trick or treat

We've been having a cold snap lately, which makes me miss Halloween at home, with fake smoke and blinking lights and lots of animatronic monsters. But that's okay. I went to a party last weekend dressed up as little red riding hood and this week I'm going to be a zombie housewife, a la Betty Draper. Even got pearls and a lacey apron with blood on it.

I have an interview of sorts tomorrow. Well, really I just emailed a lady who said she needed a nanny and she called me back and said would you like to meet my three sons and niece on Sunday? I was really hoping for three girls and a boy. Little boys are so hyper. But whatever, maybe these guys will be awesome. I guess I'll see tomorrow. I just hope I don't have stains on my skin from all the fake blood I'll be wearing later.

Kim sent me this picture in an email, and maybe everybody else has seen it before, but I thought it was hilarious.

WARNING: KEEP ALCOHOL AWAY FROM PUMPKINS

happy halloween, everybody

Talking Books

I've been going to the gym a lot lately.
That's a lie.
I've been going to the gym a lot for me lately, especially because for a while I wasn't going at all. Anyway, as I'm desperately trying to lose about six spare tires and gain a six pack before beach season in December, I've been listening to a lot of books.
A woman I met recently called audio books "reading with your ears." The Wellington Public Library calls their collection "Talking Books." I prefer the slightly outmoded "Books-On-Tape." Whatever it is, I think I'm in love. With audio books.

Here are some benefits of listening to your old standards and new favorites on your ipod:
1. Multi-tasking. You're always walking or driving or running, and there's always time to listen to stuff.
2. You don't learn to hate songs you love while your muscles burn at the gym. That always happens to me.
3. No more eye strain. Staring at a computer all day is hard on your retinas. Reading is nearly as bad.
4. Size. Digital files are amazing and fit in your purse way better than regular books.
5. Professional readers usually have cool voices.
6. Renting audio books from the library = lots less paper waste.

Most importantly for me, I get to read for fun, without feeling like I should be spending my time reading nonsense about Mansfield.

So far I've listened to: Black Dogs by Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan,
The Great Gatsby, and I'm halfway through The Old Man and the Sea. Next on my list are Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame and Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. I toyed with the idea of renting War and Peace, so I wouldn't have to take anything out of the library for a while, but thought better of it.

Rhythmic Noises make sleeping hard

The Offender:

I slept with earplugs in last night, despite the fact that the wind and rain were relatively peaceful.
I've never noticed this before, but maybe it's just something that's crept up on me and now that I notice it, I can't ignore it. The intersection in front of my house has a crosswalk light, just like every other intersection in Greater Wellington. But all of a sudden, this one right here has turned into one of those that beep on the second, every second, to let you know where to find it if your vision is impaired. That's fine, but I can hear it in my bed now.
I can't even sleep with a freaking analog clock in my room.

Headache City

This is how I look when I get really localized headaches in my eye.

Just not as glamorous.

Marge Simpson is a Babe

I just read this article, which confirms my opinion that Marge Simpson is awesome.

What a dreary day today. I've been staring at these trees outside my window and listening to news podcasts instead of doing anything.


P.S. I love that our top scientists agree: "We need to confirm there could be water (life?!?!) on the moon. Let's blow the shit out of it."

In like a Lion

Man, I hate spring. That's not totally true, but at home I hate having that one freak snowstorm at Easter, which always happens, no matter what day of the year Easter falls on. Or those days in May when it's forty when you wake up, like when we graduated from college. Ugh.
We're having a cold snap here, lots of Southerlies flying in from Antarctica and places like that. Awful. Gordy moved my baby silverbeet inside because it was getting picked on by hail. It's growing well, though. Turns out planting greens in the inside of a sidetable drawer was a good idea. Score one for me.


And here is my sage plant, which, as it sits in the sunniest window in the house, is oblivious to the cold and growing like crazy. I've already harvested enough leaves to kill it, but it's doubled in size since then.


Most of the henna has washed out of my hair. I would feel cheated by Lush, but I did only leave it in for the bare minimum amount of time and was super conservative about what color it would be. Apparently henna builds on itself, and I have half a block left, so sometime soon I'll do it over and leave it in overnight.

I might go out tonight for the first time in ages. My flatmate's all-girl rock band has their release party tonight, which is awesome, so I'll at least be out for a little while. I feel particularly out of touch with things when all I do is read about things that remotely pertain to my thesis and go to the gym. Speaking of which, has anyone read Henri Bergson and feel like explaining him to me? Lauren, perhaps?

Botanical Gardens

I know that every city has a Botanical Gardens, but I forgot that Wellington has one. It's right by Uni, too. Yesterday I got a call from Alex. He and my one flatmate wanted to go up to the gardens and hang out, since none of us had been there before. Here are some early spring flowers and cacti. Don't tell Alex I posted this picture. I want to see if he ever actually reads this. Also, we both look stupid. But you can kind of see my red hair!

Sultanas v. Raisins

WTF??

The internet is telling me that all dried grapes are raisins, and that sultanas are either golden raisins, seedless raisins (I never have eaten a raisin with seeds, have you?), or made from white grapes or a specific type of grape called sultanas. That leaves quite a lot of room for error.

Having eaten sultana bran, I can tell you the only noticeable difference is not in the fruit, but the bran flakes. They are thicker here, more like handmade pasta v. machine made. And they don't really get soggy in the milk. To tell you the truth, despite the no-sog benefits, I prefer lighter, crunchier flakes. These little guys hurt my teeth.

I guess, looking at the box again, maybe these are golden raisins. They look a little light. But I always add extra to my cereal, anyway.

Sloths

Have any of you realized how cute sloths are? Alex and I spent a long time looking at videos of them on youtube. Holy crap.

I'm trying to finish the introduction to my thesis and I feel like I'm swimming like that sloth.

Easter Island

I recently read a biography of Katherine Routledge, who was obsessed with Easter Island (which is really named Rapa Nui) and went there with her husband on her own private yacht to explore those huge stone men that are sprinkled around the island. She was kind of a bitch and absolutely racist, like everyone in the early 1900s, but still a cool lady. She went to Oxford when women weren't allowed to get degrees, drew a lot of wonderful sketches of the island, and documented a lot of folklore. Although I'm not so sure all of those things are necessarily good deeds. She also robbed a bunch of graves and stole precious artifacts from Rapa Nui and other Pacific Islands where she worked.

The biography was not great. The research was well done, but the writing was silly, and I think the author was too caught up about whether to celebrate Routledge's career for paving the way for other women archeologists or denounce her for her shoddy research methods and racist ideology.

Anyway, I always seem to be writing about women who I love and hate, and I think that the most important thing is to give up caring about them. The more indifferent I am to a writer's life, the better I think about them. Which is why I don't really care about Mansfield, at least not in the way that this woman cares about Routledge. KM was a bitch but she was also very nice and she wrote some neat stuff. That's all I want my thesis to say. I guess maybe you can tell that I'm about to write the introduction to my thesis, and this is a way of putting it off. Sorry if you've just read this and felt jipped out of a real or semi-entertaining post; you've really just read my warm-up.

Here's a picture of the Rapa Nui sculpture the English stole by ripping it from the ground and dragging it across the island with its proper owners staring in disbelief. It's on display in the British Museum now, and I touched it. Thanks, imperialism:

Henna-ed!

I've been wanting to change my hair for awhile now. Upon Ga's suggestion, and her already fearless attempts at home henna-ing, I decided to henna my hair, too. Since it's natural, kind of semi-permanent, and actually nourishing for your hair, I figured I had nothing to lose. My hair's always been a little red in the sun, anyway. Besides, everybody loves a redhead.

My process:

First, I grated a chunk of the block of henna I bought from Lush. (It comes in bars, like giant Hershey's.)
I added hot coffee to the gritty stuff because I read that will bring out browns, and also some cloves to make it smell extra yummy. (My hair still smells like them.)
Then, I heated the mixture up in a double boiler and let it sit, hot, for an hour while I showered and prepped my hair.
Next, I tried to brush in the henna goop using a hair dye brush from my flatmate's normal hair dye kit, but it was too sticky and gunky. So I grabbed handfuls of the stuff and plopped it on my head, mooshing it in with my gloved hands.
I rolled it into what looked like a dreadlock beehive, and let it sit, uncovered, for two hours.
This hurt my neck.
Then, I rinsed out the chunks in the sink, showered, and washed my hair a bunch.

When I dried it, I suddenly had coppery red hair. Amazing!

Before:

After:

Henna is super fun and super messy. It looks like poop, smells like Aveda products, and crumbs off your hair if you leave it uncovered. But it also makes your hair super shiny and lovely.

These pictures don't really do it justice, but I do look way different.



I'd call it success, even if my one flatmate made fun of me for wanting to be a 'ginger,' which is pronounced with 'g' noises instead of 'j' noises here (think: gehn-gurrr).

muffin morning

My netball team has two games this evening, which we are sure to lose stunningly.

But since we'll be outside playing sports all early evening, I baked us some muffins for dinner. I had half a mind to make us cupcakes or cookies, but I hate that feeling of eating sweets on an empty stomach, especially after running. I would be sick nearly every night I had a hockey game in high school from Swedish Fish. Oh man Swedish Fish. Will somebody please mail me some?

Anyway, I woke up earlier than usual this morning, almost a normal people time to wake up, and looked up a recipe for cranberry muffins. I never follow recipes, I don't know why I shouldn't just make them myself. But I always have a hard time trying to figure out the leavening agent to dry ingredient ratio. It's all science! How will I ever know?

So these are Cranberry-Apple-Orange-Walnut-Flaxseed-Wheat Germ-Whole Wheat muffins, and they sound pretty yuppy. Not the best I've ever made, for sure. Somehow the chunks of apple taste funny. Either they cooked much faster than the other ingredients or they managed to soak up all the oil somehow, even though it was blended with the eggs and the sugar beforehand. Weird. I think maybe it was the orange juice I sprinkled on them so they wouldn't turn brown, because I stupidly cut them first. Whatever it is, if it weren't for the fact that we're going to be outside, playing sports instead of eating dinner, and a little drunk, I wouldn't serve them to company. But I doubt they'll notice.

"I dreamed last night about Bowden - I was at an opera with you sitting on a converted railway carriage seat & I heard Bowden talking of his wife to an american lady. Then he saw me & I went up and spoke to him. Just as I was saying I never had and never could love him, etc. Mrs. Saleeby appeared & seeing us together she came up to me and kissed my hands and said 'Oh Katherine I always felt such love for you - & now I know why' - & she pressed me to her & said 'Caleb is at home digging in the garden' This so touched me that I nearly sacrifiged myself on the spot but I knew you were waiting for me in a little house in South Kensington the opera had disappeared & I was sitting on the stump of a cut tree & Bowden leant against it toying with a top hat - so I pressed his hands awfully kindly, picked up a very large rabbit that was watching us, with twitching ears and walked away, saying to Bowden over my shoulder - 'there is always a beginning and an ending George.' But he burst into tears and called - 'Ah, my dear - dont dont be so wonderful' 'If that is the case' thought I, "Im wasting myself. I shall take some inexpensive but good dancing lessons.' Then I woke up."


^This is in a letter to KM's future husband, John Middleton Murry (hereby JMM). George Bowden was her soon-to-be ex-husband, and the Saleebys were asshole Eugenicists who liked to introduce young artists, like Mansfield and Bowden, in the hope of bettering white people everywhere. Thankfully, their plans for white supremacy didn't pan out, and neither did KM's first marriage. She married Bowden after only knowing him for a few weeks and left him the same day she married him. Oops.

lolita

There's a Martha Wainwright song called "lolita," which I never paid attention to other than it's got a really cutesy melody and the chorus is "I got my eyes on you all of the time." Well, I finally read Lolita about two months ago and listened to the song again. Eew.

It's finally stopped raining and the sunshine is really strong coming through my windows. We have a little sage plant for the rare occasions when I need fresh sage in vegetarian cooking, and it's really loving it in my house. The thing has grown at lesat 3x since we got it a few weeks ago. I guess I should harvest some of the leaves and use them soon, or stick them in the freezer. Also did you know that aloe just grafts? It grows wild here and all you need to do is slice off one of the baby aloes and stick it ON TOP of some soil, you don't even need to plant it, and then it grows. I can't believe we have to buy it in grocery stores at home.

The one thing I really hate about beautiful mornings is I always feel a little guilty, like I should've been awake for more of them. And then I feel bad when I'm still at home, like I should walk to school earlier and really get more out of this sunny day, but walking to school just means I'll be sitting on a computer all day, and that's less appetizing than feeling guilty about being at home. I hate not having summers off to be totally carefree, read what I want, and get a crappy service job that I don't care about. Although I'd prefer if the restaurant had windows, not like RK. That's so werid. The casino is stupid.

I'm thinking about dying my hair red. Opinions?