Ladies who lunch

That's been me this week.  Wednesday I went out to the AEON* to catch up with a bunch of people I worked with out there, originally intending to see just one person, and ending up seeing loads of others - everybody misses me, apparently.  It was like a ghost town, with hardly anybody around, which meant we could sit and chat over coffee for an hour with nobody feeling guilty about reducing the August Institution's profit down from its most recent $6 billion result...


On the way back from the AEON*, I stopped in at my favourite fabric shop, Cottage Quiltworks, to get some more Christmas fabric supplies, fully intending to spend no more than $50.00.... ha.  Suffice it to say, I went over the limit by just a little and I got these:

Which I think will make some nice decoration-y things, and are proof that traditional and modern go well together, if you make sure the colours are right (love the blue-reds!)... and this:





Which amusingly has the same title as some erotic literature by Anais Nin, so watch out what you ask for in the shops!




Yesterday I spent a very enjoyable 2.5 hours with an ex-boss, somebody I worked with for a long time, whose company I always enjoy, and we chatted about Italy, travel disasters, life, the universe, you know.  He recently went to Europe with his lovely wife JJ & three lovely children - twin boys of 11 & a girl of 14 - how bloody brave is that?  


Apparently it all went well until the three kids contracted food poisoning in Hong Kong just hours before getting on the plane to come home.  His stories of the progression of each child into the vomiting stage was hilarious - one in the hotel bathroom, one all over their bed, one in the cable car up Mount Victoria - just the way to finish a holiday.  On mature reflection, I think I'd rather just have my wallet stolen.


And now, Gentle Readers, I have the first visit of a new cleaning person today, so I need to go & make myself in the epitome of a respectable Northern Beaches housewife.  I may be some time.


Ciao!


*Arse-end of Nowhere

Farewell, Streaks on the China

Some time ago, I was wasting time browsing links to other blogs on sites I read (does that make sense?).  I was on the lovely Angela Pudding's blog, Fluid Pudding, and I started to flick through the blogs with interesting titles.  Now, Gentle Readers, you know that I'm clever, but I'm not that clever.  I could never come up with something as witty as 'A woman who sews, her slightly daggy** husband and his worm farm', or "A woman who works in IT but wishes she'd trained in Upholstery when she was 17", or, my all-time favourite, "The slovenly woman's guide to day-wear when you're 48, not working and don't have to go outside ".  


Anyway, I was quite taken by the idea of Streaks on the China.  It had resonance of 1950's America, where women wore stilettos and aprons, actually ironed their husband's underwear and produced fabulous gourmet meals from packets of dried, reconstituted mushrooms, mince and non-dairy creamer.  Apparently.


So, I started to read.  I read about Sara's life, which was not about dried mushrooms and non-dairy creamer at all.  I followed her struggle with grief after a truly terrible event, her humour, her hubby, her dog.  I liked her.  She sounded a bit like me.  I even went right back to the beginning, and re-read everything she'd written.  I hung in there when she had a break from blogging, willing her silently to come back to it, which she did.  But now, it's finished.  She has declared her blog is dead, and she may or may not pop up in some other blogging endeavour.  I hope so.  I'm going to miss her.


I wish you well, Sara.  Ciao!


**daggy - slightly disinterested in fashion, likes to wear tracksuits, sit in a beanbag and fart a lot, which he blames on the possums.

So, now I'm a little peeved

You know how it is, Gentle Readers, you see a bargain, you impulsively jump in & buy, and then, wham, you get stung at the end, so that the actual bargain ends up costing you more than it would if you'd just bought the damn things outright.


This has just happened to me.  I bought a bunch of stuff from an Etsy seller who advertised herself as 'going out of business'.  OK, so she's keen to get rid of her stock.  Yup, no issue with that, and the things were quite nice.  So I bought a lot.  Quite a lot.  They're useful, they last forever, they don't take up much space.   They're hard to get here.  Enough justification, I would have said.


Anyway, they arrived, 12 days after I ordered them. From the States to here, that's OK.  I can deal with that.  However, what I can't deal with is the absolutely total dishonesty of charging me $22 to ship something that cost her $4.80 to ship.  I've been buying stuff from Etsy and the internet for some years now, and without exception, my sellers have refunded overpayment of shipping.  I even had a refund of shipping costs within Australia just last week, and that was about $2.00 - something I would not have batted an eyelid over.  But $17.20?  That's five cups of coffee and a biscuit!  That's two day's lunch money.  That's 15 minute's parking at Sydney rates.  That's definitely refundable.


So, anyway, I thought I'd have a look at her feedback.  Silly me, of course I should have done this first, but who does?  I've always had such a good positive experience with every other Etsy seller that it didn't even occur to me that somebody would rip me off.  Anyway, there was quite a lot of negative and neutral feedback, and a number of comments about the shipping costs being outrageous... Guess that should have alerted me.  I've never seen any Etsy seller with less than a 99% positive rating before.  Silly silly me.


Anyway, I did a bit more digging.  Her shop has been 'going out of business' since August 2008.  How long?  Yes, Gentle Reader, August 2008.  What should that have told me?  She's picked on a great way to get people into her shop, and then is gouging them on the shipping.  Not nice, not nice at all.  So, if you're thinking of buying paper tags, be warned.  The sharks are circling.

Did I mention these?

I made these Christmasdecorations just prior to the market, and after beading the birdie's eyes with an actual garnet, stuffing them with lavender and putting little brass beads on the whoopy bits (I don't know they're really called, do you?), I thought they were too nice to sell, so I've sent them off to my lovely friend Clare, who is 96, in the UK, as a Christmas gift.

Quite nice, methinks.  Shame about the reflections.  Picnik, where are you now?

Ciao!

You have been warned

OK, Gentle Readers, it's time to get serious.  You know I mostly write this stuff with my tongue stuffed firmly in my cheek - my name isn't really Isabella Golightly (she was my great-grandmother, honest to ghod), I don't really have a fabric addiction (oh yes I do!) and my husband's name isn't really Mr Golightly (it isn't even the same as my name!), but sometimes, serious stuff needs to be discussed.  And this is one of those times, because I've started the sentence with a preposition, so it must be.


I got an email from somebody pretending to be Helen Bainbridge, who has the lovely blog "Baino's Banter".  It was titled "Check out my photos".  I thought it might be from her, because she'd been blogging about her trip to Italy & France, and she knew I was interested in seeing her photos, so I clicked on the link.  I created a user ID, and then, lo and behold, there was nothing from Baino at all.  What did happen was that people in my email address book started getting emails from me (both in my real, actual name, and my Isabella Golightly persona) inviting them to check out my photos.  


I take a lot of photos.  I love photography.  But I don't email every single person in my address book (work colleagues, Etsy suppliers, friends, relatives, you name it) asking them to have a look at them - I'm extremely discerning about who can see what of mine (really mine, not Isabella Golightly's.  She even has a Flickr page!).  So, I did a bit of digging.  Turns out the mob who sent this email are serial spammers who use this insidious method to get into your computer and your address book.

Who are these people? The site is called "fanbox[dot]com". There are lots of pages on the net warning about how insidious these people are - here's a link to 'Can Talk Tech', which will give you some idea of bad these people are. In addition to their completely illegal invasion of your address book, they also use your user ID's and passwords to 'pretend to be you' on other sites. It's phising, pure and simple.

Here's some of the terms and conditions if you do sign up:

“…You agree that your public profile information, including but not limited to your display name, photograph, interests and greeting may be utilized by the community representatives or community technology to encourage other users to communicate with you or to interact with the Service…”

They can pretend to be you so they can spam you via mobile phone, which you are charged for. I also particularly liked this one:

“…you are appointing SMS.ac to be your agent and authorizing SMS.ac to store, in your profile, your usernames and passwords (provided by you) to other web site services (“Other Sites”) and to act on your behalf to access and interact with such Other Sites…”. 

This implies to me that they put some kind of trojan horse on your computer once you sign up, and it records your passwords & user ID's, then they use that info to log onto other sites & pretend to be you.

They can pretend to be you, and the final straw:

“…you, not SMS.ac, are entirely responsible and liable for all activities conducted through your Account…” 

These guys were known as SMS.ac in a previous life. That they had to change company names says a lot about the way they work. So, if you get an email apparently from a friend asking you to check out their photos, talk to the friend first, and open the link at your peril.

That is all. Normal service will resume shortly.

People are...

By turns, nice, weird, rude, amazing, funny, generous, helpful, dismissive... people.

The market was jam packed, and the well-known groovy funky women’s clothing boutique just next door to the beautician had racks of clothes outside, for apparently bargain prices, and let me tell you, Gentle Readers, it was a scrum.  All sense of decorum and propriety was forgotten in the quest for a $25 bargain (details?  women stripping down to their underwear in the street to try things on...).  As we were the first stall immediately beyond the logjam of strollers, frustrated husbands, wailing children and desperately terrified dogs, lots of people just put their heads down and kept going, thrilled to be beyond the ruck, and completely passed us by.

My neighbours, the very worthwhile Clown Doctors, had a secret weapon, which involved free chocolates, cheap Christmas cards and a guessing competition for a 10Kg block of chocolate, which worked quite well on people heading into the scrum, but completely failed on the escapees.

No matter, we both coped, and there were some object lessons for me in having a stall, viz:   

1. Have a price for something you didn’t even consider selling – I could have sold the ‘Bend the Rules’ bunting about 3 times, and hello to the very snippy woman who wanted to know why I didn’t have any made up to sell, and her very nice friend who wanted some for her daughter’s room – mail me! 
2. Make signs for the containers – although it was mostly obvious what things were, nobody bought a badge (but I did give one away, hello Rachel!), perhaps because they couldn’t tell what they were?  Maybe the Ziploc plastic bag packaging threw them off?  Next time I’ll just have them in the box on their luggage tags.
3.  Make more stuff.  I thought I’d be sharing a table with the lovely Kerry, but it turned out she was giving me the whole table – so my stuff looked a little lonely by itself.  I could have sold some of the cinnamon & elderberry bags about 8 times – I think it was the fabrics, because my Christmas special clove-only bags were picked up, sniffed and discarded by about 3 million people (or maybe it only felt like it!), whereas the red, cream & blue ones, and the Momo Wonderland ones pretty much all sold.
4. Don’t feel like you have to justify why things cost what they do – I sold one of the Joel Dewberry birds to a lady who obviously appreciated quality, but a number of people wanted to know why they cost so much more than the ‘two pieces of linen, two buttons, bob’s your uncle’ birds – it was obvious to me, but then... I made them.
5. Ignore the teenagers.  I had a pair of girls go by, one of whom said “those birds are cute”, and the other one trampled all over me by saying “my mum makes that stuff”.  Keep walking, girls.
6. Don’t fall over in the parking lot & sprain your ankle.  It’s very hard to run a market stall with an icepack and towels wrapped around your ankle – and a very big “Thank You” to the charming lady from the Eco Linen stand who came to my rescue with said icepack, and the two wonderful girls who rushed to pick me up out of the dirt.  So undignified.

So, today, Gentle Readers, I am testing a pattern, having my windows cleaned for the first time in two years (how’s that for slovenly, hmm?), catching up with my good friend Doc Rosie who is visiting the lovely Clare, the brains behind Lulu Carter, and resting the ankle.  Oh, and listing the remnants of my Markets expedition in the shop, so if you’re looking for a nice Christmas badge, you’ll know where to come.

Ciao!

Sneak Peek

Well, here's the fruits of our labours - that's me, My Best Friend & the Kidlets.  We stuffed, stitched, punched, cut, knotted, stamped, wrote and argued, mostly about the pricing.  I admit I have no idea how much to charge for things - I always worry that they're overpriced, but then I remember Lois McMaster Bujold in 'A Civil Campaign', where Kareen Koudelka tells Ekaterin "don't undervalue your own work, there's plenty out there who'll do it for you - what they pay for, they'll value".  So, I've gone with more than I would have, say, three months ago, and we shall see.

Fingers crossed!  I will report back on Sunday night, if I'm still alive.


Ciao!