Berrytime

There is this huge mulberry tree is someones front garden that has grown so large and its lower branches are weeping over the foot path on the way to the train station. Every spring it bears heaps of mulberries. I have been having a gorgefest on my way back from work. First time I had mulberries they were from a tree growing on the council median strip infront of my apartment and I found out then that only fully black mulberries are sweet, if even the tinest hint of red is on them they will be tart and sour. You have to have a light hand when you pick mulberries, The ripe ones are so full and juicy that by the end of picking just a handfull, your fingers are all stained purple and if you're not carefull so will all your best work clothes.

I so want a mulberry tree in the garden, but we haven't the space. We have planted strawberries, raspberries and blueberries this spring. I'm told that raspberries really should be eaten off the vine to taste its full flavor. I wouldn't know really because I never can afford the store bought ones either..up to $8 bucks a punnet. Here's hoping for homegrown berries next season

Hair & makeup

I was still undecided up until meeting the stylist about my hair. Decided to wear it down in the end. But even though I stressed I wanted a loose casual look. She made the curls too tight and assured me they would drop later....well, they didn't and Rod said the meanest thing after. He told me I looked like Rose Porteous/Hancock. WELL .... I said if I do look like Rose then why the hell was I marrying him for? I should find myself some old half dead filthy rich mining magnate to marry instead.

We had to hang around Richmond to go see the garden and restaurant pple to finalize details and payment. After paying $160 for my trial, I wasn't going to wash it all off straight away, I wanted to see how the look would hold up in the hot summer. So there I was, Rose Hancock, made up to the nines in horse country of all places. We went to the nursery and bird farm to kill time. All the local folk to thier credit were very polite and didn't stare, although I did get some stares from the children (ahh well, Halloween is around the corner innit?). I stuck to Rod like glue, thinking if I had to grin and bear through it then he might as well be implicated along with me...instead of asking who that crazy made up lady was they will say " Hey! Look at that guy with the crazy made up lady" and the locals will shake thier heads and mumble knowingly "Ahh... them silly city people"

Wedding Hairstyle

I've been growing my hair long for 9 months, always with the intention to wear it down on the wedding day. I've been having second thoughts after watching Lipstick Jungle and seeing Victory Ford's beautiful updos.

I love that headband look. Today I finally succumbed and bought a feather headband fasinator from Diva. I also found more headband looks and am seriously thinking that this is the look. Only problem, headbands give me headaches. I tried it on today and after 5 minuts my head started to hurt. I think I will pull the headband apart and reattached the feathers to a cloth band like below which will be kinder on my head.

Stories of France

Whenever I rummage thru Rod's library, often trying to find a book to read in the loo ( hah! he hates that habit of mine) I am always discovering little surprises about him. Books and things to give me a better insight into his past and childhood. For instance, he has nearly the complete collection of 'The Three Investigators' and whenever we're in a secondhand booksop he's always looking for his missing titles. Last nite, I found on the lower shelf, a cache of french storybooks, Used to teach French in high school. The book I pull out is called ' Contes du France' - 'Stories of France' Rod translates later. Anyway. On the front page is Rods full name plus his class number - 2D which meant he was fourteen at the time. Except for the English foreword explaining that these are a collection of simple French stories for junoir high schoolers, the rest of the book is completely in French, even the questions and answer section. I flip thru reading aloud and mispronounce every word, making no sense but liking how the words roll off my tongue. The next day I ask Rod to read it to me. He apparently took 4 years French in high school and 3 years German. To which he now barely reads or speaks French and can do a mean German accent in English which cracks me up all the time. 'Vee haf vays of making yoo tok. ya?

His forehead is furrowed and he's thinking really hard. but miracously its coming back to him. He reads me this story written in the first person about a boy. Alain is his name when he says ' Alain, cest moi' and its about his fist solo trip at the age of 12 to visit his Uncle Antoine in the South of France ( la Midi). He flies (avion) from Paris to Marsilles and takes the train (autorail) and finally the bus (autobus) from Veryan to Azy to see his uncle. When he decides to buy a bus ticket (billet) the conductor ask him. 'Premier, deuxiemme or troisiemme class?"

He sees that all the seats in the bus are the same and ask the conductor what is the the difference? To which he gets this answer "All the seats are the same, you can sit anywhere, first come first serve." Alain immediately buys a third (troisiemme) class ticket for 50 cents (cinquant centimes) and takes his seat because he says why pay first class prices (trois francs) when you can pay 50 cents for the same seat.

When other passengers arrive, some buy first class, others buy second and third. Alain is perplexed ' Cest estrange' (its strange) he says. A poor old peasant woman in old clothes arrives to board the bus. Surely, Alain thinks, she will buy a third class ticket. but No! She buys first class and pays 'trois francs' and takes her seat. The bus is quite full now and starts its journey to Azy amid a puff of billumious black smoke, It is an old bus and Alain wonders if it will actually make the journey to Azy. When the bus approaches its first hill....it stalls. (Now I wish I can recall and write all that happens next in French because its very funny)

The bus drivers says
"Passagers d'attention! Passagers de première (first class passengers) remain in the bus.

"Deuxièmes passagers de classe (Second class passengers!) Alight from the bus and walk up the hill on foot

"Troisièmes passagers de classe (Third class passengers!)...........Enroulez-vous les pochettes, les gars! (Roll up yer sleeves. Lads!) Get out and push the bus!

ahahahhahaah...I kept rereading the part when the drivers says "roll up yer sleeves, Lads' in french....there is more to the story but the mystery is over and credit to Rod, he read me the whole chapter and was amazed he managed to remember any of his French.

He thinks he's so hard done by...I'll show him a real bridezilla!!!!!!!

On Saturday we went shopping in the city. Rod had to buy shoes and a belt to complete his wedding outfit. I've already bought my shoes, I found them months ago at David Jones. They were flat beaded sandals which were the exact shade of dusty ivory as my gown albeit slightly on the informal side but I conviced myself that they were the ones. Then something caught my eye in the Nine West shop window, a lovely ivory diamonte pair of shoes with a low kitten heel (after I spent months searching for low heel wedding shoes in that paticular shade of ivory b4 settling on the DJ pair) So now I have 2 pairs of shoes for the wedding.

What I really needed was underwear for the dress but I got distracted by the lacy (sometimes completely impractical) Elle Mcphearson range on sale. I like owning sexy lingerie,..yet everyday I just pull out my old cotton set because they are so comfy and only resort to wearing my best underwear when all my crappy cotton ones are in the wash. Nevertheless I bought some Elle because they were too cheap to ignore and I will leave them on display at the top of my underwear drawer. So not only did I not buy what I set out to find, I bought two items I didn't really need.

Rod comes back after leaving me in the lingerie department and wanted to show me a belt he liked. I said if he liked it, he should have just bought it. to which he had the cheek to say this:-
"Well knowing you, I had to get your aproval first, incase it wasn't the exact colour or type of belt that you wanted for the wedding"

"You say that like its a bad thing" I shot back and anyway he's way off base with a comment like that. Rod's his own man and I am generally there in the capacity of fashion consultant but if he's made up his mind about something he's going to do it regardless of what I say. I might be more opinionated on stuff about the wedding especially if he's about to commit fashion suicide but overall Rod has had a concept on how he wanted to look from the start, I've merely fine tuned it for him.

So after my tick of aproval, we bought the belt but no luck with the shoes. When we get home I hurriedly lock myself in the room and try on my new shoes with the dress, I've done it a dozen times but its alrite because Rod's never seen the whole ensemble. then its his turn but I get to see. he's got everthing except his shoes including the felt hat we drove all the way to Katoomba to buy. When he ask me what I thought. I say, all he's missing is a 1920's tommy gun and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. He looks like a character from the Godfather. but he's too square to be an actual gangster, perhaps the crooked lawyer that works for the gangsters.

With this ring.....

We went to see the jeweller to get our wedding bands made. We used the same guy who made my engagement ring because he's a craftsman who works in this tiny unassuming shop rather than a salesman in a suit you find in a shop full of gliterring bling. I took to him pictures of a ring I had seen on Etsy. It was a simple gold band with a hand hammered look. Rod had convinced me that our wedding bands should be an unbroken ring of gold as is traditional. As my engagement ring already had diamonds in it, I didn't mind but I got him to go with me on the hand hammered effect because we both love things with a handmade feel about them. His first reaction to the pictures I brought home was that it looked like a bit of gold foil candy wrapper scrunched and twisted around someones finger. (It does actually) but I think its represents us better as we're not shiny, polished pple, we're a bit rough around the edges, a bit worn, not perfect but special nevertheless.

I didn't know if the jeweller could replicate that random beaten pattern at the right scale as well because if I were to describe it, its sometimes doesn't look hammered but as if someone used a very sharp knife and sliced away slivers of gold and all the slivers are randomly sized and shaped then lastly ran a very light polish over the ring to soften the peaks giving it a lovely subtle facetted appearence. I've seen some hammered rings in stores and the hammering looks too heavy and you get very deep dents nothing subtle at all. but he put me at ease quickly when he went back to his workroom and quickly beat up a few sample pieces to show us. He did it exactly the way we wanted it and so quickly that I thought we could just sit and wait while he made it there and then (like getting our shoes mended) but I have to wait a week.

Behaving like a Crazy Person

My sister/brother inlaw and I had some heated debate on what cocktail dress means. The outcome of the debate is usually them pounding me into submission where I begrudgingly have thier opinions stuffed down my throat.

To summarise, my wedding invites said 'garden cocktail dress' in which I took to meaning, men wore a jacket and tie and women wore short cocktail dresses (ala spring racewear). My sister (in her know it all voice) was adamant that I should have said semi formal and that cocktail dress meant a night out at the pub and the guys could turn up in jeans and the women would wear club clothes. She kept insisting I got it wrong even after I told her I googled it a thousand times.

So I go back and furiously google 'cocktail dress' again and thank you! Internet, for proving to me that I'm not an idoit after all!!!' As much as I would love to rub thier noses in it, It would be utterlly childish to send them a link and say...I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!

I can't win debates with my sister and brother in law because they always gang up on me and also because I'm naturally non-combative. I have the worst come backs and sometimes my mind just goes blank when I'm confronted agressively. On my own and with the benefit of hindsight, I dream up all these witty and apt things I should have said and my revenge fantasies get crazier and weirder. Like having the fashion editor of Vouge on my side chastising the two of them on thier appalling knowlege of dress code, or the two of them turning up at my wedding in jeans while everyone else is dressed to the ninths.

Sometimes you want to rant and explode on your relos or just want to sit on thier heads and yell NANANANANANANAH!! and generally behave like a crazy person. but you can't. So I dumped it on my friends on facebook, because the glee in being proven right is only half the joy if you can't gloat about it !!!

Aren't we all overreacting just a little?

I'm reading my friend's travel blog, feeling slightly jealous. 9 months ago, her life was not unlike mine, she was getting married, had bought her own house with her partner, was working as an architect when she decided to chuck it all ( 3 months before the wedding after I had bought my non refundable ticket to fly to her wedding) and have a mini quarter life crisis. She bought an open year ticket to europe and couldn't even hang around for my wedding. Now she's doing the most bizzare things, hitchiking and couchsurfing with virtual strangers basically being being a bum and moocher ( I mean that in the nicest way but I call a pipe a pipe when I see one). Its baffles me.

As I mope about at dinner time, I'm asking Rod all these rhetorical questions to gauge his reaction if I decided to go away for a while (only temporarily while he pays the mortgage) and couchsurf myself. In truth I would be miserable without him. What I'd love would be for the both of us to pack up and jet off together. Of course this would never do for Rod, who is Mr Sensible, he's the last boy scout on earth. He lives by thier motto ' Be Prepared'

So after unsuccessfuly getting Rod to agree to wait for me in Sydney and pay all our bills while I holiday for 6 months or let alone come along with me while the bank reposesses our house, the talk turns to buying a new computer. One that does not lagg so badly that I can take a 15 min shower and still not find windows loaded up when I get out. I want an Imac but for all the wrong reasons. I want one because it looks cool. Rod's not aversed to the idea but he's being cautios as usual. He says:-

"The way things are at the moment, it just might be wise if we had some cash squirreled away, just in case."

.........You know what? Perhaps we've all had it so good for so long and none of us have ever been in a recession that we're sort of naive in thinking that its not so bad. It didn't occur to me that whats happening in Wall Street and around global financial markets would have any direct affect on us or our jobs. Interest rates coming down is a good thing when you have a mortgage and we bought our house for us, not as an investment property so falling house prices in the short term don't bother me. We've used our own money to invest so we don't have to make any margin calls (Everthing is getting slaugthered at the mo, have to hang on till everthing recovers in a few years). So really, what else are we worried about? Losing our jobs? There's the slightest of possibilities, but with an international shortage of engineers and firms desperate to find workers, they aren't going to be firing anyone at his work at the mo.I'm not too worried at my work place either. So do I think Rod is overreacting? We're not what the government would call 'working families' in fact we have it pretty good, I think. So why can't I buy my bloody Imac?????

"So what about S?" (i.e the globe trotting moocher) I ask, as if to say, "Well if you think I'm bad? look at HER!!!" Blowing her life savings to go travelling and then returning to an Aussie job market thats isn't quite as crash hot as when she left it. In fact I know things are slowing down already. Is she worried? ( I'll bet its the furthest thing from her mind as she's sipping a margarita in some mediteranian villa somewhere)

'All I'm saying is we should be prepared" Says Rod

Sometimes I hate that I'm marrying a boy scout.

What colours?

I've never written about the wedding. Infact when peaple ask me about it I really have nothing much to say. It is just about 6 weeks away and I'm getting more excited because I can finally pin down some of the details

A few years ago, Rod and I were fossiking at the Reverse Garbage in Marrickville. You never know what you will find at the RG, mostly junk but sometimes you find a real gem if you're willing to go rummage through all the crap. I found a huge reel of ribbon for 5 dollars. Now when ur at the shops and you want just a metre of ribbon you get charged about 3 dollars anyway. Sometimes a bargain is so good it doesn't matter what you are buying, you do it for the sake of bragging that you saved so much money buying something you absolutely do not need. Of course Rod is the sensible one and ask me what I was going to do with 100 mtrs of ribbon. I stood there like a 5 year old clutching a toy she really wanted her parents to buy her and dug my heels in, refusing to put it back...."I don't know? Use it at my wedding?" I cheekily replied. Now I don't always follow through with all my cockamanie ideas but I was determined that the ribbon would feature in the wedding because if it doesn't, I can't find any other use for 100mtrs of ribbon. (build a maypole?) I've already used some during Christmas and the odd birthday but its hardly dented the supply. The problem now is that its quite a bold red and white candy stripe pattern (grosgrain) completely at odds with my idea of a soft muted romantic colour sheme.

Rod loves colour, whereas I'm a beige on beige girl. I want the colours to be classic but I would agree with Rod that in the pictures it will look a bit dull and not really us at all (besides he hates white flowers and even though he couldn't be arsed about the minute details, I want the reception to be a reflection of the both of us). So last nite I brought the ribbon out and trialed it with some flowers out of our garden. I am quite happy with the result, its very kitsch.


Except my gown is not kitsch at all. Its a simple elegant roman inspired a-line dress. I was envisioning a cream bouquet all along but I took some pictures with the multicoloured bouquet to see if I would change my mind later. Anyway don't want to stress too much. Its a fairly minor detail.