angharad_gam

Two firsts for me recently.

A couple of weeks ago I got into the full version of mermaid pose for the first time.

And this morning I managed to synchronise coughing and swallowing in such a way that tea came out my nose. I can't recommend it as a method for clearing out the sinuses.

But hey, today is the first day of the year that the pollen count was forecast to drop to 'low', so I guess that's something (it's normally dropped way earlier than this, but note the unseasonable weather I mentioned a few days ago)...

Finished Dragon Age: Origins on Friday night. Still getting over the feels, and playing through the post main story add-ons. But on Saturday I went out and bought the second game.

I managed to achieve a reasonably satisfactory ending to DAO, in which both the player character and her love interest both survived and stayed together. The thing is, if you do this, then in the third game you get a 'someone has to stay behind so the rest of us can escape' choice between this particular love interest character and the main character in the second game (if LI gets a different outcome in the first game you choose between MC from game 2 and some lesser NPC). So that will be fun...

Still haven't quite gotten over this rotten cold, but last night was the first in a while that I didn't wake myself up coughing. Andy claims that this is because I have perfected the art of coughing in my sleep, but it feels like progress...

It's not been a great week. The pollen seems to have been turned up to 11 recently. I pulled a muscle in my back last Wednesday making beds. Note to self: no making beds. And my grandmother is basically dying. They moved her into palliative care yesterday (ish - the time zone issue makes timing weird), and from here it might be days or weeks.

I am having random, odd thoughts about this.

When I was 15 my great grandmother (my mother's grandmother) died. Now, twenty and a bit years later, my teenager daughter is about to lose her great grandmother. I feel like we've all moved one step up the rungs of some cosmic ladder. The next rung is going to suck big time. And the one after that is no fun at all.

I had the weirdest sense last night of experiencing these events from the future, as if I was reading the book of my life and thinking 'ah, yes, now we learn how the granny buys it'.

The condition that is finally killing my gran has prevented her from flying for about five years. Before that she was a fairly regular visitor here. Erin will remember her quite well. Liam probably hardly at all, and Ashwyn has not encountered her since he was a toddler.

Sometimes, when someone fairly lightly connected with me dies after a long lifespan I think 'well they've had a good run'. I think I am going to stop doing that. Sometimes it doesn't matter how long it has been, it just isn't long enough. It is not fricking long enough.

I have been predicting for a while now that when the six months o' crazy was up I would fall in a heap, and here I am, heaplike. It's been an eventful few weeks to round out the six months o' crazy.

Firstly, the week before ASC I had a sore breast. I thought this was some kind of hormonal thing, except it was fairly localised and getting worse. Turned out I had mastitis. I didn't know you could get that if you weren't breast feeding, but apparently you can. Although, to be fair, the doctor said it could equally as well have been cellulitis - it was just a matter of which tissue the infection was located in. Either way, I went off to Sydney feeling a bit sorry for myself and loaded up with antibiotics.

The conference venue was an old locomotive workshop, which was kind of neat, except the conference rooms were rather spread out and there were a lot of stairs. Kind of a triumph of trendiness over accessibility. I made the mistake the first day of thinking I would be okay with the stairs and spent the rest of the week hobbling around with a sore ankle, and taking the lift. The ankle is still bothering me. I took it to the doctor last week and he said 'yeah, sorry but there are no shortcuts'. Basically, tendons are poorly vascularised, mine is probably messed up with a lot of scar tissue from previous sprains, and it will be done when it's done. A little work is good for it, but take it easy, so no heels, no stairs and no dancing for a while :-(.

Mum and dad came over to visit last weekend. This was the first time they have actually seen our new house. It was great because we had them, and one of Liam's friends (okay, well technically he is Liam's only proper friend) over for a sleep over, and it was totally okay. In our old house such a situation would have meant people being slung from the ceiling for lack of space. I took a long weekend, and it felt like a very well deserved one, and it was a bit of a drag going back to work (it doesn't help when the kids are on holiday).

I managed two and a sort of one days at work last week (on one of them I forgot my laptop, so I ended up going home and working at home, insofar as that is possible when it is school holidays and the house is full of kids). But for the last few days I have been stuck in bed with an unpleasant laryngitis type lurgy. Last night I basically couldn't talk at all. Which was very frustrating when Andy turned the TV over to Clash of the Titans and I felt the need to rant about Sam Worthington's hair (or lack thereof).

Given all of this, we completely failed to make it to AVCON this weekend, and I'm trying to summon up the energy to go to a feast next weekend (is there much point if I can't dance?).

Word is insisting that I change 'X came to slowly' to 'X came too slowly'.
Which really changes the meaning quite substantially...

So I had the feast dream last night. This one was a bit different from the usual one. Normally, in the feast dream, I turn up to the hall only to discover that I've somehow neglected to bring most of the food with me, or we don't have all the proper gear, or are in some other way seriously disorganised and we have to muddle through and scrape together what dishes we can. This time round I dreamed that I myself forgot to show up - or rather that I turned up to the event but didn't remember I was actually supposed to be cooking until the food started to come out. It's funny how these things seem perfectly normal in dreams.

Anyway, I thought I would post the planned menu for Baronial Changeover (5th April - there's still time to book if you are interested). This is what we'll be eating assuming that I don't forget to turn up (or catch 'everyone crammed into a tiny room at work so they can rearrange the furniture' crud (although I think it might be too late for that :-()).

First Course
Lombard pasties (chicken and bacon)
Spinach tarts
Sallat
Urchines (little meatballs made to look like hedgehogs)
Darioles (custard tarts)
Entremets (cheese, olives, etc)


Second Course
Potage d'Ognion (your basic (and original!) French onion soup)
Brouet de Cannel (chicken, almond and cinnamon soup)
Makerouns (pasta)
Pollastri Uva Negra (Roast chicken with Black grape sauce)
Haedus in Alio (Roast lamb with rosemary and garlic and a verjuice sauce)
Cavoli ala Romanesco (Broccoli)
Rapa Armata (turnips, but cooked like potato bake)
Cariota (roast carrots)

Third course
Strawbery Gely (yes it is period!)
Trifle
Bizcocho (cinnamon/anise cookies)
Caliscioni (marzipan pastries)
Tartis in Applis.

It's a bit of a mix of times and places, but I think it will work.

I have also been thinking a lot about garb lately. It's been a while since I've made any. Or at least, it's been a while since I felt like I accomplished anything by making any. There was an attempt at a new kirtle that just didn't seem to come out right, and a new shift that I've been noodling away at off and on for ages. But I think that putting all my garb books right there on the shelf, and reminding myself about all the fabric that I have (in the course of moving) has sparked the juices. There are three things urging me to make them right now, which means if I am careful (not to push it with the RSI) and persistent I might actually get one done in the next year. I think I've decided to go with a late 15th century gown. I bought a length of yellow-orange wool a couple of years ago that is an almost perfect match for a shade you see a lot in manuscripts of the latter half of the 15th century (which is not, of course, any guarantee that people were wearing that colour). I am not very keen on Burgundian, but I have long had a yen for a style that appears briefly and almost exclusively in England for a fairly short time in the 1470s and 1480s. There's a few examples of it illustrated here (most notably the portrait of Elizabeth Woodville).

I found a variant in a drawing from a brass (evidence for these kinds of gowns comes almost exclusively from brasses) in The Mediaeval Tailor's Assistant, which does not fit tightly to the torso, but falls into full skirt folds from just under the high-waisted belt. It's probably a more transitional form from the earlier Burgundian style, but struck me as a bit more middle class as well. I am finding myself drawn a bit more to middle class outfits these days as easier to pull off in a sufficiently authentic way than noble outfits. If I can't find anything more suitable I have some brown velveteen to use for the collar and cuffs.

I started drafting a toile this weekend. Because it has been a while and I am feeling a bit rusty I wanted to go slowly before hacking into my lovely wool. I haven't quite gotten the pattern right yet, especially the collar shape. I don't know why I am drawn to these off the shoulder styles. They are not suited to someone with narrow, square shoulders and a large bust ie me. However, having had a look around at some more images it is clear there is a wider range of variation there than I thought, so hopefully I'm not quite as far off as I thought. Anyway, I took some photos and I'll take some more as I go along, so there might be a dress diary in this yet.

Sorry, I meant to be getting back to this sooner, but between hot weather (the kind of hot weather where it's too hot to do anything but scurry between air-conditioned boxes always seems to discombobulate me as much as if I actually had to be out in it) and toying with having a bit of a cold, and the new place not quite as well set up for sitting at my laptop, I couldn't really summon the energy for it.

Anyway, where were we...ah yes, we'd just gotten the keys.
So we drove over to the new house, let ourselves in and marvelled at it a bit. Then we poked around a bit, discovering the confusing range of air-conditioning and heating options (there seem to be two of the former and three or four of the latter), the very large number of picture hooks (good) and the fact that we didn't seem to have keys for all the locks (bad). Then the removalists showed up and started hauling stuff out of the truck.

I spent the next few hours doing the 'put that in there...no just dump that there for now...' thing while Andy went to get the kids from school and then he and the removalists went back to the house for round two and I actually started unpacking. The new house was a bit dusty because no one had been living in it for a while, and also there's no obligation when someone sells you a house that they do the kind of clean you need to do when you move out of a rental property and have to pass an inspection or lose your bond. So all the shelves and cupboards had to be swept out before we put anything in them.

The removalists came back about 5pm with the remainder of the stuff, and once they had gotten all that inside, it was time for them to reassemble the furniture that they had disassembled to move - principally the beds and the dining table. There were a number of problems with this as a) they could not understand how to put Andy's and my bed back together, so Andy had to help them, b) they had managed to lose a large number of the bolts from Liam's bunk bed, rendering the top bunk unsafe to use and c) they put Erin's bed (also a bunk but with a desk underneath) together the wrong way so the ladder and the guard rail were against the wall. This latter meant that Andy and I had to half disassemble it, turn it around and then reassemble it again.

We ordered pizza for tea, bathed the kids, managed to actually find all of their bed linen, and put them to bed. Then, for want of anything better to do (we couldn't find the antenna cable for the TV) and a great many boxes urging us to unpack them, Andy and I did more unpacking. Until finally about 10:30 we packed it in (ha ha) and went to bed. Unfortunately for us, we couldn't find the bedding that was on our bed just that morning, and although we managed to dig out a couple of sheets, we could only find one spare pillow.

And so we passed our first night in our new house, passing the pillow back and forth between us. Since then there's been a lot of unpacking and sorting out of various teething issues.

It turns out we were missing some keys - the real estate agent rang us up on Monday and said they'd forgotten to give us them all.

We never found the antenna cable for the TV - Andy went out and bought a new one. And then went out and bought another, because he got the wrong kind first time round. And even then we couldn't watch the telly, because the reception was terrible. 'Maybe this is why the previous owners moved out', he said. 'People don't sell their house and move to Canberra just to get better TV reception' was my response. Eventually we had to call out Mr Antenna, and he discovered that the house appeared to be wired up in a more elaborate way than most TV studios, with a large number of TV points and far more sophistimacated connections than were actually necessary. So he snipped a few of those out, and now the TV is fine.

The internet took just about as long to sort out. They would have connected us pretty much immediately on disconnecting the old place, except there was some kind of issue with the phone line to begin with (or so they said - by the time we dug the phone out of a box and plugged it in, if there was a problem it was gone). The there were no more ADSL ports left in our area. So we eventually had to get a man out (Adam from Adam) to put an antenna on our roof. Now we have wireless, and because it is more expensive we reduced our allowance from 200Gb to 100Gb. We had used 13Gb within the first 36 hours of it being put on. Stay tuned for us being shaped well before the end of the month...

We managed to get about 50% unpacked by the end of the first weekend, and maybe about 80% by the end of the first week (with no internet and no TV there was not much else to do but unpack). We got most things in order, but some things had to wait on furniture. We lost one bookshelf during the move (it was too fragile to move so we basically threw it out), and we also decided to put all the cookbooks on shelves (in the old house they were in one of those large kitchen pan drawers), so we were going to need more shelf space. Last weekend Andy did a run to IKEA and picked up some bookshelves and some deeper shelves, so we could unpack both books and board games. At this point the only thing that's still awash with boxes is our room. This is because we need some new bedroom furniture, and we can't unpack our clothes properly until we have drawers to put them in (although technically we have drawers, but I refuse to unpack things into the grungy old drawers only to have to move them again when the new furniture comes). There's also some figures and garb that has yet to be unpacked.

We have the following furniture on order: a lighted glass display case (for figures); a new bedroom suite for Andy and I; a custom gaming table.

We still need: a sofa bed or futon for the back/family room; a new bed for Liam; storage for DVDs and CDs

The new house is very awesome, and I think it will be even more awesome once we have it all set up to our satisfaction. There are a few small irritations and things that aren't quite how we hoped they would be, but for the most part this move has been pretty good.

Casualties: four fingernails (not a bad tally all told); the aforementioned bookcase; the last of our favourite set of wine glasses (it was already broken, but Andy's superglue fix was not sufficiently strong); The Big Fella (Andy's large 60cm high Alien figure) - like the wine glass he was already broken and the fix came unfixed during the move; Andy's left leg - which he somehow managed to impale on his replica Conan sword.

Right now we're gearing up for crazy birthday week, and then it will be off to Canberra for me.

Last minute packing still happening. The internet will shut off here at midnight, and we're not quite sure when it will be on at the new place (certainly not until we plug in the modem and router somewhere). I'm also pretty much out of mobile data. I am filthy right now from having squirmed right under the bed to fetch things out (the bed is up against the wall, so we can't reach under from each side).

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. I need to get up, empty the fridge and switch it off. Drinks will be going in the laundry sink in a whole heap of ice, and anything else we want to try and keep in a cooler bag in the bathtub.

The removalists will be here at 8am. The kids will be off to school at 8:30am. Then it gets a little hairy. Some time between 11am and 2pm, settlement happens. I thought settlement was some kind of automated event, like an electronic payslip, that ticks over at midnight (or 9am) on the day in question. However, it turns out what actually happens is that your conveyancer goes down to the lands and titles office, gets in a queue and performs all the transactions in person. If I had known this, I might have chosen a different day to move, because we can't actually get the keys to the house until we technically own it. Also sometime between 7am and 6pm the electrickery people will be showing up to switch the electrickery on. Until that happens there will be no air-conditioning at the new house. It will be 40C tomorrow. It's going to be interesting...

Odd things that have turned up while we were sorting through stuff and packing: a Yr 11 report (for me), my student diary from 1994 (second year uni), a letter to Andy announcing the closure of the last place that he worked, a copy of the original Civilisation game, a Lego viking fort we totally forgot we had, any number of nostalgia provoking old letters, photos and cards.

...as my body gradually becomes allergic to all the things: raw onion.
It seems that eating it now gives me a horrible stomach ache. This conclusion is, admittedly, only based on a small number of observations, but frankly I'm too busy at the moment to risk time spent lying around clutching my stomach. It's quite possibly not an allergy - I don't swell up when I'm chopping them, and many people are intolerant of onions and other members of the allium family. On the other hand, there's a chance it is related to the sulphur allergy I already have. Right now I am hoping it remains an issue with raw onions only. A life without sautéed onions and garlic is not to be contemplated.

In other news, Liam spent two nights this week with insomnia (which meant that Andy and I got to have insomnia too). The problem was exacerbated by Erin telling him that if you don't get enough sleep you can die, which only made him worried about what would happen if he didn't sleep, which lead to further sleeplessness...

On the house front all is proceeding as it should (one or two minor glitches but nothing serious), and we are all systems go for moving in on the 31st. It's still completely surreal to think that in less than two weeks we will be living in a different house. We have been here for almost nine years now, which is the longest we have lived anywhere together, and the longest I have lived anywhere ever (Andy had a rather more stable childhood than I did).

I've spent most of the last week with a really horrible head cold. Andy has also had said cold.

Ashwyn has managed to get an infection in a patch of eczema on the back of his knee. The whole back of his knee is peeling and gooey and gross, but he is now on antibiotics, so we are hoping they will help. We have to bribe him with lollies actually take the antibiotics however.

Today I did some calligraphy for what I reckon must be the first time in ten years. I discovered that a) I am badly out of practice and b) I badly need some new nibs