of the evil was clear!! An ash burn!!!!!!!!

For those of you who know our balcony, you may wonder how Ash Man and his foul accoutrements got near enough to my beautiful chairs to complete this accursed desecration! I will tell you in six words. 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'.

My dear friend Blondie recently lent me the entire Swedish trilogy, assuring  me that it needed to be seen before we sullied our cinematic sensibilities with Daniel Craig et al. Now, Himself and I have few movie choices in common, his tastes tending toward explosions and gangsters and mine towards tap dancing, humour, romance, cinematography, plot and character development so the idea of a film we could both enjoy was panacea indeed. The scene was set: no children, a hot Adelaide night and the opportunity to enjoy something together.
Unfortunately Himself, being the nicotine addict that he is, cannot go more than 30 minutes without a hit so he retired to the balcony behind the lounge room, from whence he could watch the movie and smoke in peace. Except that it is the section of balcony which contains my chairs and table!

Not happy!!

So, incendiary graffiti aside, what did we think of the movie? Well, we both loved the first one. Indeed, Himself was keen to watch the second straight away! We deferred until the following night and then were royally disappointed by 'The Girl Who Played With fire'. I had loved the second book and  looked forward to the cinematic rendition but was quite disappointed by the lacklustre adaptation. With school on the horizon I retired, disappointed, while Himself went straight to the third film and watched it on his big screen computer until all hours, well away from my precious balcony furniture (just saying)!!!

Surprisingly he loved it and so I am looking forward to the third installment, once my frantic clawing for control over the  beginning of the school year is over.

I am not sure how to repair the offensive cigar burn in my cushion. The sad truth is that if I do nothing, some bastard spider will probably decide to nest in there, so, short of turning the thing over, I am faced with the inevitable cushion reconstruction project.

Excellent :-(

52 Weeks of Me: Close

Now you see, I couldn't decide whether this was meant to be 'close' as in 'get closer' or 'close' as in 'close the door, mother!' So I did both.

Click on the button to join in on a focus on you over at Corey's.

The Dedicated Follower of Fashion.

My husband is a creative man. In the sartorial arena, he leans towards the carefree, unselfconscious attire of the obsessive artist and I often have to remind him that there is a fine line between 'creative' and 'slob' and he is dangerously close to it!!

The thing is he puts on clothes he likes. He puts them on again and again and again. And because he likes them so much, he also mows the lawn whilst wearing them, cleans the pool and puts the chlorine in. Now, I do not know if any of you are familiar with the net effect of chlorine on clothing? It bleaches it. And then it weakens the fibres sufficiently for holes to appear. Himself is totally oblivious to this process.

I have done a lot of mending since we married, in deference to his love of certain garments. I have sewn denim inserts into the backside of a particular pair of jeans. I have gritted my teeth as he appears in public in tattered old T Shirts. On Friday I had had enough. I pulled two holey T shirts and a pair of jeans out of his 'stash' and committed them to the bin. And not just ANY bin...the outside wheelie bin. Up the back of the garden!

So imagine my dawning horror as I came to give him a cuddle last night, as he sat at his computer.

********************************************************************************
Me: Hang on.....(examines the fabric beneath her embrace)....I THREW THIS OUT!!!!!
Him: I KNOW!!!! I had to get it OUT of the BIN!!!!!
Me: You got it out of the bin????????? That is disgusting!
Him: Well you shouldn't have put it in there. It's a perfectly good T shirt for around the house!!!!
Me: aaaaaaaaaauuuuuugggggggghhhhhhhhh

What am I supposed to do with him???????

52 Weeks Of Me: Morning

Corey over at Living and Loving Every Minute of It is hosting a weekly self portrait challenge (for want of a better word). I haven't done anything like this since Megan and Melody did 'Team Up Thursdays' which were a lot of fun, but then life got in the way.

Because we are planning a facebook ration in our house as term commences, I feel a need to get my blog 'back on' and, although The Honourable Husband assures me that blogs are being abandoned left, right and centre by the chroniclers of daily trivia and being reclaimed by the real bloggers, the writers, I choose to use a photo challenge to kick off my blog revival. What that says about me and my credentials as a blogger, 'I neither kno nor care' as Nigel Molesworth would say.

The challenge asks you to take photographs of 'yourself' with a different weekly theme or prompt. How I feel about watching myself age further week by week I am not entirely sure, but Corey says that your family will appreciate these photos of you in 'years to come'. With thoughts of 'The Iron Lady' in my head, I assume she means when we're dead. Or too old to be recognisable as ourselves. A difficult thought.

So this week, the prompt is "Morning".

Saturday mornings for me usually bring a welcome relief from the interminable treadmill of 6am school 'get ups'. However, since I am still on holiday I have been fairly relaxed in the mornings of late anyway. The sun is mild at 8.30am and the balcony beckons.


My lines are my own. I have earned them. And as the lemon light of a Saturday morning breaks over the roof of our house, I claim them!

Good Morning Adelaide.

Not So Crafty Tuesday: The Button Disaster

I tend to think of Crafty Tuesday as a place to showcase sewing but as Carrie has shown us recently, it is also a place to share all manner of creative activities, or in my case, solutions to creative disasters.

When I was a gal, I remember being able to buy self-covering buttons (would that they could have covered themselves!!) the pack for which included a shank, a small metal cup and two rubbery things...one for tucking the fabric into and one for pushing the button together. Look! This lady still has a kit!!

Anyway, when the BA asked me to buy her a dress for Christmas, which was missing one of its fabric covered buttons (half price dress due to missing button), I thought that I could easily buy a button kit and find some suitable material to replace the missing item.

WRONG

The button kit I eventually found required me to cut out a miniscule circle of material, run a line of running stitch around the circumference of the thing (oh for the eyes of my youth...or better glasses), gather the fabric and slip a washer over the gathered mess before jamming the washer down into the button to finish it off.


Hah!

After three goes on one type of fabric,


a change of fabric and two more attempts,


I decided on this.


(*mutter mutter bloody self covering buttons indeed mutter mutter expletive*)

For more inspirational Crafty Stuff, click over to Barely Controlled Chaos for Crafty Tuesday.

A Sailing We Shall Go

This is Cronulla Beach NSW. Don't let anyone ever tell you that Queensland is the only place to be in Australia for beaches!!

Here's the view from my balcony.



Maybe it wasn't the top floor, but it was perfect as far as I was concerned.

For one thing, it did not contain smelly boys!!!!

The boys in question, No2 Son (aged 23) and Small Boy (aged 13) were ensconced at a seedy Motor Inn 10 minutes down the road. They had arrived on December 27th, after a massive 1427km drive, for seven days of sailing in the NS14 Nationals. Now, only two of them were sailing so for Small Boy, the following four days consisted of a fair bit of this:

In the mornings, 60 boats which had been secured at the Sailing Club overnight:

departed from the inlet for the open sea, leaving a scene like this:


Very pretty but pretty boring for a 13 year old on his own. Fortunately, one of the Sailing Widows back at the Club lined him up with a few other Sailing Orphans and they amused themselves by jumping off the jetty and undertaking any number of other unsafe activities usually undertaken by pre-teen boys whilst in a group. I try not to think about it.

Seriously though, they weren't allowed to stray from the environs of the Sailing Club so they could not really take advantage of this:

which was just as well as far as I am concerned. I mean, when did you know young boys to actually 'swim between the flags'????

I arrived on New Year's Day after a stressful New Year's Eve with the Baby Angel (who is about to be renamed the Baby Succubus!!!!!! >:-(...) who required me to pick her up from a party at around 1am. On arrival at the party I discovered that she had moved parties and a little bit more driving located her at a Toga Party no less!!!! Interesting as she did not have a toga!!! She was less than grateful for being collected at 1.45am and even less grateful for being conveyed to the airport for a 9.30am flight the following morning. By the time we reached Sydney we were not speaking and after some fairly harsh words and tears from both of us, she departed for her flight to meet up with her Dad whilst Himself collected me from the airport.

I was in need of a major chillout.

Here I am looking a lot more relaxed than I was; although the first day in Cronulla actually went very well.

We started with breakfast on the Mall


where I commenced my New Year's diet by having fruit salad with yoghurt and muesli.


After a hard day's shopping with Small Boy (who is very into clothes at the moment!) we walked around the point to see what we could see of the race. This was about it.


Unfortunately, the boats race quite a way out to sea. We could see them through the binoculars, but even then we couldn't read the sail numbers to know who was winning. There's one lime green boat and one yellow boat but other than that, they all look pretty similar from a distance.

On this day, the wind was blowing at over 20 knots and about 12 of the 60 entrants withdrew from the race or were forced to withdraw due to damage. This is not lazy 'messing about in boats' you know! If you haven't already seen it, take a look at this video shot by Himself last year in a mere 15 knots of wind! The other thing the boats have to contend with sailing here, is the ocean swell. On one day Himself told me that the swell was so big that when you dropped into a trough, you lost the wind!! That means the waves were over 4m high!!

My sailors were pretty much the worse for wear after their previous four days of sailing. Both were sporting open wounds on ankles and knees and No 2 Son had sprained a tendon in his wrist so he was wearing a wrist splint out there. Nevertheless, they were overjoyed with the performance of their new boat (I call it 'Retaining Wall') which saw them achieve some of their highest ever finishes in this kind of competition. I think their best result was 17th, which, in the calibre of sailors competing, was VERY good indeed.

On the second to last day they were in 24th position overall and gunning for a top 20 slot. They were up early, tuning the boat to perfection; adjusting the tension on the side stays, the rake of the mast and the angle of the dangle (well I DON'T KNOW what angles they adjust!!!). They were pumped.

Small Boy and I decided to head into Sydney proper on the train to see The Rocks, the Opera House and the Bridge. It was a one hour train journey and we left it a bit late to depart as Small Boy was, once more, agonising over which T shirts to buy with his Christmas money. We ended up finding a shop which enabled you to choose a colour and style of shirt and then a transfer to go on the front. not being a great decision maker, it took Small Boy over 40 minutes to choose his colours, styles and designs. Here's one of his choices:


the other one is here:


although do not ask me WHAT he is doing in this photo :-D!!

We made it into Sydney eventually but didn't have much time to do more than have lunch and play around with a bit of parkour on an outdoor sculpture.


(The BA and I had visited this sculpture once before. It's a wonderful place to wander and wonder about who lived here in the past).

On the train back to Cronulla we spoke to Himself to see how the final day's racing had gone.
Disaster!
It transpired that there had been a collision before the start, involving three boats. One hit another and the second, turning sharply to try and avoid the first collision, ploughed straight into the side of Retaining Wall. The side stay snapped and the release of pressure was so great that it bent the mast and snapped it off at the base! The whole rig crashed down over the side of the boat and proceeded to be dragged under the hull, the broken side stays gouging away at the deck and crunching the sails underneath like a Christmas cracker.

Fortunately, after a protest where the first boat was found negligent, a new mast will be provided by insurance.
UN-fortunately, my dear husband has decided he will ALSO get the old mast repaired so that he 'has a spare'...aaaaaauuuuuuuugh!!!!!! More money!!!!!

After one more day basking in the luxuries of a hotel over looking the sea (we moved the boys up for the last day too. It turned out the seedy motel was only $20.00 a night cheaper so we gave them a treat. A separate room of course!! No smelly old sneakers for me thank you!!) we headed back to Adelaide.

After more than 15 hours on roads like this,

we made it back home, boat still in tow and most of us tired but happy.

Next year the competition is in Tasmania. I don't think I'll be up for that one.

The Nips Are Getting Bigger*

2005

2012




*With apologies to 'Mental as Anything'