things I saw on my travels

Yesterday afternoon Graham and I needed to go into town for some stuff. I took my camera and photographed some fun sights. I thought this bike was very lovely and the flowery shower cap keeping the seat dry added a bit of colour to a very dull, grey and rainy day.

This foxy hat made us both laugh. I think it was in the window of River Island, but I may be wrong. I was too intent on not being caught taking photos in a shopping centre to pay much attention to the name of the shop.

I'm pleased to see the bakers have all got their garish halloween cakes on display, but I don't think I'll be eating any. I'm a bit frightened of this level of food colouring.

I am in a prime grump today and have that icky, fuggy feeling that is either caused by too much sleep or not enough of it, I'm not sure which. I have a perma-scowl on and can't bring myself to do nothing or anything. Harumph. I'm quite fancying climbing back under the covers for a long afternoon nap, but I don't think that would be the most sensible thing to do in the long run. Maybe putting the heating on would help. Brrr! My plans for later are to watch the X Factor, go to bed at a reasonable hour and hopefully wake up in a better frame of mind/body tomorrow.

three little hurrahs

The view from up here - Lola worshipping at the altar of my belly.

Just a wee high-speed post today. Three good things.

1. I slept all night last night! I even stayed in bed until 10am! I feel so much better!

2. Yesterday, when I tried on my tights to see where the first incision would have to be made, I realised that they were actually OK just as they are. Seems like my bump is now robust enough to stand its ground against nylon and lycra... if that is what tights are even made of? Yippee!

3. I don't have to go back to work until Tuesday now. Hooray for a four-day weekend!

today's challenge

Denier Nylon Tights from circa 1950s, a photo by billyrosendale on Flickr.
Very cute vintage tights packaging, I thought, though I'm not sure what purpose the cat serves...

I mentioned yesterday that I had been in town looking for a dress to wear to a wedding reception tomorrow night. The pickings were slim - New Look had got rid of their entire maternity section (the only one in Glasgow's city centre with more than three items to choose from) and everywhere else seemed to have nothing but jeans and big woolly jumpers. In the end, I found something in Dorothy Perkins. Their maternity section was actually larger than expected and they had a whole five dresses to choose from. Unfortunately, none of them really grabbed me, so I thought the best thing to do was to try them all on. Four of them looked like flabby old flour sacks and one looked much nicer on than it did on the hanger, so I bought it. Looking at it on their website now, I think maybe I bought it a size too small, but c'est la vie. So after buying the dress, I went to get a pair of maternity tights, but the dress is decidedly navy and apparently maternity tights only come in black. Nooooo! So today's challenge is to convert a normal pair of navy tights from my drawer into a pair of maternity tights by inserting some sort of panel. While lying awake for 90 of last night (that's now three consecutive nights without sleep - zzzzzzzzzz) I spent my time thinking about how best to tackle this and came to the conclusion that I really don't know what I'm doing. Initially I had thought about using stretchy material for the panel, but I worry this will make the tights liable to fall down. The dress is quite short, so any falling down leaves me in peril of showing off my gusset - always a totally classy look! So now I'm thinking a non-stretchy panel in the hope that the stretch from the tights will do the job of providing flexibility and comfort, although it would be nice if the tights would grow with me over the coming months, something I'm not sure they'll do with a non-stretchy panel. Then there is the question of what shape and size to make the panel and whether to have one big panel at the front or maybe two V-shaped panels at the sides... Never having seen a pair of maternity tights out of their packaging, I am kind of clueless as to how they work. The most important factors (my design brief!) are that I should be comfortable and that I should have no unsightly bulges... apart from the baby bump, obviously. Oh, it's a challenge all right! I will let you know how it goes.

ps I'm not sure why Blogger won't let me change the size of this font. I hope you are not suffering from eye strain now. Sorry.

lucky me!

On the way back from town (where I had to find a pregnant-lady-appropriate outfit to wear to a wedding reception in two days' time and was reduced to tears by the harassment of charity workers combined with the effects of another sleepless night) something really fun happened. As I was walking along Great Western Road in the sunshine, I noticed...

... a book sitting on a table outside Roots & Fruits. I thought it belonged to someone in the shop, but a few doors on I noticed a book sitting on a table outside Felix & Oscar and then another book sitting on a table outside Cafe Alba. My suspicions aroused, I looked more closely and spotted...

... this sticker on the corner of each book and realised that all three books were free to a good home. I had a good look at them all, but ended up choosing the first one I had seen, which was...

... Smoking Ears And Screaming Teeth by Trevor Norton, a book all about people who have experimented on themselves and the consequences. I am more of a fiction reader usually, but this book sounded fun and interesting and I thought it might overcome my currently poor concentration skills with its outrageous truths.

All the books were being given away as part of the Guardian and Observer Book Swap. Apparently thousands of books are being left all over the country. I feel very lucky to have found one and it has the double bonus of giving me something (an actual thing) to blog about today too! I'm glad I happened to have my camera in my bag for once because it means I can go and add my photos to the website. Actually, I had better do that later since I need to eat before work. I hope I don't have to subtitle anything too emotional tonight - sleep deprivation is really making me weepy (even though I feel very happy with my day and life in general) and it is always embarrassing to cry in the middle of the office... as I discovered when subtitling Undercover Boss yesterday. Wish me luck!

cats + fire = lazy blogging

I'm really running out of Blogtoberfest momentum but, not being ready to admit defeat yet, I thought I would do yet another post about how nice it is to have an operational fire and cats to enjoy it with. I had a very productive morning yesterday (doing crafty stuff too functional/boring and too Christmassy to share here now) before crashing and burning and spending the rest of the day generally being exhausted/lazy. It was so rainy outside yesterday and the flat was absolutely freezing, so Poppy, Lola and I were all very glad to have the fire on for the evening. Graham was glad too since it meant he could dry out his soaking wet cycling shoes as seen behind the cats there.

It all got a bit too much for Lola in the end and she spent most of the night with her tummy on display.

Just look at her little face! Aw, I love her so much.

Sad as I know I sound, I am off to vegetate in front of some crap telly until bed time. I woke up at 3.45am this morning and did not get back to sleep, which is why it was such bad news when my work phoned me at 8.45am (just when I had decided to go back to bed for the morning) to tell me I would have to come in on my day off. It wasn't so bad once I got there and I spent most of the day subtitling watching a film again, but I am now shattered and a bit brain dead. I'm going to try to hold off from going to bed until 10pm for fear of waking up at stupid o'clock if I go to bed too early. I think the baby has had as little sleep as me (it kicked away all night and kicked me all day at work in its usually quiet time) but it is showing no signs of flagging yet. Oof! I love it when it has active days like this - it's just nice to know it's definitely there.

pick me up

A few years ago I was completely addicted to reading this magazine. My sister loved it too. We both loved it so much that I even got her a year's subscription to it for her first (paper) wedding anniversary. Eventually I had to go cold turkey on Pick Me Up because it was actually making me depressed.

So I don't buy Pick Me Up any more and my life is infinitely better for it, but I do still like to flick through certain features when I see it on the shelves of the supermarket. The tip-offs page is always my first port of call, full of useful and useless tips. I think the useless ones were probably my favourite. But look closely at the tip-offs page above. Do you see anything you recognise? My kitchen table perhaps?

Here it is! Yes, I went through a phase of actually submitting tips to Pick Me Up and had a few of them featured, which was great because a) Kerry and I found it absolutely hilarious to see my blurry photographs (I only had a disposable camera) and ridiculous tips appearing in the magazine and b) Pick Me Up sent me a cheque for £25 every time they used one. Woo hoo! I should confess now that I have never tried putting wine through the Sodastream to make "champagne"... but I do know someone who has!

One of my other most amazing tip-offs to be featured was my discovery that if you burn something to a pan so badly that it is completely black and will not come off, all you need to do is heat some tinned tomatoes in said pan and then the black marks will clean off easily. I had missed buying Pick Me Up the week that was featured (about the only issue I did miss back in those dark days) but, thanks to my sister's annual subscription, I did get to hear about it after the fact.

This issue of Pick Me Up also held something very exciting.

It's somewhere on this page and it gives a little nod to my tomatoes tip-off. Can you see it?

It's a poem by my sister all about the tip-offs page. If you're having trouble reading it, you should be able to click on the image to see a larger version. Believe it or not, every one of the tips she references in the poem was genuinely found in the pages of Pick Me Up, even the one about using sanitary towels as slippers. It gives you a good idea of why we found Pick Me Up so hilarious, I think. However, five years later and my sister is still waiting for her promised payment. Shame on you, Pick Me Up!

my "working" sunday

This is my Friday night, the end of my working week. I'm pooped, but actually had a pretty nice day considering it was a Sunday and I was at work for ten hours. I kept striking it lucky with my subtitling tasks today and landed loads of versioned repeats. If you're lucky, this can sometimes mean pretty much just watching a programme with subtitles and today I was very lucky indeed.
My morning started with Jonathan Creek...

...followed by Blackadder II...

...followed by The Illusionist. This was not the film I had expected when I saw the title sitting in the list of subtitling jobs to be done, but it was very enjoyable nonetheless. I bet you are wishing you applied for that job vacancy I told you about now, right? Yes, someone actually pays me to do this! Still glad to have the day off tomorrow though!