[Clearwater Beach, Gulf of Mexico, Florida]
This is where I’ll be this time next month.
This is also why I’ve been a bit quiet recently: as regular readers know, the approach of a holiday sees me pretty much chained to my desk, frantically queuing up blog posts for The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman so I don’t go out of business while I’m lying on that there beach. My muscles ache from the tension, I’ve developed RSI in my right hand thanks to all of the typing/scrolling I’ve been doing (I have a wrist brace from the last time this happened, and I’m trying to take as many breaks as I can, but other than that, my only hope is that Rubin suddenly develops a passion for women’s shoes. And learns how to write, obviously, so he can take over blogging duties.*) and yesterday I woke up with a migraine. But it will all be worth it. Yes it will. Because… the sun. And the beach. And the Neiman Marcus shoe department. And that feeling of being “home” I always get when I step off the plane and get that first whiff of the Florida air. (And never get when I actually am “home”, funnily enough…). Oh yes, it will be worth it.
As luck would have it, the week before we leave is the week of the Diamond Jubilee, which means I don’t have to write content for the public holidays on the Monday and Tuesday of that week. On the Wednesday, our friends are getting married, so I have the day off for that and, well, the day after to recover. Friday will be spent packing, cleaning the house and all of that other fun stuff you have to do before a trip, so basically I have just under three weeks to work, then I’m off for a month. And I could not be more excited about it.
It also makes for a good excuse to shop.
*Rubin can totally write, by the way. You all know this.
Our car was officially written off yesterday. I knew it would be, of course, but I’m still completely devastated. It doesn’t help that right before we got the email (yes, they told us by email. Presumably so that we wouldn’t sob down the phone to them?) confirming this, they’d told us by phone that there was a chance they might fix it, so I’d gotten my hopes up, only to have them dashed again a couple of hours later. So that sucked.
As Terry started to deal with the huge mountain of paperwork that followed this horrible episode, and I struggled to not to start crying again, however, we slowly became aware that the house was noisier than usual. There was banging. There was crashing. There was whining from Rubin, who seemed to be trying to communicate something to us. Hmmm.
Assuming that the various thudding noises were coming from a car in the street, and that Rubin probably just needed to, you know, relieve himself, I let him into the garden, and stood there for a few seconds, listening. Nope, no car stereo was pounding out obnoxious dance music, so I shrugged my shoulders and went back inside to resume my misery.
And the banging and thudding resumed, too.
So consumed were we with the horror of the whole car drama, that it took a particularly loud bang, followed by a volley of barking from Rubin, for us to decide that hey, maybe this was something we should investigate? The sounds did, after all, sound a lot like they were coming from inside the house, in classic horror movie style, so Terry headed downstairs, and I headed to the bedroom window, to peer out into the street.
And there he was. Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door, had returned to us, a mere SIX YEARS after his last known appearance.
DUH-DUH-DUUUUUUH!
Or at least, we think he had returned to us. It’s been so long since I last laid eyes on TIMOM that I wouldn’t swear in a court of law, say, that the man spotted leaving the house next door yesterday evening was definitely our suspect, and Terry didn’t get a good look at him at all, but let’s just say that he met the suspect’s description. And had been in his house for at least 30 minutes, which does seem to confirm that this was either the Man of Mystery himself, or someone acting on his behalf. Let’s say it was him, though: it’ll make this post more interesting.
As for what Nigel – if, indeed, t’was he – was actually DOING inside the home he hasn’t visited for six years, well, who knows? What we DO know is that it involved a lot of banging, a bit of thundering up and down stairs, and was accomplished within the space of about 30 minutes or so, after which Nigel got into his car and drove off into the sunset. Can you bury a body in 30 minutes? Anyone?
What we ALSO know is that if Nigel ever does move back, we’ll have to either buy a new house, or cut off our ears, because damn, those walls are thin. And that dude is noisy, with the thundering on the stairs, and the burying of the bodies.
What is the meaning of this latest sighting, though, that’s what I want to know? Why would you own a house for six years, never bother to visit or maintain it, and then turn up one day, under cover of… dusk… spend 30 minutes crashing around, and then leave? What was he doing? Why did he come? Why NOW, after all this time? And why didn’t he mow his freaking lawn while he was there? So many questions. So little chance of them ever being answered.
For now, though, at least we know this: Nigel is out there. Alive. And one day, he may come back…*
(*But hopefully not until we’ve moved out, because like I say: THIN WALLS. INTOLERABLE.)
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Tagged International Man of Mystery
Last Thursday morning, Terry and I had some errands to run. We set out early, and it was a bit of a stressful morning, for one reason or another, so by the time we got back into the car and headed for home, I was just looking forward to putting the kettle on, pouring myself a giant mug of coffee, and relaxing a bit.
Terry was driving, and I’d picked up a leaflet in one of the places we’d visited, so I started flipping through it to pass the time. I was so engrossed in this, that I didn’t even see the other car. In fact, I didn’t see anything at all. One minute I was sitting there, reading my leaflet and half-listening to the music on the car stereo, the next I was being flung forward in my seat, and then snapped back by the safety belt. There was no time to think, and yet somehow there was all the time in the world to register the look of shock on Terry’s face, hear him shout out something – I don’t remember what – and feel the sickening moment of impact as the bonnet crumpled in front of us and the thought this is it, this is how we’ll die flashed through my head.
The car came to a halt. The music played on, inappropriately loud.
Then I started screaming.
“Oh my God!” I shouted. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” And I think I would probably have kept on shouting it – in fact, I think there’s a small part of my head which has been just repeating that phrase, over and over ever since it happened – if Terry, having established that there was nothing physically wrong with me, hadn’t interrupted my hysteria by getting out of the car.
By the time I’d calmed down enough to take a look around, the two people from the other car had, thankfully, also gotten out to inspect the damage, so I could see right away that no one was hurt. Even without looking, though, I could tell that our poor car wasn’t going to be so lucky, and as I sat there and looked at the buckled bonnet, I was all of a sudden completely blindsided by the horror of it all.
First came the ‘what ifs’. What if we’d been going faster? What if the seatbelts had failed? What if Rubin had been in the car, and had been thrown forward with the impact? And, of course, the biggie: what if we’d been hurt, or worse? What if someone else had?
The ‘what ifs’ were quickly followed by the ‘if onlies’. If only we hadn’t gone out that morning, or at that time. If only I hadn’t decided that THAT day was the only possible day to run those errands. If only I’d actually stopped and bought those flowers I’d seen in the supermarket, rather than just stopping to admire them: then we’d have been a few minutes later than we were, and we’d have driven home, drank our coffee and got on with our day, just as we always do.
But I didn’t. And so instead of that blissfully normal day, I found myself sitting by the side of the road, in our once-beautiful car, which was now completely destroyed. And as I sat there, I discovered that my mind could just not compute this. I couldn’t fathom how something could be so perfect one second, and so utterly ruined the next. And I thought that this could have been me, or Terry, or one of the two people in the other vehicle, and I started to sob. It was a long time before I stopped.
* * *
The other car had just one small scratch on the bumper.
Ours is a write off.
* * *
Because of the holiday weekend, we had to spend the next four days waiting to find out whether it was repairable or not. In fact, we still don’t have the official verdict from the insurance company, but the garage have told us the cost of the repairs, and it’s more than the car’s worth, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out what will happen there.
Of course, it’s just a car. The main thing is that no one was hurt: I’ve been being told this all weekend, and it’s one of those things that really goes without saying (Although, seriously, if one more person tells me that “worrying won’t help!” I will scream. I don’t think anyone worries or feels bad about things because they think it will help: you just can’t help but feel bad sometimes, when something bad has happened.) It could have been worse. Cars can be replaced. No one was hurt. But honestly? I still feel absolutely wretched about it. I loved that car. I wrote before, back when we bought it, about how I tend to get emotionally attached to inanimate objects, especially cars, and although I told myself I wouldn’t do it this time, I seem to have failed in that endeavour, because I can’t even think about it without wanting to cry.
One second, everything was normal, and fine. The next second, everything was ruined.
And as bad as it was, it could have been so much worse.
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Kurt Geiger’s wall of shoes
I had a whole other post planned out for today, but then I remembered it was Easter, and that no one ever reads blogs on holidays, do they? Which makes them as good a time as any to do one of those huge Instagram posts that everyone hates, but which I actually love, because one day when I’m senile, I will be able to look back on them and say, “So THAT’S what March 2012 looked like! But who’s the ginger with all the shoes?”
So here IS what March 2012 looked like.
I had a birthday. And finally, someone bought me a castle! No, I jest. I went to Edinburgh, drank champagne and tried on shoes I couldn’t afford. It was ace.
Shoeperwoman’s Shoe Challenge started. You should join it. You know you want to.
People continued to believe that I have some connection to Joan Rivers and/or the ability to influence Kelly Osbourne’s hair choices, and I received many, many emails on the subject of “why Kelly Osbourne’s hair sucks, and why Amber should be doing something about it.” Given that I can’t even manage my OWN hair, though, I can’t imagine Kelly Osbourne would pay much attention to me: this was, after all, the month in which I dyed my hair orange.
My blog got a bit of a makeover, too:
And so did my closet. I got all of my summer clothes out of the attic:
And then I bought MOAR SUMMER CLOTHES, yay!
I even got to wear some of the aforementioned summer clothes, during the Week That Was Summer In March:
Then summer left, and we ended the month more or less how we started it: drinking champagne in Edinburgh, this time with my best friend and her family, and celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary.
It was a good month. And then April came. And so far? April has sucked. But that’s another story for another day. Have a Happy Easter, everyone!
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(Image fails to depict blizzard that was blowing at the time…)
… which kind of explains why I was so happy about the sunshine last week, no?
I guess it’s a good job I kept out some coats and boots when I packed away my winter stuff last weekend, too. I KNEW there would be consequences of that foolish move…
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Tagged i hate snow
So picture it: there I am wandering lonely as cloud. You know, like I do. When all of a sudden, what do I see? Only a crowd! A host! Of golden daffodils! That totally matched my outfit!
“Quick, Terry,” I said. “Take my photo: let us immortalise this magic moment forever, and not with a cruddy poem, either!”*
(*Forced to study Wordsworth at university. Not a fan.)
So we did. And, you know, it’s a bit like Where’s Waldo? for fashion bloggers, such is the perfection of my camouflage, no? I mean, you can’t even see me in some of these, can you? It’s almost like I AM a daffodil. Another dream realised!
(Where’s Amber?)
These photos were taken on Sunday, otherwise known as The Best Day of the Year So Far, Not Even Joking. You see, I’d spent most of Friday unpacking all of my Spring clothes, and trying to find creative ways to insert them into the limited storage space in the house. By the end of the day, I never wanted to see another 50s-style dress again (Seriously, why did I have to buy so many dresses with huuuge skirts? Did I not realise how much of a pain they’d be to iron when they’d been in storage all winter?), and there were clothes all over the house – tucked under the living room rug, hiding behind paintings, that kind of thing. Note to self: GET A BIGGER HOUSE. Because fewer clothes just isn’t an option.
When I went to bed that night, it was with fear in my heart. I’d completed this switchover of mine a couple of weeks earlier than usual, you see, and I knew – I just KNEW – that by getting out all of the Spring stuff and packing away the winter (Or most of it, anyway: I did leave out a couple of coats etc, just in case.) I was seriously tempting fate, and that we would likely wake up the next morning to a complete white out.
And we did.
Luckily for me, the white stuff was fog, not the snow I’d been expecting, but even so, my fears were confirmed: I had single-handedly prompted a new ice age – or a second winter, at the very least. Now we would never see the sun again, and it would be ALL MY FAULT.
That night, the clocks moved forward. And so, apparently, did the seasons, because we woke up on Sunday morning to Spring. And I know I complain a lot about winter (This is where you look politely astonished and say, “Why, YOU, Amber? Complain about winter? Surely not!”), but I don’t think even I had realised how much it had been sucking the life out of me, until it finally ended and Spring arrived. I was like a little kid at Christmas, I was so excited.
(Note to people who are about to scold me for picking wild flowers: the ones I’m holding were ones which had been trampled on or something (not by us, I hasten to add) and had their stems broken. I brought them home and put them in water because they were going to die anyway, but I didn’t pick any healthy ones, because I would’ve felt like I was murdering them, and I am many things but I am not a flower killer…)
Terry and I both had a ton of work we’d planned to tear through on Sunday, but the fact that this one day might be the only sunny day we get this year made us realise that to spend it stuck in front of a computer would be a tragedy. So, instead, we threw caution to the wind, dressed like daffodils (Well, I did anyway. Terry doesn’t really do “daffodil dressing.”) and headed out to enjoy the sun. It was the happiest I’ve been since, like, August or something, seriously. And it was kind of surreal, too: the leaves aren’t even on the trees yet (in fact, the BUDS aren’t even on the trees yet), but when we took Rubin to the country park in the afternoon (yes, I changed into flats for that part), people were actually SWIMMIMG in the river. Swimming. In the river. In MARCH. I don’t think I’ve EVER seen people swimming in that river, let alone at a time of year when it has been known to snow heavily. Everywhere we went, though, people were out in their summer clothes, having barbecues, being all happy and smiley and saying to each other, “This might be the only summer we get, you know!”
It wasn’t, though. Because it was sunny and warm yesterday, too. And today. And I, my friends, am as happy as a clam. Happier, even. (Seriously, it must kind of suck to be a clam, don’t you think?)
(Dress, River Island, last summer; cardigan, local shop, many moons ago; belt, stolen from my mum; sunglasses, eBay; shoes, Carvela ‘Gypsy’, c/o Sarenza [available here])
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(The highlight of the weekend: a crisp (potato chip, Americans) with a heart. The only thing better would’ve been a crisp with a shoe. Or if I’d backed the hell away from it a bit, so this photo wasn’t such an extreme close-up. We live and we never really learn.)
I’ve noticed that a lot of other bloggers do weekend recaps, which are always full of charming photos of them being super-cute in lovely, interesting places. My weekends aren’t normally like that. Here’s what this weekend looked has looked like so far:
Friday night:
Rubin ate chocolate.
I know you’re all about to tell me that OMG, dogs should NEVER eat chocolate, because it can be TOXIC to them and they can DIE and we are BAD owners, but trust me, I know. Ever since we got Rubin, I’ve exercised extreme paranoia about chocolate, and all the other things dogs aren’t supposed to eat – we’re always careful not to let him near it, and if anyone’s going to be looking after him, I back out of their house shouting, “Remember not to let him eat chocolate! Or grapes! Or small bones! Or chocolate!” But I’m clumsy. You all know this. And because I also know this, I have always been aware that the day would surely come when I would drop chocolate on the floor, and before I could react, Rubin would pounce and swallow it whole.
What I didn’t really expect was that Terry would be the one who would end up doing this. But he did, and, of course, Rubin reacted with his usual lightning speed, and almost before the chocolate hit the ground, it was gone, and he was looking at us all, “YEAH, SO?”
Much Googling ensued. Also much panicking, and shouting of the phrase “OMG, he’s going to die! He’s going to die!” (from me, naturally) while Rubin just sat there looking like chocolate wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
(He also tried to eat pizza.)
After a bit of frenzied research, we managed to establish that what he’d eaten probably wasn’t enough to cause him any harm. Nevertheless, our “relaxing” Friday night, which we’d planned to spend watching a movie, was instead spent with Terry watching a movie, while I watched Rubin, providing a helpful running commentary on his actions (“He’s standing up, he must be ill! Oh! He’s sitting down again! Why do you think he’s sitting down? Should we call the vet?”) and played a fun little game I call “Sleeping…or Dead?” And by “fun”, I mean “not even remotely fun, seriously.”
After a few hours of this, and absolutely no sign of any ill-effects on Rubin, I took the panic down a notch and allowed myself to cautiously acknowledge the possibility that he might live.
Then I went to the kitchen to get a handful of chocolate-covered cereal and, yeah, I dropped one on the floor. And yeah, Rubin ate it. He got to sleep in our bed that night.
And, naturally, he was absolutely fine.
(Terry took this photo the next morning, while I was still asleep. When he woke me up to let me know he was heading out to see his friends, I tried to say something like “See you later – take care/have fun!” but what came out was, “You! Take fun!” COFFEE.)
Saturday
You know that thing I do? With the dyeing my hair bright orange? And then with the doing it again? Yeah, that. Only this time , rather than the wash-in, wash-out colours I usually use to turn my hair orange, this one was a semi-permanent, so hello, orange hair! (Yes, I did a strand test first, No, it didn’t look quite so bright.) I’m strangely calm about it. And yes, I know I could get the salon to strip it out, or buy something to do it myself, but actually, I think I’m just going to leave it, and let that be a lesson to me. Thankfully, the REALLY bright orange is concentrated on the (formerly) strawberry blonde bits around my temples, so as long as I comb my fringe in a certain way, it’s not THAT obvious. Like, my hair just looks slightly unnatural, as opposed to glow-in-the-dark unnatural. Meh, fluorescent is, like, SO HOT right now, anyway. And I KNEW that fringe would come in handy one day!
(I’ve heard that Head & Shoulders or clarifying shampoos can make colour fade faster, yes? And… there’s always hats?)
(I did try to take a photo of it, by the way, but it didn’t really reveal the full extent of the orange, which gives me further hope that it’s Just Not That Bad.)
Also on Saturday, Rubin was apprehended in my parents’ garden in the act of eating God Knows What, But He Seemed to Find it Tasty. Another vigil ensued. He is still alive.
(The red sky, it was at night. The shepherds, they were delighted.)
Sunday
Sunday was a gorgeous Spring day, so naturally we chose to spend it engaged in various mundane household chores. Don’t you just HATE it when you wait all year for Spring, and then when it finally shows up, you have to spend it digging in the garden and scrubbing down your house? Luckily for me, Terry was up super-early to watch Formula One (like, 5am early. I didn’t even know there WAS a 5 o’clock in the a.m.) and afterwards he got through the various tedious gardening chores I had outlined the night before during one of my awful, “OMG, we will have to start doing battle with the garden again, why won’t that thing just DIE already?” rants.
Then we painted the porch. You’re starting to understand why I don’t do weekend roundups now, aren’t you? We’re on a bit of a mission at the moment – or, at least, I am - to make the house a bit less gloomy and awful, and we decided to start small. Literally, I mean: the porch is so small we can’t both stand in it at the same time, and because I can’t really be trusted with a paintbrush (Look, would YOU trust a woman who’s dyed her hair orange three times now? Didn’t think so.), Terry did that too, while I gave the house a bit of a Spring-clean. He earned MAJOR Brownie points this weekend, seriously.
(I worked hard too.)
(We painted it mint green. Because of course we did. It will match all of my clothes! And if crazed killers are ever chasing me through the house, why, I will just stand next to that wall in my mint-coloured clothes and be instantly camouflaged. Oh no, wait: I keep forgetting I have fluorescent orange hair now. That’ll blow my cover. OK, well, I’ll stand next to the wall, and they will see me, but I will look like a freaky, disembodied head, and they will be scared and run away, crying like girls. I’m glad I have a plan for that particular scenario now: that’s been bothering me for years.)
(God, I wish I hadn’t introduced the idea of disembodied heads. Because now I’m thinking about being beheaded, and you all know how I feel about THAT.)
(At the moment, the mint green paint is ALSO a lot brighter than we’d anticipated. WHY DOES NOTHING LOOK THE WAY IT DOES ON THE BOX?)
This Sunday was also Mother’s Day in the UK. We visited my mum on Saturday instead, and although it was HER special day, I was the one who got the gift, in the shape of this little polka dot dress she has made for me. From scratch, people. With her own hands. Isn’t she clever? Do you think I might be adopted?
Oh, and I also changed my banner. Never let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time. Even although that’s totally true.
(I took this photo by mistake while scrabbling around on the floor, trying to find a sock I thought I’d lost while trying on shoes. I thought it summed up my morning pretty well, though.)
I wear earplugs every night to sleep. It’s partly because our room can be quite noisy, between one thing and another, but it’s also because I’m such a princess that even the slightest noise when I’m trying to sleep will irritate me beyond belief. So I wear my earplugs, and I guess it’s become part of my nigh-time routine: I switch off the light, then I switch off the sound, then I sleep.
(Actually, I don’t sleep: I mostly lie awake thinking there are crabs invading the bed, but that’s a whole other story…)
This Saturday, I had an appointment with the optician, and I also had appointments with aaaalll the shops in the mall where the optician is located. By the time I woke up, Terry had already left for the gym (“I worked out for two hours,” he told me later. “So did I”, I responded: because if running around a mall in 4″ heels doesn’t count as a workout, I don’t know what does…), so it was just me and Rubin. I made my coffee, fed the dog, and then returned to the office to drink said coffee while playing Sims Social doing important work-related stuff.
Then I showered, blow-dried my hair, put on some clothes and some makeup, settled Rubin down with his toys n’ treats, and headed out to the car.
(This post is fascinating, isn’t it? I bet you all wish I would relate the mundane details of my mundane life EVERY day, huh?)
I was out of our estate, and well on my way to the mall before I realised I was still wearing my earplugs.
D’oh.
(I was quite relieved to make the discovery: up until that point, I’d assumed the car stereo was playing up…)
Things didn’t get much better when I reached the mall, because entering into it was like plunging into the depths of Hades: partly because of the seething mass of humanity that lay within, but mostly because of the temperature, which was sauna-like. I had anticipated this, and was wearing lightweight clothes, which were totally unsuitable for the time of year, but within seconds I was drenched in sweat, and having to restrain myself from just throwing people out of my way.
“Why did I do this to myself?” I wondered. “Why did I come to the mall on a Saturday? I mean, I’m self-employed. It’s not like there’s no other possible time I could shop.” And yet, of all of the days in all of the week, I had to walk into this one, and now I was paying the price. The hot, sweaty, uncomfortable, crammed-into-a-small-space-with-The-Others price.
The Others were at their absolute worst that day. They were all doing their slow-walk, spread out across the aisles so as to prevent anyone passing them. Any time I spotted an item of clothing I wanted to try, The Others would all rush to snatch it out of my grasp. God, I hate them.
With fifteen minutes to go before my appointment, I found myself in H&M, with approximately one thousand items of clothing to try on, and the main fitting room closed for refurbishment. I went upstairs to the children’s department fitting room, which has only a couple of cubicles, and joined a line which snaked all the way to the exit and didn’t move AT ALL in the time I stood in it. Now, our mall is HUGE – seriously, it occupies a square footage that is probably larger than my hometown – and the H&M is as far as you can get from the optician’s, while still remaining under the same roof. I had no choice: I ran frantically around the store, replacing all of the items I’d been going to try on, and then I RAN to the optician’s… or rather, I slow-walked to the optician’s, held up at every turn by the antics of The Others, who were all dawdling along, forming an impenetrable barrier between me and my goal. I couldn’t get past them, and it’s illegal to kill them, so I had to content myself with jogging frantically on the spot, and trying to dash through any small space I could find. It was no fun at all.
By the time I reached the optician’s (mercifully on time), I was a complete wreck of a person. My face was tomato-red and shiny with sweat, my clothes were twisted and rumpled from the many times I’d wrenched them all off to try something on. My hair was a tangled mess, my eyeliner had started sliding down my cheeks, Alice Cooper style, and I was pretty sure my shirt was on backwards. I didn’t just look like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards: I looked like the hedge had actually attacked me, and then asked all its friends to join in.
I reached the waiting room with seconds to spare, threw myself triumphantly into a seat (everyone nearby instantly moved away at the sight of the deranged sweatmonster who’d just joined them: why couldn’t that technique have worked on The Others?) …
… and the optician was running 10 minutes late.
Gah.
I MISSED OUT ON SHOPPING TIME FOR THIS! I yelled. Inside my own head.
Anyway, the optician eventually came to get me, and I was ushered into his office. And as I sat there, patiently trying to work out whether the letters looked better or worse with THIS LENS or THIS ONE (God, I hate it when they do that. The letters always look exactly the same to me?), I glanced down at the shopping bag beside me, which was gaping open on the floor…
… and there, right at the top of it, and threatening to spill out onto the floor any second, was the new bra and knickers I’d just bought, along with a multipack of seam-free undies.
I can only hope the optician approved.
As for what I bought:
Did I mention I’m really into mint right now?
(And no, I’m not showing you the underwear: it’s bad enough that the optician had to see it…)
Tagged shopping stuff, the others
February has always been my least favourite month of the year. It’s a dark and vicious little month, and for a long time, it felt like if something bad was going to happen, it would definitely happen in February. And it mostly did. I would greet the start of the month like an old adversary, and I would fight my way through it, always waiting for The Worst to happen. Even although we’ve made it through a few years now without any major misadventure, I must admit that every year when I wake up on March 1st, I’m always glad to know that February is safely behind me, and that things can only get better: the days will get lighter, the weather will get warmer, I won’t have to wear tights any more… you know, important things like that.
Anyway, now that we’re safely out of the February woods, I thought I’d take a little look back at the month in photos, safe in the knowledge that February can’t hurt me no more. This year.
Here’s what February looked like…
So, mostly February looked like polka dots, although sometimes it looked like little tiny anchors. Then there was that one time it looked a bit like a picnic blanket: awesome! The rest of the year – and the rest of this post, actually – will probably look a lot like this too, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It also looked like shoes. Some of them had spots, too, imagine.
(I should probably point out that, with the exception of the black shoes, these are things I bought in February, not things I wore in February. I mostly wore ancient jeans and cosy sweaters. It’s that kind of month.)
Valentine’s day came. Terry and I don’t normally get each other cards, but this year Terry thought it might be amusing to scare the living daylights out of Rubin by buying me a card bigger than the dog. This worked a little too well, and as you can see from Rubin’s face, he was absolutely terrified of it. Er, I mean, he wasn’t scared at all, because he is a wolf. In fact, he ate that card later.
(He made me write that last bit.)
We went out to dinner (Terry and I, that is, not Rubin), and I got so much cheese with my cheeseboard that I had to have it boxed. God, I love cheese.
Valentine’s day also marked the end of the Shoeper Shoe Challenge, in which I wore every pair of shoes I own in the space of the year, and took photos to prove it. I’m glad I’m not repeating it this year because, well, let’s just say the shoe collection may have expanded somewhat since then. So many polka dots, so little time!
(Yes, I can walk in them.)
We celebrated with champagne, and bright red shoes. And by “we”, I mean “I”. (Well, OK, Terry DID have some of the champagne: no red wedges for him, though. Maybe next year.)
Mostly, though, the month was a quiet one:
It was also, to my great joy, a pretty quick one. In fact, I can’t quite believe it’s March already, because I’m still having to remind myself to write “2012″, not “2011″, and my first post of the year has yet to drop off the front page of the here blawg. (Or at least, it hadn’t when I was writing this. This one may just push it off, though, and then we’ll be able to pretend that I actually update this thing sometimes. Maybe March will be the month I’ll get my blogging groove back?)
March, if you could try to be more like a lamb than like a lion, that would be much appreciated…
This weekend, something went bump in the night. Literally, I mean.
It was Sunday night/Monday morning. We’d been in bed for maybe half an hour – long enough to have completed the ritual of Rubin padding up to the bedroom door and being sent back to his own bed approximately eleventy-one times, anyway – when suddenly there was a loud BANG from downstairs.
The noise had definitely come from inside the house: there was no possibility of it having been something out in the street, say, and it was loud enough to send Rubin into a frenzy of barking, and make Terry and I sit bolt upright and stare at each other, each of us wondering who had left the front door open THIS time, and whether or not we were YET AGAIN in danger of being murdered in our beds.
Well, once again, Terry drew the short straw (because yeah, right, like I’d venture downstairs in the middle of the night to investigate a mysterious noise. I may like to THINK I’m Nancy Drew, but actually, I’m more like Scooby Doo in these situations, if I’m completely honest…) threw on his dressing gown and headed downstairs, and ONCE AGAIN I lay in bed, shivering slightly and imagining all kinds of horrible endings to this particular story.
Terry, meanwhile, got to the bottom of the stairs, stepped into the living room, and, as if on cue…
THE TV SUDDENLY SWITCHED ITSELF ON. YES, JUST LIKE IN THE RING!
I swear I’m not making this up.
Of course, Terry didn’t actually TELL me this had happened until the next morning. “I thought it might freak you out,” he said casually, as if it was totally no biggie, and TVs are just ALWAYS switching themselves on in the middle of the night, following a mysterious banging sound. And he was right about that, too: if I’d known that the mysterious BANG had been immediately followed by a mysterious switching-on-of-the-TV, I would instantly have deduced that, why, we were obviously in the middle of a horror movie! And I would have proceeded straight the basement, just like a good horror movie heroine who gets killed. OK, I wouldn’t have: and not just because we don’t got no basement. It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have gotten much sleep, though, and the reason I know that is because I didn’t get much sleep the NEXT night, on account of how I was lying awake the whole time, listening for mysterious banging noises.
Oh, and about that: Terry didn’t find anything at all to explain the bang during his nighttime tour of the house. He obviously wasn’t looking very closely, though, because when I went down to make coffee the next morning, I walked into the kitchen, and saw the two canvas prints which are currently propped up against one of the walls, both lying face down on the worktop, as if they had offended some ghostly hand and been thrown down there. (Which I bet they did, seriously.) This, I can only assume, had been what we’d heard the night before.
We have no explanation for this occurrence, or the switching on of the TV, other than that there is totally a ghostly presence in our house now, and it REALLY dislikes those prints. And possibly wanted to catch up on its soap operas, or something.
My money is on it being the ghost of our old friend NIGEL. And folks? He’s ANGRY.
(Image has nothing to do with post. Is cute, though, no?)
Tagged International Man of Mystery
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