Vegetable Viewers

How is it that after a moderately productive weekend Monday morning is still a saucy little reminder of how much I didn't get to? Bad Monday.

I started one of the sewing projects and at one third done am ready to declare it a success. In total (and eventually) there will be eleven little birdies perched on a birdie branch mobile over Frankie's crib. I was nervous at first having never sewn from a pattern but after a few tries there were plenty of perfect birdie body pieces ready for stitching and stuffing.

Getting all of my ducks in a row

Rocking robins (or chickadees or sparrows or other birds with pretty poor adaptation skills who would be unlikely to survive a bleakly coloured Canadian winter)

I decided to hand sew them because (a) they're pretty tiny and delicate and I am not yet that adept at maneuvering material under a fast-moving needle (b) I could then stitch them up while watching the weekend's films - The Invention of Lying and The Hurt Locker.

The former was forgettable and the latter was decent but maybe not multiple oscar worthy (in our sofa-film-critic expert opinion). It did a good job of depicting war without explicit commentary or judgement (no small feat) but is this always a good thing? How do you look at the lives of soldiers in isolation from their political context. How do you not ask (when watching a film like The Hurt Locker) but how did they get there? Who sent them? Why?

On the upside it didn't follow any sort of traditional Hollywood narrative curve and this was nice. There wasn't a clearly defined introduction, character development fifteen minutes, action peak and resolution. The film wanted to create the impression that you had just dropped in on this group of soldiers and it succeeded in doing so. I like movies that let you fill in the blanks for yourself (and don't automatically assume that you're about as smart as celery) so points for this.

In other weekend news I lit the stove on fire (okay so sometimes as smart as celery). We've taken to hiding food from the test babies in the oven when it's too warm to go in the fridge. After setting said oven to 400 degrees and leaving it to warm up the billowing smoke reminded me of where we had hidden that bag of two-bite brownies. My animal-like reflexes kicked in and I jumped into action yelling "dude help" and then waited for R to come in and tell me to gather up the test babies and head for the out-of-doors.

He opened the oven and put the fire out with a tiny spray bottle of water which was kind of anti-climactic. After much laughing (and deciding that we should probably dig the fire extinguisher out from the back of the cupboard) our kitchen smelt like campfire smores so it wasn't all bad. We are sad to report, however, that the two-bite brownies didn't make it.

Extra highlights - some lovely afternoon knitting, not nearly enough editing and surprise last minute free tickets to the East Coast Music Awards gala. We didn't stay for the whole thing but did get to see Katherine McLellan, Classified and a tribute to Jerry Holland (my most favourite part)!