sallysetsforth

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house ...

Nope. No silence here. It's more like a madhouse - we're running around trying to get everything done in time. And then when we realise that there's no way we *can* get everything done in time, we start compromising and working out what's still possible in the time available! Why does Christmas always seem to creep up so fast?!?!

Tim and I have both been slaving away in the kitchen for much of the day. We're having Christmas Eve dinner with my family tonight, and Christmas Day lunch with Tim's family tomorrow. But there's still lots to do, because although we're only contributing part of each day's meal, we have to do it twice. I've made a vegetarian main course and the hard sauce. Tim cooked the pudding a couple of weeks ago, and today has been making hommus for tomorrow, as well as cooking for gifts.

Anyway, just dashing off this quick blog post before we head to my Mum's place. I hope that everyone has a lovely - and not too busy - Christmas Eve :)

We finally finished the Christmas shopping today. We'd already bought all of the presents for Tim's nieces and nephews, but we still had a few adults to look after. Unfortunately, even when you know exactly what you want and where to get it from, shopping at this time of year is pretty nightmarish. We had to admit to ourselves, though, that our attempts to get it over with quickly probably made it even worse! Tim and I lost each other twice in all the rushing around!

Anyway, everything is now wrapped and ready to go. I'm still working on some handmade Christmas ornaments, but that's coming along alright. We've got a fair bit of cooking ahead of us tomorrow, but then all the hard work will be over and it will be time to enjoy the good company, food, drink and music.

The music is usually Christmas carols, depending on who gets control of the stereo (me! me!). I prefer my carols to be jaunty, fun and upbeat - and preferably sung by the Muppets. My favourite Christmas album is 'A Christmas Together' by John Denver and the Muppets. Happily, someone has uploaded the Muppet version of the 12 Days of Christmas to YouTube, so that I can share the joy with you! :)



After the third or fourth repeat of 'A Christmas Together', the rest of the family usually demands that we play something else ;)

That's when the crooners come out - Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole. I do love those classic Christmas songs: Winter Wonderland, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Let It Snow, and White Christmas. I even love that little tear-jerker, The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot. *sobs*

Thinking about becoming a librarian? Perhaps you should watch this vocational guidance film from 1947 ;)



You know, apart from the emphasis on books, I must say that this film's message and content has held up pretty well over the years!

Yesterday, when we were on our way to a Christmas BBQ with friends and former colleagues, a screw on my glasses came loose. That caused one of the lenses to fall out and render my glasses useless. We were already halfway to our destination (which was a fair way from home), and I didn't have my contact lenses on me, or the small glasses repair kit that I used to carry around (I used to carry a *lot* of stuff in my handbag!). So I resigned myself to a fuzzy day ahead.

I'm shortsighted, with a prescription of approximately -5 in both eyes, as well as astigmatism in my left eye. My vision is perfect up to about a foot away from my face. Beyond that, everything is blurry.

Interestingly, Tim and I recently had a conversation about our poor sight (he's about -8). We speculated that without the invention of spectacles, evolution may very well have prevented us from ever coming into existence. Without our glasses, we're a liability - weak, disabled. And who would want to mate with a squinter ;)

So yesterday I spent the day as a squinter, rather than as a fully able-bodied person. It wasn't as bad as I thought it might be, mostly because I had Tim's help. Although sometimes he forgot (like letting me know about the baked potatoes, which I consequently missed out on - grrr!). But I couldn't see facial expressions properly, which left me at a social disadvantage. And I couldn't do normal guest-like things, like help with clearing up and the like.

Although I tried to keep my eyes relaxed, I had quite a headache at the end of the day - probably a combination of constant blurriness and the unconscious strain of trying to compensate for it. By the time we got home at the end of the day, I was feeling quite agitated about the need to quickly locate my old glasses so that I could get some control back.

I got my glasses repaired this morning, and everything's back to normal. But it was an interesting exercise in living without vision, even if only for 8 hours. And I feel so lucky that corrected vision is so easily obtainable in our society.

I love finding inspiration on the internet, and when I came across this Zakka Life tutorial for felt Christmas decorations, I knew I had to make some!

I gave these to some good friends of ours as a housewarming gift :)



If you haven't come across the term "zakka" before, I'll take a stab at describing it. Zakka is a design movement encompassing a wide variety of hand-sewn household items, usually functional. Their style is often a little bit kitsch or cute. You can view some nice examples at the Handmade Zakka Flickr Group and the project gallery from the book Zakka Sewing by Therese Laskey and Chika Mori.

I woke up this morning with a sunburn headache and a cold. As a result, I spent most of today in bed. So having done nothing today, I have nothing to blog about (except for the fact that I slept the day away!).

Unfortunately I missed out on a 1st birthday party that I'd been looking forward to attending. The 1-year-old's mum is an good friend of mine from high school who I haven't seen in ages. Hopefully we'll catch up in the new year.

I started feeling better after about 7pm, so hopefully this was just a one-day thing. It's a busy social time of year, and we have another party on tomorrow - this time a BBQ with a close-knit group of former colleagues.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I went along to the #socialmelb tweetup for a spot of creative bartering this morning. It was held at Mr Tulk Cafe in the State Library of Victoria. And it was the beginning of a very enjoyable day in and around the city for Tim and I.

After we left Mr Tulk Cafe, we did a spot of window shopping in Melbourne Central. We were hoping to finish our remaining Christmas shopping, but had no luck in that department. So we popped into a cafe for something to eat (and had a vigorous discussion about the pros and cons of homemade versus purchased presents!).

The weather was lovely, so we next caught a tram down St Kilda Road to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Tim and I had a lovely wander through the gardens, and also stretched out on one of the lawn areas to simply enjoy the view and lounge about for an hour or so :)

We walked back to the city along the Yarra River, eventually arriving at Southgate where we had some lunch and an ice cream to go with the view of the river. We did a spot of people watching too - mostly those dancing drunkenly on their Christmas party booze cruises ;)

Our evening was a bit stressful, unfortunately, when we arrived home to discover that Roxy hadn't eaten any of her food while we were away. This is extremely unusual for a cat who's on a diet! Tim and I had taken Roxy to the vet yesterday for a suspected ear infection. She acted very subdued afterwards, which caused us some concern and resulted in further phone calls to the vet. She'd seemed to pick up overnight, but the loss of appetite was very worrying. So it was off to the vet again! He couldn't really determine a cause, but it appeared that Roxy wasn't eating because of pain rather than appetite loss. So we changed her over to wet food this evening, and happily she's had a couple of good-sized meals now. Hopefully she'll be able to eat normally again once the ear infection clears up (fingers crossed!).

The other downside to the day was the discovery that I was sunburnt! At first I just looked a bit pink, but as the evening wore on it became obvious that I was quite badly burnt on the face and forearms. I've applied aloe vera gel, but wish I had remembered the sunscreen! I think all this funny weather we've been having lately made me forget that it's summer!

The day did pick up again when I realised that my University results were due back today. I checked online and discovered that I got marks that I was more than happy with for the semester  - woohoo! :)

Tim's day appears to have ended well too - he is ensconced in front of the television, flicking channels (without any protest from me) between a zombie movie and a disaster movie. And I'm more than happy to leave him to it!

Sorry about the lack of a blog post yesterday - I was stitching to a deadline and ran out of time!

I've been meaning to post here for some time about crafty stuff - crafts that I currently do and crafts that I want to learn. That blog post is still in the pipeline, but for now I'll show you my latest cross stitch project of robots mucking around in a photo booth :) (click on the photo to see a larger version on Flickr). The pattern was created by Krupp at Mr X Stitch. I loved the design as soon as I saw it!



I've previously mentioned that I have met some great people on Twitter. A couple of lovely librarian/crafter/creator types - Kim and Ruth in Melbourne came up with the idea of swapping items in their areas of expertise - a creative barter (#creativebarter on Twitter). They brought crochet and pottery into the mix, and when they put out for the call for others to join in, I volunteered my cross stitching efforts.

Now, cross stitch is not one of the trendier crafts that one can do. And a lot of cross stitch designs consist of flowers, kittens, etc. In fact, I must confess that I love cross stitching flowers myself ;). But like many crafts today, there are people out there doing some pretty cool, edgy stuff with traditional crafts like cross stitch, embroidery and crochet. And happily, Kim and Ruth were open to the idea of some modern cross stitch :)

So I became part of the #creativebarter group. We arranged mutually agreeable swaps for our wares, and I got to work on stitching the robot photo booth, which I made up as a bookmark in this instance. I've also created a cross stitch design (my first!) of a teapot, which I'll be starting work on as soon as Christmas is over. In return, Ruth made some gorgeous blue-hued pottery bowls, and Kim offered an amigurumi knight and crochet lesson (amigurumi is a Japanese term for small crocheted toys).

Our first swap took place this morning (which is why I was madly finishing my cross stitch last night!) at the weekly #socialmelb tweetup. Kim took a bunch of great photos which can be viewed as a set on her Flickr account.

This photo shows some of the wonderful items being swapped. I feel very fortunate to have been the recipient of several of these beautiful bowls, as well as the super-cute knight and coffee cup pincushion :). The other awesome crocheted goodies (such as the dalek - yes, a dalek!) were made by Kim for Ruth.



#creativebarter photo credit to haikugirlOz (on Flickr)

P.S. Another blog post is on its way shortly to make up for yesterday's lack ;)

It's hot. 39°C to be exact.

We beat the heat earlier today by getting out this morning to do some Christmas present shopping. But now we're home, the air-conditioner is on, and you can expect very little activity (from me at least) for the rest of the day.

Unfortunately, the computer is not in the same room as the air-conditioner, which is why I'm writing this quick blog entry and then skedaddling to the cooler part of the house :)

All these Advent Calendar posts, and no mention of Christmas yet!

Well, last night Tim made the Christmas pudding. The recipe we use is slightly too big for our pudding basin (as we discovered last time when it popped the lid off!), so Tim made some mini puddings as well. They cook faster than the main pudding, and turned out absolutely delicious :)



I love having a traditional Christmas dinner, although nowadays I substitute the roast with a nutloaf or something similar. But I still enjoy the roast veges and gravy with the main meal. And who doesn't love a good old-fashioned Christmas pudding with hard sauce (brandy butter), custard and ice cream. Mmm...