misskate’s blog

ARGH!!  A few weeks ago, .mac migrated to the stupidly named Mobile Me that is not supported by any browser other than Firefox and Safari, so for the second time in as many trips, I can't check my e-mail.  This could really bite.  At least, Internet is free at Singapore airport.  And they have a pool.  A POOL!!!!  And thanks to TLA, guess who knew about it in advance and packed her swimsuit!??!?

Yes, yes, there is a lot of catching up to do.  There will be a lovely long post about my fabulous weekend in LA and just general end of school year belly button gazing.  But in the mean time, I need a boarding pass and a swim. 

 

Hope all is well!!

I know that I really should have thrown the whole amount on to my credit card as I am *still* trying to get that paid off, but I didn't. 
Instead, I did exactly what the government (who in their infinite wisdom gave me some of their money despite the dire situation of the U.S. economy) hoped I would do.  I bought a dress.  And the garment bag to go with it.  I did buy my dress from Delaware where there is no sales tax, but still I bought a dress.  It's a long, formal gown.  Not that I need one or have the occasion to wear it, but if I were invited to an occasion where I would need to wear one, I would have had to say no.  Long gowns are wicked expensive here even to rent, so there's no way that I would have said yes to such an invitation without already possessing a dress.  And now I have one.  It's long, v-neck, midnight blue; very basic, conservative, goes with everything, blends right in.  Exactly what I was looking for.  So, I will have it altered when I am home so that it fits and then it will hang in my closet until I have a chance to wear it. 
And I was still able to put a chunk on the visa card, too. 

I have one right now.  A friend of mine is visiting from the U.S.  I've known her for nigh on ten years.  I haven't seen her in four, but what a good friend she is.  She's caught a lot of curveballs the past couple of years, is still standing and still manages to think of others and be a supportive and encouraging friend. 
So, what's the problem?  Houseguests leave.  They don't stay forever even if you want them to.  It's like when my parents come to visit, I start to miss them when they're still right there. 
Okay, the sun is shining and I need to eat lunch. 

I wanted to write this wonderful post about how much I love Liverpool city and what a fantastic place it is, with fascinating and good people, but for the sake of expediency, here's a photo:

I had a wonderful time visiting my friend, staying at the best hostel in the world and enjoying being in town.  My friend is a great cook, so dinner and a HUGE breakfast were fab.  I'm getting hungry thinking about it.  She's just in general one of the kindest people I have ever met.  My emotional role model. 
I finally took the ferry 'cross the Mersey.  You got to do it at least once, right.  We actually crossed the river three times.  And they don't play the song the WHOLE time.   It was lovely.
And there, that's my pathetic Liverpool post.  My favoritest city in the UK.   

Stuff.  Lots of stuff.  Here's some of the stuff I've made. 

After I painted the bedroom (sorry, no photos) and the hallway, I started in on a couple of projects I had wanted to do for a while.  When I bought the dressers and nightstands for my bedroom, they came with the standard Ikea knobs.  Ikea had some others that were wicked on sale, 2 for fifty cents that were large and flat.  I needed something to start tying the colors in the room together.  A year or so ago, I had bought all the accessories for working with polymer clay.  I even had the clay in gold, purple and magenta which turned out to be the three main colors in my bedroom.  I love it when serendipity strikes.  So, I spent a Sunday making drawer pulls for my room.  I need 26, some are swirls, there are some stripes and then the remaining six are the marbleized mix of the leftover clay.  I was surprised at how easy it was, but after I thought about it, I realized I shouldn't have been.  In the year since I bought the pasta machine, the extruders, blades, etc... I had done A LOT of reading on-line about polymer clay and how to work with it and how to bake it.  In essence, I had been preparing for this project for a long time, so of course it went off without a hitch.  Are the drawer pull covers exactly as I had hoped?  No.  It was my first project, and I'm not particularly artistic.  Crafty, yes, artistic, not so much.  But, the colors look good, and I'm really proud of myself. 

The notice board above has actually been in the works for a couple of years (I am a very slow thinker!) and I finally got around to it a month ago.  Problem being that in the year and a half between buying the ribbon and buttons for the accents, I had lost a button.  I was down to five.  And, I had brown ribbon and cream ribbon, but not enough of either was left to do the whole project in one or the other.  Not to worry.  I had brown and cream polymer clay, so I made the little pieces to cover up the intersection.  They're hard to see in the picture, but they're just blocks of stripes.  They're not uniform at all.  Some are wider, some are thicker, but I like how it turned out.

I also made curtain tiebacks for my bedroom out of beads and I need to do some for the spare room.  Eventually.  And maybe there will be a photo or two, but given my current track record, I wouldn't suggest holding your breath. 

It has been more than two months since I last opened up thesuperficial.com, perezhilton.com and thedefamer.com.  I nearly broke down and did it today, but I haven't.  I would check these sites multiple times a day, but the Brian Andreas quote has multiple meanings. "I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts, but they need constant attention & one day I decided I had better things to do."  It became not a compulsion, but something close, the way I would hit refresh, refresh, refresh. 
I would hate to have my life under a microscope as those people do, so rather than be another hit on the sitemeter, I decided that I would stop visiting.  Does this make a difference to these three sites?  God, no.  I am one of millions who visit daily.  It does make a difference to me.  I don't feel grubby and like a gossip anymore.  Of course, I do feel a touch clueless at times, but if it's the latest Britney saga, I'm okay with ignorance. 
Now if only quitting smoking were as easy.

(my catch-up posts will be out of order)

Three years ago this coming August, I went speed dating at Pickwicks.  They served free pints and jello shots.  I'm not much for jello shots, but beer (especially in pint-sized glasses) is almost always a welcome addition to an evening.  Most of the fellows were considerably younger than me; adorable, but young.  Brazil, bizarrely enough, was extremely well-represented.  The outcome of that evening was my good friend, Anna, the hot Swedish chick.  We met while we were cowering in the ladies room at half-time.  It was a tough crowd. 

Fast forward to two weeks ago.  I was stood up by a friend at Pickwicks after an already crappy Wednesday morning at work.  There was a whole snafu, but the upshot was I was sitting at Pickwicks waiting for a friend who wasn't going to show.  But, there was a sign in the Ladies room announcing Speed Dating that very next night.  Well, hey, free beer! 

So, I dragged that friend of mine with me the next night with the promise that she only had to spectate and another friend would join her not too much later.  No free beer.  :( But more men than women.  Most of whom wanted to speak French, many who took this experience way too seriously and one totally dissed my job.  (Never ever piss off someone who works with children; no matter what you do, my job is cooler and worthier than yours, so go far far away)  One guy came prepared with questions.  Maybe it's an Anglophone thing, but my approach to Speed Dating is it's a total lark.  I'm going to laugh, so you better be funny, otherwise I'm laughing AT you.  (I'm kidding, I try very hard not to be a mean person and for the most part, I am absolutely lovely, but yes, every now and then I can snark with the best)

The guy who came prepared with questions, I'm sure you're nice, but I'm not going to mark you as a YES, when you look at me, look at the empty chair across from me and immediately move away as fast as you can (this was before the whole thing had even started).  I don't care that you even worked to finagle a second date with me (there was some confusion as to how the guys were supposed to rotate through the tables), you're unkind.  

Funniest part was my second date of the evening.  Fellow sits down and I say "hey, how are you?  What have you been up to these past few years?"  Yes, it was someone from the previous turn at Speed Dating at Pickwicks.  And in fact, he was there with his same friend, who I ended up having a couple of dates with that night.  (I had three dates with another fellow, but unfortunately, I guess three was enough for him and we weren't matched up)

I was drinking beer, but the evening was sponsored by a vodka company, so I tried a vodka and diet coke.  Yeah, just not a vodka fan.  I went back to beer.  I even sat out a round.  I think there were a couple of guys I didn't have dates with.  I know it hurt my chances that I wouldn't speak French.  (The majority of the guys were Francophone)  That was not the situation where I wanted to practice my French. Besides, verbal acuity in English is one of my gifts.  In French, I sound like I haven't graduated from high school.  I may not take Speed Dating seriously, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to play to my strengths. 

Apparently, there's going to be Speed Dating at Lady Godiva. I have a friend who swears she'll sign up with me!

I really didn't mean to put the blog on hiatus. 

The past few weeks have been no busier than than the three weeks before that, or the three weeks coming up.  My parents were here for a few days and we had a lovely time with a wine-tasting and a Seder supper.  I went to Liverpool (which is where I really paused) to see my friend Christine and hang in one of the loveliest cities out there, I went speed dating, painted my hallway, went to Ikea and have continued cleaning out. 

I took photos in Liverpool that I wanted to post, but iPhoto is a right pain in the ass when you have more than 3000 photos stored on it, so I haven't quite gotten around to taking them off, so I didn't post, and then it just spiralled down from there because I really wanted to post about Liverpool. 

I have also had the worst ten days in recent memory at my job.  I'm sure I have had worse days even right here in Geneva, but since I have such a crap memory, I don't remember, so as far as I know, this is as bad as it gets.  This was capped off by a not so great visit to Cyril.  Don't get me wrong, I still adore him, but I asked for just a little trim and my hair is shorter than it's been in yonks' age.  Like barely shoulder length.  Of course, it's Cyril, so it's still a great haircut, but when I want my long hair back, this is rather a step in the opposite direction.  Much like adventures with Cyril, even bad days in Geneva really aren't that bad.  It is Geneva after all and the weather has been gorgeous. 

Oh, on the other hand, in really crappy news, that 1000 pound deposit I sent to school, yeah, they don't have a record of it. 

I will blog, hopefully, more regularly than the past few weeks, but I still need to get those photos off the camera.  I finally took that ferry cross the Mersey (three times in fact!).

I bank at the Post Office.  They offer everything I need with lower fees than the regular banks (who offer services of which I could never take advantage, and I can't maintain the insane minimum balance) and for the past five years it has worked.  I have an account with an actual bank, too, but it's a supermarket bank, so it's about a step above the post office (I am so lower middle-class in Switzerland).  I use it to save up for stuff.  I'm allowed to make twelve withdrawals a year, so I plan.  I use it to save up for my bus pass (no car in this household!), swimming pool pass and grad school.  Well, the time has finally come to send a huge wad of money to the university.  I've been saving up for it and I'm really proud of myself for having put the money aside.  It was a little difficult emotionally to go withdraw all but a little bit of the money in this account, but that was why I had been putting the money away.  So, I went to withdraw the money and oh my gosh, I got to touch a one thousand franc bill!  I had never even seen one before (do we even have a one thousand dollar bill?) and now I actually possessed it for a whopping ten minutes which was the amount of time between withdrawing it and re-depositing it at the post office.  Depositing it made me relieved to have it out of my hands.  I have friends who routinely carry around hundreds of francs in cash (Switzerland is still very cash-based), but I really just like using my little yellow card and calling it done.  I'm not great with keeping track of my money, so the more I can see details of where money was spent (like by checking my on-line account) the better off I am.  And I am just nervous in general about carrying cash, so pretty much if you hold me up, you might get about twelve francs mostly in ten and twenty centime pieces. 
I thought that I was done, once I had deposited it, but no, it turns out that there is one more step.  I'd been home for a little over an hour and I got a call.  My French isn't great; it's not bad, I get by, but the telephone is hard.  My friend, Lynn, has been out with food poisoning and we're supposed to go to a wine and tapas tonight.  Phone rings, it's a 022 number, so I picked up.  Someone says (in French) "hello, wanh wanh wanh is this madame concannon" and I swear to goodness, I thought it was Lynn.  So, I started talking and there was this pause.  And she tried again,  "wanh wanh wanh, Madame Concannon"  So, it wasn't my friend, Lynn.  It was the supermarket bank calling to verify that I had indeed withdrawn the bulk of my savings and did I still have the money.  After apologizing and explaining that I mistaken her for a friend, I explained that no, I had already re-deposited it.  Did I remember the denominations of the bills?  I told her what the configuration was and she said thank you and that was pretty much it.  I dig the security, but it was a trifle bizarre.  What if I had hung up, or not spoken French?  Oh well, what if, what if, what if.
Roehampton will soon have lots of my money.  (They wouldn't rather a first-born?)

A student pointed out yesterday that every book I read to them is a favorite.  And he's correct.  I did clarify, though, that while I have lots of favorites, each is a favorite for a different reason.  For example, Karma Wilson's Bear Snores On is my favorite rhyming hibernation story, but Little Bit of Winter  (Stewart/Riddell) is my favorite friendship hibernation story. Saving Sweetness (Stanley/Karas) is my favorite orphan story, but my favorite G. Brian Karas illustrated story is Mr. Carey's Garden (Cutler/Karas), though my favorite book written by Karas is the Windy Day. 
I can split hairs like you wouldn't believe.  There are way too many good stories out there to limit myself, so I don't.  My answer to the question of what is your favorite book is always "whatever I am currently reading".  Which right now isn't a whole lot.  Widow of the South is what I am supposed to be finishing up, followed by Empire Falls.  We'll see.  I'm off to Liverpool, so hopefully, will have plenty of reading time!