Windowsill has been painted. Three coats over three consecutive nights, go me. I've also cleaned half the carpet, done all the laundry, sorted out the upstairs bookcase I wanted to sort out, rearranged the front room, moved some furniture around, collected dozens of items for the charity shop and sorted out most of the things I wanted to sort in the bedroom, except the wiring in and hanging things up. I didn't clear the balcony because it's been raining all week and the wood is soaking wet. Maybe next week I'll have more luck, I have to drag it down two flights of stairs and through the house, so it's going to have to be somewhat dry.

Things to do tonight when the kids are in bed:
- finish the wood for in the balcony door, I've cut it to size, but it needs putting together, sanding and painting
- finish tidying the office upstairs
- put away the last bits of laundry and start tidying Summer's room for when she comes on Saturday

Things to do tomorrow:
- take the collected detritus to the charity shop
- finish cleaning the carpet
- clean the bathroom, kids' rooms and the kitchen
- if there's time, drill some holes in the bedroom for hanging stuff up, tidy up the wiring and then collect all the tools from upstairs and put them back in the shed. If there's no time, then just the tool thing.

Things to do Friday:
- put the tools away, let's face it, that won't get done on Thursday.
- change the sofa covers
- buy beer for D, that bit's apparently important

That's it, it's been an amazingly productive week so far, I hope I can keep it up.

A completely self-indulgent list of things I am going to do while the other half is in the States. The other half being in the States means I can return to my normal nocturnal self and do things past 7 in the evening, which I plan to. He left this afternoon at 1, it's now 7 o'clock and already I have done 5 loads of laundry, dried them, put them away, changed the fish water and tidied up several of the children's drawers of crap. One of the reasons I can be more productive when the other half is gone is that me being productive usually involves me making an unholy mess. The laundry gets spread out on the floor, cupboards are emptied and sorted, that sort of thing. I can't do those things when he's here, because he cannot stand the unholy mess involved, and so me sorting and tidying therefore involves me making the unholy mess and then, when I'm about halfway through, shoving the unholy mess back in a cupboard before he comes home and complains about it incessantly.

The list involves:

• Painting the windowsill. Yeah, if I trawl back through the archives of this journal, there's probably a picture of the unpainted windowsill with a statement about it getting done before Christmas 2008. It wasn't. The cat on the windowsill in said picture has been dead for about 8 months. That's how long this hasn't been done. It is getting done this week, or I will eat my hat.


• Clearing the balcony. The balcony is full of the rotting remains of the wooden tiles that were on the bare roof for years and years. I took them up and stacked them in a corner, but they need to go because I need to get something down on the bare roof again before winter truly kicks in. There's also three garden chairs that were taken up from the garden below, which need painting, again before the winter sets in and kills them. I will endeavour to do that as well.


• Sort out the bedroom. There's stuff that needs putting away, and there are things that need hanging up, there's also the wiring to sort out and the daylight lamp to hang up and sort out with a remote control, again before winter truly sets in and him indoors becomes gloomy and unmanageable.


• If I have time, there's a bookcase full of shit in the upstairs office that needs to be sorted, there's also a baby bed, small desk and huge television unit that needs to be put online to be sold and taken away so I can get some space back.

That's actually it for the list, I'm hoping to at least get two of these things done this week, as well as finishing the laundry and sorting out the piece-of-wood-with-hole-in-it that currently serves as a place to put the dryer hose out of the balcony door with a more permanent painted-piece-wood-with-more-aesthetically-pleasing-hole-in-it. Wish me luck.

You know your kid's properly in school when you find yourself being asked to sew a pair of stripey swimming trunks for the school play. I'm aware of the story being pertrayed and of the frog in trunks in question and it irks me that B's teacher doesn't really think far enough ahead to buy enough fabric to fabricate a pair of horizonally striped swimming trunks like the frog wears in the book, and only really gives me enough to comfortably make a pair of vertically striped ones. I've been botching bits together all morning to stay true to the frog's costume. Damn you, woman!

In other news, we bought a dryer. I've never owned a dryer before, which is now making me question how the hell I got through two children without owning one. The excuse, funnily enough, was always that we had NO ROOM for a dryer. It was only a few months ago that I realised that if I have room for THREE clothes airers dotted around the house, each of which is perpetually filled with drying laundry, some of it hanging there for DAYS ON END, then surely I must be able to find room for a dryer. Which I have. It's all a bit botched and the hose goes out the balcony door, but there used to be two airers in front of the balcony door, so it's actually aesthetically far more pleasing. I have been drying things non stop for three days now, and I'm actually making a dent in the washing. Another bonus with the dryer is the fact that every few hours it spews out ONE LOAD of dry laundry, which I can then fold up and put away. The standard method with the airers was to do as much laundry as would physically fit on them, wait two days for it to dry, and then be confronted with FIVE OR SIX dry loads of washing which would form such a mountain of putting-away that it didn't happen. Actually putting laundry away was always the biggest obstacle in the house, and that seems to have been taken away. Whew.

The Dutch have a fondness for a thing called a condensdroger, which is a dryer that doesnt require a hose. It recycles moist air and requires about three hours to dry one pair of jeans. I am more than willing to stick a hose out of my balcony doors in order ta avoid owning the world's most pointless machine. The Dutch are fucking masochists sometimes.

Abjectly lazy parenting on my part meant that when Beckett expressed a desire to make cookies, I got out a "homemade!" Betty Crocker oatmeal cookie mix. Yeah, I know, oatmeal cookies shouldn't really require a pre-prepared "mix." Have just eaten one and come down with an almost vomit-inducing sugar headache. What has this world come to, Betty Crocker? In my own quest for convenience I would appear to have contributed yet again to my child's already worryingly high addiction to refined sugar. Oats and flour it is next time, folks. Blech.

This was made from Beckett's TARDIS zipperrobe. It arrived in Amsterdam in the back of the inlaws' car, and upon opening it, it transpired some of the hardware was missing. Not being able to take it back anywhere, I improvised the missing hardware with plumbing bits, but the Zipperrobe was never really the most stable thing as a result. It was also a HUGE MONSTROSITY, and not terribly handy for storing anything at all. After about a year of it standing around Beckett's room, and the various unofficial hardware bits falling out AGAIN, I made the executive decision to take it down. I unpicked the two side panels from the zipperrobe, lined them and made these two curtains which hang under his bed. He can now hide underneath his bed and play with his TARDIS and his guys and his Spiderman house and all the rest of it, unseen. He's got a light under there and cushions and toys and he can hide, which is the most important part. He quite loves it, so I'm pleased.


He's recently acquired a hand me down computer, there's space in his room for a desk now that that monstrous huge thing is gone, so I covered a chair for him.



A pretty standard upholstery job involving machine sewing, stapling and tacking and finishing work, but again, I'm very pleased with the result, and again as with the fwower chair, it involved a chair I took out of storage recently which I had just refused to get rid of out of love.

All in all, both projects together took about a day, most of which was spent unpicking the stitches in the zipperrobe and unpicking Beckett's Doctor Who duvet cover to aquire the fabric for upholstering the chair. I replaced the Doctor Who patterned backside of the duvet cover with a plain blue. The reason I ended up butchering the duvet cover is that I quite simply couldn't find a children's fabric with a suitably small pattern, everything was huge and unsuitable for the size of the chair.

All of which does mean I now have more than enough Dalek/Tardis fabric left to make a few Doctor Who themed aprons and oven mitt sets. Any takers?

Uhh, so yes, I've bought the nibblies, we're making cake and jelly, there are presents and prizes and sweets and surprises of all shapes and sizes... I digress. Beckett has invited his entire class of around 20 5-year-olds to his belated birthday party. It looks like it may rain on Friday. I have no idea if 5 or 20 children are attending, despite my request to rsvp (I am certain of about 8.) I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH THESE CHILDREN FOR THREE HOURS. Like I said, there's prizes, and I'm perfectly willing to play all sorts of games, I'm just wondering if anybody out there knows of any foolproof fun for such a possibly large group of kiddies of that age (I can't play musical chairs as I don't have that many chairs and I don't want to do too much that involves one kid doing something while 18 kids stand around and watch and get bored.)

Any mums or indeed childlike peeps out there who have any ideas for five-year-old fun?

So, yes, the side project was a wee chair. I'd had this seventies bucket thing in storage for the longest time, even though I'm quite fond of seventies furniture. The main reason it has been in storage for so long was that it's low, the seat height is just a bit off, making it only really suitable for children.

But I HAVE children now, so YAY!

Anyway, before:



After:



I haven't done upholstery in about a year, so this was a nice easy starter, I have a few projects that need doing some time soon. In the next few days, I'm hoping to finish another chair, for Beckett. (Yes, "fwower" chair was for Millie, obvs.)

( Yes, I'm still doing things in the house. A tale of two doors. )
The thing I did in between was a chair. It follows shortly.

Yet more proof my garden attracts some sort of retardation. Apparently Mickey laid some eggs elsewhere:



She keeps moving them, making sure they're lying on the bare soil and not anywhere nesty looking and then she sits next to them for a bit and falls asleep. Then yesterday she broke one.

I moved the plant that I was hoping was an exotic flower. I meant to take a picture of it flowering, but frankly it only did that for about half a day, which wasn't enough for me. It was also one fuck ugly flower, as was the rest of the plant. So when I say I "moved it", I mean I actually dug it up and hurled it across the water so that it may have a chance to propagate on the other shore should it so desire. Or die. Whichever nature decides is best.

So anyway, things were removed on that side of the garden in order to give a home to the now overgrown pumpkin plant. I've let it trail over my old sled, how romantic is that?



Anyway... to return to the topic in hand, which was retardation, the pumpkin plant is flowering quite enthusiastically:



That's yesterday's flower on the left, and today's flower in the middle. Unfortunately, the pumpkin plant is pretty much exclusively making female flowers (like these two), and the male flowers that it is making seem to be at least two weeks away from blooming, if not more. I am getting increasingly worried that the internet advice I read along the lines of "Don't worry, the plant will usually produce a female and male around the same time!" is utter bollocks, and in fact I won't be able to pollinate a single flower or produce a single pumpkin. This makes me sad.

The eggs I rescued from Mickey a few weeks back appear to be dead. Well, one is certainly dead and the other one is questionable. I shall throw them away soon.

I have in my possession a bag full of cotton damasky-type table linens, all sort of post-war era, dating from around my grandparents' wedding. They were all white and have stained yellow over the years, with almost brown fold-lines and such. Now for some reason one set of twelve napkins refuses to bleach back to white, on most of the rest I eventually successfully used Dylon pre-dye to whiten them, but these twelve seem to just be going greyer and greyer the more I try to clean them up. Anyone have any suggestions on how to get greyed fabric to brighten up again? I don't mind how aggressive the method may be, I'm usually quite the environmentally friendly type, but when it comes to getting fabric clean, I am quite capable of turning into professor Frink with the bleach and the stuff you're not supposed to mix with bleach and the OHMYEYES!! I need magick whitening now, and I'm afraid my efforts so far have only succeeded in making the greyness more and more permanent. Help.

And coots...

A few undoubtedly dull notes on the state of my plants and the wildlife...
( are here. )

I've been busy in the garden. For months. Mostly I've been removing ivy. For months. I think I'm nearly done now.
( My special place. As in special needs. )

Inspired by off_coloratura's fabric rummaging, I went to have a look at the fabric stash I currently have lying around, and what it is I'm intending to do with it.

( MY EYES... )

Still being hugely domestic, to the extent that after deriding Anthea Turner, I actually did end up on my hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom floor with a toothbrush. Well, the grout between the tiles, anyway, it was gross, but nothing neat bleach and dettol couldn't deal with.

But anyway, thanks to crediniaeth, I ended up actually inspired enough to deal with Beckett's drawers full of clothes. I had never considered rolling anything up, apart from when packing, but he now has half a drawer of upright t-shirt tubes that allow me to easily see which shirts he has clean, as opposed to when they were folded and stacked in the drawer and he inevitably wanted the one on the bottom of the stack, leading me to create a huge mess in the drawer when dressing him and attempting to shoo him out of the house. So yay, it looks lovely.

( Revised shitlist )

On a completely random note, we agreed some weeks ago that we would not purchase any Christmas decorations this year, as we're moving and we've got lights and things up the yin yang that we'll need to sell on or give away due to voltage problems anyway. But then I was in the shitty Action dollar-store type shop and I saw a placemat, and I couldn't resist, because placemats are flat and don't actually count. They had a lovely romantic looking Christmassy cottage type thing on them, as photographed by a clueless Eastern European placemat maker. The cottage was, in fact, as the two signs next to the cottage in the placemat photograph clearly state, the LA-based L RON HUBBARD'S WINTER WONDERLAND, where kiddies can meet Santa and be subjected to kind of weird plays about the spirit of Christmas that teach them about peace and love and harmony and understanding and body thetans or something. I lolled so hard that I bought two, mostly because inwardly I was kind of smirking at the fact that here was a Scientology related knickknack that the CoS was actually not making any money from, and would probably be really annoyed to learn was being sold in the Action for 25 cents. I'm thinking of going back for more.

Them's the state of things at the moment. Off to the shops.

That's quite a result for me. Dress number two was a modification job, but took just about as long as dress number one.

( DRESS TWO )

Been sewing for the last week or two, doing various bits and bobs of the curtainy/cushiony variety. I'm good at sewing the straight lines, me. The straight lines got to me and Monday morning I decided to sew myself a dress. I drafted the skirt pattern from a dress I already had and the top was just cobbled together through fitting after fitting after fitting. Yes, I know the pattern's hideous, but I have never made an article of clothing before and I didn't want to fuck up any fabric I really liked. It actually fits better than the picture would have you believe. Also, my arms are not that fat. What's up with that one? (And yes, I cut my head off, I wasn't looking my best last Monday, trust me.) Anyway, if someone tells me it's not laughably horrible I may attempt to wear it ouside. The weather's quite nice.



( Proof that I maded it, and my other projects within... )

I usually aspire to have at least two freshly made, pickable things in the fridge at any given time of the cold saladesque variety. That way when unbearable peckishness strikes, there's something to hand and it's not a hot pocket. So anyway: food that I have made in the past week under the cut.

( Cut for being too salady and cold... )

off_coloratura asked me what the conical thingies were for in my retro hair post, they're for this:



I actually made them hella long and then cut them down the first time I used them, so they're about an inch shorter now. But, yeah, that's what they're for.

Ah, yes, the perpetual problem of Books on Top of Other Books. I swear to God, I cannot keep my bookcase tidy for the life of me. Problem the first being the bottom two rows, which Millie perpetually pulls out and onto the floor and then eats. Poor Dutch Baker-Era Doctor Who Annual, all chewed up and spat on. But then there's the five rows above that. First of all, I have a tendency to take whatever book Millie has in her hand and put it one shelf higher, horizontally on top of the books that are already there (vertically and alphabetically organised, natch), out of her reach. Temporarily, of course, oh yes. Then, I go to the charity shops and inevitably return with 2 sex manuals (70's were the best era, really. The hair!), a book about psychology, three novels and a random book along the lines of Anybody's Rollerskating Book - Whoosh! Here Comes America's Newest Craze!. Which I then proceed to lay, horizontally again, on top of the shelf where they should be placed, vertically, if I had the room to squeeze them in. So the novels lie on top of the alphabetised fiction section and the sexy books on top of the sexy books section. I only just noticed as well that at least say, six months ago, I had the decency to lay them horizontally with the spine facing out, so I could se what they were and fantasise about where, theoretically, they were supposed to be placed when I got around to vertically placing them in their correct aphabetical or genre-related place. But now? I've resorted to turning them ninety degrees so I'm just looking at their bottoms. I can't even tell what they are anymore. Subconscious reasoning behind this, of course, being that I can only lie about three books next to each other per shelf if I place them spine-out, but if I turn them, I can fit, like, five! Woo! I FAIL AT BOOKCASES.

My bookcase, a small excerpt, yesterday:



And seeing that now, brings me to another one of my problems (this is the self-help section, I'm a sucker for a self-help book, especially if it's got an amusing title containing the word "man" or "woman" or both). See that Gay MANual there? I bought that, not particularly because I wanted to read it, but because I was in my local Amsterdam second-hand shop and there, staring me in the face, was a SLEW of english language books about the trials and tribulations and kinky sex involved in Being a Gay Man. And when that sort of thing happens, I inevitably find myself trying to work out what happened to the Gay Man in question. The english-speaking Gay Man, in Amsterdam, who has either A)been evicted B)gone straight C)split up with his Dutch Gay Boyfriend who proceeded to throw out all his Gay Man books in a hissy fit of gaymongous proportions or D)died. And now all his Gay Man books are here, in this charity shop, begging me to buy them and spare a thought for the poor Gay Man. Which I inevitably do. The urge is twice as strong when I see a veritable cornucopia of books obviously brought in by someone who has suddenly become Disillusioned with Scientology. Doubly strong because I also feel I am doing the world a great service by buying them, thus removing them from the shelves lest they be stumbled upon by someone far more gullible than I am. And also because Scientology books are full of luls. Also, I buy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy whenever I see it in a charity shop. I have, like, six identical copies now and I have no idea why.

The IKEA Ivar shelving system is endlessly extendable. My wall is not. I have reached the end.

ETA: Why is that FREUD book there? That should be somewhere else. FAILCAKES.