Notes from the side of a volcano

You can take the Husky out of Alaska ...

.. but you can't take the Husky out of this dog!

Despite what the SPCA wrote on the card on the front of his cage, the vet's best guess is that Tosh is a mix of Husky and Labrador (with goodness knows what else as well: probably some Staffy, maybe some Border Collie and some German Shepherd).

We have been laughing about this, because he really does not like the rain. Not the best idea to get a puppy in the middle of winter. When you take him outside to do his business and it is wet he looks at you as if to say "you think I am stupid?" then runs back inside to try and do it in the hallway. Even when you start singing "it's business, it's business time" in a Flight of the Conchords falsetto.

But last night we took him out to do his just-before-bed business in the lull in a storm and this is what we found:

He loved that ice!

Boy, it was freezing yesterday. An icy blast straight from Antarctica, and it was snowing in places it hasn't snowed before! (Or at least not in 50 years).

The evening TV news was all about the closed roads and snow drifts - yet still the blokes directing traffic and pulling cars out of drifts were wearing just jeans, a shirt and a jersey. Maybe a woolly hat if they were real softies. Some were in shorts.

Around 150 years since the first European immigrants arrived here, and they still haven't let go of the idea that this is some sort of balmy South Pacific paradise!

In the circumstances, seems a bit odd to be putting these in the store at Designer Digitals but here you go:

Diary of a trying-to-work-at-home mother

Monday

Hurray! Daughter-two is back at school for a week. Daughter-one already on holiday but that means she can help out with the puppy. Looking forward to a good few hours of productive work .. until I remember that I have to get daughter-two a toy to sweeten the ordeal of her allergy tests tomorrow. Try to talk daughter-one into going to the toy shop for me but she says the shop assistant might think she is buying the "Thomas the Tank Engine" toy for herself and that would be too embarrassing to bear.

Tuesday

Had cleverly made a doctor's appointment for daughter-one weeks ago knowing that I wouldn't have daughter-two in tow. But it has turned out that today is the school cross-country plus the day that she has to go to the hospital for her long-awaited anaesthetic allergy tests. Decide that cross-country in the morning followed by a rush to the hospital would be too much so she may as well stay home .. which means dragging them both to daughter-one's appointment in the morning.

Daughter-two's hospital appointment is scheduled for 2.30pm but I get a call asking me to come in at 2.00pm. Arrive flustered but feeling virtuous at 1.59 pm. Take a seat in the waiting room and wait until 3.15pm before we are called.

Because it is in the main hospital and not at Starship Children's Hospital where we usually go, there is only a basket containing one broken toy and the TV mounted on wall is showing soap operas. Daughter-two eyes with interest and asks why the women are crying. Explain it is a silly programme for grown ups. Daughter-two, who never gets to see this sort of TV, is fascinated by commercial for Ab King Pro exercise machine. Leans up against a woman of the fat and jolly sort to watch it, then giggles and apologises. Fat and jolly lady smiles and says that is OK. Daughter-two then turns to me and in piercing voice says "oh, she needs to have a go on that exercise thingy". Spend remainder of time feeling waves of animosity coming from woman who is no longer jolly. At all.

Finally get tests done. Daughter-two terrified and in tears but lies down and doesn't move while they do prick tests on her back. Bounces around small room for half an hour while we wait to see if there is any reaction to the medicines they are testing. All tests come back negative. Good news she is not allergic to morphine (although was thinking that being able to say "you would drop dead if you even tried it once" would have been a good way to make sure she didn't ever try drugs ...). Now she can finally have a general anaesthetic again, although will still be nerve-wracking after the disaster last time.

No work done all day.

Wednesday

Day gets off to very bad start when puppy poos on kitchen floor.

Instead of taking to outside bin or even putting into the rubbish bag he has just taken out of the kitchen bin, Bernard makes interesting decision to pick up poo with paper towel and drop into empty kitchen bin where it will stink out house all day and convince puppy that kitchen is, in fact, a giant toilet area. Words ensue.

Decide will have to get baby gates to keep puppy out of kitchen. Find it ironic that I never had a use for them until now despite having two children. Obviously they were much less mischievous than puppy, despite fact both crawled early and walked before first birthday.

Settle down to work then remember there is a coffee morning for the mothers from daughter-two's class. Really must go since otherwise they will realise am anti-social and will end up the one standing like a ninny alone outside the classroom at home-time with no-one to talk to. Head off in rain and spend two hours talking about dramas of getting hospital appointments for our children, who all need to be treated in Starship despite us having private medical insurance - leaving us at mercy of falling apart health system.

Come back to try and get some work done. Realise that throat is starting to hurt every time I swallow. Bernard comes home and says "I think I am coming down with something". Excellent.

Thursday

Wake up at 4am with raging sore throat. Get up to get painkillers, waking up cat who winds around legs demanding food. Feed cat. Struck by sudden stomach pains that leave me rolling on kitchen floor in agony then dashing to loo. Ponder whether it is related to sore throat, whether I am unlucky enough to succumb to two bugs simultaneously or whether I need to make appointment to see specialist again. Creep back to bed trying not to wake puppy but he starts whining so find myself at 4.30am standing in cold in garden saying "good boy, good toilet" while clutching stomach.

Take daughter-two to school then go to chemist for throat lozenges. She says I need an anti-viral gargle. Pay $15 for this, take home, try to gargle then spray all over kitchen in disgust.

TVNZ work arrives in mail. Try to work until lunchtime, when I have to jump up and run to school to collect daughter-two early so teachers can attend funeral of student who sadly died last week.

Friday

Fast losing voice as sore throat bugs migrate to cause layrengitis. But get going on a great run of work .. until I have to leave to pick up daughter-two early AGAIN, since they always break up early on the last day of term.

Sniff, sniff ... something is wrong ...

I was sitting here the other day trying to work and feeling vaguely discombobulated when I suddenly worked out what was wrong ...... I smelt of dog.

This is definitely not my role in lfe. If anyone was to smell of dog in my family it would be my sister AKA "dog rescue woman". Not that I have ever known her to smell of dog - probably because she is wise enough to adopt old dogs instead of little puppies which need constantly picking up and cuddling.

She is a useful person to have in the family though. Lots of great advice, which is why I found myself carrying the puppy's food bowl into daughter-two's bedroom the other day and saying "sweetheart, can you just pretend to eat the dog's dinner please?". (Because feeding her from his bowl before him shows that she is dominant to him). And whenever Bernard comes home he has to make a royal progress through the house patting us all on the back and saying "good dog, who's a good dog" (or in my case "who's a big b***ch" ha ha very funny). All the while the puppy is squirming at his feet desperate to be acknowledged. Because the puppy has decided that Bernard is the "alpha dog" of the pack. Show's how much he knows!

Not surprisingly, no kit this week. But I do have these going into the store at Designer Digitals:

And a layout I love:

Today is "take your dog to work day"

Isn't that lucky? Because look what's in a play pen beside my desk right now:

I don't quite know how this happened.

We were all agreed on one thing - that we were cat people, not dog people.

But then daughter-one confessed she had always wanted a dog. No, we said, not possible. But she kept up a relentless campaign, centred cunningly around how the dog would encourage her to get out and take regular exercise and how she wanted to compete in agility competitions with it. Then I started picturing a friendly dog resting at my feet while I worked, before jumping up to come on a regular midday walk forcing me to take a break from the computer.

Have you ever tried to fence a volcano? It's not easy, let me tell you. Once we worked out how to leap that hurdle (through the application of lots of $$$) it seemed inevitable we would end up with a dog.

Still, this time we really were all agreed on one thing - we wanted a grown rescue dog not a puppy. Some friendly, house-trained dog that needed a new home.

So we went out to the SPCA to look at dogs. But every one that caught our eye was either not cat-friendly (they "test" them on Maggie, the resident cat, perfectly humane as Maggie just stares them down) or had been sent back from previous rehoming attempts for snarling, or was the sort of dog you could imagine being dragged around a run-down street with a piece of old rope around its neck. (Staffy crosses - almost every single one was a Staffy cross and sue me but I wasn't prepared to pay $230 to bring home the bastard offspring of a South Auckland fighting dog. I'm funny like that).

Then the SPCA's "dog man" said, "what you need is a puppy". Apparently people like us (fools who work at home and want the dog to come on lots of walks) are just who they need to adopt puppies. So they took us over to the puppy section and handed us this naughty, fluffy little mutt who is allegedly a Border Collie/Beardie cross.

Though the first night back as we sat exhausted on the sofa and watched him demolish a toilet roll we found ourselves thinking "you know, there could be some Staffy in there......."

Puppies are clearly nature's joke on mankind. Make them cute and crazy people will live with them in their homes. Unbelievable, but really they will!

It is like living with a three month old baby - but a baby who can not only walk but can run faster than you, refuses to wear a nappy (diaper) and has fleas and very sharp teeth. And loves chewing on dried pig's ears.

Somehow I think overpopulation would no longer be a problem if human babies were like that.

But thank goodness for dried pig's ears. This blog post has been brought to you by one (because do you really think I would have been able to sit and do this uninterrupted otherwise?)

He's called Tosh by the way (MacIntosh).

Pre-Tosh I finished up this kit, which is in the store at Designer Digitals now.

packing a calculator for a funeral

We had to go to Napier (on the East Coast of the North Island) this week for the worst of reasons. Bernard's Aunt Doreen died recently while on holiday in Canada. It took a while for everything to be organised so the funeral could be held.

We were intending to fly down, but found out the fares for four of us would come to $1800! That's before you even add the $100 in taxi fares to and from the airport, and taxis or a rental car in Napier. So we ended up reluctantly on a really long road trip.

It took pretty much a whole day to get to Napier, what with the stops in Cambridge to check out my parent's new house, at Huka Falls to shiver by the side of the river and at the thermal pools outside Taupo where daughter-one had a great time on the water slides followed by an hour spent fretting about amoebic meningitis.

In Napier we had rented a house. On the flat. Which in Napier usually means that, until the big 1931 earthquake, it was the sea floor. The quake lifted a huge section of seafloor nearly 3 metres and it was then quickly built upon. I don't know about you, but I don't think my first response on being shown a block of land that had a few months earlier being jolted up out of the sea would be to say "great, sign me up and I'll build my family home on it". Guess it must have been cheap. Anyway, the house was perfect for us and daughter-two fell gratefully into bed with her entourage of toys and was asleep within minutes.

The next morning, in a cunning plan to wear her out, we went to the National Aquarium on Marine Parade. Daughters-one-and-two both loved the crocodile who, like us, arrived from Singapore a few years ago. (Unlike us, she was only 20cm long at the time and I bet she had a more comfortable journey).

The highlight was, however, not even a fish or amphibian but the kiwis.

The usual plan of events for a kiwi display goes like this:

- build a hugely expensive one-way-glass fronted enclosure and plant with native plants

- place kiwis in enclosure and gradually over a period of weeks adjust the lighting so that eventually it is dark in the enclosure (fooling the kiwis into thinking it is night and time to get up and forage for food) when it is actually day

- open the display to the public

- stand back and watch as visitor after visitor stands peering into the enclosure going "can you see them? I can't see them? Where are they? Oh, is that one over there at the back? Oh, it's only a rock. Can you see them?"

For the first time ever I saw a kiwi really close. It was foraging in the dirt right next to the glass. Then another kiwi came up and starting pecking about too. It was amazing. Then the first kiwi jumped onto the the back of the second kiwi ... and started trying to make a third kiwi. Enough to make you proud to be a New Zealander.

Bernad's mum had come along to the aquarium and met up with us there. She insisted on buying Daughter-two a soft kiwi from the gift shop, which was a big hit. We promised her she could take it with her to hold in the church. Five minutes later there was a high pitched squeaking noise. "Oh, it make a noise when you squeeze it!" said Daughter-two excitedly. Brilliant.

(She does already have a toy kiwi at home. In fact, she found it as soon as we returned home and immediately made one kiwi jump onto the back of the other kiwi. Such an observant child. Let's hope she doesn't want to take them into school for show and tell).

We were so determined not to be late we got to the church an hour before the funeral. Daughter-Two immediately latched onto the poor funeral director who was standing to attention by the hearse and began chatting away to him about the periodic table and atoms and ions. Slowly people began arriving, and as he said "welcome" she would stand beside him and pipe up with "welcome" too. Eventually we dragged her away and took her around to greet people as they arrived. Though it was somewhat nerve-wracking not knowing what she might come out with. But the worst she said was "I'm SO glad to be at this funeral" to the bereaved husband and that just raised a smile!

It was a lovely service and a very big funeral. I did need the distractions I had packed in my handbag - notably a calculator and paper and pens. When she got bored with the calculator I just wrote down sums on the paper for her to write the answers to. As you do in a funeral of course. Well, in the world of Aspergers you do!

We drove to the cemetary and after everyone had filed around and thrown the handful of dirt into the grave, Doreen's husband and sons grabbed the shovels left lying by the mound of dirt and began filling in the grave. It started off very sombre but I guess it is hard to stay that way once you are working together like that, and after a while the joking and teasing over each other's fitness began. Then the friends, and grandchildren and nephews and nieces took their turns too with the shovels. Daughter-two was watching fascinated from the sidelines until her 6'11" uncle said "come on, let's do some spadefuls together". So they grabbed a shovel (which was twice as tall as Daughter-Two) and set to work with lots of giggles and laughing. She thinks funerals are very jolly affairs now.

Next morning the uncles also had a ball showing her how to have fun on the "jumping pillow" at the campsite they were staying at (I'd never seen one of these before)

Anyway, it was lucky we went to the aquarium because it meant I had an excuse to use the new kit which is in THE STORE at Designer Digitals his week:

 

And don't forget that Ali Edwards has now joined the store as a designer, and her first templates and brushes are in store now!

Cat vs husband

Bernard often says I prefer the cat to him. He usually says this after I have allowed the cat to jump on the bed first thing in the morning when Bernard has spent the night banished because of the snoring.

Given his snore is the loudest snoring ever recorded by the Auckland Sleep Clinic is it any wonder I prefer the gentle, soothing purr of a cat?

But I started thinking about it the other day as I collected the mail from the mailbox.

I usually go down and check the mail at least twice before it actually arrives. It's a "work from home" phenomena I think. Anyway, a good excuse to stretch and take a mini-break from the computer. And sometimes there is something nice in the post - like a scrapping magazine ... or, even better, a cheque from a scrapping magazine.

On this particular day there were two things in the mailbox - a package from TVNZ with disks and scripts I needed to work on and TWO parking infringements notices for Bernard.

So there I stood - with work in one hand ... and what I would have to work to pay for in the other hand.

I mean, Hobbes the cat may occasionally have fleas and he does have a bad habit of threatening to gnaw at my feet if he is not fed on time but otherwise he doesn't rate too badly against the husband.

For one thing, it has been a long time since he racked up a parking fine.

Plus, he brings me presents. OK, this usually takes the form of a dead rat ... but he still thinks of me more frequently than the husband.

They both have a bad habit of leaving their leftovers around the place. For the husband this means coffee cups, apple cores and orange peel. For Hobbes it is mouse innards. So on balance I think husband comes out SLIGHTLY better on that front. But that's probably just because he can't fit through the cat flap with a rat.

I will be quiet for the next few days as I work on TVNZ stuff .. to pay those parking fines. Grrr.

Fortunately I had a kit finished for the store at Designer Digitals:

And how cool is this??

The wonderful Ali Edwards is joining Designer Digitals as a designer! Such fantastic news. We had a great time chatting with her the other day when the announcement was made to the team, and she is as nice and fun as she is talented. It's going to be wonderful having her there with us.

She is busy with CHA at the moment, but her first products will be in the store in a couple of weeks.

Check out Ali's blog by clicking on {A} in my blog list to the left.

I can think of few worse ways to start a day

 It was barely light and I had been woken up by daughter-two. I pushed open the living room door (kept shut to stop Hobbes the cat from waking me up by pushing open MY door at 4am) to go through to the kitchen to get a glass of water then ambled back through the living room only to stop dead as I became aware that I had just trodden on something very cold and squishy.

The thing is, it is never going to be anything good is it? I can't think of any GOOD cold and squishy things that might appear on the living room floor overnight. But could it be worse than a pathetic pile of half eaten mouse?

I think not.

The only positive thing was that I had worn socks to bed since it was such a cold night. And that after pulling them off, throwing them in the bin then rushing about with mop and bucket and Dettol for once I was well and truly awake at 7am.

And Hobbes had the cheek to jump on the bed while I was doing this and slept there till 2pm, no doubt with a satisfyingly full tummy.

The thing that worries me is I still haven't found the tail, and he never eats those. It'll probably turn up in one of Bernard's shoes or down the back of the sofa.

Now well and truly awake (and with an unusually clean floor!) I decided to actually do something with the day as it was Queen's Birthday which a long weekend here in New Zealand. (Presumably once William is King we will have "King's Birthday" which will take some getting used to).

So we drove out to Glenbrook to the vintage railway.Trainspotter and train enthusiast heaven. Lots of little boys who were clearly Thomas the Tank Engine fans - and lots of men who clearly had been just like those little boys and never grew out of the love of trains. Including one lovely guy who walked up as we sat in the sun waiting for the train to come and gravely shook each of our hands then strode off to shake hands with everyone else on the platform.

Two new things in store over at Designer Digitals (and I WOULD insert a link here only Typepad's new compose screen is not playing along and I don't have time to work it out, so if you want to go there you can find the link under "fine me on the web" to the left)!

I also used "Orange Crush" (plus "Kiwiana" paperpack) for this layout for the Saturday Scraplift at the Designer Digitals blog:

I went to walk out of my office earlier and noticed this:

High-end software and an upside down Strawberry Shortcake. Yep, definitely sums up my life right now.

But this makes me happy:

 

As promised...

the new glasses: