how to confuse two small children

I took my small bugs out shopping on Saturday afternoon to finish off their halloween costumes for a (fantabulous) party yesterday.

Being my children (i.e. fantastically clever, astute and beautiful), they said to me "Mummy, don't they (the shop owners) know that Halloween comes before Christmas?", since almost all the shops had started decorating themselves in a Christmassy manner and started selling all the related crap. On the 29th of October.

I bet Santa Claus hasn't decorated his house yet.

If even the smallest children think it's rather sad to have a two month run-up to Christmas, doesn't that mean it's ruined already? Can't we start it again and make it special?

I don't like Christmas anymore. Tawdry. That's what it is. Tawdry. And sad.

things one does for love...

...and for the aesthetics of one's daughters' bedroom.

I was up the bloody stepladder for so long, that i have cured myself of vertigo and hav every achey ankles from doing a lot of balancing.

At least I now know exactly HOW complicated (for complicated, read fucked-up) the wiring system in our house is... the "people" who put it in were probably either drunk or alien life forces, not accustomed to logic.

winter is on its way

You can always tell when winter's on its way. The layers of clothing multiply. There's woodsmoke in the air. The slippers get bigger. Everyone starts looking grumpier.

I love winter.

rhonda's here

(click on the piccie for bigger)

So, she's Rhonda, she's smoking a cigar, before cigars are banned, she's nicked the big red ball from a pilates class in Max's Gym, and has found a way of levitating on it, and is on her way to find herself a showbiz agent. She is pulling her leotard out of her bum at the back (we've all been there, girls, huh?). thanks, people.


Later. innit. I'm off to do some wiring.....ZZZAAAAPPPPPPPPP!

almost done,

but she NEEDS something.

So YOU have to give me some ideas.

What is she doing with her right arm?

What is her name?

And where did the bright red ball she's sitting on come from?

well, I would paint the fantastic storm we're in the middle of...

...but it's moving so fast, that I can't. so i did another hour of the ludicrous. just to prove that once in a while I actually do something I say I will.
Oh this storm is too good, I have to get out in it. Back in a bit. Drenched. What fun.

ludicrous

some days when i'm feeling uninspired, I start on something ludicrous and see if anything happens. today is one of those days. gawd only knows why this came to mind. i may even finish it later.

did i speak too soon of happiness?

* who could fail to be in love with a pair of shoes with reflector strips on them?

* and toe-encompassing rubber soles for safer puddle hopping.

but the best thing of all is that each is different from the other.

so if you see a gawky eejit on the streets of Azeitão or Lisbon, grinning at her shoes, that'll be me.

(they arrived in the post AFTER I dealt with the chocolate)

post the 501st

While slathering nutella on a large piece of french bread yesterday, otherwise known as a crutch in the after school tantrum hour (no, the nutella is for me, not them... and yes, it is in secret!) I wondered at its beauty. It is a truly perfect substance, as perfectly uniform in colour and consistency as a brand new tube of good quality acrylic paint.

I love the way that my face ends up covered in the stuff even though I'm a growed-up and should know better how to eat a chocolate sandwich.

I like reading the large signs on the label that say that it doesn't contain hydrogenated fats or fatty acids of some sort and that it contains a "high level of hazlenuts"... and the tiny tiny ingredient list that has sugar first and foremost on the list... funny that it DOESN'T have a percentage by it, like hazelnuts do (13% and it's in bold) for it is probably 80%, the other 20% accommodating the 13% of hazelnuts and 7% for everything else. No wonder I get a bit hyper and sugar shakey after a good unpretentious nutella sandwich.


can it really be that there exist people who don't do/get/eat/like chocolate?


chocolate

uma coisINHA

The 500th post in this, my safety valve of a blog, is brought to you by the suffixes -inho and -inha (oh, we're not doing sesame street? never mind) two things a foreigner will always struggle to get right.

Now, I don't do twee. I despise twee. The only time you'll see twee in my house is when it's is attached to a visitor or it's retro-post-modernist-ironic-ikea twee.

-Inho and -inha are predominantly TWEE!

One attaches -inho/a to a word to turn it into a diminutive, cuter version (not quite, but almost, doggykins, thingy, ikkle baby etc). And in an economical language like Portuguese it works well to make the language more expressive and one certainly needs to use -inho/a (and all the other gazillion suffixes) to make oneself sound less foreign (I'm NOT touching on the complicated set of suffixes that make words BIGGER... the ones you have to be extra super careful using because it's much easier to accidentally stumble upon a terrible swear word that way...and boy, have I?).

But sometimes my twee sensors go into overload and I cannot take another -inho/a.

Yesterday I heard this in the supermarket:

Ai, sim, coitadinho, fiz-lhe uma canjinha, mas estava deitadinho na caminha, todo irritadinho comigo.

SEE! It's not just stuck on nouns, but adjectives too! and sometimes verbs.... probably!
Middle aged women are the excessive -inho-ists!

Okay, so, I'll translate:
Ai, poor little thing, (though it was probably her husband she was talking about) I made him some chicken soupikins, but he was lyingywyingy downikins in his beddibyes, all pissed offy woffy with me.

Grrrr. But SOME words HAVE to use the inho/a, and so I, a foreigner, a bifa (oh how I love that appellation) quite often leave out the inho/a and get blank looks all around (actually, my friends and associates in Portuguese life are very forgiving of the utter bullshit I must talk sometimes in pt). So, then I over-compensate and over egg the inho. Blank looks all around.

Living life in a foreign language is like stumbling through the dark in a swamp wearing stillettoes and a tutu and trying to come out of it the other side still clean, unsullied and not swearing.

500artillustration

it ain't gonna kill ya!

Well, actually it is. If a person is of the Portuguese variety.

It finally came, the rain, that is, and in blessedly copious quantities (with wonderful pretty skies to go with it for me to geek over, with all the cumonimbulostratus going on up there)... and everyone ran for cover, ran for their lives, and ran for their 4x4s (essential for suburban life, don't you know... I swear that the next idiotic tia-type in one of those monstrously enormously ridiculous Jeep things that tries to ram me up the arse because she thinks in her stupid nouveau riche brain that is how one drives when one is in an amoured car and wealthy is going to get it... I haven't decided what "it" is yet, but she's going to get it in copious amounts).

There's a palpable terror in the air when the storm clouds are accumulating (or accumunimbulating!)... for Portuguese hypochondria is at its worst when the rain starts to fall. I have actually seen perfectly healthy people, touched by three or four raindrops, keeling over, coughing and sneezing (the other top-listed mental illness around here is "hypochondria by proxy" principally presented when I´m spotted out in the rain withOUT an umbrella, raincoat, sou'wester etc.. I can only say "I'm British, I'm waterproof" so many times in my life).

Ah, well. I guess it just makes me hardier.

the truth hurts

It's one of those terrible moments in life when you remember/discover that you are mortal and that life is happening to you very quickly and there ain't much you can do about it... a "first grey hair" moment, or a "oh, god, am I supposed to act like a grown up now?" moment, or a "my teeth are all wobbly, mummy, I'm LOSING MY TEETH aaaaAAAGGHHHH!" moment when you're six (or seventy five, depending on which teeth you're losing).

Or is it just me?

So, I'm off to do a bit of shopping.
So as not to get depressed.
And to get a bit of heavy lifting exercise.

And I don't own any orange trousers.
I don't know why I painted them orange being the stickler for accuracy that I usually am.... (see previous post's drawing).

vocation

being a nurse is a strange, difficult, hard and rewarding job from what I can see and have learnt from the people I have known who are or were nurses.

And most of them are great people whose middle name is COMPASSION.

So why do I get the misfortune of being greeted by THIS monster everytime I have to go to the health centre. ALL the other nurses in the place range from incredibly sweet and understanding and kind to bearable. But this woman seems to have decided that it is her vocation not to be kind but to be intolerant, unkind and brutish and in a permanent bad mood. How do people live their lives like this? Knowing that they hate everyone, their job and everything else, how do they get out of bed in the morning?

When one goes to a health centre, one is generally more vulnerable than normal ... or one's kids are, in my case.... and therefore in need of kindness and understanding. Or am I being drippy?

And no-one ever says anything to them. Do they?

wallpaper

Anyone got any bright ideas about how I could turn this into wallpaper? REAL wallpaper, not computer desktop wallpaper.

I mean it.

I want it.

For my sitting room.

NOW.

a hand

la la la la la. This hand has nothing to do with anything... what the heck am I going to draw, thought I. Gawd knows, thought I. Ah, the old bored art student favourite of the lame drawing of a hand will have to suffice, thought I.

sometimes even I am speechless.

Comes from talking ALL afternoon. In Portuguese. And being diplomatic at the same time.

God, I'm good!











And not very modest.

20 random bits of randomness

I haven't done one of these for a LONG time, but this one has a lovely something about it that I can't ignore....thank you Caroline, for the tag (and I must tag the same number of people as the number of minutes it takes me to write this... so I'm gonna be quick)!

What? well, of course it's a meme! but the lovely something is that it's a meme of randomness, and what else does this ol' vit do much better than randomness? Well, not much. So here is my list of 20 random facts about Vit that haven't been mentioned here before.

Deep breath.

I've been to IKEA twice in two days... sick I know, expecially since one of those days was today, a Saturday. Let me tell you... Dante did not know what he was talking about. The Gates of Hell can be found in IKEA Lisbon on a Saturday.

I HATE having long hair.

My favourite colour is red.

My favourite hair colour is Rita Hayworth straight out of a bottle red...but a bit redder.

I taught myself to speak Portuguese and have never had a lesson. And I CAN say ão AND nh! ;)

I failed my French A level.

I think rice pudding/arroz doce is the work of the devil.

I can't remember numbers in Portuguese... not even for a minute.

But I can remember phone numbers (in english) like a ... a.... erm... WHAT REMEMBERS PHONE NUMBERS WELL (apart from Vitsma)?

I got to the regional finals of the Junior Cook of the Year in 1981. Leslie Crowther was one of the judges.

I used to be a peroxide blonde... and burnt a hole in my scalp. that was fun.

Talking of burning holes in things, I have burnt many a hole in many a carpet, through use of matches, sparklers, irons. By accident. Honest.

I love dogs, but I don't want them shitting on my pavement anymore. I may be taking action which wouldn't be classed as that of a dog-lover.

I wince when I drive over a long dead long squished animal on the road. I'm sure it knows I'm driving over it.

My hideous feet are size 39 EUR or 6 UK. Which makes buying shoes in sales almost impossible. Bugger.

The measurement around my arse is STAYING A SECRET... are you mad?

I like solitude. A lot.

I love houseplants and gardens.... but, blimey, someone else can water the bloody things.

The most life changing thing I ever learnt to do was touch type.

I want to be a jazz singer. But I don't know the words.

five minutes (before correction of typos)... tagging five bloggeurs... andre, joolz, rogi, Lee AND Guyana.

chaise lizard

Can I tell you one of the things that irritates me more than anything in the whole world?

Yes?

It's when people misread things, not just once, but for their whole lives, refusing to be corrected, to hear how other people say it, even the ACTUAL FRENCH!

(christ, she must have been having nightmares last night, what the hell's she on about now?)

Chaise Longue. It's chay-ze long. Hard G. Long-ue.

It is NOT chay-ze LONJE!

I've even heard antiques "experts" on the godawful BBC Prime (wonderful BBC, godawful Prime) every-other-show's-a-lifestyle-show channel that we so unimpressively get on cable saying "chay-ze LONJE".

It should be punishable. Any ideas?

And no. I don't have one.

finally, the weather came back

I'm sitting on the sofa, typing on my nice warm lap, thanks to my nice warm laptop (luckily the vents are at the back), listening to Morcheeba, listening to the wind whistling through the house and out the windows, looking out at clouds (yep, REAL clouds) MOVING through the sky, and my cherry tree blowing about like billy-o and the palm tree across the way doing a good job of waving violently in the wind, and I'm remembering and trying to draw the wonderful clouds from the last couple of days when we DIDN'T get the minor hurricane, but DID get fantabulous storm cloud formations all over the place... and getting my babies re-trained at examining the sky and exclaiming "mama! Look at THAT! Isn't it beautiful?" so that their mama melts.

Summer weather is all very well, but god, isn't it boring? Blue skies. Silence. Now I got my clouds back, I'm happy.

doesn't it itch?

So, where did this fashion of nasty bugs crawling out of the backsides of young girls come from? What does it mean? Didn't it hurt? How far down do they go? Doesn't it itch? What the hell will they look like when they're old and their arses drop down to the backs of their knees? Can they REALLY think it's "spiritual" to have chinese or islamic scripts... written on their arses? What am I missing? Should I have one? Is it like a tamagotchi, but kept in one's knickers?

I feel better now I got that off my chest.

thanks.

god, we british are so repressed

Usually, I hate it when people say that to me. "Oh, you eengleesh (because anywhere outside of UK we brits and eengleeesh are interchangeable) are SOOOO reprrrrehsssed!". Because honestly, I don't think I'm so reserved and repressed and anally retentive.

Or maybe I am. I refuse to raise my voice with anyone I'm not related to. I'd rather be swallowed by a hole in the pavement than look SILLY in front of my peers (which is why I do it in front of the blogosphere instead). And you'd never catch me walking down the road with a girlfriend (as in friend friend, not girl-friend/namorada, before I get a whole load of emails from confused people swearing blind that they thought I was straight and wondering why only now am I coming out... I'm not coming out. the grumpy prof IS a bloke) with my arm around her.

And then I think of almost all the countries I've ever been (not that many, but enough to know EVERYTHING), and can remember seeing girls with their arms round each other... such as these two above that I almost ran over in my car yesterday because they were so loved up and giggly and cuddly with each other that they weren't watching where they were going.

I know that if I HAD walked around with my arm round my girlfriend in my teens I'd have got "oi, facking lezzers!" shouted at me then and forever more. Which, if you're a repressed english girl, heterosexual, lesbian or neither, is pretty bad.

All of which means, of course, that I am a reeprehssed eeengleeesh person.

arse.

the council couldn't object to this,

could they? It's so unobtrusive. Can't you just imagine this somewhere halfway up a hill?

Of course, this is just the first of many designs for this mythical house that I fear will never be... but it's always worth dreaming these things up.

(good challenge, Robin, ta).

simplified

One of the reasons I went all "apple" on you is because I wanted a simpler life (with pcs there's always so much STUFF to keep in the back of your head).

So, now I've gone all zen on you, because I want a simpler blog.

The blogroll which, frankly, is getting out of hand now has its own separate blog, "vitriolica's linking blog" and will have more attention from me (and you I hope), and all the e-commerce stuff is hidden away too... it just wasn't doing it for me. I still sell stuff. Just not for a fiver. Ask if you want something.

I'm sticking with blogger comments again, because the others keep going wrong... which means that the older comments will disappear, but I'm going to put them somewhere... so we can still read them, but in a strange order that will make no sense whatsoever. Won't that be fun?

After that, I'll be conducting talks on Pilates and Buddhism in modern day Portugal and how they can facilitate a more enlightened life.








as bloody if.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.


and if you're wondering what the new vit-logo has to do with anything, don't worry, it doesn't.


and I want to hear a BIG "happy birthday" for my baby who is FOUR today. And if you say it loud enough I won't give you the WHOLE story of her birth in Portugal from start (megalomaniacal gynaecologist) to finish (oh, really, you DON'T want to hear it).

oh, and I got myself a moblog, but it only has three very dull pictures in it so far, so I ain't telling you where it is.

watching the sky

If you live in Portugal or Spain, you may well be looking at a sky like this, all greyish brownish overcast, thinking "GET ON WITH IT AND RAIN!!!!"

I'm getting a bit weirded out by this excessively hot weather...so to see a cloudy sky, a normal autumnal sky is rather refreshing adn reassuring.

And this weather helps perpetuate the damn mozzie problem.

I got eaten alive yesterday on Tróia. (Tróia, a long sand spit to the south of Setúbal, gettable toable by ferry or a long drive... an earthly paradise if you're a mozzie....)

"Darling" (as IF I call him darling) "We're going for a little day trip to Tróia today, while you work"

"Okay, have a nice time"

Now, where in that conversation was the "Don't forget that you'll probably be eaten alive by mozzies, dearest darling vitnmadge, for as a local, I know all the little things like where mozzies call home and make humans' lives a misery." ?

So, when I got home, I mentioned the mozzies.

"Oh, yeah, those damned mozzies. Awful, aren't they?"

-----

Expect ALL municipal works to finish at 8 o'clock this evening (I think it's eight, but it would require actual research and knowledge to give you a true hour... ME? ACCURATE?) when the Autarqias/Council elections finish.

They'll be at it again in about 3 and three quarter years.

-----

I'm having a declutter. I'm decluttering my blog AND my house. I'm going to go a bit zen. But that's later. When all Sunday business has been attended to. *snore*
(and no, I don't mean going to mass.... ME? RELIGIOUS?)

a lifelong love affair... over in five seconds

I found a goddam maggot in a pistachio. It WAS roasted. But it was still a maggot.

Is there any going back to the glorious green nut?

Cashews are too expensive.

Peanuts are too run-of-the-mill.

Is it that I have eaten many roasted maggots and this was the first I'd noticed? (something I'm not bothered by... if you told me I had ALREADY eaten someting disgusting I couldn't care less... it's already in there).

Or was this a one in a million, unlikely to be repeated?

--------

There are most definitely council elections happening this weekend. How do I know?

Well, I caught a load of blokes putting up road names in azulejery (I may have just invented a new word in English... I mean tiles, obviously) yesterday... right next to the existing marble versions of the same road names. At both ends of the road.

I call it overkill myself.

THIS DRAWING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS POST

...before I get any inquiries as to what the hell a cockroach has to do with this post.

Because until I write this I have no idea what it will be about. Because I haven't any simple ideas in my little head to write down today. Because there are about sixteen hundred THINGS rolling around in my head, ideas, books, projects, underground houses, inventions, gardens, paintings, clothes, creations, amazing and wondrous thoughts, terrible and mundane regrets ... but right now, they're all in a kind of soup.

So, I suppose I'm looking for the key, or the combination, or the filter, to unlock it all and let it come out in some coherent form and let me put it into practice without getting bloody diverted from it all by cooking dinner, shovelling shit, ferrying people, being diplomatic... (bloody hell, we women are BLOODY FANTASTICALLY CLEVER... well, we ARE... (especially me... supersuper extra clever))

And I don't believe this key that I'm looking for is a cockroach. Any ideas?

mummy! it's got a nibble out of it!

Another good reason for having children. Eclipses are more fun.

We were shrieking around for a bit in the garden and then out on to the top of a hill for a more surreal view. What fun. They didn't really "get" how odd the landscape becomes in that strange watery eclipse sunlight, but they liked the way the sun suddenly started looking like a crescent moon made out of cheese.

better than tv

After a long day of playing with their friends the girls fell asleep in the car on the way home.

"Phew", I thought, stupidly, for I should have learnt by now, "I can relax now, and just chuck them in bed, free of bedtime story reading for one night... (isn't reading stories tiring when you do it every night?)".

So, obviously, they woke up when we got home, as they always do, for I should have learnt by now, demanding more supper, more stories, more fun and more everything after that little refreshing half an hour sleep in the car. *Sigh*

But I had had a long day gossiping and tittle tattling and giggling so I wasn't up for reading any stories to wind them down. So, I fired up the computer and stuck them in front of this: http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/wildcamafrica/wildcam.html

And even at past ten at night, there are things stirring, wonderful noises of crickets and frogs, and unseen creatures crunching though the undergrowth.

And I had my own spectacle of two little girls absolutely enthralled by a watering hole in Africa, listening intently to the wonderful night noises of the Botswanan savannah, gasping with excitement at the sound of two hyenas laughing in the background or a frog plopping into the pond. Wonderful.

(thanks to zoe getting me into this webcam in Africa business, and JL for pointing out this one in zoe's comment box).