Flickr

Sorry for the slack posting, my dears - it would appear that I've been two-timing my blog with Flickr. Oh, new and innovative ways to lure me to the computer ;-)

I'm going to attempt to juggle the two. Along with chasing after Baboushka - even though she hasn't yet mastered crawling, she gets around quite well. The other day I left the room and returned, only to discover that she'd manoeuvred herself backwards and under the sofa. Bad mummy.

She's also taken to making her way over to the bookcase and taking books out, and we had a bit of carnage yesterday. She ripped her first page out (a milestone?) of 'The Monster at the End of This Book', one of my own childhood favourites. Luckily this book managed to avoid the same fate:

So devoid of inspiration I can't even think of a decent post title

Ugh. The old blogger's ennui. It's what I've got. Here's a little picture in the meantime...

Buh-bye, No-Buy

And, just like that, No-Buy July ended.

I don't even have a decent excuse. I didn't even try particularly valiantly to resist the lure of consumerism. Very, very poor of me. I have the sneaking feeling that I am one of those personality types...you know, the one who is drawn to doing something only when they are not actually supposed to be doing it. In which case, a Go-on-a-mad-buying-spree July would have been more apt.

Anyway, Pat and I went shopping today, ostensibly for new work shirts for him (he wasn't bound by No-Buy July's rules), and ended up buying three big bags of tea from T2 and two pairs of shoes and a pair of thongs (in winter. I know) for me. I reasoned that the tea was consumable and thus within the No-Buy July guidelines, but the footwear was new. And amazingly cheap - $34 for two pairs of slip-on boating-type shoes and a pair of Champagne-coloured Havaianas.

Okay, that's my confession. It's pretty sad that I found it so hard! Here are the things I'll take from this little episode:

* keeping one day a week a Buy-Nothing day - not even food. This means I'll have to be organised and make sure we have the things we need in advance, or go without;

* not buying takeaway hot beverages;

* not buying bottled beverages;

* I'm going to attempt to keep a one-thing-in, one-thing-out rule. If I bring something new into the house (food and basic toiletries being the exception), I need to take something out - old clothes to the op-shop, other useful items to charity, etc.

These, I think I can manage...

Sniffles

In other news, I'm a bit poorly today. Pat's been sick with a cold all week and now I've got it. Bouh :-(

Here's an outfit post from about a month ago that I completely forgot to put up:

Hair-brained

Gargh, what a ditz I am. This is why:

Wonderful Eco-Chic-Mummy from one of my favourite blogs, Hippie on the Inside, recently posted about having a Buy Nothing July. As someone who gets as much of a kick out of being frugal as I do buying something nice (how does that even work?!), and who finds the idea of compacting immensely appealing, I thought, "By golly, maybe I could give it a go, too!".

So today, Baboushka and I had lunch in town with my mum and my brother T-Bone, and afterward we all decided to go for a quick peek at our favourite op-shop. I ended up finding some treasures (to be posted once photos are taken), and felt like quite the clever little thrifter. I remembered Buy Nothing July, and thought to myself, "Hey! Lucky I got that in before July!" and had the brainwave to go and book the haircut I've been thinking about having for months. Actually, years - I haven't had a haircut in about 4 years.

I've been feeling so very excited about this haircut - the scalp massage! The smell of hairdressers' products! The flattering lights! The free coffees! The glossy magazines! All so la-dee-dah. Not to mention the nice, hopefully manageable hairstyle at the end of it all. I've been cutting my own hair with rusty kitchen scissors for 4 years (occasionally using a nail-clipper to trim errant chunks <-- this is such a bad idea) and letting a professional take over will be a nice change.

But I've just noticed that today is actually the first of July. I don't know what day I thought it was (knowing the date is not currently one of my strong points), but July was not it.


*sad face*


Maybe I should make this July more of a 'Compacting July', seeing as I've already kind of mangled my attempt?

PS: Or maybe I should actually say no to the haircut? I can't decide what to do with this mop - the 'safe' part is leaning towards something Uma-esque, but the slightly-less-safe Iris is incurably drawn to a Seberg-style crop...

I didn't do this on purpose:

Speaking of subliminal messages, lately Baboushka and I have been leaving the house in matching outfits. Accidentally, of course. And although dressing in this manner makes me feel deeply unsettled, the thought of changing either my or Baboushka's clothes is possibly even more unpleasant.

Anyway, that particular day we were heading out to have lunch with my mum, so I made her take a photo to document me and my eerily small, bald doppelgänger (who was feeling a bit teary, possibly because we were matchy-matchy).

Working Girl

Gargh! I'm going 'back to work' tomorrow. I use the term loosely as I'm not returning in a hardcore sense; no, only for a few hours. That's the beauty of my current job, it's as casual as I want it to be and at the moment that's quite casual.

I'm a wee bit nervous as it's my first class since having a baby, and although things seem to have slotted back in to approximately where they were pre-Babushka, well, getting nude in front of people is just not something I can imagine any new mother enjoying. Plus it's getting colder and some of these older buildings, while all charming and bohemian and artiste-friendly, can get kind of cold.

So tomorrow I will be remember why the hell I do this for a living...or rather, what inspired me to pursue this line of work in the first place:


Ah, La Belle Noiseuse, with the very belle Emmanuelle Beart. I love how she makes the idea of being an artist's model so very sexy in this film, all mussed-up hair and Gallic pout. In reality (well, for me, at least), I think it is an amazingly unsexy occupation.


(Emmanuelle with Jane Birkin, another reason to love this film. And I want this house.)

Nope, tomorrow I will be turning up in my tracksuit pants, feeling a bit silly as I always do as I twist myself into (very bad impressions of) Rodin-esque poses, thawing myself out with cups of hot tea and probably chatting about baby vomit and sleeping patterns. Oh, that reminds me, I need to make sure I take a few of my own CDs - at this particular class I remember we once got stuck listening to Celine Dion, and I'm not really that big on Celine Dion.

Caramelisation

On Friday night, I had a bit of a kitchen accident. I'd put a tin of condensed milk on the stove to boil (to make caramel for these fantabulous brownies), and somehow I ended up ensconced in a long-overdue spot of vacuuming (the urge to clean hits at even sillier times of day than the urge to bake), forgot the tin and ended up with a kitchen covered in caramel. What a flipping mess.

I had a feeling it was coming. I'd heard about it happening and read warnings, but secretly I knew it would happen to me. Many a potentially delicious meal has suffered an incendiary, charred death at my forgetful hands. A few months ago I managed to melt a breastpump after what was initially an attempt to sterilise it after its first use. I cried and vowed to be more vigilant in the future. Ah, such good intentions. I like to think that I'm the kind of person who makes plenty of mistakes, but who only has to make them once. But not when it comes to the unmerciful power of the stove top.


I can only hope that the unpleasantness of having to clean a kitchen covered entirely in big gobs of caramel will stay fresh enough in my mind that I will be more careful with my cooking endeavours...

(Image via Google)