True romance

The three most romantic things D has ever done:

Less than a year after D & I were married I went on a sea kayaking trip without him. On the first day, as I climbed out of the kayak in the surf, I felt my wedding ring slide off my icy finger into churning water. Everyone searched for it for hours but we didn't find it. That night I rang D and he said "I'll get my ring split in half." It was the perfect solution. I lost my original ring forever but I still have a ring from our wedding which I wear every day. Except when kayaking.

Two years ago D & I were getting ready for a wedding. I was getting dressed and he was ironing his favorite shirt. Then I came out of the bedroom and he gazed at me admiringly for so long he burnt his shirt. (I have blogged this story before, here).

A few weeks ago I was feeling self-conscious about my facial hair. I told D that I don't like it because it seems such a masculine thing. He said it isn't masculine, more matriarchal. Matriarchal I can handle.

Tidy in her mind

Once upon a time K had a buddy called Bear, who was a bear, and H had a buddy called Fimble, who was a fimble. Unbeknownst to them their devious parents had a secret stash which contained doppelgängers, Backup Bear, Fimble's Friend and Fimble's Other Friend. This deception was carefully maintained for fear that a rift in the space time continuum would occur if Bear and Backup Bear, or Fimble and Fimble's Friend were to simultaneously appear.

Of course it was inevitable that this would happen. One day when we had searched high and low for Fimble, given up in despair and substituted Fimble's Friend H found Fimble. Our nanny handled the situation with aplomb and H & K were absolutely delighted. Magic! Now K has a fimble too. To avoid confusion both fimbles are called Fimble and only K can pick which is whose.

K is feeling in need of additional security at the moment. One of the ways this manifests is that every night when she goes to sleep she needs a vast collection of objects. Her fimble and bear, pink baby, cookie monster, Shirley, Bear's dad, wee pink bear, my leaving work gorilla, the toy shopping basket, Pooh, some pictures of fairies I drew for her, and the list goes on. Most nights the collection grows and it all has to be arranged just so. I fear that one day it will undergo gravitational collapse, become a black hole and suck not just toys but all our material possessions in.

[This post was inspired by this post about transitional objects.]

Something burnt and something blue

On Saturday we went to a wedding. Beforehand I was in our bedroom getting dressed and D was in the kitchen ironing his favourite shirt. I came out of the bedroom with green hair, I's magical green, purple and blue dress and a purple cape. D said "You look good. You look really good." And just stood there gazing at me admiringly. Until he realised he'd burnt his shirt.

I think I will tell this story for a long time as one of our most romantic moments.

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At the wedding I was dancing to some unfamiliar song with a friend who is maybe 10 years younger than me when he said "I suppose you remember this from when it came out?" I didn't but that was fine. Then he said "My dad was hippy, were you a hippy?" Suddenly I felt a hundred.

When I told this story to another friend who is maybe 10 years younger than me, he said "Well if you are 100 then you look really good for your age."

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Sorry for the lack of posts lately - my laptop is sick and I'm suffering from work angst.

Andy Knackstedt is my star

I have a confession to make: I am an Andy Knackstedt fan girl.

It is worse than that, one of the things that led me to set up this blog nearly a year ago was a desire to post this and see if I got other Andy Knackstedt fans commenting. In fact what I'd like someone else to set up an Andy Knackstedt fan site. I'm too embarrassed to do it myself. If there is one already please send me a link.

Now the question on some of your minds will be: who is Andy Knackstedt? He is spokesperson for Land Transport NZ and before that was spokesperson for the LTSA. He appears in the news saying sensible things like "carrying groceries or dead animals in your car does not make it a hearse" with deadpan humour and a twinkle in his eye.

The other question you have may be: why Andy Knackstedt? Well there is all those usual things - appears to be good looking, intelligent and have a sense of humour, and I don't have to deal with him as a real human being. (I'd show you a picture but google has failed me.) But why not a movie or pop star? Why spokesperson for a government department? Well, I don't know, but I think the fact he seems more like someone I'd have something in common with is appealing.

I've happily considered Andy Knackstedt to be thinking woman's crumpet for several years but occasionally reality intrudes. My problem is not that he disappoints but that he appears. You see, there may be six degrees of separation between a Maasai cattle herder and me, but it is all I can do to maintain two degrees of separation to Andy Knackstedt, any less and I feel I need to start thinking of him with a greater degree of circumspection.

Mammals like us

Three snippets about relationships with companion animals:

I used to have pet rats, Tanith and Trillian. Tanith was a small brown rat with white gloves. She was very friendly and affectionate. I taught her not to climb up my legs. She taught me to pick her up if she sat on my foot. Our training regimes dovetailed nicely and were equally effective.

I read something the other day that was saying that cats are different from other domestic animals in that they may have domesticated themselves. Looking for the source I found the story many places including this article from the NY Times, the origin was this paper in Science.

An animal psychologist once told me that dogs and people have much the same psychological problems, most of which are to do with socialising, but cats have very different ones most of which are to do with territory.

Age of innocence

When I was at university I had an acquaintance JB who was in the same physics class. For some reason I forget, I ended up with his water pistol.

At the end of year physics exam in I had arrived in good time and was laying out my pens etc when JB rushed in (with, as is happens, one arm in plaster). He started a conversation with one of the little old ladies who supervise university exams here. He appeared disorganised and distraught. She turned to the assembled multitude and said "Does anyone have a spare calculator?" I offered mine.

This is why it made complete sense to me to get up, go to the front of the exam room and remove from my bag a calculator and an object that looked like an automatic weapon.

You should have seen the look on her face.

Another brick in the wall

There is legislation before parliment at the moment usually called the 'anti-smacking' bill. Actually it repeals a part of the assault legislation which says it is OK for parents to punish children with reasonable force. (This excuse is not available to anyone else.)

I have never hit my children. I hope and intend I never will.

As an adult I have deliberately hit people, hard, twice that I recall. Once it was the bride's cousin at a wedding when he was trying to slow dance with me and I was trying to dance with a group and he wouldn't take 'go away' for an answer. The other time it was my recently ex-boyfriend when he looked too smug. In both cases I'd had a few drinks. In both cases if I'd thought before I acted I would have done something different. In both cases I could, theoretically, have been changed with assault but in the circumstances the police wouldn't have cared enough to do so. If I ever hit my children, even if the 'anti-smacking' bill has passed I am confident I will not be charged with assault whatever the law. So really it does not effect me.

It does effect our society. In ways I care about. It gives children the same protection from their parents which they currently have from other adults. This seems obviously sensible to me. I don't really understand why it doesn't seem sensible to everyone.

I can easily understand why many parents are driven by their children to the point of hitting them. What I can't understand is the parents who think it is or was a good idea rather than an unfortunate mistake. Most of the time when I send H or K into time out it is for hitting the other one. The message I am trying to teach is 'we don't hit people'. How would hitting them help?

I can think of one example of physical punishment which I consider sensible in the circumstances. The brother of someone I know was planning to join a gang, his mother gave him a black eye, she knew that the gang wouldn't accept as tough enough someone who got beaten up by his mother. Perhaps it is telling that in this story what the beating taught was the lesson that beating another person teaches most clearly - I am more physically powerful than you. This was a rare occaision when that message was actually worth emphasising.

[For more blogging about this check out from the morgue].

It takes two

I haven't been posting much lately. The hiatus has been because the two big things going on in my life for the last few weeks both needed care and confidentiality. Fortunately they are both over the difficult bit.

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We have given our new nanny two weeks notice. In her first six weeks she has had nearly ten days off. I've never had to go through the process of dismissing someone before and it is really hard to do. Hard to balance her needs, H & K's and ours. Hard to be as fair and reasonable as possible. Hard to keep perspective. Hard to trust we will find someone better.

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When I talk to people who are pregnant my standard advice is "The first few weeks with a new baby are impossible. No one copes, some of them just fake it better. If you make it through in two pieces you've succeeded."

Marriage is much easier than parenthood. It isn't impossible but sometimes it takes work. This has been one of those times. A time of "You said ..." "No, I said ...". A time when I have to put aside who is right and focus on the end game. Fortunately it's obvious it is worth it.

With silver bells

For my work Christmas party the poster says:

Remember you are encouraged to wear your most innovative, comical or beloved Christmas decoration.

Most innovative: Many moons ago I thought of decorating a tree with unwrapped tampons, like this but au naturel.

Most beloved: the Father Christmas I was given when I was about eight which still has the footprint on his face from being stood on on his first Christmas morning.

Most comical: whichever of these appeals to your sense of humour.

I don't think my workmates would cope well with the first and my Father Christmas is currently AWOL so I might be unadorned.

Oh Christmas Tree

When I was growing up we always had a real christmas tree. Normally a large branch off the neighbour's enormous pines. On Christmas Eve my father would take the ladder down to the bottom of the garden, pull it through the undergrowth to the fence, prop the ladder against the tree and climb up. The next phase of the procedings involved extensive negotiatons with the accompanying daughter or daughters, with my father eventually settling for the largest, reachable branch potruding across the fence.

When I moved out of home I bought a four foot tall, fake christmas tree and a large bag of cheap ornaments. The ornaments include a very strange set of slightly furry polystyrene amoebas wearing masks. They slightly resemble Father Christmases, angels, elves and snowmen in a spooky kind of way. They are not only slightly deformed but also made by aliens who thought that it would be appropriate to give the snowmen legs.

Figure 1. Masked "elf".

Figure 2. "Snowman" showing caudal pseudopods.

(Note low quality of photography due to alien interference with Earth technology and in no way reflecting on lazy blogger using phone rather than decent digital camera).

Last night H said to me "Do we have a christmas tree?" so I told her that we'd get it down when K and she were both in pyjamas. In think they broke the pyjama donning record.

Here is the end result:

Great things are afoot

Last Friday H fell and hurt her foot. She walked on it a little straight afterwards but then wouldn't. We gave her an ice pack and much sympathy. K decided her foot hurt too. Fortunately H still thinks crawling is an acceptable form of locamotion. Unfortunately K thought having a "hurt foot" meant she had to be carried.

Then H woke in the night yelling in staccato bursts, a sound she has never made before. I sleepily put a crepe bandage on her ankle, which seemed to help. On Saturday morning when she still wouldn't walk I took her to the after-hours doctor. He checked it out, told us it wasn't a sprain and that she should walk on it to help it get better.

H, who is stoic, obedient and has a high opinion of doctors, limped valiantly. Meanwhile K showed a remarkable memory, consistency and persistance by remembering to limp too. I didn't have the heart to tell K that walking with your legs as far apart as possible, although difficult, is not limping.

I took H to the doctor so quickly partly out of guilt. H last hurt her foot when she was one. She had been walking unsupported for only a week when she fell and landed badly. She went back to only walking clutching a hand or piece of furniture. The first week I wasn't worried. K had started walking a month earlier and she had started, stopped for a week for no apparent reason, and then got started again. By the second week I was worried but I was also totally distracted by organising us all to accompany D who was going to be in hospital in Auckland for the third week. We got home, H started walking again, D recovered much faster than expected and next time H had problems walking I got her to the doctor in less than 24 hours.

*hic*

I have hiccups. This is the *hic* third lot of hiccups I've had this evening. *hic* I wish they'd go away. They are *hic* distracting me and interfering with the *hic* clarity of my writing. But never-the-less here *hic* are my three hiccup stories:

1. I used to work in an office where one person thought I nearly always had the hiccups. This was because of the floor plan. Let me explain. There was main corridor loop and all the offices and open plan areas were fed off the corridor, except in one corner where an office had been created in the corridor. To get to my desk from the lifts, I'd turn left so as not to walk through the office in the corridor and then walk half way round the loop. To get to the kitchen from my desk I normally went back, past the lifts and around a the corridor so as not to walk through the office in the corridor. The one time I'd walk straight from my desk, through the office to the kitchen was when I had the hiccups. As a result the person whose office it was saw me a) when I had the hiccups and b) at social club drinks.
2. My grandfather had hiccups for a whole day on his honeymoon. He tried lots of different hiccup remedies but none of them worked. Eventually they just went away.
3. He probably didn't try this but it did get the authors the Ignobel prize for medicine this year.

I'll go *hic* and drink a glass of water backwards now.

*hic*

Three cats' tales

These are tales of the names of the three cats that I have grown up with.

One
My family got our first cat when I was three, my mother decided to get a cat partly because I was scared of them and my mother thought that it would make me get over it. She is also a cat person and I think life had settled down to a point where having a cat seemed like a natural thing to do. We went to the home of person from the Cats' Protection League and got a beautiful, sleek almost entirely black cat. On the way home in the cat box she said "Ow" and I said "Ow" back. My parents asked my sister(5) and I what we wanted to call the cat. I said "Ow". My sister said "Sarah", Sarah was her favourite name in the whole world just then. A little later my sister's favourite name was "Clare". The cat's name became Ow Sarah Clare. Over time my sister tried hard to give our cat the best possible name. Ow Sarah Clare Puffbang Lawnmower Shining-eyes Black-fur Ow was, as a result, called "Puss". I remember her best for her love of eating spiders, dust baths and being stroked, and her dislike of being picked up.

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Two
When I was eight we decided to get a kitten (as our family cat was no more). Someone we knew vaguely had a queen with four kittens. One black and white, one tabby, one tortie and one ginger. My parents held an STV election for which kitten we got. The ginger kitten had come second in everyone's ballots and won. It was decided that this cat would have one name. Our English cousins, who we all admired, had a cat called Ginger. Our kitten became Gingy. I seem to remember this being decided partly to avoid confusion with Ginger. The fact that Ginger and Gingy lived on different sides of the world and would never meet not withstanding.

Gingy was a staunch, feisty cat. I have many stories of his exploits: skateboarding, ignoring buses and chasing the neighbours' dog for starters. He was the cat of my teens. The cat whose fur I wept into when I thought no one understood me. The cat who stared so balefully at one of my boyfriends when we were canoodling on the couch that he asked if I could put him outside. I'm sure Gingy would have asked me to do the same to the boyfriend if he'd had the words.

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Three
My best beloved, D, and I are both cat people. When I no longer had rats (I'll tell you about them another day) we started talking about having a cat. Finally one day I rang D from work. He was getting really stressed out over his master's thesis. I decided if I couldn't be there as a stress counsellor during the day we needed feline help. So I got him to pick me up from work that afternoon, over protests he was too busy and too stressed, and we went out to the SPCA.

I had criteria - no long-hairs, no Siamese, no white cats and no kittens. D had criteria - a friendly lap cat. I also wanted a cat who would be quite different from Gingy. We looked at big cats and small cats, old cats and young cats, cats with loving families moving overseas and abandoned semi-strays. We spent a long time in the cat room and none of them seemed quite right. Eventually we sat down in the middle of the cat room and talked about whether we could in good conscience leave all these homeless but not quite right cats and come back another day. That's when the cat made his move. He jumped up on D's lap and settled down possessively. He was whiter, furrier and more like Gingy than I'd planned but he was clearly a friendly lap cat and he'd picked us.

On the long drive home, over the extremely loud wailing from the cat box we discussed a name. There had been a possibility of adopting a cat called Hamish that had fallen through and I said how I liked people names. D said if I didn't decided quickly enough we'd have to call him Ploppy. I mused how a dog I knew had his owners' son's middle name (they liked the name and didn't think they'd got to use it enough). I suggested Andrew (D's middle name). D like the Andy cat/Andy Capp parallel. We named him Mr Andrew P. Catt and call him Andy.

Now I should say here that I know the cartoon character Andy Capp is a misogynist, alcoholic wife-beater and perhaps our choice was in poor taste. In my defense the Andy Capp strip used to be in the Evening Post and so I became inured to it in my youth and also that Andy Capp's behaviour is much more acceptable in a cat than a person.

Andy likes to be top cat in the neighbourhood. He is big, pushy and fierce. When he is top cat, he is also confident, relaxed and smug. When his position is under threat he is nervy, edgy and needs reassurance. Once he disappeared for three days after a terrible storm. When I dropped flyers into the neighbours' mailboxes to ask them to check if he'd been locked in anywhere everyone knew him. He showed up half an hour later, very hungry.

Not the Edinburgh Tattoo

My friend I suggested I write about "What you'd tell your daughter if one of them wanted to get a tattoo?"

I'm not anti tattoos per se but I've never got one because I've never been confident that I'd still want the same thing years later. So I think I'd want to set an age limit, like 18. If I thought I could get away with it I'd like a rule that you have to write down what you want 5 years before you get the tattoo and can only get it done if you still want the same thing.

Maybe I should be evil and ask H & K when they are 13 what they'd get if they could have a tattoo, write it down and bring it out when they're 18 to scare them :-)

My grandmother had her ears pierced when she was 80. Maybe I'll get a tattoo when I'm 80. I wouldn't have to live with it for so long :-)

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When I went on my OE (short for overseas experience - Kiwi for travelling and or working overseas typically as a young adult). I realised that facial tattoos are more common in New Zealand than anywhere else I went (US, Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Samoa).

I used to go out with a largish guy with dark curly hair who wore black jeans and a black fisherman's knit jersey. Once I saw him in the middle of town, I ran up behind him, grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him round. It wasn't him. It was someone with full facial, gang related tattoos. I said "sorry - thought you were someone else" in a cheery voice and ran off again. The guy looked stunned.

I think being accosted in an overly friendly manner by small brightly coloured people was outside his normal experience.

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The Tattoo Museum in Wellington is closing soon. I've been meaning to go to it ever since it opened. If you're in Wellington and you're in the same boat you should go now.

Memories of this

I realised somewhat after I'd posted this with a link to Orisinal that I'd already done that before, here. I'd blame this failure of memory on motherhood except... well... you see... um... let me tell you the story of an embarassing incident that happened to me long ago.

Once upon a time I had a very nice boyfriend and after we had gone out for many moons I broke up with him. I tried to do it not too unpleasantly. Afterwards though something festered in my angsty teenage mind. I felt I hadn't told him the "real" reason I'd dumped him. I agonised about it. I wrote letters and ripped them up. I tormented myself about it on and off for a long time. Eventually I didn't rip up the letter and I sent it to him. It started something like "I'm sorry I never told you this but...."

And when I saw him a short time later and I asked him if he'd got the letter do you know what he said?

He said I'd told him already - I'd sent a letter before.

Posting the same link twice may show a certain lack of recollection and originality but at least it does not have the same cringeworthiness as forgetting you have bared your Soul (with a capital S for extra melodrama).