The end of the long weekend

This is what it looked like when I went to leave the house this morning. I waited until it stopped.


I'm not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. I've had a really good break, and I'm quite a lot more relaxed than I was last week, but another week or so off would be nice. Oh well, just got to make the most of what I've got.

I really enjoyed my day out at the galleries on Sunday. I slept in and bummed around the house for most of the morning and got to the Gallery of Modern Art in time to have lunch and watch the hula-hoop display in front of the GoMA RiverCafe.
The very lithe Miss Ra-Ra Sparkle (I kid you not), sharing her hula hoop prowess.
The Warhol exhibit was great, I loved the fact that it included examples of his "time capsules", and Interview magazines and film works as well as the screen-prints, paintings and drawings.


My forearm's 15 minutes of fame. Surely my pass-out stamp can be considered Pop Art?

I wasn't tremendously blown away by anything else at the GoMA, but I did quite like a series of photographs of a Chinese artist sitting waist deep in a river, stamping the water with a traditional wooden stamp of the symbol for water.

In a move quite derivative of the Yarn Harlot, here is the Eyelet Cardi visiting the inflatable pink poodle in front of the State Library.


Speaking of the cardi, I got up to finishing the eyelet rows by Saturday night but noticed a mistake and thought I could drop a couple of stitches back to the error, fix the mistake and redo the stitches back up to the current row.

I'm good, but I'm not that good.

I had to rip back all the eyelet rows, fix the error and do it all over again. I'm still happy with what I've been able to get done this weekend though, and this morning it looked like this.


I think it fits - but it does need to be just a leetle bit longer!


I had a phonecall from the intrepid traveller this evening. He's having a great time in Niseko - apparently the weather has been really good from his point of view. Not too much new snow, but sun and blue sky today. He said that he quite liked just being able to cruise around and he's not desperate for bucketloads of snow. He's got some good video too, apparently, so I'm looking forward to seeing his little ski movie.

A whole lot more than I'm looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.

A Lady of Leisure

The Man left for Niseko yesterday. I went with him to the airport, jammed into the back of the taxi with his box of skis resting across my lap, and kissed him goodbye at the "Passengers only beyond this point" sign. Jal offerred a nice little tool that allowed me to look at a little image of a plane on a map representing the last position report of his flight for his international flight so I was able to check that a couple of times during the day. His flights were all more or less on time so I hope he was actually on them. If all went well he would have arrived at his accommodation at 12.30am Niseko time (1.30am here in Brissy) and would have bunked in for not much sleep before brekky, finding his way around and getting to his lesson at 10am.


So, with The Boy still in Adelaide with Lalla, Lisa, Andrew, Holly-doggy and the chickens (he told me on the phone the other day that "the chookies lay their eggs every day"), I am a lady of leisure this weekend. To enhance the effect, I've taken Tuesday off from work, and due to data network changes at work this weekend, I'm not even able to log in from home to do any work. Gee. Looks like I will be forced to relax. Bummer, huh?



Last night I curled up on the lounge with my knitting and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and worked on my Chicknits Eyelet Cardi, which I started on Thursday night.

Here's the little nook I set up for myself


I'm very happy with the Eyelet Cardi so far. I've got heaps done on it, which is mostly due to knitting in a taxi, knitting while waiting (aaages) for the Airtrain back to the city, and a whole evening knitting in front of a movie last night. It's in Jo Sharp DK wool in Oak, which I got on eBay last year for $34. I didn't know what I was going to knit with only 10 balls, but this should just scrape in!


And no, I haven't finished PeaceBaby, but I'm up to the i-cord edging around the neckline. I decided to knit it on rather than knit it and sew on later, and it's going quite well. Well, except for the fact that I started the wrong way and I have to pull it all out and start again, but I'm getting the hang of it.

So I'm about to head off to start the weekend. The plan?
Today: Head into the city to do some shopping, then back to Paddington to get my haircut, lunch in Paddington and then probably home to do some washing and knitting. This evening I'm going to see Sweeney Todd with a friend.
Tomorrow: Visit the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Gallery of Modern Art
Monday: don't know yet, I'll think of something.
Tuesday: Doctor's appointment, going to Medicare to cash in the millions of Doctor's receipts I've collcted over the last year. Maybe some more shopping with all my hard-won Medicare refund money.
Wednesday: Back to work but let's not think about that yet!

ZZzzzzzz

I'm tired. Utterly mind-and-body-drained, curl-up-under-the-doona-wake-me-when-it's-February tired. Normally I'd get through a day like today with a can of V and a big cup of coffee but I'm avoiding caffeine as its been exacerbating some symptoms that I think are side effects of the corticosteroids, so I'm on my own.

It might help to explain my mindset if I tell you that I was inordinately happy to find that variety pack of cereal boxes in my desk drawer must have had TWO boxes of coco pops so there was one left for me in addition to the one I'd taken home for The Boy last week.

Sugar just may be my saviour.

Only one more sleep until The Boy goes to Lalla's. He's very excited.

I took some photos of my recent knitting and when I loaded the photos onto my laptop I noticed that I'd never uploaded the photos from the construction of The Boy's cubby on the 30th of December. Lalla and Poppy came down from Caloundra with the car and the ute, completely loaded up with cubby bits and proceeded with lots of help from David, and The Man and a little bit of help from me, to construct most of a gorgeous cubby. Rain on the 31st put the kybosh on finishing it, but the construction team (minus The Man and I) resumed work on the 2nd of January and got all but the back wall done.

So it went from this:

To this:


To this:
So far, The Boy has stubbornly refused to move out of the house into the cubby, but we can only hope. I know that it doesn't have a back wall yet, but that's got to be good for ventilation, right?
The eagle-eyed among you may have realised that the photos show not only the construction of a cubby, but the disappearance of a pair of cocos palms. The nice Energex men came during the week and removed them as they were too close to power lines. We are happy about this. I love trees, but these were ugly and dangerous - the huge heavy fronds would die and hang around on the trunks for ages resisting all efforts to pull them down until they would suddenly decide to fall without warning, always in danger of pulling power lines down with them, and sometimes in danger of falling on someone's head.
But it does look a little bit bare there now.

My friend the NullPointerException

Ahh. The life of a partly competent java programmer. I spent way too much of today struggling with a NullPointerException in some code I'm working on. Of course I started by trying to fix what seemed to be the sensible cause of the error, but of course it turned out to be the totally obvious, I was stupid to even think it would ever work part of the code that was causing the error! Oh well, it's fixed now.

Time to move on to something more exciting. KNITTING! I'm knitting a lot for N and P's unborn little boy - a couple of pairs of Cargo pants, Anny Purl's Peace Baby jumper and a pair of booties are at various stages of not being completed. Photos later, I promise. I haven't taken any yet. Oh, and I also made a "wine sock" from Yarn Magazine, issue 1, for Lisa's birthday.

The Man and I passed one of the greatest milestones a relationship can confront on the weekend. Assembling self-assembly furniture without dismembering each other. It was only a little bookcase from Officeworks but I see it as a good omen. :)

The Man and The Boy are counting down the days until their respective holidays. The Man is going to Lalla's this Sunday and will be going with her to Adelaide for Lisa's birthday. He can't wait and keeps trying to insist that there are less sleeps than there actually are, and then getting angry when we correct him. He seems to think that if he can just insist hard enough, he'll really succeed in making there be less days between now and Sunday than there actually are.

In truth, I think The Man would like to do the same thing (reduce the number of days) until he goes to Japan on the 25th. He did a test pack of his cases on the weekend to see how much weight he had. He's quite restricted on his internal flight from Tokyo to Sapporo, and with his skis taking up 11kg, he needs to make sure he can fit in some clothing! He's on the web every evening checking out the weather and ski conditions in Niseko.... I hope it's good for him over there when he gets there.

Just so I wasn't left out, I applied for a day off today. Just one, but I've tacked it onto a long weekend so I get 4 days off while the boys are away. I'm going to go to the movies to see Sweeney Todd, get a haircut and maybe a massage or a facial. I've just found out that I'm getting a sizable tax refund and a nice little pay rise so I think I can splurge a tiny little bit!