The Doors (but not in a sexy Jim Morrison sorta way)

Posted on | January 26, 2012 | No Comments

Ms Fix-It's cool tool earrings, just to prove that I am not, definitely not, distractible or easily bored or any such thing

Farewell Bohemia

Posted on | January 22, 2012 | No Comments

I’m in mourning. My favorite shop in Tucson has closed. With the news came emails, Facebook posts, calls and conversations with friends and fellow lovers. Where would we get fabbo gifts now? Who would support local artists? And did we shop there enough?

We all agreed that we didn’t, although we tried our best. Bohemia was not a shop but a gallery of local artists. The stuff was wild, intriguing, one-of-a-kind, inimitable. It was my first choice for girlfriend presents, and it’s where I went just before Christmas to buy the coolest mirror – its frame fashioned in twirling metal like the curls of someone’s hair, hence its name “Wiggy Mirror” – for my friend C.

Bohemia and its owner Tana supported these artists vehemently. She put on shows and parties, got local bands to play, handed out sangria.

I was jazzed when the store moved from Tucson’s Lost Barrio to near me. I could walk there. I could even take The Mutt (Tana loved dogs).

Her parting email to her shoppers was gracious and so positive it made you want to cry. She thanked us for our support – no bitterness at all about the lack of it, which inevitably led to the store’s demise – and urged us to continue to shop local. I will Tana. Thank your for nine fabulous years.

And farewell to Gabrielle Giffords too. The announcement that she is standing down from Congress isn’t surprising (if anything it came way too late). But it’s heartbreaking all the same. In seconds, Jared Loughner changed the lives of many and tugged at the hearts of many more. The ripple effect of that day in a place like Tucson, where there aren’t six degrees of separation but about two, is wide. But then that’s why I love living here. It may be a city of a million-plus people but in terms of community and closeness and support it’s not unlike the 8,000-inhabitant town in Scotland I come from.

21st Century Tween

Posted on | January 16, 2012 | 1 Comment

Thou shalt not wear flats with socks, says Sweetpea. So that’s me told then. She’s also in a huff because I bought some Converse sneakers. She says I’m copying her.

Forty-four is a strange age. I’m known for dressing a wee bit younger then I am (graphic T-shirts on the weekend, par example, or pigtails when my hair is long enough) but after so many viewings of What Not To Wear I feel I need to grow up a little. And then there’s the issue of my 10-year-old daughter now giving me fashion advice. (I mean, really? She who wears neon green leggings and ra-ra skirts as tops?) One minute she tells me the dress I’m wearing “makes you look like a Granny… like, no offence but it does”. The next she’s scowling as her friends declare my Converses to be cool. Can’t win.

Sweetpea and her friend E want to launch a website in which they will dispense tween fash advice and diss celebrities with silly outfits. Which I thought was all well and good until they talked about modeling some of the clothes themselves. I said no. I do not want my child on the web or on YouTube. E said her parents were “cool” with it (“I just texted them to tell them, and they’re cool”) but I am not. Yet again, the uncool mother.

Sweetpea wants a Facebook page and a blog and now a website, and she thinks I’m stuffy because I won’t let her tape herself in one of her own plays and put it on YouTube like some of her pals do. (Parents of these pals… what are you thinking?)

And so now I am just living in hope that the website fails before it starts, that they get bored of it and move onto something else. (What though? Starting their own TV network, for God’s sake? iCarly is a great show but I blame it for all of this fanciful celebrity-wannabe-ism.)

It would appear that not much impresses our dear tweens of the 21st century, because they really do have everything at their fingertips, and stardom is but a YouTube appearance away. Sweetpea tells me that one of her actor friends is going to L.A. very soon to discuss a show with Nickleodeon. She was ‘noticed’ by some exec or other. They only do the tiniest bit of eyelid-batting when they talk about it, her and her friends, like it’s just par for the course, and inevitable for all of them. She, Sweetpea, is so confident that she will head straight to super-stardom and a huge mansion with 45 rooms that even I’m starting to believe it. (I knew there was a reason we hadn’t started a college fund yet.)

We are heading to New York in two months, my gift to her as I have been promising her a trip to see some Broadway shows for some time now. When I booked the flights I was beside myself, couldn’t wait to pick her up from school and tell her. Her? She shrugged at the news and said, “Cool.” What excites tweens nowadays? Apparently, very little.

Meantime, she has declared that the trip will be v. busy as not only does she have to pack in these Broadway shows, but, to quote: “I have to shop till I drop and get discovered and plus E wants me to have some meetings with editors and try and sell them on the magazine idea.”

Oh good grief. There’s nothing to say to that without really sounding (and looking) like a granny.

Farewell to some ugly stuff

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | 1 Comment

Thank you all for your comments on Thing 1′s demise. There’s nothing like pets to stir up strong emotions in people.

I still miss him. I look for him every time I go into our bedroom, and I miss the way (annoying at the time but sweet now I look back) that he drooled whenever he purred.

We have gone from three pets to one in less than a year, so it’s a relatively quiet household.

Munchkin is more than making up with it, however, with his growing vocabulary of battlefield sounds: guns, explosives, and the yelps of the wounded. And I am bemused to witness that the same phonetic array – exactly the same – is shown by each of his male friends too.

Munchkin is now five. (I blinked and I’m sure I missed a few of these last years.) His desire to constantly be in battle and constantly be leaping either from or towards a ship or spacecraft or fantasy island has led to some discussions  in our house lately. We know we need to replace our sofas, and it’s partly Munchkin’s fault. He found a thinned-out area of leather on one of them, worked at it until it ripped, then worked at that rip until it got bigger and a load of stuffing came out. The other sofa, meanwhile, with four back cushions and a few more scatter ones, is lucky to actually hold its cushions for more than five seconds in a day. They are usually to be found on the floor, either because Munchkin wants more space on the sofa to jump, or because he is constructing a bridge to the coffee table, or a series of stepping stones on a make-believe river that is the rug.

And so after discussing our ideal, perfect sofa, we agreed that that was a daft idea, that with a kid so bouncy he makes Tigger look like a sloth, we needed something mid-priced: hard-wearing but something we’ll want to throw away in ten years when Munchkin has (please God) stopped bouncing.

.

I have to wait a whole eight weeks for it to arrive though, this ‘Sinclair’ sofa from La-Z-Boy.

Meanwhile, take a look at these, the latest things checked off of my DIY to-do list thanks to the wonderful, unmatchable, invincible Ms Fix-It.

Last week we turned this:

into this:    

Yeh, ugly ceiling fan in our bedroom that we have lived with for six whole years got replaced with the famed one that travelled from here to northern Arizona and back via Phoenix. Remember that story?

We did the same thing in Munchkin’s bedroom too. I say ‘we’ but really all I did was put the blades together and unscrew a few screws in the old fan. It was Ms Fix-It work (for which read ‘my brain doesn’t stretch that far’.) Ceiling fans are a complicated business (for instructions see the instructions booklet, definitely not me). Electricity is. This fact was reinforce to me today when an electrician came to do a few jobs in the house. He blinded me with science. I think it was deliberate. There was a slight smirk on his face when he uttered phrases like:

“We’ll have to convert to a GFI on that one.”

and: “We’ll have to run conduit. Is that OK”

Hnnnnh? Blowed if I know, mate. Just do whatever the hell you have to do. Make it work. Don’t blow the house up. And no, you can’t take the dog as payment. (Seriously, he did offer to, so sold was he on The Mutt.)

And so, some more things checked off my list, like a plug whose wiring was set too far in for an outlet cover to go on. It finally got it cover. Yahoo!

The major job today, though, was removing this old cupboard in my now office.

In typical bitsy fashion I had repainted the whole room several years ago, painted over some wood panelling along one wall, and neglected to remove this cupboard, still with its 1950s tongue-and-groove wood. Nice, hardy workmanship (Ms Fix-It and I found out during demo) but godawful to look at, and very darkening.

Here is the space a couple of hours later:

Yeh, of course not perfect. Still have to paint the walls and get rid of that big bit of black cable that our TV company so kindly put there. But I feel like the room is already a mile wider. Ah, you say, but what about the contents of the cupboard? It held a multitude of light bulbs, a hoover and a mop and bucket. There had to be an upside to the death of our cat, and it is this: the removal of his food, treats etc made space in a kitchen cupboard (for the bulbs), and the removal of his litter tray from the hall cupboard turned it back into a storage closet.

Still would rather have my cat back though. :/

Happy New Year…. sort of

Posted on | January 2, 2012 | 1 Comment

On New Year’s Day 2012 I found myself doing two unexpected things. The first was pushing a stolen supermarket trolley up and down a street in Phoenix. The second was driving a 10-foot truck down the Highway to Tucson.

You may surmise that Hubby and I suddenly found ourselves homeless, and that I was recruited as the runaway driver in a theft of some very heavy goods.

What really happened takes a bit of backtracking. There were these ceiling fans, you see. I ordered them new on LampsPlus.com for Munchkin’s bedroom and ours as well. Stainless steel finish, 42″ blade: cute, and just perfect for smallish rooms and 8-foot ceilings. Then along came Hubby and argued with me. He tends to do that. Likes a good “debate”, as he calls it. I call it arguing.

His argument/debate was that the 42″ blades were not long enough, especially during the cruel Tucson summers when one is brave to even put a sheet over oneself in bed. So I agreed that on a trip out of town for New Year that happened to see us bypassing a Lamps Plus store, we would exchange them.

And so our ceiling lamps travelled some 500 miles: up to Williams, AZ and the Grand Canyon, then back down to Phoenix where we celebrated New Year, and thence to a Lamps Plus. Because of the size of the boxes, we decided to drive not my nippy, reliable wee car but Hubby’s old and far less reliable, but roomy, SUV. He’d done some work on it all of last week and so I was confident of its roadworthiness. And it did good, until we were about 200 yards from the Lamps Plus store. Then it gave up the ghost, blowing a rather important fuse. A few changed fuses and more blown ones later, I declared that lunch was needed.

Happily, we broke down at a strip of shops and restaurants, so we could walk over for lunch to a restaurant, where Hubby negotiated with the AAA and also a truck rental firm (because AAA will charge you if you’re being towed from outside of 100 miles of your home). No matter. It was a beautiful day, and a new year at that. We kept smiling through it and, knowing we had to wait a while for a tow truck or rental anyway, decided to walk to Lamps Plus. Hence the stolen trolley, to transport our fans.

I told Sweetpea and Munchkin to put on their best homeless face. Sweetpea instead looked mortified. And off we trudged through a car park, along a street, across a crossing, along another street, and to the store. All for nothing, as it turned out. We were told these coolio fans don’t come in anything more than 42″ blades and I didn’t want any others. So back went the ceiling fans in the trolley, we did our trudging homeless act again, and were back where we started.

It took six hours from when the truck broke down to finally leaving. So there was nothing for it but to go shopping. Two handbags, a makeup bag (remember Hubby throwing up in mine after that party at Hallowe’en?), activity books for kiddos and some dog food (?) later, we got our U-Haul. This is what we then set off in, highly illegally:

The AAA truck wouldn’t have taken us anyway, since there were four of us. By hiring a truck we were able to circumvent any rules on passenger numbers. But it wasn’t pretty. This thing only had two seats. So there was Sweetpea in the passenger seat, Munchkin in his booster seat on the floor between her and Hubby – no seatbelt at all – and me, meanwhile, lying along the back seat of our truck that was being towed.

It was hideous. Not only really uncomfortable because my legs are too long to stretch out along the back seat, but wholly frightening. You’re bumping along a busy Interstate, staring at the sky, with no control at all over your situation. I kept thinking that people had had to endure worse things in vehicles, like being smuggled across the border with fifty other people and no water, or clinging on to the underside of a car whilst crossing the border from the old East to West Germany. You know, happy thoughts. And also: “WTF? If this is a sign of my year to come, I don’t like it. Please time-travel me back to 2011 immediately.”

Forty miles later we were within our 100 miles and felt a whole lot happier (and less criminal-like) phoning AAA and asking them to tow the truck, Hubby and Sweetpea from there. I, meanwhile, had to drive that sodding great U-Haul back to Tucson. And just to put a cherry on top of it all, when I pulled up here I realized I didn’t have my house keys.

We had gaily left the place two days before, me saying: “Should I take my keys?”

Hubby: “Well it’s not as if we’ll be travelling back separately is it? Ha ha!”

Me: “Ha ha! You’re right!”

Ha bloody ha indeed. And thank goodness for leaving spare keys with the neighbours.