xans

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, etc.

Lot of busy-ness around here atm. My mum & step-dad came over from the states. Christmas Eve we had them, plus my brother, S-i-L & nephew spend the night so we could spend Christmas Day together.

I shelled out a bucketload of money on a new phone that was on sale until the end of Christmas Eve. Didn't even get free time to open and figure it out until last night. I really should get a case for it because I'd hate to drop and crack it.

Anyway, Christmas Day itself was nice. My mum was hustling me in the morning to get to the opening presents stage. The boy still has half a dozen unopened presents as he mostly stuck to emoting his "stocking" (it's more of a sack), although my brother also opened his present for the boy because it was a book about construction vehicles that made noises and kept him from stealing his cousin's noisy dino book.

My mum also offloaded some jewellery and knickknacks that weren't part of the Christmas haul. And they picked us up a small bottle of Johnny walker blue label from the duty free shop. Damn that was smooth. Between that, my husband buying Jack Daniel's and receiving a selection of beers as his Christmas work bonus, not to mention the wine and cider we picked up from the supermarket, I've had as much alcohol in the last four days as I've had all year.

The meal itself was great. We were going to pick up a pavlova from the supermarket but we couldn't find any, and I was unimpressed at the mini meringue baskets. For the price they were, I was certain I could make nicer from scratch. So I ended up trying my hand at making pavlova for the very first time. Instead of a single big one I did six smaller ones. Once they were done, my husband put a leg of lamb in to roast, plus a tray of pumpkin, kumara, carrot & potatoes. We had an old salad I was going to top up until I saw how sad it was and just made a fresh one. We had a small ham, but my brother got given a massive one as his Christmas bonus so we traded and dished some of that one up instead. Also had a fresh crust Vienna loaf from the supermarket. The pavs turned out fantastic, served up with whipped cream, blueberries and strawberries. Also had some homemade berry tarts I made. So much good food.

My brother, S-i-L & nephew went home that evening. Boxing Day (today) my husband had to work, when it would normally be his weekend. He has tomorrow off, and then next week he's getting tues-wed as a three day weekend. Around lunchtime we walked down to town with my mum & step-dad and found the Shoreline Cinema was the only cafe open, but they spotted me a coffee and cake for lunch before they caught the bus-replacing-trains to Wellington. Munchkin thought he was gonna get to wait at the station and watch trains and I ended up chatting to these ladies that had come up from Wellington and we're waiting for their ride, they gave me an ice cream bar because they had a box of them and they were going to melt.

One of the ladies worked with special needs kids so she was asking some q's about the boy and then she got embarrassed when she asked if I was pregnant with no. 2 and I was like, "no, I'm just fat." Anyway, after they left I tried to persuade the boy we needed to get a move on and it was a big tanty dragging him away from the platform.

Got home and I think the heat plus so much sweet food got to me as I felt kind of ill. Ended up dozing on the couch with a bowl nearby in case I puked. Drank water all afternoon and peed a lot, and was a bit gassy but didn't throw up. The boy was good and played in another room with his tablet until the battery died so I didn't have to exert much energy. Felt better by evening and have had a good dinner of leftovers.

I've always considered marriage to be like getting to have your best friend over for a sleepover... Every night.

Well, I've procrastinated liek whoa, but the fact of the matter is, I'm getting married in 9 days. (I become a step-mum to four adults when I do this, and 'grandmother' to nine grandchildren. We gotta come up with a hip grandma-name for me, lol. And not Nana Hana, because ew, I hate the word Nana.) I've been with Alan for five years now. Officially got engaged two years ago. Went through idea after idea of what I wanted, and found I hated the idea of stressing trying to sort out a venue, celebrant, clothes, rings, cake, etc. So anyway. Time flew by, but the date is now set.

We're getting married at a Registry on Monday the 26th of November. Having a family get together to eat & celebrate on Sunday the 25th of November. I have my dress, he has his outfit. No rings, but that's because I think I need a custom job and we both put that off for too long.

I'm not worried about that. The legal stuff is going to be done, the family is going to gather to wish us well. Those, I think, are the important bits.

Fin.

I have made many friends in the online world, who I will probably never meet. And they are just as special to me as the friends I have made in my daily life. <3<3<3<3

My step-sister is getting married at the end of April. I've been invited, hopefully I will be able to go. If I do I'll be able to see my best friend pandoras_evil_t and my Goddaughter at some point as well, haven't seen them in ages. :(

Summer is fading...

Fin.

My grandmother died back in June of 1996. We called her Grandma Kuia, which is kind of funny since Kuia is the moari word for "grandmother" but it differentiated her from Grandma McFarland. We had Granddad and Grandpa McFarland, so they were easy to diffentiate. Also, Granddad died back in 1980 long before Iain and I were born. But when he was a toddler my brother had a dream where Granddad took him trout fishing, and he told mum about it so since then he has been Granddad. My Australian cousins (mum's sis's kids) call him Koro, which is maori for grandfather.

So when she died he was 84 years old. I was scared of her, because she was old and frail and I was terrified she would have a serious fall or something happen in front of me and I would be unable to help her. I was just shy of my 11th birthday, and she had been in an old people's home for about 6 weeks when she died. She had been living with us in a granny flat, but she was so frail and mum was really exhausted, looking after us kids and working and also looking after her mum. So it had been decided Grandma Kuia would spend a little bit of time in a home, and she just sort of faded away.

I didn't cry when she died. I was relieved for her, because it meant she would no longer be frail and old. And she was with Granddad again. Mum had her cremated, and for a while the ashes were stored in a cupboard in the granny flat. Every time my brother and I walked past that cupboard we felt obligated to say hello to her. We were scared of what would happen if we didn't. Eventually mum got permission from the council in Napier, Grandma's home town, to have her ashes buried in the old cemetary behind the headstone of one of our ancestors. When Alan and I went there a couple years ago I took him to there and at first I couldn't find the headstone but eventually we did. I can't remember if I said hi to her that time.

So when Grandma Kuia died, she left some money for my cousins, brother and I. It was put into a trust for each of us that we could not access until we were 25. Not a huge amount of money, but enough to go on a nice trip, or maybe put towards a car or house or something. Well... as the youngest, I turned 25 just last July. I've been sitting on the check for the last 3 months, sort of trying to decide what to spend part of it on. And today... I spent.

First of all I bought some new shoes. My boots, sandals, and walking shoes all need replacing, but the boots can wait until winter. The sandals and walking shoes got replaced today. As did my beach feet, the new pair funnily enough match my wetsuit and kayak, lol. I got some pretty gothy black pants, Thai size XL (12). I am so very, very glad that somehow in the last year I have managed to lose a significant amount of weight. I was up to 14s and pushing it, now I am back to 12 and very comfortable with that.

However the big spend of the day was that I bought a new computer box. Remember my old one crapped out? The Display Driver stopped working. And we called in geeks-on-wheels and the guy charged us $400 and didn't fix the problem. So it was running, only kind of, in safe mode. Now I have a new comp and it's pretty and shiny and new. :)

I know mum wants me to spend part of that inheritance on a trip to the States, we shall see how that goes. I think we still need to wait a bit because Alan needs to save up some cash, too. But a trip to the States would be cool.

Fin.

Yet another story out of my cousin John recently, same old style, but not the usual subject...

Yesterday we were celebrating Thanksgiving with a family from our church. I don’t recall how the topic came up, but somehow I found myself talking about my childhood, specifically the story you’re about to read. Thinking about it was so fun I decided to write this story. No, this is not my typical story about my zany adventures at work; this is a story about being a juvenile delinquent.

So there I was…

…Sitting in my sixth grade science class listening to Mr. Brannon, my teacher, wax eloquently about the structure of atoms. This was my first foray into nuclear science, and I was fascinated. I sat transfixed as he described the way protons, neutrons, and electrons interact with each other and bond to form atoms. Right then and there I decided to be a nuclear physicist. Of course, that didn’t last once I learned my brain doesn’t wrap itself around differential equations and other types of math that doesn’t even involve numbers, but that’s not the point of the story.

It got even better when Mr. Brannon explained the process of electrolysis, where electrical current is run through water to break apart the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. He demonstrated it by running current through a beaker full of water, and we could all see the tiny gas bubbles forming on the electrodes.

I said to myself, “Self,” (that’s what I call myself), “We have an easy, cheap way of obtaining two pure, highly flammable gasses. Now what can we do with that?”

Imagine, if you will, the metaphorical light bulb over my head pulsating with sheer delight when I came up with the idea. I rushed home after school and went right into the garage, not even bothering to drop my backpack in the house. I got a five-gallon bucket, filled it with water, and brought it back into the garage. In hindsight twenty years later, I think maybe doing this in the garage wasn’t a good idea, but that’s neither here nor there.

Once I had a bucket of water, I stole some wire coat hangers from in the house and cut the straight bottoms off them. That way I had two straight wires about a foot long each. I set those aside. I dug out dad’s car battery charger and set it up next to the bucket, then put the wires into the alligator clips. I stuck the alligator clips into the water and made sure they didn’t touch – I wanted the current going through the water, not completing a circuit between the electrodes. My next step was to put a garbage bag over the bucket and tape it off with masking tape (I didn’t use the ol’ standby of duct tape because I didn’t want the bag to tear when I tore it off). Finally, I plugged in the battery charger.

Being merely twelve years old, I had the patience of a twelve year-old. I could barely contain myself waiting for the bag to fill up, which took almost a week if memory serves me. It felt like it took all year, though, and at times I wondered if I was going to be married and moved away before I had a garbage bag of 2/3 hydrogen and 1/3 oxygen.

In the meantime, however, I got a two-foot length of cannon fuse from a friend, James. You see, hobby shops at the time regularly sold cannon fuse. It wasn’t hard to come by, wasn’t controlled, and apparently no one assumed twelve year-olds buying cannon fuse were up to anything dangerous (don’t let your twelve year-olds read this, but it still holds true today. Just go to the black powder section of Sportsman’s Warehouse).

Ok, the longest week of my life (up until then) was over, and the bag was full of flammable gas. I couldn’t stop myself from giggling as I carefully pealed the masking tape off, then quickly closed the bag so as not to lose any of the precious material inside. I inserted the fuse so about twenty inches or so was sticking out the bottom, then taped the bag shut.

Essentially, I had just created a garbage bag-sized balloon that was lighter than air (due to being 2/3 hydrogen) and had a fuse for a handle. HOW AWESOME!!!

I hadn’t bothered to tell any of my friends about my little “science experiment,” for fear their sixth grade mouths would run and tell someone. I took my experiment outside by myself into the alley behind our garage, lit the fuse, and let go.

It was a beautiful thing to watch that brown garbage bag float higher and higher, anxiously awaiting the impending earth-shattering kaboom. I had planned for my own safety very well, however, by making the fuse so long – I didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it exploded. In the two minutes or so it took the fuse to burn down, the balloon floated so high I couldn’t even see it anymore. “Darn,” I said to myself, thinking it would be too far away to enjoy the benefits of my labor.

BOOOOOOMMM!!!! Came the report. I couldn’t actually see the bag anymore, but a big orange and blue ball of flame was all the evidence I needed to know where it was – er, had been. I doubt any fragments of the bag survived, and even if they did I never found them. About three seconds later, I think, I actually felt the shockwave push against my head and chest, and car alarms started going off throughout the neighborhood (those were a new thing in those days).

I was so giddy I actually started jumping up and down, laughing hysterically in a way that strangely reminds me of my two year-old son today. Every time he gets excited and starts laughing like that, I think of how grey my hair is going to be in about ten years.

DOOM ON ME!!!

Mylie Cyrus' "I Can't Wait To See You Again" is a sucky, sucky song to wake up and realise you've been dreaming about it. And are still singing it in your head. Bugger that.

Mind you, Alan having a nightmare about a tsunami where he almost gets washed away, and at least one of his boys is injured... way worse. Poor darling.

My down-on-the-knees begging got me the time off work at the end of December, yay! That gives me from Christmas Day to just after New Years up in Hamilton with my mum and step-dad. And all the rest of the family and pandoras_evil_t.

Still sleepy. Damn.

Fin.

So on Monday at work, I had this guy ask for some smokes. I go grab them, and, because he looked awfully young, asked for ID. So when I scanned the smokes at it came up with the age-check, I typed in the birthdate, and then got this big red thing saying SALE PROHIBITED. Went, "wtf, did I type it in wrong?" tried again, no, I got the date right, his 18th birthday is NEXT Monday. I point this out to him. He tries to tell me that no, they put the date wrong on the driver's license, it's meant to be the 11th of Oct, not the 10th of Nov. But no, our driver's licenses always put DDMMYY, not MMDDYY. If they got it wrong, he should have sent it back. Whatever the case, I wasn't selling him the ciggarettes. I even had the supervisor and one other operator check. Na, no sale. Come back next week, you dumbass.

Anyway, finished work on Monday and Alan says, "Guess where I got to go tonight?" And he shows me this hospital pass. "Alan Carlton, Maternity Ward" took my brain a couple of seconds... "OH! Tarns is having the babies!" Tarns, fiancee of Alan's son Chris, went into labour on Monday night. Poor darling, they weren't born until 8:00 P.M. Tuesday, 4 November. Twin girls, Danielle and Isabella. They were actually due around the 19th of November. They're staying in the neonatal ward for a wee bit as one of the babies was having some breathing problems.

So, Alan to these girls will be forever known as "Granddad". *huffs* That makes me "Grandma" at 23. :( I guess it's bearable, but thank goodness they didn't ask me to be "Nana" because I would have to beat it out of them.

Fingers crossed that work gives me leave to see my mama...

Alan has an exciting new job prospect, more about it later...

Fin.

My brother--!

( OhdeargodWHY? )

There goes Japan.

Fin.

The only thing I hate worse than a cough is cough medicine. I am, therefore, rather proud of the fact that I have a nearly empty bottle of cough medicine on the bathroom vanity. Because it means I have been taking my medicine. Swallowing, even. Not just holding it in my mouth and gagging/vomitting it back up when the taste overwhelms me. But cough medicine and lemsip do not, in fact, seem to be fighting off this cough I've picked up. It hasn't gotten worse. But neither is it getting better and pissing the bloody fuck off.

In other news, I'm going to be a grandma.

*snickers* Okay, yeah, I know Joe's already got one kid, and I found out Chris has a set of twins living in Aus that he never sees... but now Chris's girlfriend Tarns is preggers (they were trying for baby). And Alan's way of telling me was to walk up and say, "Congratulations, grandma."

Hee.

Anyway. Life is life, atm.

Fin.