Genevieve's Journeys

Robert is away this week on work travel, and I thought I'd be pining.

Instead I've been (you guessed it) flat out at work, and while I'm eating fewer hot cooked meals, I'm more than halfway through my spinsterhood almost before realising it.

I'm not as restless on my own (well, as the only human in the house) as I'd feared, though probably mostly from near exhaustion from the office.

Filled last weekend and will fill this coming one with sewing (for fun, new 1940s outfit for goncalves and J's wedding), knitting, painting a glass for a friend, and a scroll. Starting the scroll, sometime Real Soon Now.

Would love to get back to the spinning I started at Raglan but it will have to keep til the current projects are finished.

Also got my twice annual haircut. I opted for a 'middy' cut, which is a 'vintage' cut that takes well to pincurls and 1940s styling, to match the wedding outfit, but is perfectly passable simply combed and blown dry.

My first pincurl set (amazing what people put on YouTube! this lady's tutorial was excellent) worked beautifully; this is easy, why would anyone buy rollers or a curling iron?? geez this is a snap. Don't know what the fuss is about.

My second pincurl set: not so much. :-/

My third: pretty good, but doesn't cope well with damp. Good thing it's not very damp in London, right?...hmmm.

So I'm pleased I have new girly skills to add to my personal roster of eclectic bumf I know how to do, but unlikely to start sleeping in bobby-pinned curls nightly anytime soon.

All of a sudden now I know why wash 'n go hairstyles seemed so amazing when they became popular; women no longer had to plan their evenings and mornings, social lives, their activities, around their hair.

A lunchtime run or gym session, and high-maintenance hair, are pretty much mutually exclusive AFAICS.

'Staying home to wash my hair' doesn't sound as dumb, when you realise that was the convention, pre Vidal Sassoon.

One nifty aspect of London life: all the London hairdressers I can remember have been to Vidal Sassoon's school, and I haven't had a dud yet. They all have done lovely work, and each one has taught me something about how to style my hair myself, so I could keep the look up. It's a step up from most of the stylists I knew in my first homeland.

Haggis is making the most of the tail end of long mild days, that are rapidly drawing down. I open the patio door most evenings, so she can come and go more freely than through the cat flap.

If it's open for an hour or so it insprires the scatties, where Haggis goes racing OUT into the garden, and then racing IN again, only to race OUT once more, chasing, or chased by, unseen threats to feline life. She can wear herself out doing this.

Last weekend I went for the first long slow run in awhile, taking in the park behind our place. It's huge, a wild meadow space where, aside from road noise, you could think yourself in the country. I've mapped out 4k routes and plan longer ones for fall and winter weekends, when daylight is short and long runs only happen on Sat or Sun.

I came back to the building to an astonishing amount of magpie swearing, cursing, nagging and threatening. And sure enough, Haggis was most of the way up one of the trees in the front yard, playing it cool, as if there were not half a dozen magpies blowing her cover, and giving her serious s**t for encroaching on their airspace.

Oddly, when I called her most of them shut up, and she chatted to me; 'who, me? I'm just hangin' type remarks, not entirely accurate considering she was a) up quite a height and b) well into the neighbourhood tom's preferred space as well as the magpies'.

She's still being bullied by the local tom (former tom), but I thought her wander up the tree showed he's not in complete control of all the space on the site.