Month: November 2008

shit day

jade, , , 774 wordsLeave a comment

..And that would be in the literal sense. Seriously, there was just way too much poo involved in my day and none of it was even mine. Kristian shat four times today. Three times I changed his nappy and wiped his bum, and sent him on his merry way. One time, he apparently decided to change his nappy himself or something. He came to me with the nappy off, which he knows he is not supposed to do, and since it was about time for changing I told him to put it in the bin and I put a new one on him. This was evidently what Daniel refers to as “teflon coated poo” because there was absolutely no sign of it on his smooth little cheeky cheeks. It wasn’t until about half an hour later when I got back from picking up Stephanie that a little trail of small brown lumps was discovered behind the dining table.

Yesterday, I bought Kristian some new shoes. This is, of course, why he apparently thought today would be a good idea to TREAD THEM IN DOG SHIT. As if that isn’t annoying enough, it’s not even like he was playing outside where you might expect such an accident to occur occasionally. No, he was in the lounge room. And it was several minutes before either of us realised that he had stood in it, or that there was even poo there. A little boy can cover quite a distance in a short number of minutes. He can leave little shitty footprints all over the lounge room and all the way to the kitchen, all around the kitchen, and on the stool his sister has been sitting on, meaning that she gets it on her leg when she sits back down without realising. And he also apparently stands on his own feet a lot because there was poo on both the tops AND soles of his brand new shoes. Did I also mention that he had it on his shorts? Probably from sitting on the stool covered stool.

I had a feeling this morning that it was going to be one of those days:

scherre says (7:38 AM):
abigail and kristian obviously both got out the wrong side of the universe this morning

Even before we took Stephanie to school they were being horrible. Abigail was winding him up in various ways and he was responding by pulling her hair. (It’s quite clever really; since his own hair is still too short to pull with any satisfaction, it means they can’t just do the same back to him.)

This afternoon when we were getting in the car to leave my mum’s house, I opened the front car door and then went to open the back door, so Kristian could get in. Apparently he decided that he would drive, though, because he went to try to get in the front and steadied himself by putting his hand on the part in between the two doors. So when I opened the back door, his fingers were very nicely squished by it. We brought him back inside and got cold on the hand quickly to help with the swelling and I hugged him tight since he was, of course, absolutely howling with big gaspy shuddering sobs. I sent Abigail to get the bucket of M&Ms as we have discovered that many devastating situations can be rapidly improved with a few small coloured “pills”. (Perhaps offers the same health giving effect favoured by Remus.) Then Stephanie wanted an M&M too, and asked, and Abigail wanted one and asked, but didn’t say please. So my mum prompted her, and she didn’t get the hint, so my mum again pointedly replied that something obviously was missing, and still Abigail didn’t catch on. “Abigail Josephine Leth!” said my mum. “How do you ask…” But Abigail had started her next line at the same time as my mum’s. “Incywincyspider climbupthewaterspout..” She obviously realised then what my mum had been getting at because she asked properly but of course we were both in hysterics at that stage. It just came so out of nowhere.

Tomorrow morning I am taking Abigail to the dentist, so I’m going to go with a forecast that tomorrow will prove to be just as trying as today. She is quite pleased to be going to the dentist since Stephanie went a few weeks ago, and I have told her that she has to let the dentist look in her mouth but … she’s Abigail. And if you have any familiarity with us at all, that’s all that needs to be said.

shit day

scattered

jade, , , , , , , 737 wordsLeave a comment

Is your cat plotting to kill you? I have been a bit slow moving this week, I think, being as how it is Menstrual Week. I’ve had a bit of a headache for a couple of days, I think this morning my body was trying to decide if it should go the whole hog and be a migraine because I started to feel sick too, but thankfully that passed and it just went back to the head being sore. Last week I had a huge migraine, the throwing up, can’t move, kill me now kind. They are only that bad I think maybe once or twice a year. I often feel sick but rarely actually throw up.

My thoughts feel a bit scattered. I am tired, and it feels like I am always saying that and I think it’s because I’m not very good at sleep. I think a lot of the time I don’t get all the way to how shut down your brain and thoughts should be for proper refreshing sleep. Things are still going, I’m still thinking of ideas, ways to do things, this and that. It’s like that half-asleep phase you get where you have enough awareness to know that you’re not asleep but not enough to actually interact with your environment voluntarily. (The technical term for this is hypnagogia – “the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep”) Last week we went to the doc for new prescriptions, and I talked to him about my sleeping problem. He gave me some pills to try out. I’ve had a half twice now. I decided to start with a half when I discovered that they cost $18 a box for 14, since they’re not on the PBS. I am hesitant to take them on school nights because of the warning stickers about it maybe affecting your alertness and stuff. I know that I sometimes do have decreased alertness after certain other medicines (which is why I don’t take those on school nights either, unless I really really need to.) Anyway, the couple of times I did have it, it seemed to help. I didn’t actually remember stuff from the night time, indicating that maybe there weren’t things to remember :)

Last week when we saw Luke he also made me have an ECG because when he took my BP he noticed that my pulse was quite fast and then after I had my turn talking to him and it was mum’s turn he took my pulse again and it was still fast (except I didn’t know he was going to do that so it wasn’t white coat or anything like that). I said it was probably because I was a bit highly strung that week, what with having had the incident a couple of days before, nasty migraine the previous day and then been in the principal’s office that morning. Anyway, the ECG was normal and somewhat interesting. (Though frustrating when the girl who did the test wouldn’t give ME a print out of my squiggly line without asking Luke first. It’s MY SQUIGGLY LINE!)

koru1 Last Monday I posted something I made to the person I made it for and I was anxiously waiting, waiting to see when it arrived and if it was liked. Then on Wednesday I checked the mail only to find the parcel returned to me! It had been opened by customs, their yellow sticky tape was all over it and they left their usual brochure in there. I don’t know why they should have been doing that and leaving me information about “what you can send to Australia” since I was sending it FROM Australia, not TO Australia. So I took it back to the post office and asked WTF. They basically said they didn’t know but told me to get a clear plastic bag so that it could be resealed up and still see the address, postage, markings etc and they would send it again. So now I am waiting again for it to reach it’s destination.. Oops, I just realised that I left those customs brochures in there when we resealed it up. And it’s still lacking a personal note. See: thoughts, not so collected.

I think it is now time for me to go to bed and have some (well, half of one) of those expensive pills, since it’s a Friday night and I don’t have to worry about being awake enough to drive in the morning.

scattered

backwards

jade, , , , , , , 581 words1 Comment

This afternoon I stupidly reversed into another car as I was leaving kinder after I collected Abigail. I was about to pull away from the curb, I wasn’t going very fast, but there was a bump. The other person’s number plate got a decent dent in it from our towbar thing. Their bumper has a small dent. My car is fine, since it was only the towbar that touched the other car.

My head, not so much. Driving and cars have the potential to make me very anxious. When I do something stupid like reversing into someone, that potential is realised. Even if I am trying to park somewhere and misjudge or something and then have to back up and come at it again, and there are people waiting to go past me, I just get really flustered and that just makes it even harder to do what I am trying to do. The parking in front of Stephanie’s school is parallel parking which you have to reverse into. Yes, this is generally one of the more difficult types of parking to do. But that knowledge doesn’t make me feel better when I have misaligned myself the first time around and backed into the space only to have half the car sticking out into the road still. Trying to go back forwards and fix it doesn’t work because there are usually other cars waiting to drive past you, there are other parents standing around outside the school staring at you while they hold their idle chit-chats. If I miss it the first time I have more than once just driven straight back out and gone around the block to let the people forget about me and come back able to start fresh.

This kind of paranoia isn’t restricted to driving type issues and situations, I just have it particularly intensely in those kind of situations.

Before I learned to drive I wouldn’t have thought that I had any psychological problems with cars and driving. Maybe not.. before I learned to drive. Maybe it would be better to say before I was old enough to learn to drive. If you aren’t old enough to drive then no one expects you to. Once you are old enough to drive, everyone assumes that you have a license. Once I started trying to learn to drive I think it woke up some kind of suppressed fear in me, about making mistakes, or having an accident. Or hurting someone. One would assume that these worries stem from having been injured myself in a fatal car accident. I don’t know if there is any way to fix this problem in myself. Other than not driving, of course, which is really not a practical option.

Driving is something that normal people do and I have become aware or been made aware of how I am sub-normal in so many ways that any mistake in a driving related situation makes me feel stupid and useless and so very very not right. Not right in the way that a serial killer is not right, not not right in the way that someone who wears tea-cozies on their head is not right. I try to escape that conditioning and sometimes I’m quite good at it. Sometimes I have a bad day though and I hear the voice and see the face that shows disgust and disdain at my flaws and I can’t help but to feel those same things for myself.

backwards

hi-tec-c coleto pen

jade, , , , , , , 768 wordsLeave a comment

I have been lucky to recieve a Hi-Tec-C Coleto pen from JetPens.com in return for giving a review of the pen. I have tried it out for a couple of weeks and Daniel even tried it too and liked it so I ended up buying him one as well as getting myself an extra colour. You know those pens that were quite the rage in like the late 80s or something, that had the four colours – blue, red, black and green? This pen is like that, except you can choose the body to hold either 2 or 3 colours, and you get to choose the colours yourself so you aren’t going to end up running out of one colour and still having heaps of the others that you don’t use as much. Or if you do, you can easily put a new refill in.

Since the review is of a pen, I thought it would make sense to write it by hand. Because I am nice, I will also transcribe it for you.

coleto1 (by scherre) This is a 0.3mm blue cartridge in the Hi-Tec-C Coleto by Pilot.
It’s very clean and fine but the point is so small that I feel almost like I am scraping the paper or even cutting it with a really small blade thing. It’s definitely not ideal for lots of writing when you’re trying to be fast.
If you are going to be slow and precise, it feels much better.

I’ve also got a red in 0.4mm, It has a big difference in feeling to the 0.3, much smoother and less scratchy, though when you are writing fast it does get that a bit with the skipping.

My sample for reviewing also included a 0.5mm in yellow. This one is MUCH more comfortable to write with as the slightly wider point gives you more of a gliding feeling than the increasing scratchiness as you get finer with the 0.4 and 0.3.
All three of the stroke widths are very clean and precise, there are no drips or smudges or other random marks that you can occasionally get. And even if I rub the writing straight away, there is no smudging! That is very good.

coleto2 (by scherre) My mum was ordering more things from JetPens so I decided to get myself a 0.5 purple insert. I like this very much. I also got Daniel a two-barrel outer part and purple and black for inside, both in 0.5. He was very pleased.

The lower part of the pen has some silicony-rubbery grippy bits which are very nice – the are nice and thin so they don’t make the pen feel bulky but they do make it comfortable to hold.

It’s very easy to put in and take out the ink cartridge thingies. The only thing I don’t find to be great is the mechanism for activating one of the colours – it’s a very soft, small reaction you get as you push the part down – I think I would prefer it to be a firmer feeling with a more tactile ‘click’ feedback to let you know that you’ve done it properly.

So: Hi-Tec-C Coleto: I approve!

To round up: It’s a very nice pen and the fact that you can have multiple inks in the one pen in colours of your own choosing is unquestionably handy. I don’t think that the 0.3mm and 0.4mm are suitable for everyday heavy duty writing, though when you are doing something special and taking care to be neat and slow or if you were using them for artwork they would be fine. Hah. Fine in both senses – doing the job, and producing a very fine stroke.

One other problem I thought of is that once you get a few colours, you want to get more, and then you will have to get more bodies to put them in, and that kind of defeats the purpose of a multi-ink pen in making it an easy way to carry several pens in one! :)

I don’t think I’ll change my normal everyday pen (UniBall Eye Fine) for a Hi-Tec-C Coleto but I definitely could see myself keeping one in my bag for when I need a pen when I’m out and it is a happy addition to my desk for when I want to do something a bit more creative and colourful.

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My mum also reviewd this pen – hers is here. And I didn’t take any pictures of the actual pen because there are heaps online already – all of the bodies and cartridges have pictures on the JetPens site and there are also some at flickr.

hi-tec-c coleto pen