Saturday, November 27, 2010

It's A Parade

Working in a little 'corner shop' style yarn store right on King St in Newtown is not without its entertainment value. (And frankly, as we've now entered the seasonal slow down for knitting and crochet, I'll take any entertainment where I can find it.) The first benefit of being right on the street is, naturally for me, people watching. Yes I mean perving, and yes I mean what the fuh? There is a rich tapestry of life that passes my windows and I couldn't be happier about it.

Another big fave of mine is the seemingly random question. Sometimes they're kind of obscure but you can at least see there was a logic string of sorts. Like yesterday when a woman who seemed a little worse for wear (drugs I suspect) came in to find out how much was the Christmas Tree in the window. Now we clearly don't sell Christmas Trees, either that or we are very low on stock (just 1 left!) and we have chosen to jazz it up with a shop full full of yarn as window dressing. Sometimes the logic strings are a little less obvious, and the requests a lot more obscure.

I can also hear people who stand outside the store. Frequently it's amusing and sweet, and boosts my ego when they are complimenting how the store looks or how the cute the window displays are. Every now and then I hear them be tickled/amused/gobsmacked to see a man working in a knitting store and/or knitting at the counter (if it's really quiet). Eh, nothing I'm not used to by now. Every now and then I just hear a snatch of something excruciatingly intimate being discussed. Sex. Body parts (male and female). Levels of drunkenness. Combinations of all three. I guess it helps that our store is just a stone's throw from the university (known hotbed of drunken fondling and genital obsessiveness).

And ah, Summer weather. That's when watching the passing parade becomes even more enjoyable.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

A Good One

Even though Tuesdays are essentially my Mondays (my weekend is Sunday & Monday), a quick mental inventory this morning revealed not a hint of Tuesday-itis. I was awake an hour earlier than I needed to be, but already the sun was shining brightly and my outlook was equally sunny. Who knew? So instead of rolling over and trying to get some more sleep I decided to carpe the diem and get going.

While I was pottering and getting ready it struck me that it has been a long, long time since I walked into work. Home to work is around 5kms (3-ish miles) and is far enough to get a bit of a sweat on, but not so far that I feel exhausted for the rest of the day. This morning was more like Summer than Spring, so I put on my sturdy shoes and some sunscreen and I walked to work.

I took a different route than I used to and I think it shaved a bit of time off my old walk. I made it in well under an hour without pushing it, and according to Google Maps my route was 4.9kms. Pleasant. You know how once you spot someone on crutches/with their arm in a sling or whatever, it seems like you continue to spot them for the rest of the day? This morning it was discarded televisions. In a half hour walk, and not walking through an area full of rubbish, I spotted three. That's statistically significant, surely?

My work day was pleasant. This morning's coffee was good. We had plenty of staff on for what turned out to be a fairly quiet day. The office was pretty quiet too, and I was able to concentrate on my work without too many interruptions. I even made enough space in the day to do some creative work, and make a big dent in the planning for the store promotions and windows for the 3 stores for the next 12 months. Yay.

Then when I got home there was a slim parcel poking out of my letterbox. Squee. A CD I should have bought years ago (considering what a huge fan I am) and finally got around to ordering from Amazon UK, after not finding it anywhere here in Sydney. (On sale too, it only cost me something like $10!)


The Platinum Collection. The very best of the very best. Even the crack in the back of the gem case couldn't put a dent in this day.

Friday, November 19, 2010

The Golden Age of Travel Design

While web surfing recently I discovered David Levine's amazing collection of 1920s and 30s travel ephemera (luggage labels, advertising, timetables etc). Interested in graphic design and the romance of the travel of the era, Levine has amassed a huge collection of travel ephemera on paper. These pics are largely scans of his collection, rather than ones Levine found on the internet. The design of the website itself is quite simplistic but whoa, it's quiet some collection.








Timetable Adriatic Service, 1938. Yugoslavia.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

5 Things About Tuesday, 16th November 2010: Forwardslash End Tag Edition

  • After sleeping poorly for the past few nights I took half a sleeping pill last night and had a bizarre tossy, turny, fugue state sort of night's 'sleep'.
  • Consequently I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning. Then got back into bed, got out of the other even wronger side of the bed, contemplated whether the foot of the bed could be considered a third 'side', and then decided no, my mood was probably bad enough as it was and turned to snarl at the day.
  • Because the Universe hates me back, for penance I spent most of the day uploading new products to the company website, a process that involves manually writing more html tags than anyone should ever have to write.
  • Dinner was nice. I'm clearly an emotional eater.
  • Do you know that if you Google image search on the text Jon Hamm trouser bulge you get some pretty substantial results.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Rainy Day Beauty

It's been a dull and rainy day today in Sydney, fluctuating between drizzle and downpour it essentially hasn't relented all day. As a consequence I've been relentlessly sedentary all day. It was the least I could do. The most active thing I did was get started on knitting a new scarf for myself, while I watched Season 4 episodes of Mad Men or surfed the web.

While I was surfing the web I came across a fantastic UK website choc full of visual arts and design collections, VADS: an online visual arts resource. Wow. Designed as an educational resource it is a compendium of collections owned by various educational institutions. I'm still trawling through the thousands and thousands of images, but some of my early favourite collections are:

The British Library's Russian Visual Arts, 1814 - 1909 collection.


Zhar-ptitsa’ by Polenova, Elena Dmitrievna, (1850-1898)


I'm also loving two of the London College of Fashion's collections, firstly the Woolmark collection.


Hardie Amies, 1956.


Chloe, 1966.


Secondly, the awesome Paper Patterns collection.


McCalls, 1936.


Vogue, 1957.


Next I plan on staring open mouthed at the loveliness in the Central St Martins Museum & Study collection, the The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (Medieval Stained Glass in Great Britain) collection and the Charles Rennie Macintosh's Northern Italian Sketchbook collection. To name just a few...

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Spring Colours

A few pics I took recently while out walking with my camera.

Delicate

Structured

There is so much beauty to be seen in this world. It's the looking that's the real skill, and I'm grateful to my camera for helping me to really see.

4 Months. REALLY?

Sorry about that. I popped out to put the kettle on and got distracted. Ooh, shiny.

Even though I haven't drawn back the grill on this little confessional for the past 4 months it's not as if I haven't had things to 'fess up about. There have been highs, there have been lows, and there have been shitty times. (Literally, along the way I either developed some sort of virulent bug or Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and although it has eased off just recently touchwood I was suffering there for about 5 weeks. All tests so far have been inconclusive.)

And bless me for I have also sinned. Yeah Gods I give thanks for the sinning, because I've met some truly gorgeous guys over the past 4 months. And not just in body, but also in spirit. There has been crushes, there has been friendly hook-ups and there has been lots of flirting. At 46, who knew? Turns out there's life in the old girl yet.