Hello blog, it’s been too long.  My days have been filled with teaching Beepbeep new words, going to playgroup and playing more World of Warcraft than is sensible.  I’ve also signed up for an Open University course, just a twelve week toe-in-the-water introductory thing starting in October.  I’ll need to dig out my non-parenty brain and try to work out how to learn again…

This song is on repeat all day -

On a totally unrelated note, Alex Wotherspoon’s lips are enchanting.

From Precious Metal: -

Last Year’s Girl popped my blog meme cherry and tagged me. I feel so proud.

What to do: take the book you are currently reading, turn to page 123, skip the first five sentences and quote the next three.

“He sits there drinking into oblivion and watching TV. He falls asleep there. One night he almost burned the house down – his cigarette burned a big hole in the cushion, that’s why I have it slipcovered, but I smelled something burning and came down.”

“The Women’s Room”, Marilyn French

I tag whoever reads this.

And one more for luck -

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don’t blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don’t blog about, but you’d like to hear about, and I’ll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on yaoi, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc. Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.

I feel like a pie.

Bloated, lethargic, slow and with a sweet pastry crust with an astonishingly bad headache.  This is because I have spent the last week at my parents’ house, and we all know what happens when a girl on a mega-diet visits the homestead don’t we?  She eats like a ravenous goat!  Not just that, no no (it gets better) – yesterday I baked chocolate brownies.  Chocolate brownies in the sense that it is just one huge gooey, sticky chocolate brownie and I’ve eaten far too much of it.  It sits on a plate in the kitchen under a shroud of cling film, tormenting me in what I imagine to be a seductive French accent (think Olivier Martinez and you’re almost there) until I give in and have yet another slice.  I’m paying for this by feeling like a pie.  A horrible huge chocolate-filled pie.  All is not lost though, because tomorrow BeepBeep and I return south to the big city where I will leap willingly back onto the Dax Moy Elimination Diet bandwagon, be chastised by Mr Fox for my sugary weakness and exercise within an inch of my life before seeing my lovely doctor for a weigh-in in two/three weeks.  I haven’t lost thirty-three pounds only to put it all back on, you know, no matter how alluring another slice of chocolate brownie may be.

Hair stylist are bloody rude, aren’t they?  Armed with a pair of scissors and a range of dirty looks that would make Stacey Branning (née Slater) green with envy, one took a look at my hair last weekend and asked “when was the last time you had your hair cut?  Three years ago?”.  I kid you not, I almost walked out there and then (I would have, had my hair not been soaked after the pre-cut wash at the time.  It was a very cold day after all).  After I’d wished for the ground to open and swallow me, I presented to her my magazine clipping with a nice, wispy long-at-the-front-and-short-at-the-back-but-not-like-a-boy’s style that I wanted for myself, only for it to be folded (folded!) and placed on the shelf below the mirror in front of me and the hairdresser to describe how she had “a few ideas”.  She ummed and aahed and held up lengths of hair in front of my face and tied a ponytail before finally deciding on a chin length bob.  I’ll admit the haircut is nice, but to be honest anything would have been better than the shoulder-length mess I started with.  Whilst cutting, the woman couldn’t have appeared more disinterested if she’d tried, occassionally yawning and then disappearing into the back room for ten minutes at a time, before coming back and looking a bit puzzled before continuing with the cut.  I’m not a conversationalist when I get my hair done, I prefer to sit with a magazine and let the scissor-bearer get on with it, but since there were no magazines (or at least none being offered to me that particular day, not even when I asked for one) I made up shopping lists in my head and watched the other stylists behind me through the mirror whilst the woman snipped at my locks.  It won’t take a rocket scientist to realise I wasn’t impressed, and definitely won’t be going there again.  I would mention the name of the salon, but I don’t want to end up with their other explosion-in-Topshop-clothed stylists sending me comments saying “zomg we r teh best, ur hair was lyke a BUSHPIGS btw!1!!!”. 

I have the joys of a three hour train journey with a toddler to look forward to tomorrow afternoon.  My bags are filled with snacks, juice, crayons, toys and my mobile phone is fully charged should I need to phone my mother and scream for advice.  My plan is to feed him up just before we need to catch the train, so he’s all dozy and sleepy…  He’s a sneaky one though, probably lining up caffeine pills as I type and hiding them in his toys so he can be wide awake and in full torment mode.  Alright, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly.  Toddlers are terrifying creatures, though.

Thanks to an unexpected windfall, I now no longer need to worry about not being able to afford driving lessons. This is a good thing, because after last night’s shameful effort at a turn in the road (aka a three point turn for all you seasoned drivers out there), I need all the lessons I can get. Seriously, I read up about the difference manouvers, I master the reverse park in one attempt (even remembering my observations and turning the wheel one revolution etc) but the second the turn in the road is mentioned, I freeze. In my head, I know what I need to do, I know all the steps I need to take to get from one side to the other, but there’s some part of my brain that isn’t clicking into gear (haha, see what I did there?) and I end up either overshooting the kerb or almost zooming away onto the pavement. Needless to say, I’ve pushed doing my test back – the original plan had been to do it in April, but to be honest I don’t think there’s much chance of me being ready then. Bah.

I haven’t blogged in a while – I’ve been trying to save up posts so I could write one good one, but now I’m here I’ve pretty much forgotten anything important that I had wanted to write. What is the point? My memory is like a sieve since having Beepbeep; my pockets are filled with notes and reminders, the kitchen table strewn with little leaflets, scribbles and scraps yet still even the simplest of things (such as my neighbour’s name) escapes me. I can usually get away with the traditional “oh, that’s so-and-so’s Mum/Dad”, but still there are occassions when I’m stood infront of someone with a vacant expression, mouth agape and a flock of question marks hovering above my head. Add to that the creak in my knee, the cocktail (well, two) of tablets I take each day and the fact that I cannot stay up past eleven o’clock without dozing off on the sofa and I think I should just give up now. It would be more humane to take me outside and shoot me now, put me out of my misery.

I jest, I jest…

I half-watched the Brit Awards last night after my driving nightmare, and was again utterly unimpressed by the proceedings. Honestly, if Mika duetting with Beth effing Ditto on a two year old track is the best we can muster up to open the supposedly biggest and best music show of the year, we really should give up now. Rihanna and Klaxons… *sigh* Rihanna has a face I’d never tire of punching and Klaxons are really far better in a sweaty club somewhere, so that was a bit blah. I missed Kylie, but after watching half of her “performance” on Youtube I switched off and realised I hadn’t missed much at all. I shouldn’t be surprised that the ceremony has turned into a nasty little industry backslapping event (when was it not such a thing, really?), but I suppose a little more originality wouldn’t go amiss. Ah bugger it, what do I know, I’m just a humble viewer!

In other news, my obsession with John Frusciante’s music gets deeper by the day. I intend on hunting round some record shops at the weekend to try and get some more of his albums, it has been ages (months, if not a year or so) since I bought a CD (as opposed to downloading from itunes).

Busy busy busy. I’m in one of my moods where everything needs to be done now, including this blog post. Beepbeep has a huge pile of new toys; well, not so much new as a bunch of toys he got at Christmas but had been left at his grandparents until the other day. The joy on his face as we pulled out a toy tool bench (with spinning plastic saw and colourful “nails” to hit), a Bob The Builder steering wheel, a big wooden xylophone (my ears!) as well as a heap of other multicoloured bits and bobs was brilliant. He’s spent the morning using his tool set and occasionally driving away somewhere, pretending to be Bob The Builder.

Last night, when he listened to me asking him to help to put his toys away, and every time I asked “could you pass me your ball/Iggle Piggle/trucks?” he went over to each toy and passed it to me with no fuss. He knew exactly what I was asking him to do, and whilst he might not have a lot of words yet (his new words are “brush”, “ball” and “shoes”), I know it won’t be long before he does. He’s amazing.

So, whilst he played I was busy stripping the bed, putting on washing, tidying up the cupboard/alcove/wardrobe (it’s basically a deep alcove down one wall in our room, deep enough to hang clothes and have a chest of drawers, but we removed the mirrored doors because mirrored doors are horrible -

These aren’t our doors or our room, just a helpful google image search to illustrate the point that mirrored doors = yuck). I also went into crazy mum-mode when we got up and made us all pancakes for breakfast. Sometimes I am too domesticated for my own good.

Another mum at playgroup and I made a plan yesterday to dump our kids with our partners and go off to see a local band play one night. She and her husband set up the kitchens in two of the city’s most well-known and well-loved vegan restaurants/pubs/gig venues, so she’s pretty clued up on the newer local bands and where they now all play. It has been… *counts on fingers*… almost five years since I went within a two mile radius of any local bands, so it would be both long overdue and a little intimidating to go. That is nothing to do with the bands playing and more to do with my own paranoia issues, but hey ho! I’d really like to go out though, it’d be nice to feel like me again, and not just “mummy”.

In yoga news, yesterday I managed to get my forehead to touch my knee, and for the first time since I was twelve I managed wheel pose -

I wish this was me – I’m a long way off being this slim, but still, I did this! And held it!

Does anyone know a good, relatively idiot-proof recipe for coconut ice cream?  I’m planning to cook the meal to end all meals (and no, I’m not planning on proposing, despite the leap year) for Mr Fox soon and I want to whip up some homemade contraband ice cream.  Contraband because of the big healthy eating plan we’ve been on since November – dairy of any kind is forbidden.

I did have more to say, but it is scarily serious and I won’t know anything concrete until tomorrow (hopefully).  Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.

The more I read, the more I want to learn.

Picking up on a relatively new interest of mine, Mr Fox took me out yesterday to a big out-0f-town shopping centre and bought me this.  I’ve been filling my spare time reading internet articles and blogs relating to Buddhism, but having something tangible in my hands makes me feel as if I’m being a bit more active in my learning.  Of course I’m still pretty clueless, so if anyone knows any helpful sites or other books that would be of interest, you know where my comments box is.

We’re having a good weekend, all in all.  We bought a shiny new iMac which Mr Fox has hogged!  I don’t mind really, I have my laptop so I doubt I’ll use it all that much, but it gives him the excuse to sit at a desk in the spare room and look important.  Today however he is up to his eyes in what I like to call Tax Return Hell, buried under a mountain of letters, invoices and statements.  If he doesn’t emerge from the room by the evening I’ll call in a search party.

Tomorrow it is my father’s birthday, so many happy returns to him.  Sadly I won’t seem him on the day since I live a couple of hundred miles away from my family, but he has some good mail winging it’s way to him.  My brother turns eighteen next month which scares me to death – I remember the night he was born, hell I even remember my mother telling my sister and I that she was pregnant with him!   I have no idea what I could get him other than the usual aftershave/clothes/jewellery.  I’d like to get him something a bit special since it is his eighteenth, but… I’m clueless.  I’ll check Etsy, maybe it’ll surprise me.  Then another birthday on the horizon!  This time my sister’s twenty-second in March.  Luckily she won’t be back in the country until mid-April so I have a little extra time to get her something.

The Metformin is making me so tired; once it gets to ten or eleven at night I have to drag myself up to bed before I crash out on the couch.   I’m really hoping this passes, I don’t fancy spending goodness knows how long feeling so exhausted all the time.

Despite being up to my eyes in Metformin side effects (not pleasant), this picture gave me a giggle today -

Lolcats never fail to raise a smile here.

I did some more yoga this afternoon, it was good to concentrate on something other than my grumbling stomach. It was a harder class today, the main part working up to a shoulder stand, but there was a lot of hip flexing and back-arching. We still seem to be concentrating on the lower back which is great for me; I seem to get some perverse joy in feeling all my vertibrae “pop”! Beepbeep had an exhausting time at toddler group this morning, it’s so nice to see him coming out of his shell more and more. He has two new teeth (total count – 10) and a couple of noises that sound like new words, so I’m pretty pleased.

I’ve rediscovered an old favourite – a cover, yes, but an obscure and good one.

Death Cab For Cutie – “Wait (The Secret Stars)”