Articles in “Life, the Universe, and Everything”

After Christmas, my parents fancied a day trip out somewhere. I was still pretty shaky with the chest infection, so we settled on a slow (and slightly wheezy) walk along the dam wall at the Avon Dam.

We used to go to the Avon Dam all the time when we were little, for company picnics and casual weekend walks. But none of us had been for years. Nick had never been.

It was hot and bright and very, very Australian summer.

I took photos that I couldn’t judge, because the sun was glaring off the iPhone screen. We walked slowly (and slightly wheezingly) along the dam wall and then down a path under an overhanging rock face: my mother insisted we walk single file and with a reasonable space between us, so that at least one of us would survive if the rock face fell on us.

Then we walked slowly back to the car, in the relative shade of which Nick and I flipped through our photos to see if any of them were in focus.

Then I completely forgot to blog about it until just now.

I don’t like having my hands idle.

It’s not that I have any illusions about them being the devil’s playthings (atheist, right here), but I just don’t like it. Nick and I are adherents of serial story-telling (read: we watch a fair bit of telly), and if I’m just sitting there with my hands in my lap, I become restless and bored, not matter how good the actual episode or program is.

Like the fact that they took the dagger out of Elijah! So now Elijah’s back!

Ahem.

So I make my own rugs (both braided rugs and clippy mats), which has the added advantages of both recycling fabrics that aren’t really wearable any more and keeping some of the old crafts in play. I taught myself Viking knitting, and then promptly never did it again, despite really liking the effect. I knit, though not well, and I cannot crochet. I make little felt Santa hats for Daleks.

And lately I’ve been making little felt dolls.

You see, Nick was exceptionally clever this Christmas, and showered me (bless him) with an array of really lovely, thoughtful presents, including a little book on making steampunk soft toys.

This book on making steampunk soft toys, to be exact.

And one quiet Sunday, I thought I’d have a go at making one of the simpler patterns—one that didn’t involve too much brass or leather or ageing fabrics with wax.

I only had felt to hand, but felt is cheap and fairly easy to work with (albeit a bit on the stiff side), and though I couldn’t actually make any of the steampunk accessories with the materials I had to hand, I did manage to hand-sew a couple of little Victorian ladies who worked out well enough to please me:

Of course, they haven’t any arms, but then they are Victorian ladies. (And at least they have mouths. That’s my main problem with Hello Kitty—what kind of role model for girls is a creature that doesn’t even have a mouth? All the best women are a bit lippy, in my opinion.)

And then I had a thought. The kind of brilliant thought that led to my making tiny little felt Santa hats for my Daleks.

I thought to myself, “Self,” I thought, “you might be able to make a reasonable facsimile of a Weeping Angel out of this pattern.”

So I did:

Of course, felt is the worst possible fabric to try and make flowing robes out of, so there’s that. But for an experimental pattern (where I had to ad-lib both wings and arms), he hasn’t worked out at all badly.

Of course, now I spend my working days being loomed over by a little felt psychopath and compulsively glancing at my bookshelves to make sure he hasn’t moved closer.

And I still haven’t worked out a way to attach the arms in a way that would let me cover the eyes. But for a first attempt, he’s a pretty satisfying Weeping Angel.

Now I just need to make another half a dozen before Christmas.

Oh, and make them all little Santa hats, of course.

Christmas Eve:

Christmas Day:

Visiting the Archibald Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse:

Chest infection:

A fortnight ago, on both Twitter and Facebook, I went completely Christmas mad, insisting on updating everyone every five minutes about my seemingly futile attempts to find napkins, Christmas crackers, and place mats that matched the fabulous purple Indian tablecloth and lime-green beaded coasters that my mother-in-law had bought me for my birthday.

Because these were a gift and because the Christmas dinner was for that side of the family (Nick’s immediate family), I wanted to make the tablecloth and coasters the basis of the dinner table, which necessitated (in my mind, at least), a purple and green colour scheme that was not, perhaps, in keeping with a traditional Christmas table.

But seemingly, purple and lime green were not popular Christmas colours this year. I scoured dozens of shops looking for matching crackers and napkins, getting increasingly frustrated. I was also attempting to find beer glasses that would take an entire bottle of beer, which was even more frustrating.

I worry quite often about being an unsatisfactory daughter-in-law, and Christmas dinner (since it’s the only Christmas dinner that Nick’s entire family attends) tips me right over into the kind of domestic insanity that leads to me vacuuming the living-room floor with that little brush you use to do the upholstery.

Luckily, since the advent of social networking, there’s an outlet for such things. So any and all of you who also follow me on Twitter or are a Facebook friend suffered update after update about my increasingly downward spiral into full-blown Christmas psychosis.

In the end, we won at Christmas, which is the main thing. But it seems to me you might like to have some reward for your patience. And if looking at pictures of a garishly decorated Christmas table counts as a reward, today is your lucky day!

(You might notice that I ended up panicking about the owl-themed silver crackers with purple and lime-green accents that I’d eventually settled on, and bought an additional set of purple and green crackers at Woolworths that very morning, when I was meant to be buying fresh fruit, wine, and flowers. So everyone got two crackers, and I spent an hour the next day picking up bits of cardboard from my living-room carpet. On the upside, the Woolworths crackers had the best paper hats ever.)

Sadly, hosting eight people for dinner in a six-room cottage with no dining room necessitates shoving the furniture anywhere it’ll go, so you can put two tables together right in the middle of the living room. Luckily, tinsel tends to smooth over any unorthodox seating arrangements.

Just to make everything even more Christmassy, I also insisted—much to Nick’s initial annoyance—in buying additional baubles and garlands, and sticking them to all the bookcases.

After all, who says GI Joe, Space Marines, and Decepticons don’t also want to celebrate Christmas?

(Actually, maybe not the Space Marines. The God Emperor probably doesn’t like Christmas. Then again, I don’t know his life.)

Just in case I don’t update again before the full madness of actual Christmas, Merry Christmas, lovely readers! See you all for the Doctor Who Christmas special!

Now, we thought Heather’s Eric Northman pumpkin was fantabulous—and he was.

But she’s really excelled herself this year:

(I only wish we’d taken a more lowlight picture.)

Traditional Jack O’Lantern be damned: next year, I’m lobbying for all eleven regenerations.

UPDATE:

A night-time picture of the Doctor pumpkin, courtesy of the fabulous Kirsty:

Now the baby blankets have gone to their new home, I can show them off on the blog a little. They’re hardly the greatest baby blankets ever made, but they were certainly fun.

Sensible baby blanket:

I grew to dislike the sensible baby blanket intensely as I was making it: those lozenges were frustrating to fit together, and I ended up having to strip one back and completely re-knit it, which it always annoying. But once I’d backed it with flannelette and added the velvet ribbon, I folded it up and put it away, so I could finish the second blanket. And when I unfolded it to shake it out and wrap it up, I found I actually liked it.

It’s always fun when that happens.

But it was the fancy baby blanket with which I was besotted:

As I say, I’m hardly the best knitter in the world, and this is the simplest of things: garter stitch (because, with that beautiful variegated wool, you hardly need a fancy stitch), increasing at the end of every second row, and with a deep (stockinette) frill.

But, gosh, it was pretty:

I thought it looked like coral, when it was folded up. Now I might need to knit one for myself, but not, perhaps, during a Brisbane summer.

I’ve blogged so much about the unexpected horror that was the spring-cleaning of the study this year. I’ve devoted an entire blog post to the empty space pre-carpet cleaning. I’ve blogged about the slow re-build.

But finally—finally!—the study no longer looks like the squalid yet arty black-and-white photographs that I originally posted.

Now it looks like this:

It also has 100% more hot-pink plastic cuckoo clocks:

And 100% more swan-shaped TV lamps:

(In fact, combined with my insanely gorgeous Flash Gordon duck print, the study now has a whole unplanned bird-thing going on.)

As an added bonus, the spare room no longer looks like this, but like this:

Admittedly, I’ve barely started on the braided rug I intend to put in the study, but I hereby declare the spring-cleaning of the study officially over for another year.

… just turned up on my doorstep, and it’s making a bad day (Nick’s off for some frightening medical tests this morning, while I’ll be invigilating an exam) that much brighter.

A few weeks ago, I came across Kathleen Jennings’s blog and, particularly, her Dalek Game, where she replaces a word in a famous book title with the word “Dalek” and then draws a delightful pen-and-ink sketch of the result.

My favourite? Has to be Wuthering Daleks.

But thanks to the Wuthering Daleks page, I came across something even more delightful.

It’s right here.

Now, the Dalek of the Baskervilles? That’s brilliant. But the Flash Gordon picture made my heart sing. My love for that quotation outweighs the combined value of all the kingdoms of Mongo. Combine that with ducks (who doesn’t like ducks? Only monsters!), and you have something with which I fell in love at first sight.

So I texted Nick, and said, “Please, please find out if there’s any way we can get a print of this.” And because the artist is a woman who understands the susceptible hearts of geeks, the print landed on my doorstep this morning.

And it’s magnificent.

Right now, it’s sitting on my desk, just making me happy. But it’s going to be hung right here in the study, where I can see it as I work, and remember that we only have fourteen ducks to save to Earth.

While documenting the epic study spring-cleaning ordeal of 2011, I’ve made mention, on occasion, of my spare room now looking as though a disreputable secondhand bookstore had exploded in it.

And I thought to myself, “Hmm. What if people think I’m being hyperbolic? If only there were some way to demonstrate that such a description is not merely hyperbole!”

It’s not hyperbole.

I cannot wait until this marking is finished and I have time to start moving these books back into their rightful home.

So.

The carpet cleaner has come and done his best to remove the mould from carpets that should probably have just been stripped up and killed with fire. (And, incidentally, the carpet cleaner also loudly bemoaned modern morality, insulted the music I was playing while I was working, and said “Who cares?” when I explained what I did for a living. He also left me to move all the furniture myself after I corrected his assumption about my boss’s gender, which is fine, and called me a “brave girl” as he watched me drag a bookcase down the hallway, which is not fine.)

Leaving all that aside, though, the end result is that we can start moving stuff back into the study. Or we will be able to once my marking is out of the way, which means (practically speaking) we still won’t be able to get into the spare room for at least another week.

But we’ve moved the books out of the living room, so at least one room in the house isn’t littered with academic debris.

So now I can work at my desk again, loomed over by shelves of Victorian and Edwardian novels, just like a real nineteenth-century scholar:

Of course, until Nick has a chance to pop some picture hooks up for me, everything’s still in a state of “propped up wherever there’s a space”:

And the majority of the study looks like this, which is neat but not particularly useful:

Still, it’s better than a completely empty, mouldy room.

Slightly better, anyway.

So, obviously, finding new life in the study carpet put a bit of a crimp in our plans to have everything back on the shelves and a lovely, sweet-smelling new work space by the end of the weekend.

And I was so looking forward to it: I love my little house, and try hard to make it both comfortable and attractive, and I’m so sick of spending all my days and half my nights in the ugliest, least comfortable room in the house.

I had grand plans. New curtains. A few pictures. A hot-pink plastic cuckoo clock. You know: the usual.

And then the mould. And the waiting for the real-estate agent to get a plumber out to us. Then the news that the whole shower has to be ripped out (goodbye, late ’50s fiberglass shell), but that we have to wait a week before we can have the carpet cleaned and get back into the study.

So now we live in a labyrinth of Victorian novels, video games, and manuscript notes. The spare room looks as though a bookshop exploded in it.

But in the interim, at least I’ve stripped the study back to the bare essentials, waiting until I can actually get the new curtains, the pictures, the cuckoo clock up on the walls and start filling the shelves again:

At least this much is certain: when I spring clean, I do it thoroughly.

So, as anyone who is also connected to me in any of numerous forms of social networking already knows, we embarked on a thorough spring cleaning of the house a fortnight ago.

Since we can only clean on the weekends, we’re only two rooms through the process. (Luckily, this is a tiny house.)

This past weekend was dedicated to the study, a room that, as you can see, radically needed a thorough spring cleaning:

(Note that I have chosen to present the photographs in black-and-white form, to make them look “arty” rather than “squalid”.)

And all was progressing just beautifully, despite various complaints from Nick, until we discovered, after moving a bookcase, that the shower had apparently been leaking directly through the wall for some time, creating new life in the fertile ground of an ancient rental-house carpet.

It was at roughly that point that the spring cleaning passed from “annual chore” to “epic adventure” …

I’ve been debating about whether or not to write this blog post, for a variety of reasons.

Partly because this is yet another in my intermittent series of “why I haven’t blogged lately” posts, and I’m sure there’s a saturation point to be reached in those.

But more than that, I just haven’t been sure I’ve wanted to talk about why I haven’t been blogging.

Don’t worry: it’s not as bad as I just made it sound. Though each time I’ve said to someone in person, “I should tell you this, but I don’t want to talk about it”, they say, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

I’m not pregnant.

But I have quit smoking.

Big deal, right? I’ve done that before, and never successfully. But this time, it’s a bit different:

That’s the number of days since I last had a cigarette. Sort of: I’m over onto the next leaf of the calendar now. (And yes: that’s a Doctor Who calendar with a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet stuck under it, but that can’t come as a shock.)

So: three weeks. Nearly. Nearly three weeks.

And if I’d known that I’d feel this awful, I don’t think I could have ever done it, even though it was entirely my choice.

Luckily, and against all advice, I quit at a moment when I was insanely busy. So what with the nearly three-hundred first years whose final exams I had to either mark or moderate, the final grades for those students, and the Animal Farm manuscript (which came back from the structural edit right at the moment the exam was being sat), it wasn’t until last Thursday that I had a moment to notice the symptoms.

Oh, I noticed that I was a bit short-tempered and craving cigarettes. But I had no idea what a plethora of symptoms the quitting process would bring.

I can’t regulate my body temperature, so I’m either flushed or shaking uncontrollably, regardless of what I’m wearing or what the ambient temperature is.

Because I can’t control my body temperature, I can’t sleep through the night. I wake up boiling hot, but can’t throw off the bed clothes because it’s 3 am and freezing. So I can’t get back to sleep, and I lie there and fret.

And fretting has a whole new meaning, since quitting smoking messes with your adrenaline and cortisol levels, so my anxiety levels are through the roof, and I can’t control them.

My appetite has changed radically, and not in the direction I intended: I was expecting to be eating more, but instead I can force myself to eat during the day, but can’t stomach anything after about 6pm.

(Of course, it’s not as though missing a few meals would do me any harm. Quite the contrary.)

And—and this is the relevant one—I can’t concentrate.

I can’t concentrate on anything.

I can’t even read. After about half a page, I just can’t concentrate any more, even if it’s a book I’ve read before.

Can you imagine what not being able to read does to someone like me? Not to mention that I certainly can’t work, when I can’t even re-read a Charlaine Harris novel.

And one of the casualties of not being able to concentrate on anything for more than about five minutes at a time is this blog.

Before this blog post starts to sound like a particularly dangerous public-service announcement, I should say that I don’t regret quitting and I have no intention of starting again. My breathing is easier, even now. And my skin is brighter, too, even though I do look like a ghost. I’m sure it’s only going to get easier from this point.

It can’t get harder.

At least, I hope not.

But until I can get my brain (and body) back under control, I don’t think the blog will be updated as often as I like.

As I said to Nick, it’s like living at high altitude for fifteen years, and then coming down into an oxygen-rich environment. I just have to stop and sit down until my head stops spinning.

Last night, Nick and I watched the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode covering Project Moonbase, the 1953 film based on a short story by Robert Heinlein.

And, honestly, of all the many, many bad films we’ve watched in the course of our MST3K obsession, this was one of the less rubbish ones. They actually had some nice zero-gee effects, and Nick was delighted with the “Please Do Not Walk on the Walls” signs slathered all over the space station.

But the most important thing about the film was the important lessons it taught me about life in the distant future (1970, to be exact).

1. I really don’t like Heinlein, even when he’s being adapted by someone else.

2. Nick takes an odd delight in Heinlein. All through the film, he kept saying, “This is so Heinlein it’s killing me”. He also recommended that an enemy spy be thrown out an airlock, “because that’s what Heinlein would do” (and was immediately delighted when the second-in-command said, “Well, I could throw him out an airlock”).

3. Couples don’t have to agree on the value of Robert Heinlein to have a successful relationship.

4. In the future (1970), women will be allowed to have roles of supreme importance, like spaceship pilot (rank of colonel) or President of the United States of America.

5. Women in positions of power get uppity, so you need to balance gender equality in theory with extreme misogyny in practice. Therefore, women in power should be described to their subordinates as “spoiled brats” and, if necessary, be threatened with spanking by their superior officers. (No, really. This actually happened.)

6. Women should also have a good sense of their own weaknesses so that if, for example, they’re trapped on the dark side of the moon with no hope of rescue, they can offer an adequate apology for their behaviour. Something like “Sorry for coming over all female, Major” should do the trick.

7. All the above holds true even if the woman is a highly decorated Air-Force officer, the first pilot to achieve orbital flight, and the first pilot to successfully land a manned craft on the moon.

8. In fact, if she is the first pilot to achieve orbital flight, it’s probably due to tokenism. You should definitely tell her subordinates that, just before a vital mission. That won’t affect her authority, at all.

9. “Briteis” is a really stupid name for a woman, because no matter how much you emphasise that it’s pronounced Bry-TIES, people will still just call you “Bright Eyes.”

10. It’s important, if you wish to achieve orbit, that the weight in the cabin be minimised as far as possible. The first thing to go? All that unnecessary weight on your trousers. Hot pants for all!

11. If you end up having to make a forced landing on the moon, you might end up becoming a de facto moonbase. And if it’s just you and your co-pilot, and you’re different genders, NASA might make you marry each other, to stop the press writing scurrilous tales about the lax morals in the Air Force. Goodness knows what they’d make you do if you were the same gender …

12. An excellent wedding-present for your new husband is the rank of Brigadier General. Never mind that he’s only a major at present: you need to skip him up a good few ranks so that he safely outranks you. Nice gender politics there, Colonel Bright Eyes.

The exodus from our main teaching building began last week. When we return (if we return, in my case, I suppose), the building will be shiny new.

And we certainly need shiny-new teaching rooms—hopefully, these ones will have windows. Windows would be awesome.

But I admit to a strong fondness for the old building, where I completed my graduate degrees and met my partner. So this is just pure nostalgia, really, before the building is gutted and rebuilt.

I’ll definitely miss the mysterious but deeply ’70s ceiling decorations:

I’ll miss the funky fonts and the building’s resistance to ordinary, non-textured walls:

I’ll miss the of-its-time stairwell sculpture, which I always wanted to touch, but never did:

I’ll even miss the staircase that I feel down on more than one occasion:

Dear Michie Building: you were rather ugly in some ways, and your hallway carpeting was older than I am. But you have a certain charm, for all that. Let’s hope they don’t strip all of that away from you.