helen-louise's journal

A video in which OK Go (them of the treadmills and Heath Robinson contraptions) play with DOGS and IKEA FURNITURE! (Seriously, everything they use is from IKEA. I worry about the fact I recognised this).

I have five or six livejournal entries in my mental queue to post here at some point. This is not one of them. As often happens, I'm buried in mostly-offline life, and A Thing has happened that's stressed me enough to need to post about it NOW.

Has anyone ever tried the concept of a safeword with their mother?

I'm asking this because I've spent the past 3 days in very close proximity with mine, working incredibly hard to clear out the back room in my house so I can use it as a study. This has been going really well (thanks also to hatter & bfo) and it is now usable and quite comfortable.

But about midnight tonight my mother got to the state of tiredness/stress where she started misinterpreting everything I said, and I kept telling her that she wasn't listening properly and it was too late at night and she should go home, and she kept on trying to argue with me despite acknowledging tiredness, and we ended up having an absolutely blazing row which wouldn't have happened if she'd have just gone home an hour and a half earlier like I'd suggested. So now I feel guilty and sad because it seems very, um, ungrateful to have a massive row with someone after they've been helping you sort out junk for three days, but still frustrated because I'd said I needed to be left alone.

So I'm wondering about the concept of a safeword to use with one's mother, with the implication of "No, I really mean no, you are pushing my buttons and we need to end this conversation now!". Of course, it would only work if your mother is reasonably sane, or else her response to the safeword would simply be to ratchet up the levels of emotional blackmail.

In other news (actually, completely related to the above, this being most of the source of the stress), IKEA don't make the sort of units I want, and I don't know who does. They did 21 years ago (when I was 13), but don't any more. This is highly annoying. I have a picture in my head of what I want this room to look like (basically my teenage bedroom, only without the bed), and I don't know how to go about getting it to happen.

It's probably mostly-pointless trying to buy more furniture for this room in any case, because it needs to be completely redone properly - at least one wall has such bad damp in it that paint is actively peeling off, and the floor has a crappy carpet and fails to be flat to such an extent that furniture leans in a multitude of directions. I think we're back to Richard and his legendary Gantt chart of house renovational d00m actually coming into existence before I can get any further. (I'm thinking it'll look something like this, only with far more dependencies. Have to clear the furniture out of the room before we can get the walls replastered, and have to do that before we can think about fixing the floor. But probably have to get the kitchen sorted out first because it's all the same wall - argh!).

We just got back from Ikea. SIX AND A HALF HOURS!! Plus an hour or so's travelling in either direction, making it eight and a half hours in all.

Still, we have slain the mighty Ikea beast. Achieved all of the furniture on our list except for the doors for the new BESTA and the two bedside tables to go alongside our new beds, which isn't any great loss as the only bedside tables they do in birch are vile. Though we picked a couple of tables in white (one of the HEMNES designs with a drawer on top of a cupboard), we're not amazingly sold on them; so the extra time will be useful to look in other shops.

Did not achieve new bedding. The one I really wanted is discontinued, and it has taken me well over an hour to find out even what its name was. Ikea have discontinued it, Richard doesn't remember it, and there is no evidence of it ever having existed in the past 4 years of Ikea catalogues, so I was feeling like a crazy person who hallucinated its existence. It was brown, and had a white tree design, with what I remembered as blue blossom flowers. I eventually found out it was called AMORF. But it's almost non-existent on eBay, and the only site I can find selling it is in Germany, where they have weird bed sizes. Not sure what the standards there are, but German Ikea bedding comes in 140 x 200, 155 x 220 and 240 x 220 cm; compared to most of the rest of Europe where it's 150 x 200, 200 x 200 and 240 x 220 cm. Hmm. We also wanted to match Richard's existing BRUNSKÄRA in green, but BRUNSKÄRA is in the process of being discontinued and only exists in red in Croydon, and red and blue worldwide. Dunno why they got rid of the green, it's the nicest colourway.

I would also like to say that this duvet cover disturbed me immensely until I saw the double version. I thought it was supposed to be one of those chalk line around a murder scene things, and in fact it's two people dancing :P

We were extremely successful in the kitchenware department, buying only 6 pasta bowls, which we've been saying we needed more of for ages. In general we did fairly well with the accidental purchases, though I did accidentally buy a gigantic silverfish. KLAPPAR SKALBAGGE is an enormous cuddly arthropod which, like all of Ikea's toys, cost virtually nothing. I've been needing a new creature to hug in bed, as poor Yowie the octopus really isn't up to the amount of washing that's necessary to stop me dying of dust mite allergy, and this kritter is fully machine washable. Richard points out that he is also the Alpha Dust Mite, and will scare away all lesser dust mites. Hrm! I was also strangely drawn to these LED lights, and ended up buying two sets of them, one in multicolour and the other in white. We'll use them on the new shelf that's going above the new beds.

Most of the stuff is being delivered courtesy of Ikea's home delivery service, but we may need to abuse one of our friends with a car at some point when we go to get the missing doors.

I have been busy uploading & tagging photos from various trips - some almost a year old.

dino Trip 7 - Modern Art in Manchester, 2006-09-22. If any Mancunians could tell me what the saxophones, Moon, bat wings & bees statue is called, or who it's by, or even what street it's on, I'd be most grateful.

Me, alexa_robinson, rowan_leigh, fluffymormegil (friends-only), at BiFest, 2006-09-23. (Tell me if it's ok to make this public.)

Various "new" photos of me & Richard, from 2006-12-28 to 2007-03-12. Features naked wuzzie-chest, if you feel you need warning of that.

dino Trip 8a - Minneapolis & the Mall of America, 2007-03-29 & 30. Features an iPod vending machine, Lego stegosaurus & giant octopus, and wedding chapel - in the Mall of America.

dino Trip 8b - Lost in New York, 2007-04-03 & 04. Features the Empire State Building, giant topiary bunny, a hideous golden statue outside the Rockefeller Center, and the Nintendo World store. And this rather nice picture of ancient & modern NYC. 95%-written post about New York just needs a quick edit & post.

Check out all his majesty. 2007-06-08

Why tricycles are better than bicycles, 2007-06-09.

My birthday party, 2007-06-21. Photos edited so it looks like the plushies went to the restaurant without us :) Delicious vegan food porn from 222.

Toronto Zoo photos, all uploaded & tagged. 75%-written post about the Zoo to follow. 2007-06-29

Photos of actual humans from alt.polycon 15 and from hoopycat & veryfineredwine's wedding will follow. They're the ones which take the most effort, as technically I'm supposed to contact other people before putting their photos online. What I'll most likely do is upload them all friends-only & get people to say if it's ok to make them public.

Yesterday was very, very bad. Woke up profoundly panicky, took me half an hour of warm boy cuddling to manage to get out of bed at all, stood up and the room lurched abruptly sideways. After staggering to the loo and almost falling over twice on the way, I called two of my students to reschedule. Went back to bed for a couple of hours but only managed to sleep for the last 45 minutes of it (kept waking myself up with a jolt just on the point of drifting off), then had no choice but to go out & see the third student, because she's in severely dire straits owing to the fact she's insisting on taking the Higher Tier papers when really she should be doing Foundation, and thus she's far more likely to get a D than the C she deserves. I walked down the road only too aware that I couldn't walk in a straight line, and was weaving around like a mildly drunk person. Every so often (like every minute or two) the pavement tried rushing up to meet me, but I'd anticipated that.

And the journey down to Epsom was absolutely terrible - the buses were hot and not running properly. The last thing you need when already dizzy and nauseous is to have to wait 35 minutes in Surbiton for a bus that's supposed to be every 15 minutes. (I just missed one 406, the 418 10 minutes later never arrived, and the 406 25 minutes later was 10 minutes late.) Got home afterwards and just collapsed in bed again, but with the laptop for company this time.

I have no idea what any of that was about, because I seem to be basically ok today. Just one of those random "h-l's body goes into spoon deficit" days, I 'spose. Could well be hormonal - I'm prone to not-amazingly-bad-by-many-people's-standards-but-still-debilitating migraine at certain points in the month, and it could be that manifesting a bit differently to normal. Oh well.

Today involved horrible students from 11.30am-4.30pm, followed by a trip to Ikea. It was highly successful, by Ikea-trip standards: we managed to buy everything we'd gone in to buy, didn't impulse-buy anything that we didn't need, and spent only a moderate amount of money. We also managed to finally solve the Great Mug Dilemma - this being the fact we needed new mugs to match our new china but didn't previously like any of the mugs that Ikea sell, owing to them being too small or too white or both (I have a general dislike of mugs with white insides as tea stains them so they look perpetually dirty) - with 12 very large black mugs, half with blue swirls and half with red. The red doesn't go fantastically well with the black & purple of the other china, but the mugs match each other very well, and it will be possible to distinguish normal from soy milk drinks (or sugared from unsugared, I 'spose). We were unsuccessful in buying a new sofa, but we couldn't really afford that this month anyway, and I think it would be a good idea to go to the shop for people with bad backs first, because almost all of the sofas I sat on wrenched my back horribly either as I sat down or as I tried to get up again or both. The shop for bad backs only sells individual chairs that I know of, but they might have sofas hiding out the back (no pun intended), or have recommendations.

Anyway. Not really looking for sofa recommendations from passing strangers, unless you are exactly the same height as me and have exactly the same sort of back/leg issues - as a sofa that's perfect for a much taller person isn't going to be any good for me. Just waffling, really. Not that I do that a lot, or anything, you understand ;) Hrm.