Monday 17 October 2011

A New Project, Nerves and an Excellent Weekend.

After many months of meaning to, but never quite getting around to it, I finally attempted a sewing project, in an attempt to break the stranglehold baking has on the therapeutic fun-things-to-do-that-double-as-gifts-for-people space in my life. Rochelle had mentioned an apron she had seen on her adventures in Australia and seeing as it was her birthday, I figured it was a good excuse to give it a try. I am most definitely hideously out of practice, and the finished product was nowhere near as polished as I would have liked it to be, but I definitely had fun making it, and I was confident enough to mess with the pattern a bit and to draw my own designs to appliqué on. 

All in all, I'd class the experiment a success, enough of one that I'm contemplating investing in a sewing machine of my own, so that I can play about more, as a large amount of my frustrations came from not knowing the machine I was sewing with, something that would be fairly quickly remedied, I imagine.

I did, however, completely forget to take any photos, at all, of the finished product, despite promising Izy that I would, given that she's been encouraging me to do this for ages. Oops.

In other news, I have a job interview on Wednesday. NERVOUS. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but it's been delayed, which is rather handy, because I have a horrid head cold and  can now stay at home in bed tomorrow and wallow. It's stupid to be nervous, because I know that I would be good at the job and I know that I generally present well in interviews, but still, I cannot help it.

Despite the aforementioned sickness, I had a most excellent weekend. Saturday was a general day-of-pottering about and then catching up with Rob and Rochelle in the evening (including eating delicious bento box goodness, zomg). Sunday was all about MOTAT. We discovered that MOTAT had a tea exhibition on about the history of tea in New Zealand and that they also served high tea on the third Sunday of the month so we decided it would be worth a day exploring around. High tea combined with cool old technology? Hell yes! A good excuse to be comically overdressed and get to play with cool stuff. Aside from a very brief visit there last year, I hadn't been to MOTAT in years, and neither had any of the other 8 people in our group. 

It turned out to be a fantastic day's expedition. We got to play with remote controlled tanks. We saw steam engines and vintage cars and old aeroplanes and miniature railways. They had the printing presses running so we got to see how they worked, too. We saw tanks. We saw a working forge in the Victorian village. We had a tea etiquette lesson from a fabulous old lady in a green velvet dress, lace bonnet and satin gloves, who took a shine to us and broke the rules so that we could have high tea in the vintage tea room. We had a tram ride (and didn't pay $10 for the privilege, unlike the Wynyard Quarter). At the end of the day, when we had to leave, we all felt like we could have spent several more hours exploring. It's definitely worth going, especially on a day when they have lots of the extras, like the tanks and trains, running. $14 well spent. I shall be going back for another visit, to see the things I missed, soon.


Saturday 8 October 2011

A recap and a Happy List.

It's been an odd jumble of a fortnight and my brain has been a bit fuzzy with it all so, foolishly, I haven't bothered to write about it. A mistake, it seems. Not that anything particularly grand has happened, but getting it out of my head seems to help!

I'm conscious of the fact that things have seemed rather negative, of late, which isn't really a fair representation. Things, as a whole, aren't going too badly, right at this moment. And they could always be worse. On top of that, it's really in my hands to make it better. I can't control some of the things, but I can take steps to make each week better than the last one, fixing the little things, giving myself something to look forward to, and hopefully that amounts to something.

So, the status quo. 

Home: Mum's partner is home from surgery and recovering, hopefully to start the next bout of chemo in the next week or two. The battle continues, but it looks like the surgery was relatively successful, a small victory!
Work: Application is in, and pre-interview task completed for a new position (with the same company). Nervously awaiting interview. Eep. In the mean time, I have a mountain of work to do on a mini-project that I've wanted to complete since I started there and finally have the opportunity to do. So, despite the many frustrations there, it's actually pretty cool. Progress!
Health: An unfortunate return of the pain in the last two weeks (boo, hiss) but I sort of expected it as I'd been more adventurous with food. Back to being a bit more cautious and giving my Doctor a colossal kick up the backside when I go to see him again in a couple of weeks.

in general, not a bad place to be starting from, definite progress on where things were a few months back, at least. And I'm not feeling too stressed out by it all. Hooray.

But the last 2 weeks have also had lots of little cool moments, and I have lots of stuff to look forward to. Izy recently made a worry list, to get her worries out, I think sometimes I need to be reminded of my happy stuff. So, a happy list, from the last 2 weeks:

+Random lunchtime expedition to Revel with Jonelle
+Spontaneously booked Wellington trip to visit Jackson
+Unplanned drink and dinner with Rochelle
+Craft market wanderings with lovely ladies
+Dinner with Annette, Andrea and Rochelle, followed by tea afterwards
+Cute pictures of small furry animals sent regularly to me by two lovely friends
+Long morning chats with Izy about Czech adventures
+Long chats with Mum at the Hospital about random funny stuff from childhood
+Morning cups of tea with Jonelle
+Dumplings with Rob and Rochelle, and then mint chocolate
+Dumplings with Mum (yes, that's right, TWO lots of dumplings)
+Lovely random messages from Bee and the midgets
+Friday evening chats with Alex at Red before the crowds arrive
+Being brought a cup of tea and croissant in bed this morning
+Plotting MOTAT high tea
+Plotting kidnap missions (I'm not crazy, promise)
+Doing a good deed for the day by walking a lost sportsball tourist to the place he was looking for (OK, OK, he was French, and cute).
+Pretty flowers on my desk
+A lovely pseudo-team at work
+Kitty smooshes when I get home from work, every day.
+NEW DRESSES arriving, ZOMG they're so pretty
+Cute necklaces arriving, A dinosaur AND a grizzly bear AND a plane. YAY.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head. I know there was probably heaps more. I have wonderful, lovely friends, who make me smile and laugh so much. Sometimes it's too easy to forget the little happy moments with the crap that's going on, but I'm definitely making a concerted effort to focus on the good stuff.