More adventures in wigs

I took the plunge about a week ago and wore my newest wig to work. A few of my colleagues knew that I wore wigs sometimes but none of them had ever seen me in one.

I was the first person into the office on the morning in question, and I sit near the door, so everybody saw me as soon as they arrived. Every single person who knows me by name stopped to ooh and aah over my gorgeous new hairstyle. This included all the men as well as the women - and you know how rare it is for men to notice a change of hairstyle! I freely admitted that it was a wig, because I know I'll be going back to my usual hair and also switching to other wig styles when I feel like it, and everyone was really shocked. Nobody had suspected that it was anything other than a really expensive salon job.

Several of the women asked if they could touch it, and were all very impressed by how realistic the hair felt (and this is just a synthetic non-mono, nothing fancy). And my boss asked for a photo of the colour so she could ask her hairstylist to match it! Throughout the whole day I was bombarded with compliments, which has never happened when I've changed my hairstyle before.

Nobody appeared to think that I'm terribly strange for wearing a wig, and quite a few people seemed openly envious of how easy and cheap it was for me to achieve a look that would be very difficult and expensive to get with my bio hair. And now that I've come clean, I can wear whatever style I want! I've already ordered a blonde version of the one pictured here, so you can look forward to seeing me as a blonde bombshell whenever that arrives. Or perhaps I won't show you at all, if it looks awful...

A cycle in the sunshine

It was a beautiful day today, so we decided to take advantage of everybody being off work on a Sunday afternoon and went to the park. Hagley Park is just on the other side of town and is a lovely place to take the bikes, although strictly speaking I don't think we were supposed to cycle in the Botanic Gardens part of it. There were lots of other people enjoying the warm sunshine and crisp autumn air, and nobody seemed too bothered by us on our bikes, so I don't think we caused a problem anyway.

Skry and I cycled to the park by ourselves and met up with Phil and Lou there. They had done something I wished we'd thought of in advance - bought takeaway food and had lunch in the sunshine. After they'd eaten, we all met up and took a meandering route through and around the park for half an hour or so. Even though it is definitely autumn, and the weather has been both cold and wet recently, today was a jeans-and-tshirt day and we were all wishing we'd brought sunglasses too. It was a really pleasant afternoon, finished off with a refreshing pint of Nally's cider (incidentally, way better on draught than it is in bottles) in a local bar before heading home. More Sundays should be like this one.

Adventures on TradeMe

Over the last week or two I have been gradually building up my presence on TradeMe, which is the New Zealand equivalent of eBay. Only people in NZ and Australia are able to buy and sell there, but it is extremely popular, to the point where eBay wasn't able to get a foothold in the market here at all.

I've been trying to come up with things I can make which do not require vast amounts of material, and which are easy to ship. Jewellery would have been the obvious thing to start with, but the beaded jewellery market seems to be saturated here, so I thought I would carve me another niche. Baby gear with skulls on it seems to be an untapped market, and I truly believe there are customers out there who are crying out for such things. I can make bibs and burp clothes without using a huge amount of cloth, and I'm also making little gift tags which hopefully people will buy along with their bib orders.

Keep your fingers crossed for me that I get enough sales to at least pay for the cost of materials! It'll never be a big money spinner for me, but I'd like my hobbies to start paying for themselves for once.

The flatness of Christchurch

As a (short-distance) cyclist, I really appreciate how flat most of Christchurch is. It's no wonder that there are so many bike commuters here - getting to work in the morning is almost effortless, unless the wind's blowing in your face, because most of the roads are almost completely level. Yesterday Skry and I went to a barbecue/party that was 7km from our house, and we thought nothing of taking the bikes there and back rather than getting a bus or taxi. I know 7km isn't very far in the bigger scheme of things, and somebody who cycles a lot would barely register it as a blip, but I have never cycled to a party before. My beloved Princess is a joy to ride, but she weighs so much that going up even the slightest incline leaves me a red-faced sweating mess, which isn't generally a good party look :)

Here's a contour map of Christchurch, courtesy of Google Maps. The contour lines are drawn every 33 feet.
So long as I stay away from the hills, cycling should be my preferred method of transport!

A sample of NZ news

I saw this in the Press the other day and thought it bore repeating. Enjoy!

'By the time I'd got some jocks and shorts on and running shoes he'd have been gone.' Constable Tom Taylor.
The thin blue line developed flesh tones when a naked off-duty Balclutha policeman foiled an attempted car theft after he leaped from his bed and chased the offender.
Constable Tom Taylor didn't think twice about leaving his regulation police-issue pants on the bedroom floor when his property was threatened. His lack of coverage has attracted coverage of a different kind in police magazine Ten One.
Mr Taylor said yesterday one of his colleagues had sent the story to the magazine. "It's good to have nice workmates." The saga began after he was woken by his wife one morning when she heard noises outside their home. "My wife woke up and thought a car out in the street had stopped or run out of petrol." He then recognised the sound of his wife's car's starter motor being turned over.
"It was a hot, hot night," he said, explaining his lack of attire.
His instincts as a police officer over-rode any thoughts of modesty, he said. "By the time I'd got some jocks and shorts on and running shoes he'd have been gone." He grabbed a torch and raced outside to grab the offender, who had managed to roll the car only a short distance out of the carport. The offender then fled with Mr Taylor legging it in hot pursuit.
His wife, suitably clothed, arrived outside shortly afterwards. Mr Taylor deputised her on the spot and asked her to cut off the villain at the gate to their property.
When the offender ran into her she grabbed him by the collar, he said.
"He was making some sort of feeble explanation as I caught up with them." However, Mr Taylor's nudity startled the offender who dropped two bags he was carrying and fled into the darkness. "Man he could move." A check of the bags found identification that revealed the offender was a "thieving git from Christchurch", Mr Taylor said.
The tale took another twist when Mr Taylor's wife spotted the offender hitch-hiking north of Balclutha. Police gave him a lift to the station shortly afterwards.
In explanation, he told police he had tried to reason with Mr Taylor, whom he did not realise was a constable.
"His words were, 'the angry naked man wouldn't listen, he just got more and more angry with me'," Mr Taylor said.
The man was charged with trespass and unlawfully interfering with a motor vehicle. A court appearance is pending.
(Original article here.)

DVDs on the cheap

While we lived in Northern Ireland, I made many purchases from Amazon, but I rarely bought DVDs. I had plenty to watch on television without building up a personal library. But since we have moved to New Zealand, we've come to the realisation that television here is not always very entertaining, and both Skry and I have been buying DVDs instead. This can be an expensive habit, as they aren't particularly cheap here.

A bit of investigation a few weeks ago led to the revelation that the Amazon UK site will ship DVDs to New Zealand. Because the destination is not in the EU, they take off VAT from the purchase price - an instant 17.5% discount. Shipping is very reasonable. And the New Zealand government doesn't add any GST or duty charges at this end unless the total value of the order is above $400, because it's just not worth their while. Result? Cheap films!!

Today I received an order which I placed with Amazon on March 29th, for four boxed sets and two single discs. The whole lot, including shipping, cost me a mere £52.36. That is less than I would have paid in Ireland, and it has come to me from the far side of the planet. It's madness, but madness that is working in my favour!

Convertible Dress

While looking for something else last week, I saw a dress for sale which touts itself as the ultimate black dress - a dress that can be worn in many different styles, for many different occasions. It's not a new idea - there was a similar dress around in the 70s - but it seems to be in fashion at the moment. Although this sounded like a great idea, I wasn't keen to spent $300 on a piece of clothing, so I went online and looked at alternatives.

Having found a tutorial for making a similar dress, I headed to the fabric shop and picked up four metres of stretchy black material for $32, and got to work. Cutting out the pieces was dead easy - a circle of fabric for the skirt, two long wide bands, and a small narrow band. Because this sort of fabric doesn't fray, I didn't bother hemming any of the edges, so there are only two seams necessary - one to complete the circle and one to attach everything else to the circle. This should have been a doddle, but unfortunately my sewing machine threw a wobbler at the thought of sewing anything with a bit of bounce to it, and kept skipping stitches. I think I need a finer needle for this sort of work, so that it doesn't move the fabric down but pokes right through it. Anyway, I ended up hand-stitching everything, which is a bit frustrating but meant I was able to get cracking straight away.

Having assembled everything, it was time to figure out how to wear the thing. I haven't done this very successfully so far - I can twist it into lots of lovely styles, but most of them involve an awful lot of bare back, which isn't very practical if there's a bra underneath.

Anyway, here is today's style, which I will be wearing out later. If it all stays in place I might even try this in the office tomorrow. We haven't got our washing machine sorted out yet as we have to get a plumber to attach it, and I am running out of clean clothes, so something new would solve that problem!


Convertible dress - front:
Convertible dress - back (sorry about the crooked sleeves, didn't notice those at the time):For $32 and an hour's work I am pretty happy with it. I wouldn't have got anything more wearable for $300!

Slow cookers

When we got married about 18 months ago, one of the presents that Skry and I received was a slow cooker. I can't remember where I got the idea of putting one on our wedding list, as I can't think of anyone else I knew at the time who had one, but it was a very welcome gift and we have got lots of use out of it.

The beauty of the slow cooker is that is can be left on overnight, or all day while I'm at work, without using up much electricity at all (about the same as a light bulb, I believe) and without requiring any attention. It's so nice to come home from work and smell dinner ready to eat, or to come downstairs in the morning and have a hot lunch ready to pack up and take to work. Since we moved into our new place in Christchurch I have used ours quite a few times, and our friend Don (who is staying here at the moment) also bought one and uses it often. We are all very domesticated, aren't we?

My favourite recipe at the moment is extremely simple:

• one tin of creamy tomato soup (the dreaded Wattie's brand, but more tolerable than their tomato sauce)
• two chicken breast fillets
• sliced carrots and potato and onion if I can be bothered
  

1. Switch on slow cooker.
2. Place chicken (on top of veggies if using) in base of pot.
3. Pour soup over chicken.
4. Replace lid on pot.
5. Leave for 7 or 8 hours.
6. Wake up/return from work to find lovely tender chicken in a thick tomato sauce, ready to be eaten with mashed potato or chips.

Don has being getting very creative with sausage and vegetables, so I think I'll copy him soon. Maybe chuck in some lentils - there are some great ideas on allrecipes.com so I just need to go shopping and then do my Nigella routine. Now that the nights are drawing in and the colder weather is somewhere around the corner, it'll be good to have a store of comfort-food ideas to see me through!