I made a gamble hoping to lose… and won instead. I think that means I actually lost. Only I also won. I’m not sure. Is everyone else is as confused as I am? Excellent. As I’ve briefly mentioned in a few earlier posts, I have found a new hobby in ball-jointed dolls (BJDs). Here’s what mine looks like in bad lighting:
Look at her eyes reaching deep into your soul. The little cutie.
Part of the appeal behind BJDs is customising them. While others may have the same sculpt every one makes their own look unique, right down to the freckles and eyebrows. In fact, I ordered my doll to come with a simple default faceup, intending it to be temporary until I could commission someone to paint a fancier one. There’s nothing stopping you from doing the faceup yourself (of course!), but because it apparently takes years before you’re any good most take the same route as me and find someone with skillz. Also eughkk, doing art.
A few months back I discovered Andreja and her wispy delicate style, and decided she’d be perfect. Thing is, she’s also one of the most popular faceup artists; every month there’s a scramble of doll-obsessed freaks over just twenty available slots. One way of winning a slot is by being among the first to comment on a certain blog post. The last time she did one of these, people who had commented within the first minute were too late. Crazy.
Obvs I was going to have to try lots of times, but this was okay with me and I wasn’t planning on getting a new faceup for a few months yet… that is, until I checked my Google Reader at the exact time she updated her blog ushering in a new round of speed-commenting. Oh my.
My brain started yelling at me.
“OMG SLOTS JUST CAME AVAILABLE WHAT AMAZING TIMING GO GO DO IT NOW.”
“But I don’t even want to apply yet.”
“SHUT UP IT’S REALLY HARD TO GET A PLACE LET’S SEE IF WE CAN GET ONE YEEEES.”
“But what if we do get one??”
“…IDK LOL. DO ITTTTTTT!!!! THIS IS SO EXCITING.”
I tried applying. Just to see if I could win the game. The internet lagged and it took four attempts to post a comment … meanwhile, every time the page refreshed other people were successfully posting comments! OHHH NOO I DON’T WANT TO LOSE A GAME THAT I DON’T CARE ABOUT WINNING. That would be tragic. Then BAM!!! My comment: 7th out of the lucky 8 (the other entries would be put in a lottery to win the remaining slots). THIS IS SO AWESOME AND YET NOT WHAT I WANTED AT THE SAME TIME. SO THAT’S BAD. EXCEPT NOT BECAUSE I’M A WINNERRRRR. WAIT ARE YOU SURE THIS REALLY HAPPENED. I keep recounting the comments. Yes. It totally did. My furious typing skills were superior … at an inconvenient time… except not really. And all because I heard myself talking to myself! Oops!
I’ve since wiped her current faceup, as is required before sending it away. I love it even more now that it’s blank, which shows how unsatisified I was with it before. Can’t wait to see what Andreja does with it!
This post is dedicated to Kate, who wanted to know what this tweet was about…. and probably wasn’t expecting it to be about a stupid doll face. Hah!
TL;DR: I get to send a disembodied head in the mail tomorrow.
Today’s post is brought to you by Wendy ~inspiring me to blog~. Let me pretend that life has been super exciting and full of sparkles, hence misleading you into thinking I’m definitely not spending my entire summer holiday on Reddit. Oh my god, Reddit is so much worse at sucking your life away than Tumblr. I mean, what?
I trick cats to snuggle into boxes.
I put a couple of boxes on the decking just in case Blackberry wanted some shade on a scorcher of a summer day. Summer sucks. Til forever. I have the feeling my cat feels the same way.
Warning: irrelevant cat lady rambling. Today she caught a yellow bird. To get everyone’s attention she made muffled trilling noises only to be kicked out of the house. Not wanting her to feel bad (especially since it takes a Big Deal to make her meow), I watched her eat it. The sound of crunching bones will haunt me forever. Acck, such a vicious cat, I can never look at her the same way again.
My mummy made a birthday cake.
My mum finally made Baby Sister a birthday cake (sort of). This is to make up for the one she owed a few years back – remember how she makes pretty birthday cakes? This is why we don’t let her get away with it! It’s also why I don’t feel like I could possibly be ready to be a mother unless I also had mad cake-making skills.
I had a lot of fun watching her panic around the kitchen trying to get this finished before Baby Sister came home. Then I scribbled on the bench in a white fudge pen. It totally looks like the cat in the top photo DON’T LIE.
…I’m still waiting on my 22nd birthday cake, by the way. Just saying.
Then I tried making panda cupcakes
Such derpy looking pandas… panderps, if you will. What’s even more sad is that these were the best ones from all my experimenting. Blame the oreos. They’ll take any opportunity to crumble on me, those tricksy biscuits. At the very least I’m quite happy to have found a new favourite recipe for vanilla cupcakes in Divine Cupcakes – they’re fluffy and not overly sweet, meaning you can eat more before feeling sick, yussss! The author runs a cupcake shop in Wellington. Cupcakes and Wellington, how perfect does that sound!? Clearly I need to visit… and maybe beg to work there lolol.
Balloon cat!
SURPRISE, MORE CATS – srsly, whose blog did you think you were reading.
Bought from Hey Chickadee!, and I just found this kitty has a tumblr too. Sometimes I think it looks like a giant lollipop is attached to the cat, but that’s too friggin precious to be considered a flaw. Where would it go if your cat was strapped to a balloon? :O Mine would probz become a menace to the skies. OH GOD FLY AWAY BIRDIES, FUZZY DEATH IS FLOATING YOUR WAAAAY-
PS, you gorgeous law students
I think it’s around this time that invites for second year law come out. If you are one of the anxious people hovering by your mail boxes, I have my fingers crossed super hard!
I bullied my friend into updating her blog with one, and thought I’d do the same thing. Initially all I wanted was new underwear and tights, but I quickly found that I’m just as materialistic as always. Phew!
- Tivoli Audio Model One, a sweet little radio for when I’m in Dunedin.
- Flower head band. OOH.
- Dollflower eyes for my creepy BJD hobby.
- A job, so I can afford to buy stuff for above hobby. Also, sewing skills to make it somewhat cheaper.
- For 2012 to not suck.
- Wendy to turn up at my house with a poofy ribbon on her head saying “I AM YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT OH HEYY“, and then we can skip underneath rainbows with cheerful unicorns.
- New earrings. Possibly hypoallergenic, because my current ones have started making my ears itchy/painful. Also the green ooze that accompanies all this is a bit freaky.
- This minty cake mixer, although you can also get these in pink and they’re so irrestibly cute but I’m trying to be a grown-up today.
- A red VW Beetle (and a driver’s license, lololol).
- A4 hardcover notebook with plain pages. A nice one. So impossible to find.
- Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Waiting for the PC version is killing me, and logically I should wait a year when it’ll be super cheap…
- Ponies! A shetland pony (fluffy mane!), a clydesdale (fluffy feet!), and a miniature horse (fat bellies and short legs!).
I took photos.
(…What the feck are those furry green flowers? It’s like they have leaves instead of petals.)
Mum put flowers in my sister’s room to welcome her when she came back from uni. While I love obnoxiously bright daisies (take note!), I also like roses but had no idea you could get them in purple – my favourite colour! Combined with my weakness for flowers, it made for a jealous Becka.
Macro shots make me feel like a photography expert, and means I don’t have to remember to clear the background of Distracting Plastic Bags (see first photo).
Personally, it’s exciting being tough enough to celebrate someone’s birthday without wilting, eesh. For these cupcakes I daringly tried a new recipe that gave me a fluffy sponge cake and I’m ashamed to say that I ate more of these than Birthday Girl did! The icing had splashes of vanilla and lemon essence… I didn’t know what I was doing, no… making it a miracle that the end result was so tasty (phew!). Please note that I further honed my baking skillz by putting coconut in a plastic bag with green food dye that I shook around to make grass. I get more incredible every day. ;D
Macro! Forgive me.
When I was 5 I asked my mum what the first thing she’d buy if our house burnt down (“I WILL BUY YOU TOYS“), and then bragged to people in my class about it, cos everyone else was saying their mum would buy clothes. HAH their parents sucked. It’s only recently that I realised that she was probably lying.
The Burning House is on a related topic: what stuff would you rescue if your house was on fire? The most important things to me ever are all on my computer/online. My whiny journal, photos, this crappy blog… almost everything I have ever written, yes. I am an egotistic twat. Most of everything else I can buy again. The chocolate beside me would melt amidst the flames, but I’m sure no one at the supermarket would be surprised if I bought more. It’d kinda be a bummer I never got to sell on all my uni textbooks, but never mind. And I can always buy more hats for me to secretly wear by myself.
As for everything else, it starts with the obvious things: my laptop, loxamine (I’m guessing if you’re dealing with the drama of a charred house you don’t want to risk missing a dose of your anti-crazy meds) and wallet. If I had enough time I’d clamber around fetching things of sentimental value, such as:
- Two notebooks. One is an odd journal from last year (I wanted to see how I liked it, as it’d give me an excuse to buy lots of stationery). The other I use as a daily to-do diary which has miscellaneous lists, planning, etc!
- Scruffy Pagan books. Nyaww.
- Owl necklace. I’m cheating and using another owl necklace (promise I’m not a hipster), because most of my jewellery is still in Dunedin.
- Box of Sentimentality, which is full of notes and letters and pictures that I’ve collected over the years. Not pictured because its contents are currently scattered all over the place… I’m lucky my house isn’t on fire right now, yes.
“….I could risk running back inside, right? Right?”
- Favourite shoes. Soooo impractical.
- Cambridge Co Satchel. I haven’t even worn it outside yet, I just like to quietly stroke it.
- Nail polish. I spend an eternity looking for the perfect colour that I’ve imagined in my head, I’m not enduring that all over again!
- Asian ball-jointed doll. If you knew how much they cost you’d understand. Not pictured, because I’m still embarrassed of my new hobby even though my mum has forbidden me from feeling ashamed. It’s cute though.
If I was in my Homeland I’d of course have to fetch the bitey cat, although I’d probably burn to death racing around the house trying to find her, only to see her trotting outside with a box of matches in her mouth. Oh my god, cat, if you wanted to move back to our old house so badly you could just said so. HOW DID I RAISE AN ARSONIST CAT.
P.S. If you’re a commenting-inclined sort of person, please feel free to share what you’d save! It’s good to be prepared for the day that a cat chucks a molotov cocktail through your window (don’t think about opposable thumbs, just go with it).