A little bit of everything, all rolled into one

Some cool tea cups I inherited when someone left the team at work. They are now sitting on my windowsill looking funky (funky is a great word, don't deny it).

So, not much progress has been made on either the sewing or knitting fronts. My first sock is going interminably slowly; I'm getting quite bored of it, it's taking much effort to do even a few rows. I want to knit a baby cap for some quick gratification but I'm worried I'll never return to the sock.

As for sewing, I practiced buttonholes on my sewing machine on the weekend and they were okay but not good enough that I want to attempt them on the baby pinnafore yet. This weekend I hope. I actually wasted a lot of time when I got my sewing machine out last Saturday fiddling around with all the dials because the straight stitches looked weird. It had been on zig zag and I followed the instructions for putting it back to straight except for one instruction I misread which lead me to mucking around with all the dials for ages and sewing 'test' lines all along a piece of scrap fabric until I realised what was wrong. Craft rage follows me wherever I go.

Seeing as my Tuesday night sewing clasess are now over, this week I was able to go to cheap movie night with my friend (and sewing guru) Janet to see Inception. Janet suggested it and I wasn't sure it would be my cup of tea because I don't normally like anything that could be potentially scary, has lots of violence/shooting, or is all action/blockbuster-y. Turns out Inception isn't really any of those things, but I hadn't taken enough notice of it to realise that. All I knew was that when it came out everyone seemed to be saying it was amazing and like The Matrix (which I haven't seen, someone tried to get me to a while ago but when we started watching it it seemed really out of date, the computers and cellphones looked old, and I just wasn't into it; granted I didn't really give it much of a chance).

Inception, on the other hand, was amazing! I loved it! There was quite a bit of shooting but nothing was particularly gory and it didn't feel gratuitous or never ending. I loved the twisty twisty mind benderness of it and the suspense and I especially love that afterwards you can talk with people who've seen it about what they thought about the end and then read stuff on the internet that makes you go 'Ahhhh yes, I didn't think of/notice that'. I'm glad I went slightly out of my comfort zone and saw it. I didn't know until she appeared on screen that Ellen Page was in it which pleased me greatly because I really like her and Marion Cotillard is just the most beautiful person with an amazing voice. It makes me want to watch the movie in which she plays Edith Piaf.

Just in case you think I have abandoned theatre for movies, what with all my classic movie Sunday talk, the Banksy documentary, and now Inception, rest assured I really haven't. It's just that of the shows I've seen lately none have made me want to rave about them. The ones that I can remember are: Doors. Walls. And also silence. and Distraction Camp at BATS - one was a bit extreme but enjoyable; the other I did not enjoy.

I saw Marat/Sade at Toi Whakaari, during which I spent most of my time feeling like I was having major deja vu. The fact that it was in the basement, the way the seating was arranged, and that it was set in an asylum reminded me of a show I saw there last year called Bedlam and some of the costumes and the company-ness of it made me think of another show I saw at Toi last year called The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I know that some of this was unavoidable due to the choice of play - you can't just rewrite the script so it isn't being performed by a company of people in an asylum, but it made me question why the play was chosen in the first place. I also thought some more original design concepts could have saved if from the Bedlam deja vu. But this isn't a theatre review blog so I'll leave it there...(except to say there were some really strong performances).

I saw Shipwrecked! at Circa which has its last show tomorrow night. This was theatrical storytelling in a pretty pure form and very entertaining with lots of clever uses of props (a dead dog symbolised by books laid out a certain way was one of my favourite examples) and really engaging performances. It tells the story of Louis de Rougemont which is a really interesting case of storytelling in itself.

And now I am off to my first Phoenix game. With a black nostril. If you get a burst blood vessel in your nose cauterised with silver nitrate, make sure the person (well, doctor) doing it is careful not to get the silver nitrate anywhere visible because it is a burn. It will not just come off, you have to wait for it to fade and the skin to heal. I'm thinking of it as a social experiment - who will say something? Who will merely stare? Good times.