Moment to Moment

Music

I never realised before how much Interpol sound like Xiu Xiu on I Luv the Valley Oh!.

I am also currently listening to Josh Pyke's new album, which is good if a bit singer-songwriterish-familiar, and also some weird weird stuff by a band called Of Montreal. Which escapes categorisation by dint of being so odd.

And then there's new Kings of Leon song, On Call, which I seem to have a crush on, because it makes me quite schoolgirl giggly. The dudes in the band however? Need to wear looser jeans and get haircuts or something, which just reveals how old I am. And the video clip is just rotten. Almost as bad as Eskimo Joe's Black Fingernails Red Wine video, though the song is much much better. Much much. Much.

Other albums I want to buy but don't have the money to right now: the entire Calexico back catalogue, Joanna Newsom's Ys, 9 by Damien Rice, I am not afraid of you and I will kick your ass by Yo La Tengo, Neon Bible by Arcade Fire (I totally liked them before they were hip), Jenny Wilson's album, and... I'm still debating whether or not to buy the new Modest Mouse CD. I think that's it.

So what are you listening to right now? Anything spectacularly ground-shakingly good?

Things I have learned somewhat recently, a short list

Green tea should be brewed for no more than 3 minutes or it tastes like something you'd give to someone to cure agues, fevers and divers ailments.

Shorthand is hard.

Kimchi gives me a funny tummy.

People think it's funny to joke about unravelling your knitting.

People don't think it's funny to be stabbed in the neck with a knitting needle.

That I have trouble with the word 'no', which is odd, because it's a very short and simple word.

Footless tights aren't really that bad and in fact I have purchased a pair and I wear it as part of my special ninja outfit. (So far only two people in the world know I call it the ninja outfit and now you do too. Don't you feel special?)

Covering your cream couch in a throw rug will in fact keep it much cleaner and will also reduce the amount of doghair that adheres to it, and I am a bit dumb for not thinking of it before.

Dog(gone)

So the girl turned out to be some sort of houdini, because last night she somehow escaped from our backyard. I'd put her outside because she and Miss J thought it might be fun to play all sorts of games while I tried to sleep, and I left Miss J in the house because I didn't want them chasing each other round the back yard and yipping frantically, as they did for several hours yesterday evening.

This morning when I got up she was gone. Somehow, she escaped from a yard with 6-ft high walls. How? I don't know. I thought she might have tunnelled her way to freedom and I spent all day at work fretting about how Miss J might also wander out of the yard, but I came home and Jasperella the uberhund greeted me with her usual whole-body enthusiasm.

Anyway, I hope the girl is alright and she gets back to her family soon.

Some people collect cats, I rescue dogs

So this was hanging around the front of my house when I got home tonight, sans collar and identification. I couldn't leave her out on the street like that to get hit by a car so I bought her inside.

So now she and Miss J are hanging out the back, racing around the yard hysterically and sniffing each other bums and generally being doggy best mates, as though they'd known each other for a million years.

She knows how to sit and stay too, she's clean and well-fed, and friendly, so someone out there has most probably lost a beloved pet.

I've rung up the ranger but it's after hours so she'll be staying with us tonight.

In the meantime, I think I'll call her Girl. Just so's I don't get attached or anything.

Oh and while I'm not doing that work...

Enormous congratulations to Cristy and Paul on the arrival of wee Lily! Isn't she just the cutest?

15 feet of pure white snow

Actually, that should be 15 feet of pure white work. Am digging my way out but have sent for a rescue St Bernard with one of those tanks of whiskey or sherry or whatever it is around its neck. Hope he's here soon or we'll have to start eating our own feet. Or perhaps each other's just for some variety.

Masstige

For some reason my work colleague H. and I decided to go to the House of Tarjay to check out the 'exclusive' Stella McCartney range that went in store today. So we went down to the one in the Hay St Mall in Perth at 12:30 or so, with gladness in our hearts for the opportunity to spend money neither of us had on stuff neither of us needed.

Observations: it was pretty crowded when we got there and then got more crowded. There weren't many sizes left, well, all the 10s were gone anyway, and I didn't see many 8s. We did not witness any fist fights, abusive exhanges or women trading items for their children, tho I did have to queue for about three minutes for a change room.

I tried on a few items in my usual size, 12, and most of them were utterly huge. Like the grey be-frilled and ruched trenchcoat, which was a medium, and made me look like I'd just rolled off the nearest park bench and headed down to the mall for a spot of begging before rifling through a bin to find breakfast and possibly half a cigarette.

Do not try this look at home. Can result in wearer being offered money by passers-by.

Other items which were also unsuccessful were the wool-cashmere jacket with the little ruching along the mid-chest region -- also far too big in a 12 and the sleeves were weird, as though the lining wasn't sewn in properly. The t-shirts were also similarly enormous and baggy and fairly unflattering on.

I also tried on a pair of blackish skinny jeans which were suited me as much as rolling in tar would have. But I should have known better, as skinny jeans are a creation of the devil, and not in a nice decadent way. No, in an evil evil suffering screams as one burns in the eternal fires of Hades evil.

So I purchased nothing, which is good, as I already have some clothes at lay-buy at Country Road and Morrison. (Look, I went a bit mad with the whole 'have job and money thing'. I'm over it now. And BTW that's Morrison the WA label, not Morrissey the annoying Sydney dude who also makes the odd nice frock. I didn't go that mad.)

Beyond the clothes, I have mixed feelings about the whole idea of 'designer target'.

Masstige, as it's called, is the marketing of 'prestige' items to the masses. Since prestige and exclusivity are impossible to get in abundance and cheapness, I suppose it's all about the double-blind of pretending things are more exclusive than they really are. Selling the sizzle of exclusivity with the steak of ordinariness.

On the one hand, it's nice that you can buy a reasonably trendy top from Target that won't cost you the earth. I have quite a few items of clothing from that store and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Well, mostly.

But on the other, isn't it all all part of this middle class aspirational affluenza, where we're being such busy little consumers of mass-market luxury that we don't take notice of what's around us? That we all feel like we're deprived because we can't afford to buy a real Stella McCartney coat? And so we buy the Target version for a fraction of the price and then we feel better about ourselves? Or do we?

Of course, if you're truly fashion-forward I'm sure you wouldn't be caught dead in anything from Target, regardless of whether or not the Stella imprimatur was upon it. But then, I wouldn't know, because I'm not fashion-forward at all. I'm more fashion-follower, and I'd probably be quite happy wearing the same thing I wore in 1996 only everyone would laff.

In other fashion related business, I saw this at Witchery (another place I buy work clothes from):

Now isn't that nice? Of course what I want to do is knit one exactly like it very similar to that, except maybe without those dinky stupid pockets which would stretch and sag if you tried to put anything heavier than a 10c coin in them.

So far the closest I've come is this one:

Which isn't very similar at all, but it's kinda close enough. I think I'd knit it in a lovely greyish colour out of Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran. Or a much much cheaper substitute, depending on whether or not I was using my kidneys that week. Also sans waist tie thingy and maybe with slightly longer sleeves.

Anyway, if any of youse see a knitting pattern like that let me know. Or mock me for liking nanna clothes. Either's good.

Cyclone update (no further distraction required)*

Jacob has fizzled out, much to the collective relief of the state of WA.

And I can now return to my regularly scheduled program, which consists of worrying about JW being in a car crash or rockologist drilling equipment explosion. Oh and skin cancer. Worrying about JW getting skin cancer has kept me up at nights. You think I jest but oh, I do not.

*Except for like the normal distraction one needs to keep from going totally batty when one** spends too much time considering things like global warming, peak oil, chances of a flu pandemic/asteroid crash/nuclear war, and so on.

** And by one, I mean me. It's so GREAT being me sometimes I can't even tell you.

Cyclone Distractions #1

Happy Buffiversary for, um, Friday!

This makes me remember watching the very first episode on the WB when I lived in Canada during my student exhange year over there. I was living with some people I didn't like very much and I used to spend all of my time in my room in a sulk.

God, what a joy I must have been.

But in my defense, the people I lived with -- my 'host' family as they're called in the exchange student bizz -- were borderline psychopaths who gave me a 5pm curfew (I was 18), would go through my things, and forbade me from going out with any of my male friends.

They were convinced that should they let me out of their sights I would go on a drunken orgiastic bender, I think, even though I didn't actually drink. Yes, I was an 18-year-old non-drinker. Seriously, if there was anyone less likely to do that sort of thing it would be me -- but I'm also very stubborn, and so I didn't tell them that when I broke my curfew on a Friday night I was actually at the public library. Reading a book. Which saw me grounded and put on exhange student probation.

It was a very odd situation.

Crazy family also had an enormous, and real, moosehead sitting over the TV in the living room, which so profoundly creeped me out that I couldn't be in the same room as it.

Anyway, I was miserably homesick and lonely and going through every awkward spasm of adolescent self-consciousness you can imagine, in another country too, and I credit Buffy with giving me a tiny weekly way to escape, a little glimmer of excitement and joy in what was a pretty distressing period of my life.

Yeah, that's pretty sad, I admit -- I got to go overseas and all I could do was think about how miserable I was and how I really wanted to be back home with my family and friends.

I was that kind of a kid. (If I were ten years younger I'd be sitting in my room listening to My Chemical Romance, painting my nails black to match my hair and thinking bitter thoughts about how few friends I have on MySpace.)

Thankfully the misery only lasted until I moved in with a new host family who were lovely and didn't read my letters from home and check my breath when I got home of an evening to make sure I hadn't been drinking. (Yes really.)

And after that little trip down memory lane, I bring you:

Cyclone watch

Jacob's back down to a category two after intensifying yesterday to a category three, so that's good. (Well, there's still the possibility it'll cross the coast with winds as high as 130km an hour, which ain't so hot.)

It's due to reach the coast early tomorrow morning I think. There's a warning for much of the Pilbara coast.

JW continues to be bored, or so his latest report says. Let's hope it stays that way.

White knuckle week

When George struck Port Hedland on Thursday night, I wasn't too worried about JW.

He's in Karratha at the moment for work -- the two towns are about 240km apart, in case you were wondering -- and he's worked up there quite a bit over the past two years. I knew the cyclone was coming, but I was pretty confident that it would all blow over and be done with. Cyclones hit that part of the world all the time, and they have preparations in place, and it would all be good.

But after the tragic deaths of at least two people, one at a place where JW worked about a year ago, I was wrong.

JW was perfectly fine, of course, and he and his workmate spent Thursday night and yesterday in their motel room, eating nuts from the bar-fridge and waiting for the whole thing to be over so they could go and get some proper food.

They even had in-house movies and they watched The Departed, Blood Diamond and The Prestige, or so he reported to me last night. From a flash dinner put on by the company. So you know, life goes on in Karratha.

But now cyclone Jacob's on the way to the same part of the world. Intensifying as it comes to a category four, like George.

JW's company won't be flying him back -- there's no time, no flights, and chances are he'll just spend another few boring days twiddling his thumbs in his motel room and then he;ll get back to work. Chances are.

Rationally, I'm sure it's all going to be okay. But I'm a worrier, you know, so it's not like I'm able to put aside my nagging fears.

Christ, I worry about quotidian things like having enough milk for my coffee -- another cyclone? Of course I'm worried.

And not just about JW, but also about the people up there. I desperately hope there'll be no more fatalities, and that Jacob will just cause a bit of rain and wind and it'll be over soon.

Fingers crossed.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to bookmark the bureau of meteorology cyclone watch page so I can refresh it every 20 minutes.

Latest satellite image of cyclones Jacob and George.