Miss Cellaneous

I owe an apology to Possum Princess for not saying a big thank you for the blog award you bestowed on me. I will post it and pass it on soon, I promise. It's just that I want to take my time to think about what I write and at the moment life is just getting in the way and hassling me a little bit. So this is just a quickie post because. . .

Because I was plucking my eyebrows and thinking about all of the things that we are not warned about when we are young. So I'm warning everyone under 50 now, before it's too late. I hope you are listening.

Firstly, relating to eyebrows, did you know that grey doesn't happen as a nice gradual lightening? They seem to pop out overnight. One minute they are not there and then they are. You suddenly get odd entirely grey ones in amongst the dark ones. This is so that the contrast in colour shows the grey ones up more garishly. Not only that, but from your 50th birthday onwards you suddenly find that eyebrows have developed the ability to grow to enormous lengths. I can't help wondering why they never did before that. Up until 50 they seemed to just know when to stop growing at a nice respectable length, but after that 50th birthday you wake up looking like Albert Einstein in a nightie. But maybe some of that was from the celebratory/commissoratory drinks.

The news just keeps getting worse too, because these extra long, glaringly silver, eyebrow hairs like to stick out at right angles to your face. Not all of them, but just enough to bring attention to themselves. It helps them to catch the light in a way that makes passers by dive into their handbags for their sunglasses. Now you have the mental picture in your head of a sexy, well-dressed and immaculately groomed, young-middle-aged women stepping out in public with not a hair of her brunette head out of place but, going before her like a silver lance about to strike unsuspecting strangers is a huge shining eyebrow hair. But wait there's more. . .

I hear you ask, "Why doesn't she just pluck the b... things and stop whingeing?" That is just the point. When you reach the time of life when you need to have all of your faculties sharpened, what happens? You can't see anything that's too close, too small, too far away, too pale, too dark and you definitely can't see a hair. So you get glasses. I haven't yet found a pair of glasses that allows me to see my eyebrows while trying to pluck them. I try though. I've poked myself in the eye with tweezers and I've plucked tiny pieces of skin and I've plucked huge bald patches in my eyebrows in the relentless pursuit of a single hair and I've given up and gone bushy.

But now I have a solution. I could wear my glasses and pluck someone else's eyebrows because I wouldn't be relying on a mirror and glasses wouldn't get in the way because the pluckee doesn't need to wear glasses, only the plucker does. So we need to form some eyebrow plucking mutual support groups. This could work. I pluck yours and you pluck mine.

Any volunteers?

In the future I'll share some more warnings to the under 50's. There's so very, very much they didn't tell us.

I'm not a good sport

I really think I was never any good at playing tag - you know the type - the first to get caught and then unable to catch anyone else. Nothing has changed accept now it's blog tag and I don't have to physically run anywhere.
MMcT tagged me so I'll do my best to play along, but since I've borrowed all of her blog friends to become my blog friends, I'm in the same old boat. No one left to catch. We'll see.


1.What are your current obsessions?
Ans: Reading, mostly Agatha Christie. Marketing and publicity for our business which is under a strain from the "global financial storm".

2. Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?
Ans: Yep, knickers. I never go anywhere without them. Then jeans and shorts. I'm pretty basic.

3. What's for dinner?
Ans: We just had crumbed pork steak with cole slaw, tomato, minted pineapple followed by cheese and crackers.

4. Last thing you bought?
Ans: Eggs benedict at a breakfast business meeting. Before that it was a duplo garbage truck yesterday for Lion and Dragon. I promised it to them months ago and I can't remember why.

5. What are you listening to?
Ans: The sound of my computer fan whirring in the background and teenagers gathering in the park at 10PM.

6. If you were a god/goddess who would you be?
Ans: The goddess of children so that no child would have to suffer abuse or disease or starve or die.

7. Favorite vacation spots?
Ans: Tasmania. All of it.


8. Reading right now?
Ans: Mostly my typo's in this post, but also a collection of Miss Marple short stories.

9. Four words to describe yourself;
Ans: TIRED, complex, blessed, optimistic

10. Guilty pleasure?
Ans: Staying in bed till 9am on a cool (we don't do cold in North Queensland) morning with the quilt over my head.


11. Who or what makes you laugh until you’re weak?
Ans: The funny things kids say and do. Situations and people who (unintentionally) remind me of TV sitcoms.

12. Favorite thing to do in the summer?
Ans: Go to Tasmania for a holiday. They think it's hot if it gets to 25 degrees C in Summer.


13. Planning to travel to next?
Ans: Maybe Brisbane to visit family or Tasmania in 12 months or so for a holiday.

14. Best thing you ate or drank lately?
Ans: Mr Sunshine brings me porridge and coffee in bed every morning (except on breakfast meeting mornings). It is the best meal every day.

15. When did you last get tipsy?
Ans: About 10 years ago one of my friends kept giving me a fresh wine cooler every time I finished mine and it was a very hot day and I was drinking them like cordial. I couldn't stop giggling.

16. Favorite ever film?
Ans: The same as MMcT - The Princess Bride. It's got everything except swearing.

17. Care to share some wisdom?
Ans: Smile at strangers - it's more contagious than swine flu.


18. Least favorite thing about driving in the Boondocks?
Ans: Dirt roads that fill every nook and cranny of the car with dust.

19. Least favorite part of your day?
Ans: Trying to wake myself up in the morning.

20. Favourite Christian author.
Ans: John Dickson. He's an Australian author and writes in a very down to earth Aussie way. He makes difficult subjects easy to get a grip on. I recommend If I Were God I'd End All The Pain.

Rules of the meme.
Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question . Add one question. Tag 8 people.
Now let me see...
Can I tag tomorrow. I need sleep. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

A Butt Fly nested in my hair

My dear little Dragon had one of these butterflies that fell down from the ceiling in the guest room. He was holding it up, pretending it was flying and landing on various objects while making butterfly noises (???) - a sort of squeaky chirp according to Dragon.

Eventually it "landed" on my head and Dragon giggled as he helped it create a nest of my hair and told me, "The butt fly is nesting in your hair".

Cheetah's hobby

Don't believe everything you see. His hobby isn't gardening.

That is an illusion created by the photographer. In fact, his hobby lately, appears to be hole digging. Not digging holes - plural. Just this one hole. Every time he comes over he asks if he can go and dig in the garden. The hole just keeps getting bigger.

On Mother's day Lion and Dragon joined in and helped him. Like I said in a previous post, I don't need a hole in the garden. I have nothing to plant there and no time to get out and care for the plants I have.

Many years ago a wise friend who had 3 little boys commented about her back yard that looked like a moonscape and was completely free of any foliage. It didn't even have a blade of grass. She said, "P and I asked ourselves what was more important, raising boys or raising a lawn. We decided that raising boys was more important and if excavating the backyard was what kept them active and outdoors and safe, then so be it." I might add that their front yard was beautiful.

Unfortunately, at the moment mine isn't.

It wasn't all bad

Click on image to enlarge
After the Episode of the Disappointing Icecream (see yesterday's post), Lion soon cheered up and put it behind him. First, he and Dragon chased each other all over the lovely, big, grassy area. I would have been a bit more relaxed if it wasn't for the humongous trucks on the highway about 20 meters away. You know how quickly little boy legs can cover that distance and how quickly they can forget to not go near the road, especially when they are getting excited and having fun.
Anyway we managed to keep them from getting flattened. The BIG thrill was the Mimosa pudica, a delightfully fascinating little weed that suddenly folds up its leaves when they are touched. Little boys love 'teasing' it, even big boys like Mr Sunshine love to 'tease' it.
It's actually a noxious weed with nasty, needley, little spines that go right through some soles. It's most common, common name is sensitive plant because of the leaves' sensitivity. In reality it is not sensitive enough. It is almost impossible to kill.

A thousand words

Doesn't that sad face just make you want to cry?
After all the build up about going for icecream at The Frosty Mango when the new road opened last month, Lion made a sad mistake. He chose the prettiest icecream. It looked delicious. He did try to enjoy it. He sort of paddled around in it. If I had realised a bit sooner, like before I scoffed my own tiramasu flavoured icecream (yummy), I could have swapped with him. Too late I realised that the problem was that he couldn't stand the taste.
What was really a valiant effort to eat something he didn't like was interpreted as playing with his food and he missed out completely.
Poor Lion.
Grandparents can be so thick at times.

Happy Dance

A nice sunny day, a spray bottle of water, the whole driveway to run around in and mummy and grandma keeping an eye on you to make sure you're safe. They also make an appreciative audience.




It just makes you want to do a happy dance.

How do you celebrate Mother's Day?

I hope this will NOT be a family tradition, but my grandsons celebrated Mother's Day by digging an enormous hole in my backyard just for the fun of it. I don't need a hole in my backyard.

Dragon and Little Bear weren't supposed to be joining in, in case they got accidentally hurt by the amateur gardeners' lack of workplace safety, but somehow they managed to escape to the great outdoors a few times. Aunty and Uncle Jingles tried to entice Little Bear back to relative safety (unintended pun).

The menu for the afternoon centred around the poffertjes (tiny dutch pancakes) made with Grannysaurus' new pancake maker. In the photo they are served with icecream, cream, powdered sugar and berry sauce. Dragon preferred his with camel sauce.

Maybe that is something our government could do with the millions of feral camels that roam the outback.

Ansel Adams in the making

I was feeling a bit sad that Cheetah often seemed to miss out on being posted on my blog. The main reason being that he is usually at school when I am out and about with my camera. But this weekend he stayed with us for a sleep-over on Friday night, so on Saturday after visiting the McT clan for a play, I asked him if he wanted to take some pictures of himself with my camera and remote control.

We pulled down our huge roller blind to act as a backdrop and set up the tripod and camera and, hey presto! we had our studio. I was there mainly to prevent him from tripping over the tripod in his haste to check his settings and review his photos and sending my precious camera onto the unforgiving tiles, but I did give some tuition along the way. During the studio session part of the exercise, Cheetah learned a bit about white balance, composition and depth of field. 89 photos later. . . and he was ready to hand over the remote and download the photos.























Not content with just being a child prodigy photographer, he wanted to learn and do his own photo editing as well. The results are here to be seen. Entirely his own ideas and his own work. We opened up Picasa 3 (great free photo editor from google), I gave him a few minutes to experiment and get the hang of the program and his imagination obviously took over.

I only intervened when he wanted to post a reward on the wanted poster. Paranoid Grannysaurus could just imagine some nutter taking it seriously. I still feel a bit twitchy about the "dead or alive" issue.

It's hard to believe that these creative pics are all entirely his own work at 9 years old, but I promise you they are.

I'm sure he would love to read your comments if you are as impressed with his artistic flair as I am.


This won't be the last time that I feature Cheetah's art on this blog. Not now that I know what he can do.

Where did you get that hat?

Last year, one of my church colleagues had a cancer fund-raiser. It was a girls' night out and as part of it she auctioned off some specially chosen fashion catastrophes. One of them was this hat, crocheted out of plastic bags. I kid you not.
Could I resist something like that? It's a piece of artistic and creative history. Even though I knew it wouldn't fit me I bid for it and won it, thinking that it had a sensible wide brim and one day Little Bear might get some use out of it (if nothing else was available at the time). Little Bear loved it and surprisingly, it's not a bad fit already.

What I hadn't counted on was that Dragon also loved it at first sight and I had to fend off an impending cousinly war over the hat. Believe it or not that is Dragon in the next photo. Wouldn't he have made a gorgeous girl? (Don't tell his father I said that!)

To prevent the war of the hats breaking out in the rumpus room, I quickly found another hat for Little Bear. She just likes hats and it doesn't really matter whose hat, what shape or what colour. It doesn't even matter much that you can't see when you wear it.

Lastly, Lion had to get in on the act and found a baseball cap to wear.





You just have to wonder what the competition will be like when these three become fashion conscious teenagers. I can hardly wait.

Cuddles rides again

This is an old photograph of Jingles.

Uncle Jingles is now 22, but when he was a little tike, grandad (my dad) took him to a big toy store in Sydney that sold nothing but teddy bears. In fact two floors of teddy bears. You can imagine what a 3 year old thought of that. There were teddies of every colour, shape and size. Every teddy had its own certificate of baptism. Truly!

Jingles chose the teddy he wanted - not the biggest teddy or the best dressed teddy, just the right soft, cuddly blue teddy to cuddle up to in bed. The teddy's name was on his baptism certificate already, "Cuddles". Very appropriate. So we took Cuddles home and he was always a favourite.

Eventually, Jingles grew up, got married and left Cuddles behind. By then we had Lion and Dragon and Cheetah and Little Bear often coming to visit so Cuddles never got lonely for long.

But Dragon has taken a special interest in Cuddles, whom he calls Huggles. He has even taken Cuddles/Huggles home to stay with him and Lion for a few weeks, but Cuddles belongs here and comes back to wait for Dragons next visit. Cuddles is never disappointed. Dragon always takes Cuddles for a little walk around the house and once even around the whole park. They make such a cute pair.

Cuddles is one lucky little bear.