Embarrassing

There is a reason that I am the one that normally has the camera and is taking the photos.  Very occasionally I let others take photos of me.  I have just flicked through the photos that girl-child took yesterday and realised that my eyebrows are all wrong, clearly I am long overdue to make a visit to the fur shop (the place of hair removal to normal people).  Apparently having legs that are so hairy you could pass for an ape isn’t enough to make me realise that a trip to the fur shop is well overdue but that is another story.

Mouse Me!

The photo also reminds me of a few other things – one is that I hate photos but am occasionally happy to make a fool of myself for everyone to see even if I did refuse to leave the house looking like a mouse.  Two, perhaps a 6 year old isn’t the best person to do my face painting.  On the up side – having her clean the face paint off my face was a little like a massage!

Honest, it is only a scrap

Here is a meme from over at Chatabox and since Ash isn’t so good at following the rules, I have decided to tag myself and then not tag anyone else also.  Despite not following the rules, I will copy the badge.

<—  See, isn’t it pretty.

The rules for this award are to tell your readers 10 things about you that are true, that they might not know. Then you have to tag 10 other bloggers to do the same. Apart from the tagging of other people, I am ready to go…

As the majority (of the few) people who read this don’t know me in real life, pretty much anything I say will be a new fact.  So, here are some random or weird facts about me…

1.  Thanks to Anna and Mari, I like bi-phasic sleeping (even if they don’t).  I like to nanna-nap whenever possible, although unlike most nanna’s, I prefer to have my nap at around 7 or so at night.  I set my phone alarm for an hour after I lay down and drift off to sleep.  By having my nanna-nap, I have more time to get things done as I can stay up later without getting grumpy or too annoying.  When I nanna-nap, I feel fantastic after 4 1/2 to 6 hours sleep a night, without a nanna-nap I need 7 1/2 or 9 hours (8 hours wrecks me).  If only I had time to actually have a nap.

2.  I am a morning person.  I actually like getting up early in the morning.  I love having a few minutes to myself in peace and quiet to do nothing or to plan my day.  Mornings are even more enjoyable when I have been nanna-napping and don’t need to sleep as much.  

3.  I moved out of home when I was 17 to go to college, it was the first time I moved house.  In the following 10 years I moved 13 times, over 3 countries.  (Some were only mini-moves to allow for renovation repairs)

4.  I am gluten and lactose intolerant and addicted to chocolate.  Yes I DO know that chocolate contains lactose, but there is only so much I can not eat.  For some chocolate I am willing to tolerate the consequences.

5.  I have the attention span of a doorknob.  I get bored very easily and my mind wanders.  I often find it difficult to do nothing.

6.  I am jealous of friends who can live in a permanent mess.  I find it liberating to be with friends who are comfortable having stuff/mess/junk everywhere yet are happy having people visit without feeling the need to justify the mess, make excuses or even acknowledge that the house is messy.  I hate having mess around me, I can’t relax knowing that there is mess that needs cleaning, yet I am often too tired or lazy to bother so I end up just being grumpy.

7.  Despite #6, I have boxes of stuff that needs sorting, cleaning and getting rid of, I just can’t bring myself to do it, probably because having to go through it all will make more mess.  Right now it is stacked neatly in piles in cupboards so I can almost imagine that it is clean!  Well all except for my study and that is just too messy to describe.

8.  If I haven’t whined about it over and over yet, I will – I am now working 5 days a week.  I still do school drop off, pick up and after school activities, now I get to go to work every day too.  I haven’t quite worked out the whole domestic aspect of this concept yet.  I see #6 becoming a more regular feature around here and me being grumpy and intolerant.

9.  Now that I am stuck on a cleaning rant on this meme I may as well stick with it for one more point.  I hate vacuuming.  I have an amazing ability to injure myself when I vacuum.  Most often these injuries occur on or around the stairs yet somehow they seem to be the areas that require frequent vacuuming and did I mention that I HATE vacuuming?

10.  I want to be a runner.  I don’t want to run fast, although that would be nice, I merely want to be able to run for more than 3 seconds without complaining.  I also want to be able to run during daylight hours, I hate people seeing me run, even if I haven’t turned beet red at the thought of exerting myself.  

So there you have it, 10 very random facts about me.  Now who should I tag?   Oh that is right, I am following Ash and letting you tag yourself if you want to share some random.

 

I guess since I have referred to them, I should tag them,

1.  Anna at You and Me Baby 

2.  Mari at Slowing Down   

and here are a few more

3.  Chatabox

4.  MiscMum 

5.  Perhaps We Learned Something 

6.  Living in the Gray 

7.  Freckle Face Girl

These are from some of my favourite blogs and are in my ‘must read’ folder.  Like everyone else, I read heaps of blogs, but couldn’t tag everyone.  Feel free to tag yourself.

Pick Ups

A quiet evening at home after a longish day at work and it was finally time to catch up on the blogs that for some reason don’t stick in my reader, despite adding them over and over and over again.  It bugs me that they won’t stay in my reader as there is always something great to read.

After reading about the Kay’s favourite pick-up lines over at her blog and then her suggestion that people leave their favourite pick-up lines in the comment section, it got me thinking about the best pickup line I have ever experienced.  It was too long to mention in a comment section so here I am writing a post about it instead.  

Now I need to set the scene.  I was 17 or almost 18 and had just moved to Melbourne to study.  I was boarding with a family who lived near the college I was attending.  Now the head of the family was a single mother who was dating a man who lived in the country.  He coached and played in the local football team in the town where he lived.  She went to every game to watch him play and often I would go along for the drive and to spend a relaxing afternoon in the country.

Now the day of the fantastic pickup line was one of those days.  The football team were playing at a different ground, a ground that was in the middle of a state forest, surrounded by majestic trees and deliciously fresh aromas of the Aussie bush.  Needless to say the  footy match was uninteresting but area was beautiful.  I was perched on the bonnet of the car with a book in hand enjoying the autumn sunshine, oblivious to the world.  

All of a sudden there was another body leaning up against the car.  I glanced up and saw someone I had never seen before looking at me.  He started talking to me, just general small talk about the weather, nothing exciting.  We chatted for a minute or so with the conversation going something like this…

Him, “Gee isn’t this a very picture-skew area?”

Me, thinking briefly, wondering if I had been wrong in my understanding of language for all of these years eventually asked, “Isn’t it picturesque?” 

Him, “mumble, grumble, gah” before wandering off hanging his head, never to be seen again.

Now whenever I am in a particularly beautiful location I have the urge to comment on how ‘picture-skew’ the location is.  

Reliving Childhood Memories

Many of my childhood memories involve a not-so-lifelike plastic doll.  Nothing big and blow up, merely a collection of almost 12 inch dolls.  I loved my Barbie dolls, in fact I collected Barbies for a quite a while and still have a shelf full of brand new dolls, still in boxes that girl-child is only able to look at, drool over and imagine playing with.  In actual fact it is clear that I still love my Barbies.  

To many she is a totally disproportionate representation of a woman but to me she is a woman who can do anything she chooses.  Yes she is totally misrepresents the true body of a woman but she is so elegant and beautiful, not to mention well dressed.  She may have a short attention span and change careers even more frequently than I have been known to, but she is accomplished in all of her chosen career paths.  Seriously, who else can be a teacher, astronaut, vet and olympian as well as a business woman and socialite with family and friends who clearly love her (and boyfriends with plastic underwear).  

Anyway, I loved and still love Barbie.  I can remember writing Christmas wish lists when all I wanted was a Barbie.  The weeks of anticipation, wondering if I had been good enough for Santa to get me a Barbie, especially when all I wanted was Western Barbie and Dallas her horse.  Apparently I was a really good girl that year because not only was Western Barbie and Dallas there waiting for me under the Christmas tree, but Barbie was there in her 4wd jeep and towing a horse trailer.  I was over the moon – it was the best Christmas present EVER.  (OK, so Loving You Barbie that I received the following year was actually the best Barbie that I ever received but she was also the cause of or at least part of a terrifying series of nightmares but that is another story for another time entirely.  Now that I have moved on from the nightmares I can raise her to the status of my favourite Barbie).

I love Barbies so much that I have shared my love for the plastic doll with girl-child.  (I have also shared my hatred of other similar sized dolls with oversized heads and skanky clothing with her.)  She was given her first Barbie doll when she was 3, the same year that she inherited the huge doll house that dad made for me when I was younger.  I really wanted Barbie to have the same significance for her as she does for me.  She loves her dolls but unfortunately she doesn’t treasure them the same way as I do.  I think that the main reason for this is because she has so many.  In the last clean up of her dolls she had more than 20 Barbies as well as dozens of Kelly dolls (that’s Barbie’s little sister), it is no wonder they aren’t so precious to her.  Now the dolls are so inexpensive that it isn’t uncommon for her to receive half a dozen or so more than one for a birthday.  I have even been guilty of allowing girl-child to give her friends a Barbie for a birthday gift.  I even have vague recollections of giving a Barbie just for the hell of it.  It is no wonder they are losing their significance.  

Now back in my day Barbies were expensive.  You didn’t just get a Barbie doll for the hell of it, only for a birthday or for Christmas.  In fact a Barbie doll was your main present for Christmas.  They were an item wished for and if you were lucky enough to have a Barbie or one of her friends you treasured them and looked after them right up until you were too old and too cool to play with Barbies and then you practiced your hairdressing skills.  Not that I ever cut my Barbie doll’s hair, I only played hairdresser with my sister’s dolls!  I did manage to amass many Barbies over my childhood and I still have them now, they are at my parents house and I love it when girl-child drags them out to play.

So I have lost the point of this post, the part where I shared my love for the disproportionate doll with my daughter.  To cut to the chase, the Forever Barbie Exhibition celebrating 50 years of Barbie beauty is in town so to celebrate a few of us went along to check it out.  

We were there the day after the exhibition opened, arriving just after it opened for the day at 10.  Already there was a queue to get in but fortunately it moved along quickly and we were inside in only a few minutes.  We wandered around looking at all of the dolls.  There were some dolls from my childhood there, as well as many dolls that are still on my wish list.  My favourite part of the exhibition were the dolls that children had dressed and the captions that were written under them.  

Naturally, at the end of the exhibition there was a merchandise area.  You should have seen the crowds with huge shopping bundles.  Now I know that I have just said that Barbies are inexpensive, I wasn’t referring to these dolls, these dolls were kind of expensive.  It wasn’t just the dolls that were expensive the other merchandise was insanely expensive.  Tiny tins of mints for $20, carry bags from $60, after that I pretty much ignored the price tags on everything else there.  I did give in and purchase girl-child and her friend another doll.  I know, another doll but this one was special, girl-child was able to customised it.  They had computers set up where you could choose your own doll from a limited selection and then choose the clothes that she would wear.  After you printed out the picture of your doll and paid for her she was ‘made’ for you to specification.  Once she was made the doll paraded around the catwalk before being boxed up and then delivered.  Girl-child was so excited to make her own doll and then have it made for her, it was definitely worth the insane price tag.  

Milla and her Milla Barbie

 

 

It was a great morning sharing my memories of Barbie with girl-child and her friend.  If this is what the holidays are going to be like I am looking forward to them.

Dr Horrible

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