Rainy Deliciousness
Mama and I went to Greensborough Plaza today in order to leap about at the Millers sale, because Millers sales are awesome. Came away with lots of goodness to wear – new with tags! This Savers girl doesn’t know how to feel about that… anywhoo, as we were paying, the lights flickered and thunder rolled. Then thunder rolled. Once we’d left the store, we noticed all the internal lights that weren’t in stores were off, and through the big skylight we saw heavy rain. Heavy, heavy rain. The storm didn’t last particularly long, but it hit with power, dumping vast amounts of wonderous wet stuff.
We stopped off to see Katie at her bauble stand and she said she could feel water hitting her, but figured she was just being paranoid. Apparently not, quite a lot of the plaza had incoming water issues.
Okay sure, there’s been issues. Someone in Eltham came home to find the contents of their garage, including a double deep freeze, floating down the road. Greensborough Plaza had some MAJOR issues themselves:
As well as multiple stores flooding, they had a cave in of the ceiling near the main street doors. Quite a few shops closed up till the waters were out, and the shops near this cave in were closed pretty much till that’s fixed I think.
In Diamond Creek, the supermarket was dealing with a rising tide of water coming in, and recovering from a power failure which left a few registers out of action. Again, more shops closed.
Pretty wild old day for weather. Came home to find my desk covered in water from an old roof leak, but we’ve only had 1 leak in the whole house, which is a record for us.
I didn’t die!
I went to the US for a couple weeks is all. I did intend to blog from there, but eh. I am lazy. I’ll blog up a few points of the trip later, right now I just want to share with you what I consider the highlight (International Beatles Rock Band Day notwithstanding).
I’ve known Matt for just about exactly 5 years. We met on the forum of a webcomic I won’t link here because I no longer follow it or support it. The forum there, however, gave me some of the best friends a gal could have. Matt and I flirted semi-seriously for a long time, before it became more serious before eventually, and early this year, we both realised we were into this deeper than just silly flirting.
The trip to Chicago was to meet Matt. Oddly, even though we’ve only been official for a short time, it felt like something I’d been waiting to do for a long time.
Short version (minus the mush, I don’t want to be that girl). Matt has asked me to marry him, I have said yes (he’s asked many times, I’ve accepted many times). So there you go, I’m getting married (at some point).
I love my Hedgehog.
I’ve been a semi-okay photographer since falling in love with the process back in high school. But even before I was developing my own film, I was a snapshot junkie. In primary school, my parents gave me a 110 camera – remember those? The film was in a cartridge that snapped into the back of the camera. The quality wasn’t great, and I was happy to upgrade to a 35mm as soon as I could, eventually getting a vintage Ricoch just before I went to the UK in 98. I love my SLR very much, but these days it’s just a pain in the arse to be taking film in to be developed. I still shoot film from time to time, just not as often.
I’m an overshooter anyway. I enjoy digital because you can take 20 shots to make sure you get THE shot with no hardship in deleting the other 19. My newest higher end digital gives me almost 2000 high quality shots on an 8gig card – so I have plenty of room to shoot to my hearts content.
But! I do miss film. And I miss the low-fi results from a non aligned viewfinder. Ages ago I was hunting around for a digital camera that gave the same results as the toy cameras which are currently popular. There wasn’t anything then, but when my photojojo newsletter came in to announce the Zumi, I ordered it right away.
The proper name for the Zumi camera is the Digital Harinezumi, which apparently means Hedgehog. It differs from standard digital cameras in 3 special ways. First difference, there’s no way to line your shot up perfectly. It has a small plastic flip up viewfinder which will give you a general idea of what you might be aiming at. Focus and framing are in the laps of the gods. The second difference is that the LCD screen only shows basic information while you compose your shot (no picture) and gives you a glimpse of the image once you’ve taken it. I’ve turned that off however, bit worried about chewing through my battery. You CAN review your images, delete them etc from the card. I’ve not done that either.
The third difference is that the camera has built in picture imperfections. Colours saturate, whites blow out, lights flare and film grain covers all. Check out these I took today (they’re on Flickr if you want to embiggen them):
Frankly, I love my little camera. I love that it’s tiny, I love that I can’t possibly know if I’m getting a great shot or a dud till I upload it. I even love that sometimes my finger ends up in frame. The shape resembles the 110 film cartridges of my youth, and the random snappyness reminds me of that old camera. The one thing that slightly worries me is that after taking 75 shots today, I’d dropped a battery charge line. Until I can get a hold of a charger and matching batteries, that’s going to worry me some.
A friend of mine, when shown the link to the camera (before I got it) said “You know you can get the same effects in Picasa?”. it’s sort of true. You can take a photo you’ve snapped with a “better” digital, mess around with it for a while and get sort of the same effect, but for me the fun is NOT knowing what the final shot will be. I love to line up photos, don’t get me wrong, but just aiming in a general direction and pressing the shutter button is very very freeing and delicious good fun.
Snow’d
I went to see Slava’s Snow Show last night. To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting much. My Aunt bought the tickets for my mother and I for our birthdays, but I wasn’t overly keen to go. I changed my mind within about three seconds of the start of the show.
See it. Go go go go see it. The performances are theatrical clown, overflowing with joy, pathos and hilarity. The staging is so stunningly simple and effective it’s hard to believe it’s so minimal. Moments of pure magic when the lights drop for 2 seconds and then come up to a new prop. Amazing.
Go see it. Don’t leave during interval, because you’ll miss some excellent clowning.
It’s a Frog Thing
I yoinked the idea for photographing on scrapbook paper from a flickr person. I am all about idea yoinking. Anyways, that there is the latest frog in my fast growing collection of frogs. I got him at savers for $2 so you can’t beat that! He’s even a money box, so he serves two purposes.
Today I didn’t sew a skirt, although I planned to. Two in one weekend might have been a LITTLE bit overachivey, don’t you think? I did start to sew a frog out of a green/beige skirt I got at (here’s a shock) Savers. I’ve done her legs and.. other legs and tomorrow after work if I have a skerrick of interest in anything left I’ll put her together. Shouldn’t take too long.
I also pretended to turn out my chest of drawers on the basis there’s too much crap in there. Seriously, I pulled out a pair of pants i have NO recollection of at all. I didn’t end up throwing anything away (read: Bagging for op shop) because it was like getting new stuff. One of the bonuses of being a total slob I suspect.
PS: The person I stole the idea from was Dyxie, who does beautiful wonderful things with colour.
Saturday Bedspread Day
Fairly full day today. Matt is back from his holiday (no I will not say vacation) so I got to hang out with him properly this morning rather than at the mercy of the phone godlets. Then Mum and I went to Savers because she saw a shirt there yesterday that would go with the skirt I cut out last night. Sadly, someone else had nabbed it, but I managed to pick up a few nice shirts, couple new pairs of jeans and 2 headscarves as well as more ties for my tie skirt project.
Once I got home and tossed the new stuff into the wash, I settled down to make me another skirt from a bedspread I picked up at Savers months ago. I’ve been meaning to make this forever. Again, it’s a cheaty hem (I kept the decorative hem on the edges). It wasn’t originally going to be a jeans top, but as I was sewing I realised that the jeans I had on were REALLY overdue for throwing out. Knees and inner thighs were gone, and I was keeping them around as spares, so I took em off and hacked the waistband off to use here. This is good because I am not good at waist bands, so reusing the jeans was handy. The legs are in the ragbag waiting for something to be used for.
So, overall, a productive little day. Hope yours was goodly too 
Downsizing
This is my former handbag, as of today. It panders to two of my affections: Greyscale and stripes. Also, apparently, to my fondness for huge bags. It is a very excellent bag. They’re made from recycled canvas awnings, sturdy as hell and also very roomy. You can’t tell from this shot how big it is, but it’s just over laptop bag sized. They’re designed for cyclists, so there’s a reflective stripe on there. I haven’t had it long, but I love it. Sadly, there’s something not greart about this bag, something I… didn’t want to admit. Something I finally had to face today.
This bag is an enabler.
I don’t want to come over all “Clutter is the enemy of the soul” but shitfire, how much crap do I haul around on a daily basis??
What is in there: Smokes, several lighters, purse, phone, pager aaand brochures from my trip, minutes and agendas from 5 months worth of meetings, sewing patterns, pens, a ton of loose change and god only knows what else. I weighed it. 6 kilos. SIX kilos of crap I drag around with me all the time. Good lord.
So, because i am trying to improve myself in various small ways, not the least being spending less time digging around in my bag for keys, time card or lighter, I splashed out on a new bag today.
Apart from being red (YAY red! That’s my bed spread it’s on, so you can probably guess my favourite colour) and having kinda hippy flowers on it, it’s smaller. Not a massive amount of smaller, but it doesn’t expand as much as the old one. It also has handy pockets to stop me bagdialling people on my phone and to keep my timecard nice and handy so I can swipe in slightly closer to time. My only sadness about it is that the strap isn’t adjustable, so I can’t wear it the super daggy way over my chest, but I can live with that.
Here’s to dragging less than 6 kilos around with me in future!
Envelope Fail
“Hey mate, could you go and shove these 3000 envelopes under windscreen wipers in the carpark?”
“Sure no worries”
Someone should have been more specific.
A Meme already?
Yeah I know, I have the suck. But it interested me. The meme, or challenge or whatever I spotted on an unrelated blog today was to pull up your photos folder, find the 6th folder in the list, then post the 6th photo in the folder. So here you are:
It might look like a random shot of the garden, but if you peer into that you’ll see the back end of a bird (hint, it’s yellow and brown). This is one of a few dozen shots I took trying to capture a great shot of this bird that was nesting in the staghorn. I didn’t get one SINGLE clear shot of her, but I’ve since figured out how to shoot continuous mode, so that helps!