rachel.blog

Category: Journal

  • A very expensive cotton bud

    I’ve been having some issues with my hair colour. Ever since I bleached it, I’ve had problems with tinges of green. Yesterday I decided to colour it red to hide the green. This worked well except that I didn’t really like the red. So today, I bleached it again and now the very top of…

  • Donate to SAFE!

    It’s the SAFE (Save Animals From Exploitation) annual appeal today and tomorrow and Freud and I volunteered to collect for two hours this morning. I put my hand up a couple of months ago for this and figured that since it was going to be on the 21st December, 2012, that the world would be over and…

  • How are you?

    This is an interesting question because it is often asked without a genuine desire to hear a truthful answer. Most people expect a “fine, thank you”, response. But if you’re feeling miserable and you answer ” fine, thanks”, then this is a lie. And why bother asking a question if you already know the answer?…

  • What to do about a sore neck?

    For the past few months, I’ve had a sore neck. The pain was just on one side of the neck (right side) and spread down into my shoulder and the upper quadrant of my back on that side only. It wasn’t debilitating, but always there and so irritating. The pain in my back and shoulder…

  • Insomnia

    It’s Halloween today and I’m a zombie. Not because I’ve got blood dripping from my mouth but because this past week I’ve had the worst insomnia I’ve ever known. Last night I slept briefly for a time between the hours of 4am and 6am. The rest of the time was spent twiddling my thumbs and…

  • The need for control

    When you don’t like where you live but there’s little you can do about it, there’s only one thing to do…and that is, colour your hair. This creates a feeling of having some control over your life, when in reality, you have none. So it was with this thought that I decided to ditch the…

  • Culture clash

    New Zealanders are moving to Australia in droves. The job market here is poor and salaries are low, so it’s a fair assumption that they’re moving to Australia in order to pay the bills. Sometimes New Zealanders move to Australia and become famous. Sometimes the Australian media dares to suggest that these “famous” Kiwis are…

  • Opshopping

    I had a great trip to the opshop this morning with a fellow opshopper here in Auckland: the very lovely Pascale. I got this gorgeous, 100% silk top by Gail Elliot – Little Joe New York – for $8. Ok, so my amateur photo doesn’t really do it justice and it needs an iron, but…

  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

    I’m currently reading a fabulous book called “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” by Oliver Sacks. It uses a case-study approach to document the lives of patients with various neurological disorders. I started reading it because one of the case studies is that of a patient called “witty, ticcy Ray” who suffers…

  • On old age and misery

    Today I looked in the mirror and saw a long black hair in my nose. I know that nose hair has an important role to play but I thought it was something that was only visible in old men? Am I turning into an old man? Something happens once you pass the age of 35:…

  • Brewery tour for $10 and Collette Dinnigan for $6

    Ben is home. Hooray! He had a very productive trip in the Black Forest region of Germany. It wasn’t all work though. On one day, he took some time off to visit a German brewery. For the paltry sum of NZ$10, he got a tour of the brewery, two cups of beer and this handsome…

  • An unimportant job?

    Someone told me this week that I should get a job. Haven’t I got a job already? Is looking after one’s children considered so worthless by society that it’s not even recognized as being a valuable occupation? Sometimes I think about looking for paid work because I want the money, not because I don’t like…

  • In possession of one iphone 4s

    I have an iphone! …and as you can see, I’m very happy about it. Now I can ditch my suddenly very old-fashioned Nokia phone. It is very timely because in upgrading Xcode (the Apple development environment), I have rendered my old ipod obsolete and it is no longer recognised. So I would not be able…

  • Fumbling my way forward

    I’ve just submitted my EruptNZ app to the app store for review. This app reads the RSS feed from Geonet New Zealand and reports back the current alert status for all of New Zealand’s volcanoes. I thought this might be useful for tourists visiting New Zealand and also for people living near or on the…

  • The perils of wearing designer fakes

    Since moving to Auckland, I have become more acquainted with my iron than I’ve ever been in my entire life (aside from the short stint I had working on a private motor yacht as an ironing lady). How can this be? For the first time in a long time, I have a burgeoning wardrobe of…

  • Zero shades of grey

    I’m not referring to the notorious book, although I have read 50 or so pages of that book and it was 50 pages of dreadful drivel. Instead, I’m referring to my hair and the increasing number of grey strands I keep finding. Do I keep them and pretend to be proud of them or should…

  • Speech therapy and some videos

    Daniel was finally assessed by a speech therapist yesterday morning and he qualifies for Government support which is great. Starting next term, he’ll have weekly sessions with her and she’s confident we should see some improvement in his speech. We have all come down with the dreaded lergy here which is very bad timing because…

  • Freud

    Freud took a turn for the worse last weekend so we took him to the vet on Monday. He has kidney disease in addition to his mitral valve disease. The vet gives him months rather than years to live. I felt a tremendous amount of grief about this this week which is sort of strange…

  • The evolving rug and conversations with Daniel

    My rug is growing. It now has some colour and I like it.  I almost wish I hadn’t used the cream-coloured sheets at all because I can see it’s not such a practical colour for a rug. Still, I can throw it in the washing machine which is the main thing. So far it consists…

  • Vomits again

    Daniel woke up in a pool of vomit this morning. He was at a loss as to how it got there and even tried blaming it on Freud but we just did not believe that Freud could have vomited on Daniel’s pajamas, on his doona and sheets and even in his hair during the night…