Five things …

• Is overexposing photos currently trendy? All the photos that are appearing on blogs I follow and on Pinterest’s photography category are super washed out, and yet the photographers are told they are just amazing. I’m the most amateur of amateur photographers, and if I can tell something is overexposed… well, it might be time to take a good long look at your shots.

• So many of the super popular blogs – the ones that earn enough for people to live on – have no content. Like, seriously. The entries are three lines ‘I saw a kid with a banana in the supermarket and remember how my sister and I used to play a game… what are your favourite banana recipes?’  Er, seriously, how do you earn money off this site, let alone enough to raise your family on? Seriously, please tell me because I am totally baffled.

• I really need to replace my Starbucks tumbler. It was one of those plastic ones, and it happened to be BPA plastic, so I quit using it ages ago. And I miss drinking out of it. I don’t know if they’ve changed the type of plastic, but I’ll have to check out a Starbucks this weekend, in Sydney. I also must, must, must see the inside of Books Kinokuniya for my Sailor Moon and Avatar: the Last Airbender fix.

• One of my favourite Sailor Moon artists, KumaCrafts, makes these amazing necklaces based on the brooches from the anime, and she’s restocking again before Christmas! I was crushed to miss out the time before last and just let it go in the hopes I’d get a job before the next restock went up, so I could pay for the two I’ve picked out myself. Nothing will make me happier than seeing two of those necklaces in my Christmas stocking!

• Now that one of my beloved birthday presents – The Sims 3: Showtime – has installed, I’m off to mess with the new features for a little while and then take my sister’s puppy to the beach for awhile.

Friday5.Com: November 2

If you suddenly received a ton of money and could open up some kind of store or service just for the pleasure of having it (assume it wouldn’t have to be too financially successful!), what would it be? Hmm.  Probably an art store. A proper one, with paints and pencils and Copic markers, plus really good quality paint brushes and the hard to get paper. No crap – no glitter glue or face paint or any of that filler garbage for scrapbookers and children (my local art shops have been taken over by these products – I cannot get ANY decent drawing paper, but they have every single Cristina Re product ever released.)

It would be all wood, with polished concrete floors, and the signage would be brass letters in lowercase. I’d even have a few Macs and Wacom products set up for testing out and for classes I’d run. I’d keep tons of art books – the big, heavy ones – and would encourage all types of art – from manga and graffiti-style, to oil portraits and watercolour scenery. The uniform would be a t-shirt. probably in a deep blue or green, with my logo on the front and a famous quote by an artist on the back. Oh, that just sounds amazing – I haven’t quite put aside this dream yet; maybe one day I will be able to open it! :)

What service or store that no longer exists do you miss most? I really, really miss Borders and Angus & Robertson in Australia. There are now only three book stores I can get to (not including the second-hand book store, but that’s luck-of-the-draw, when it comes to availability); one of them is privately own and insanely expensive, with a very small range. One of them is new chain, and they are totally clueless (Fifty Shades… was in the Young Adult section. Talk about not knowing your product) and the third is just weird. It’s half discount books, so super odd and limited-interest stuff, and half normal-book store, so the wider-interest stuff is expensive.

With Borders and Angus & Robertson gone, there’s no big competition making sure the other stores are keeping up-to-date with new releases or making their prices competitive. It’s so bad that I’ve turned to swiping any Kindle books that happen to be on sale (thank GOD my mother has an iPad!), and buying discounted books from Fishpond.

What local business do you think you could make better if you were to take it over? And if you don’t mind sharing, what changes would you make? My local art store! I’d make sure the customers were comfortable to ask me as many questions as they wanted. I’d definitely turn the focus back to art supplies, rather than craft and scrapbooking, because we have a lot of cheaper alternatives for craft and scrapbooking in this town. I’d bring back the classes and demonstration mornings. And I’d move all the stacks of product out of the window and do super fun displays incorporating both the products and any art skills all the employees had.

What spot nearby seems to be impossible for businesses to survive in? Our local CBD, an open-air mall, is totally dead since a few big businesses pulled out. At least two thirds of the shop fronts are empty, and what is left (that appear to be surviving) are discount or warehouse shops. Anything else is gone within months. It’s very sad, but our council desperately need to invest some money in tidying it up (like actually marking the road and the walkways properly; there is very little distinction at the moment, and I’ve see many people almost get hit.)

We’ve all seen stores that combined books and records, beer and laundry, or coffee and whatever. One of my favorite places to get coffee in Honolulu is a cafe and florist, and there is a car garage that’s also a diner in a town nearby. What would be a cool hybrid of two disparate ideas for somewhere you’d like to hang out? A hairdresser and a bookshop. That would be completely amazing; nab a new release and read whilst you get your hair done!

NanoWrimo Daily Word Count: 8,074/50,000

Wow. The weekend was kind of crazy. 

Thursday: Mum went up to the hospital for seven hours with severe dehydration. My sister went with her, and I stayed how to feed the pets and get some sleep, since we were meant to be going to Sydney early Friday morning (we didn’t know that Mum would be up there quite so long. She left just after 4pm, I expected her to be home by 9pm. She didn’t get home until 12am.) I ordered pizza for tea, and my dad yelled and bitched and complained because we had no white bread or potatoes for his dinner; he wanted meat and vegetables. Apparently potatoes are the only vegetable in the world. By 10pm, I was crying because he was so nasty . At 11pm, I fell down our concrete laundry stairs and cracked my bad knee (I’ve done something horrible to the muscles in my right thigh, so that all the tendons are getting trapped … or something. It’s super painful and feels like felt ripping every time I walk).

Friday & Saturday: My mother and sister undertake a massive, incredible, huge task of cleaning out our laundry and the kitchen. We had so much stuff we don’t use anymore. We have two giant bags of things to donate to the animal shelter (beds, coats, blankets, bowls and food) and two giant bags of food to give to one of my sister’s university friends. Plus five huge bags of things that couldn’t be donated, recycled or repaired. It’s crazy, we have so much space! I spent most of my Saturday cleaning out my tiny closet of a bedroom and studying.

Sunday: Oh man. Part of the ctazy-laundry-clean was because we were ‘interviewing’ a dog for a possible adoption. Meya is a 2 year old beagle that was being rehomed. Now, we originally had one sort of beagle – they had hunting instincts but were ultimately affectionate, friendly and obedient dogs. We got a pair of white rabbits, Blossom and Harriet, when Molly was roughly 10 years old and Bella was 8. Normally, beagles hunt rabbits. But we managed to introduce our rabbits to the beagles to the point where they liked them and considered them pack of the ‘pack’ (well, when they got out, Bella like to herd them, but she never hurt them. Molly was better, She’d get in their pen with them and just lie down with them.

Meya was taller than Molly and Bella were, and full of energy. We were leaning towards no in the first fifteen minutes, but it was when she made eye contact with Harriet that it was a firm and fast no. Then she worked out our neighbours had guinea pigs. She was determined to have two guinea pigs and a rabbit for lunch (and I learnt that the old gate between us and our neighbours’ property isn’t as strongly blocked off as I thought (next time we go to the hardware shop, we’ll have to get some kind of bolt or something). We quickly put Harriet back in her cage on the verandah and blocked off access to the verandah completely. We couldn’t keep her – we could never leave her alone with a rabbit on the property and the guinea pigs next door. It would end in tragedy. (It didn’t help that she was frightened of our cats and once she realised we had five of the scary, fluffy things, she waited at the gate for ‘Mum’ to return. 

Alls well that ends well, though: Mum learnt that we’re not ready for another dog and that she’d like a puppy she can train to suit herself, and Meya’s owner made the decision to keep her, since we couldn’t take her, and the first family she visited were… well, idiots (they had a toddler and another beagle in a townhouse with a courtyard. Beagles need land or roughly 10km of exercise a day. Anything else is cruel.)

The only vaguely amusing thing was that the owner brought her daughter and she went to City School. Mum mentioned that my sister went to Another City School and the daughter glared and sneered at my sister and I the entire time. God, we are ALL in our 20s. Who cares where we all went to school? Grow up, no one cares about high school rivalry anymore.

And now, today? My knee is going again – I can feel the clicking, the next stage is the muscle ‘ripping’ sensation. My father is still an ass, my printer refuses to scan and the software updates are for a newer OS release than I have and I think the frelling optical drive in my Mac Mini has died on me.  So I can’t even dig out the original printer CD and reinstall from that because the drive is probably dead OR install the software for my DSLR. (I wasn’t going to install it at all, then I figured I better since I know diddily squat about photography and DSLRs and cutting corners is always a bad idea.)

I don’t want to have to go to the local Apple Store. :tantrum: I know and dislike several of the Geniuses – wouldn’t trust them with a glass of water, let alone my computer. This blows. I’d say next week HAS to be better but at this week I will end up at the Apple Store and that will not improve my mood at all. Upside: at least I’ve got repairs covered. Nothing would tick me off more than having to have the same problem repaired twice in twelve months and have to pay for it (last time, the quote for repairs came to more than I paid for the actual computer and the monitor… and the keyboard and mouse. Luckily, it was within warranty.)

Every year, I think to myself that life has to get better. That I can’t be more unhappy, that my home life can’t get more miserable, than it already is. And every single damn time, I am wrong. Things can get worse.

In August, we lost one of our rabbits, Domi, but also our 18 year old beagle, Molly. That was like a suckerpunch, honestly. I’ve lived more years with Molly than without her. She came to us this sad, neglected little two year old beagle who didn’t understand toys, bones or why there were three excited little girls crowding around her; she arrived the day after my 11th birthday, and one of my friends was staying over.

And she came with us, across two states and at least half a dozen moves, if not more. She was a beautiful, wonderful dog and she just… wore out in the end. She had various medical problems but in the end, she was just old.

Plus, my dad is living with us at the moment. He is really hard to live with. Like, he gets really angry and nasty when he can’t find specific things to eat. He doesn’t ask us to buy them or buy them himself, he just expects them to appear. It’s sure as hell not helping my depression. I’m getting worse again.

And my sister moved home from Sydney. Wow, that’s been a shock to the system. On one hand, we are really similar, which causes us to clash but also bond. So similar, I find myself saying things with a similar inflection to my sister and not realise it until I’ve said it. Or I’ll make a gesture that she makes.

On then other hand, we’re different. Very different. She’s lived away from home for five years – two years at boarding school, three years at university – by herself. We’ve both got different experienes, different ‘codes’ of behaviour, and I just feel very hunted and crowded with her home. `

So, yes, August has been hard. And my sister is home indefinitely, my father has no jobs coming up that will take him away from home, so I’m stuck in this horrid environment, making me sick and sadder.

On one hand, I’m so ready to live by myself, by my own rules and have a life after being stuck in an unhappy place for so long. On the other hand, I am so goddamned terrified. I like to plan and outline and prepare myself and every little detail. That’s way harder to do when it’s just me by myself.

And right now I’m tired, angry at my father (it has been a very long night) and waiting for my mother and sister to get home and waiting for my naughty, evil little cat to come home.

Tomorrow’s another day, I guess.

It’s been a garbage few days, honestly. Domi died, and then I dropped my glasses case as I was getting into the car. They were still there when we got home, but Mum had driven over them as we left.

Thankfully, my Versace case took one for the team, and whilst it is crushed beyond repair, my glasses were only slightly bent. Your sacrifice was not in vain, Versace case! I haven’t been wearing my new glasses all the time at the moment, and at that moment I was SO glad, because if I had been, it would have been them in my case and they have bigger, plastic frames and definitely wouldn’t have survived. So, the glass is definitely half full.

Anyway, things happen in threes. So what was my third thing?

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