/startsulk

I am a sucker. More to the point, I am a sick sucker. Last night I spent 8 hours at work in horrible pain every time I tried to swallow, only to come home, have a shower, mumble something about dragons at my mother and pass out on the floor in front of the fire with the towel still wrapped around my wet hair. Then today (I wasn't supposed to be working, but they appear to have fucked up my roster this week) I worked 6 hours, coughing and spluttering and feeling pretty miserable. Tomorrow, also when I'm not supposed to be working, I've been rostered 10-3, which contravenes both my don't-work-fridays and my don't-work-before-lunchtime rules.

And, even though I have over 200 hours of sick leave accumulated, I go to work, I suffer through it, I share my germs with customers and I devote at least 40% of my concentration to mentally telling myself not to throw up over and over again. Because whenever I try to call in sick they get all passive aggressive; "but we don't have anyone else, wah wah" on me. And meanwhile, the department manager randomly takes a day off a month out of sickleave to "help keep the budget down"

Oh, and the best part? If I quit, I lose all that sick leave. Nearly four grand worth.

/endsulk.

In actual good news, the first issue of GenQ magazine arrived today with my bonus 8 kickstarter bribe fat quarters. Especially loving the brown and pink zigzag one.

It's so nice to be home, on my own bed with it's electric blanket, in my own bedroom where I'm not worried about the sound of my typing waking people who actually sleep at night, driving my own car, and having enough powerpoints for all my tech.

And, since I'm warm and happy and content, I may as well break out a couple of whinges.

Why do all the motels in Adelaide make you check out at 10 when nothing opens till 11 on a sunday? I think it should be like how maccas does breakfast till later on a sunday. In my world, motel checkouts would be at least a half hour later on sundays, maybe a full hour. It just makes sense.

Why on earth do people still listen to the radio? I mean, yes, it's a handy way to learn new songs, but if I'm honest, most of those new songs are shit. Even Call Me Maybe, which I adore, is admittedly, lyrically quite weak. And the jingles, oh, the jingles. My travel companions wanted to listen to the actual radio as we were going through the hills, and the stupid ads were so insipid and annoying that I wanted to pull the car over. I lost the will to live, let alone drive. If I'm gunna be stuck in a car for five hours, I want to be feeling pumped, having fun... not listening to a cheesy rhyme about shower screens. And the fizzy sound. kzzzzztch...Really science, it's 2012. Haven't you fixed that yet? I don't want to have to find a new station every 45 minutes, but the fuzz at the edges of range gives me a terrible headache.

Why does Spotlight have their sales on weekends when I've only got 10 minutes to shop? Why can't they have 30% off fabric next thursday and friday, when I can get to a whole lot of stores, instead of popping into one quickly and grabbing a half dozen random fabrics while everyone else looked at baby stuff? (I'll take photos tomorrow, they've pseudo-assimilated into the stash already, so I need to fish them back out)

Why do I get an overwhelming urge to quilt when I'm stuck in a car 300km from my machine, but as soon as I get home I'm like naaaah...

Achoo.

The fact that I'm allergic to my best friend's dog literally makes me cry. Literally, as in my eyes water and my nose runs. That's what literally means, contrary to what you may have read on some people's facebook walls. When I read the word literally being used in the wrong context in a facebook post, I literally mentally disapprove of their inability to correctly use the word literally.

In the meantime, I need to go buy myself some more demazin.

Sometimes, the internet makes me cross.

I've never liked tumblr. Not only is it spelt dumb, but a lot of people who use it pretend like they're actual bloggers, when really, all they're doing is re-posting pictures they've found on other tumblrs, with occasional twitter-length posts about how they don't have girlfriends. Yes, there are some brilliant ones out there (if you can read textfromdog with a straight face, I will send you stash) but so much of it just an endlessly reposted waste of server space.

Nonetheless, tonight I got one, because, as I mentioned the other day, Instagram doesn't like Picasa, and since it makes me cross when other people spam up my facebook news feed with Instagram, I'd not only have to get a sword, but also fall on it, if I started doing it too. So it was a choice between Tumblr and Twitter, and since Twitter falls off the face of the internet after a fortnight, I went with the longer lasting of two evils.

And longer is right. It's taken me 45 minutes to get it set up and the first picture loaded. And all I wanted to do was show everybody a picture of my empty box of chocolate.

Gah. What a hassle. 45 minutes is almost half again on the time it took me to do tonight's project.

I suppose the proper name for it would be a pram quilt, or a car-seat quilt, but since they are both a bit dull, I'm going to call it a quiltlet. It's a bit under 50x75cm, so it's about a sixth the size of my usual quilts, and I just sewed around the edges and turned it right side out before quilting it, so no binding.

It's also got polyester batting, something I'd never used before. Spotlight had all their bags of precut poly batting for $3.99 last week, so I bought 3 queen sized ones, figuring I could use them for bags, or for cushion covers, or just let Maddy use them for her quilting endeavours. But I'd also used it under the lattice quilt, so I could take some photos without the darkness of the lino underneath, and so that I could roll it up without getting creases in the top, and the trimmings were the right width, so I went for it. I was only using random bits from the stash, and I told myself I wasn't going to spend more than 2 hours on it (all up, including cutting, it took an hour and 45 minutes) so I figured, even if I turned out horrible, it wouldn't be too much of a waste.

I haven't washed it yet but it seems okay - I suspect it will be a bit loftier than cotton, but I'm cool with that. It's a bit less clingy, obviously, but for something this sixe, I'm happy so far. The actual design of this one is very blah, but I might churn out some nicer ones for the facebook page.

It always ends in swearing.

Fashion is hard. I'm not talking about dressmaking here, for all that it has its difficulties, I'm talking about "fashion". Or, if you'd rather, fashion.

It's a thing. A thing that says that those shoes do not work with that handbag. That that belt is an inch too wide, that that heel is just a tad too chunky and that that waistline is a wee bit too high.

Take this skirt for instance. 1m of polytulle, 1m of hot pink cotton and a bit of zipper I had leftover from making my gym bag. 3 hours of work, cause I pinned all that runching instead of gathering it, and it's lovely. Really really nice. Pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be.

Except it's all wrong. See, I want to wear it with the top I altered last night, and a wide belt. But the top is quite long, and I'm not sure that I want to cut it down so I'd rather it be tucked in. This skirt sits on my hips perfectly, since I used the same waistband design I've used for pretty much every skirt I've made myself in the last 5 years, but oh no, it doesn't "look" right with it on my hips. Not with the belt. The belt needs to be higher. But the skirt is too big at my waist, because it wasn't made to fit there. Oh well, there's this belt, why don't we use to gather it in? The tulle is gathered anyway so you won't see it... But the band is too wide when it's up high. It's all wrong.

What I need is the same skirt but with no waistband. A bit of elastic would do the job fine. It doesn't matter that the top will be tucked in to it because you still won't see the top of it for the belt. I can make a gathered, elastic waisted skirt in about 15 minutes. If I had been able to try on my non-existent skirt before going to the effort of making it I could have saved myself 2 hours and 45 minutes.

This is why I didn't move to Adelaide and do fashion design. Squares are simple. Squares don't make me cross. Even rectangles are quite alright. If HSTs were on facebook I'd probably even be friends with them. But fashion?

Fashion can fuck off.

And yet, I do actually like my job.

Now that we're properly into 4 week rolling contracts at Woolies, I only work one of every four Sundays. And while I miss the extra $50 or so that comes with the bonus half pay, those 3 weeks where I'm not doing anything on a Sunday, or more to the point not running around stressing like a crazy person (or bursting into tears like some of my co-workers) being passive aggressive towards some really genuinely lovely 16 year-old girls who are nonetheless faffing about and not getting anything done and making me cross but I can't yell at them because they're nice and sweet and it's bad enough that the people who are supposed to be in charge are out the back crying and I don't want the people I'm supposed to be having on register crying too and... I forgot what I was talking about.

Oh yeah. I'd much rather spend my Sundays feeling shit cause I spent Saturday night drinking waaay too much alcohol and injuring my coccyx by falling off the stage than feeling like shit cause customers are swearing at me because there's a NATIONWIDE FAULT IN THE EFTPOS SYSTEM, and therefore THERE'S NOTHING I AN DO ABOUT IT. No, swearing at me doesn't help either. Trust me, I wish it was fixed waaaaay more than you do - this 3 minute wait you have to SUFFER THROUGH while we process your transaction is nothing compared to the 45 minutes I have to stay back tonight getting everything counted and balanced and put away. If you keep this up I will STAB YOU IN THE EYE WITH MY PEN, lady who wants a raincheck on the cat food we still have plenty of on shelf, even if it isn't still wrapped in plastic. GTFOI.

Nine hour shifts with a good deal of pent up anger followed by an hour at the gym waiting for the anger to be replaced by apathy have let me here, to my bed, with its lovely warm electric blanket. I'm going to go and dream sweet dreams of people paying for everything with cash, and of being able to ban customers simply for getting on my nerves.

Ranty Ranty Rant Rant.

I, personally, find it a bit odd that people sew so much stuff for Halloween and Christmas. It feels a bit too flash-in-the-pan-ey for me to bother really. Not that we're even meant to do Halloween here in Australia. I was okay with it a few years ago when Spotlight had Halloween stuff, because apart from Rubber and Plastics, they're kinda the party and costume shop in the mount. But now that we have Halloween stuff in Woolies, I think it's time to make a stand. This is Australia, goddamn it! There's a Melbourne Cup to be getting excited about, not some stupid thing with bloody pumpkins. They're a stupid bloody vegetable, only good for soups and confusing you in the camp oven, sitting there pretending to be potatoes. And real aussie pumpkins can't even be carved, except with a bloody chainsaw. One time I saw my nanna split one with an axe! They're properly tough, and don't need some silly face to get that message across.

And I don't need an excuse to eat loads and loads of candy. And coming two weeks after the show, when everyone's still coming down off that sugar high... Actually, now that I think about it, most of the showbags have a variety of nasty looking lollies in the bottom that never get eaten. Halloween could be used to fob them off on the neighbours you don't like. I suppose if you're doing that though, why do you need to buy a special 1kg bag of nasty lollies to fob off on some other poor sucker's kid? They're not gunna eat them either, just gunna put them in the cupboard where they'll be looked at in disappointment every time all the good lollies in front of them have been eaten*

As you can see, not a big fan of Halloween. Christmas can annoy me too, mainly the whole having to get up early thing, combined with the forced visits to relatives thing, but at least it is actually an Australian holiday. Expecting aussies to celebrate Halloween feels kinda like expecting Americans to celebrate when Geelong beat Collingwood in the AFL grand final.

But what the shit is with Proclamation day, huh? Answer me that, fellow South Australians... Celebrating an event that occured on the 28th on the 26th...

The world is seriously doomed.


*While I'm having some random rants, I like the word "et" as a past tense of eat instead of eaten. Can we all work together to get this into wider usage?