I’ve had an official request for the list of things I wouldn’t mind receiving for my birthday, so here goes….

<3 Lots of stuff from Felt. In particular cat and unicorn necklaces. This or pretty much anything from that shop *drool*, pretty pictures or public service messages.

<3 Comics/graphic novels: Volume 5 trade paperback of Buffy season 8 would be nice. I think it's called 'Predator and Prey', I'm also needing Y: The Last Man volumes 3- 4 5 and 6, Nightwing Year One, Batgirl Year One and all of the Batman: No Man's Land series.

<3 hoodie is cute. Of course, I have plenty of hoodies, but I wear them all the time, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to have many. I would also like nice quality plain black hoodie. My polar fleece one is dying.

<3 There is heaps of awesome stuff at the following stores that I would like: Eyeball Kicks, Madame Fancy Pants, Pop up and iko iko. Although, things with a definite use are preferred over knick knacky stuff.

I also appreciate vouchers for Unity Books, Borders or Whitcouls, something you made yourself, little awesome notebooks, something you painted, things which enable me to make stuff, new socks, Lush goodies, cute or clever T shirts, photos, weird/cute earrings, random Japanese stuff and hugs.

I finally managed to import my blog entries from the old stonesoup blog over to here. So there’s suddenly a heap of archives that weren’t there before.

I’m going to go through and delete the ‘nothing’ posts and memes and tag the ones that are staying. In the meantime let me know if you find a broken link or anything that makes no sense. It will take me quite a while to do this, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I’ll probably do a ‘best of’ as I find the old gems, so watch this space! Tomorrow you have another writing related guest post to look forward to

Inspired by Gala Darling and the whatsinmybag flickr tag….I present the contents of my handbag! And my handbag as well.

The handbag is a Club 55 one from Farmers.
*Filament postcards for distribution. I already got Suraya at least one subscription!
*One bic biro and one red pen/black pen/pencil magical changing writing implement that Bryn left at my house and is never getting back.
*My wallet. It’s a weeny bunny ‘happy dream’ one that Zephfi gave me years ago. I use it because it’s so small I can’t carry too much extra crap around.
*Geek-cessories, 2D10. The only roleplaying I do away from home is Buffy. In unisystem you only need one ten sided die, both of these have rolled very well for Calvin.
*Inhaler, moxie tampons, cellphone.
*My huge bundle of keys and key cards. Shark keyring given to me by my brother many moons ago, Tupperware shape-o won after long and arduous Tupperware party going.
*’Stop, look live’ lollipop which are currently being given to pedestrians who obey traffic signals in Wellington. This isn’t me, I live to jay walk. I got the lollipop from my mother in law.
*Whacky Obama badge from my workmate.
*Nood brand blank notebook partially filled with notes, story ideas and numbers I should remember. I find the colour a bit obnoxious so I’ve been writing quotes over it and putting stickers on it.

Not pictured: tissue supply and a half eaten packet of cashew nuts that are probably stale now.

Love my Zambesi designed Glassons breast cancer research tshirt. It’s cool.
Need more product in my hair or I get a kind of mushroom shape over my left ear. Not good.
It’s very cold today and Lee woke me in the middle of the night by poking me in the face. He was asleep. Obviously dreaming of things he had to poke in the face.

I wrote about a thousand words of my book yesterday. It felt good.
Photo printing paper arrived yesterday so I madly printed photos. Now my printer is out of ink. Le sigh.
I also managed some scrapbooking yesterday. A certain Nick and a certain J-who-shall-not-be-named are again scrapbooked into immortality. Oh yeah.
Tonight: more delicious Slayers East. I have nearly cried even *thinking* about playing it, so let’s hope I can keep the tears at bay and not break down in front of my roleplaying group.

PoF: dark and cool. I have my tiger hoodie though, which changes the look somewhat.
CO: fun roleplaying tonight!

Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. ~ Dave Barry.

I forget how much I enjoy dancing. I like to dance at weddings, and I like to dance terrible dances like the Running Man, and the weird dance my sister and her friend and I put together based on singstar videos*.

I made some people dance at Giffy’s wedding, perhaps they didn’t want to at first, but then they had fun. I like to be asked to dance, it makes me feel all Olde Tyme popular**.

I want to learn a new form of dance but my work hours tend to preclude it, then there’s reasons like I already do too much, and I should be focussing and it all gets too hard.

Dancing is important because everyone can do it, it’s a non-verbal form of communication and it’s excercise.
Lee dislikes dancing, but doesn’t seem to mind if I dance with other people. He’ll dance one or two with me at a wedding, if I insist, but then I let him sit down and have fun with my fellow dancers. I get euphoric on the dance floor and I start wondering why everyone isn’t up there too.

I won’t do the birdie dance though. I refuse. I had to do it too many times as a kid and it has bad associations for me now.

*The best move is the repeated pointing at the ground behind your back with both hands, while you lean back, pelvis forward and switch places with your partner. A wide open mouth improves this move dramatically.
** I have a space on my dance card near the end of the evening…

I have been using various eco-friendly products over the few months and finally feel like I have some things to recommend.

Every dishwashing liquid we’ve tried has been fine. The cheapest is I think the Down to Earth green stuff with the dolphin on it, but the bubbles don’t last a terribly long time. The other one we’ve tried is a BEE brand one called “I feel good on your hands” (all their products have conversational names, as you will see…) and it’s a bit more expensive but rather good.

I’ve tried a couple of different dishwasher powders and found them to be lacking. One was a Plunket approved one, which I can’t recall the brand of and the other was an Eco-store bottle. In the process of using them both I found the glasses would come out of the machine smeary and the plates would sometimes have little bits stuck on them, so I’ve gone back to the old nasty chemicals instead. The eco-store rinse-aid seems good though, and just as cheap as any rinse-aid. The enviro-friendly dishwashing powders are quite expensive, though, and you get less.

Spray on surface cleansers turned out fun to test, since I bought a BEE brand one called “I love your every surface” and Lee found the essential oil smells got right up his nose and irritated it. He simply can’t use it without sneezing and complaining so we bought an Eco-Store one, based on citrus and he likes that one fine. The spray cleansers work the same as regular spray and wipes and are about the same price.

For the laundry I like to use a liquid, because it’s less hassle, so I tried out the BEE line first. The environmentally friendly laundry liquids are a bit more pricey than the other brands, but I kind of think a couple of dollars to get their businesses booming now and the price will come down as more and more people use them.

So, the BEE cleaner “I’ll take care of your dirty work” was fine. It works perfectly but didn’t have any kind of wow factor. I didn’t realise I needed some sort of wow factor from my laundry until I switched to the eco-store branded laundry liquid. This is based on eucalyptus oil, but it gives the clothes this lovely clean fresh air lemony smell. I pulled the laundry out of the machine that first time and knew I could never go back. The clothes smell awesome and the bottle has a pretty picture of a petticoat on the front. What more could you want?

There are two brands of recycled toilet paper available at my supermarket, and I approve of both of them. And yes, I recall the jokes from primary school about recycling toilet paper, but these packets both assure me they are recycled from clean office paper, so it’s fine.

One brand is SAFE and produces it all within Australia and the other is Naturale and has a tree frog on the cover. Generally I buy SAFE because you can get 6 rolls, but the tree frog only seems to do four at a time. Again, these are exactly the same price as all the other nicer toilet papers (it’s more expensive than the cheap stuff, but not Sorbent which we used to get.) It’s soft, it’s 2 ply, it’s clean and even embossed. SAFE also do a range of unbleached toilet paper but it was a weird brown colour and Lee got upset.

I have yet to find recycled paper towels or tissues, but I did find a range of organic sanitary products called Natracare and they are just fine. Oh, and mustn’t forget the Potato plates I saw, a nice colourful alternative to paper plates and fully compostable and biodegradable! They’re a bit expensive but I suspect just because they aren’t yet mass produced.
Eco-store online, or at the New World in Thorndon. Oh and they have a free sample of laundry powder promotion on the main site there.

BEE (Beauty Engineered for Ever) here or at the supermarket.

SAFE are here.
And the Potatopak brand, and after having a brief look it seems a lot cheaper to buy their stuff from the website. Huh. A LOT cheaper.
Also, for those interested in the new Susanna Clarke book The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which is $55 in bookstores in town, fishpond have it for much less, more like $37. See for yourself here

Fancy a goat for Christmas? Or ten buckets? How about an alpaca? Or mango saplings? They’re not for you, though. It’s a charity thing, you pay for things to go to the people who most need it.

http://www.oxfamunwrapped.org.nz/shopping.asp

I think it’s quite lovely.

PoF: Island Girl
CO: writing