things i like
february 14, 2006
things i'm a bit partial to at the moment.
Icebreaker clothing and Goretex jackets
Dilmah tea with purple Vitasoy
Smart looking spectacles
Handmade electronic Valentines
Midnight dance parties
Friends and housemates
Crikey daily emails
Wholemeal muffins with honey
Skype
Impractical pointy green shoes
Pink ugg boots
Naot sandals
Luge racing on tv
CouchSurfing and HospitalityClub
Badgemakers
Ratatat
Knowing the starting point, but not the desination
St Johns Wort and Vitamin B
3 more sleeps until Dan gets home
Knowing that I don't have to go to work the day Dan gets home.
And most importantly, Dan himself.
Happy Valentines Day,
Love Pippa
pipstar @ 12:30 PM | link | Comments:
september 30, 2004
$2 or trade
[I might be projecting my feelings onto my hometown when i say this, but] Adelaide's favourite zinester ianto.tripod.com/" target="_blank">ianto Ware is featured on The Program.
The interview is mainly about Australian zine producers and perzines so they there's not much information about ianto's music. You can download a couple of mp3s iantoware" target="_blank">here. No Sleep Et Al, ianto's latest release, has been one of my favourite cds this year.
There are a number of songs about boats on that cd.
Here's a picture of ianto's head:
And Eleanora Martinez's stomach.
pipstar @ 06:27 PM | link | Comments: *
september 17, 2004
while you're away
I've been waiting for the next New Buffalo album to come out ever since I first heard the e.p. About Last Night a couple of years ago.
I just picked up The Last Beautiful Day from Big Star only half an hour ago.
And already it's a cd I love.
patterns in static present...
saturday october 23rd @ the jade monkey, adelaide.
NEW BUFFALO (solo) + DELORIS double album launch
with: no through road
pipstar @ 04:51 PM | link | Comments: ***
september 13, 2004
daydream believer
I'm heading into a dangerous, consumption heavy phase of my life...
I bought a bag I've been lusting after. A very excellent bag that smells of saddles (though minus the horse smell) and looks damn good. A bag that cost $143. [And that my dear friends, was half price. Already.]
Add to that a perfect pair of green shoes - $130 and an $89 tshirt that are all on layby. As well as much needed cutlery - $100.
New shoes and tshirt? That means that I need skirts, pants and dresses to flesh out my increasingly cool summer wardrobe.
And now that I have an MP3 enabled mobile phone I'm considering investing in an IPod, and while I'm at it why don't I get a sexy Titanium Powerbook at the same time?
But logic tells me that I may as well stick with my PC, but only if I invest in an LCD screen because my 17" CRT is quite frankly, driving me nuts. I admit that the only reason I'm being driven nuts by the CRT monitor is because it isn't a good piece of design.
So there goes another $700 on a new display.
But I can spend that $700 in a far more reasonable way on a washing machine, a machine that would take care of my fancy new clothes, reducing my need to drive to clothes washing enabled homes, meaning that i could take a bus...
Or maybe I could get a scooter?
I blame that idea on a rather elegant magazine about scooters, and so I've spent the last 24 hours imagining how cool it would be to drive around town on a mint green Vespa, only to stop, walk into a cafe with my fancy new clothes on and then I'd write witty blog entries on my laptop, posting using Adelaide's CitiLan.
This post is in no way inspired by my upcoming birthday on October 8. It is merely a list of things that I wouldn't mind owning, own already or am in the process of purchasing.
Though if you were wondering...
pipstar @ 07:53 PM | link | Comments: ****
september 12, 2004
[the new] macromantics...
The glory of Azure and moblogging is that you can post when you want to, not just when you power up your PC.
Not even ten minutes ago i saw a very cool set by Macromantics. Apparently there were technical difficulties, but i didn't notice. Romy was able to hold her own in a largely acapella set. And when Amy the dj was able to play, the beats and samples worked well, Danny Elfman's Nightmare Before Christmas even got a work out.
It was exciting and inspiring to see a woman on stage speaking her mind.
The cd, Hyperbolic Logic is burning a hole in my pocket. I'm tempted to leave early and walk home through the rain so i can go and play it straight away!
pipstar @ 12:07 AM | link | Comments: **
september 10, 2004
friedrich: yes, liesl is hot...
I make no secret of my love for The Sound of Music, and I've been known to go gaga over the kids at McSweeney's.
So I was very amused by David Ng's The Von Trapp Children Speak to a Geneticist.
And I think you will be amused too.
NOTE: Advanced knowledge of Von Trapp family would be helpful...
pipstar @ 10:57 AM | link | Comments:
september 06, 2004
phoenix claws
I love yum cha, but have always avoided the more scary dishes like tripe and the ubiquitous chicken's feet. However, on sunday i bravely did go the phoenix claw.
I don't think that I'll revisit that dish as it's very obvious that one is consuming a foot... With tiny little bones...
What did it taste like? Chicken of course.
pipstar @ 10:53 AM | link | Comments: *
august 03, 2004
we are in cockroach latitudes.
I've been avidly reading since I picked it up on Saturday, and once again I am completely infatuated by Joan Aiken's writing style.
I was introduced to the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series in year 7, and have managed to read and re-read almost every book in the series as well as assorted short stories and other novels.
I wriggle with excitement when I get to a good bit, and this morning I tried to read whilst I walked to work, although I had to give up for fear of stumbling into traffic.
A while ago I mentioned my desire to write. Alongside Susan Cooper (author of The Dark is Rising series), Joan Aiken would have to be one of the authors who I am completely in awe of. The authors I would most like to draw on in my own writing.
Cooper and Aiken wrote extensively for both adults and children and I think that the knowledge about writing for both audiences is what makes their novels so incredibly exciting for me 12 years since I first read anything by them.
As is the habit when I am obsessed with something I google to get more information... Only to find out that Joan Aiken passed away at the start of the year. (Obituary from the Guardian).
From The Stolen Lake:
Presently the door opened softly, and Dido felt the blanket twitched off her feet.
"Hey," she muttered, "you're tickling!" Then she was suddenly wide awake, bolt upright. "Murder, is it one o' them spiders? . . . Oh, it's you, Mr. Holy! What the blazes are you doing to my toes?"
"We are in cockroach latitudes," replied Mr. Holystone, who held a little bottle of dark green liquid and a paintbrush. "They swim out from land. So you must paint your toes every night, and your fingers, with this cactus oil. I thought I might do it without waking you." He passed her the bottle.
"What if you don't?" inquired Dido, industriously painting away at her toes.
"Cockroaches come into bed and nibble; you wake up next day with half a dozen toes missing."
"Oh."
pipstar @ 02:57 PM | link | Comments: ****
july 29, 2004
i'd rather be reading a book.
The other day I mentioned to a friend that I enjoyed reading good books more than any other thing, including sex, eating or music.
I'd like to clarify that. I enjoy reading good books as much as good sex, good food or good music. But over the last six months of full-time work I've come to value the act of reading more than I ever have before.
Now that I've moved into town I walk to work, which means that I'm missing out on the 30 or so minutes of precious reading previously enabled by bus travel. So the reading time I do get is the few minutes in bed before I crash out after a hard day of games development related "fun".
Books which previously would have taken me two or three days to complete are now taking a fortnight to get through, and as a result of reading slowly I'm enjoying the process of reading even more. And it means that the pile of books I want to read grows at a rate far faster than I can keep up with.
It also means that I've finally forked out huge amounts of postage for some books from Amazon. , and .
I may never leave my new house again.
pipstar @ 11:45 PM | link | Comments: **
july 17, 2004
words
Last year I wrote about my grandmother and realised that I love writing and that I seem to do it fairly well. At least, I think that the process of realisation began then.
For a long time I've always told myself that I couldn't write. High school English classes were tedious because they largely prescribed a dogmatic approach to interpreting literature and ignored the craft of writing. I feel cheated that I have never thoroughly learned the rules of English to be able to use the language to its full extent.
Reading is a pleasure I hold in the highest regard, and as such I've always been in awe of the people who write books. Reading bad writing is painful and who would want to be guilty of writing something bad and therefore painful?
And so I've avoided consciously "writing". I've demurred when previous employers have asked me to edit content. Many times I've told people, "I am not a writer, words aren't my thing".
Hello? I've been maintaining a website for almost four years now. Sure, there's photographic content, but it's taken me a long time to realise that battlecat IS about words. It appears that words are my thing.
Over the last two months I've hardly written at all, either online or in my paper journals. When I have written, it's been unit specifications for work or draft entries for battlecat. I've loved the technical writing for work because it has a clearly defined purpose and audience, but I've laboured over blog entries and hardly ever posted them because I've either felt that my everyday life is quite tedious, or not felt that my writing is up to scratch.
And because I haven't written enough, I've realised how much I enjoy the process and how it is actually something that I want to do. I want to write.
pipstar @ 08:33 PM | link | Comments: *****
june 17, 2004
pebble
I've been reading the Things Magazine weblog for quite a while now, but I've never properly delved into the archives of the Magazine.
Two articles which have captured my attention are Pocket Sized Pleasures (about beach pebbles) by Christopher Stocks, and Adieu Paris by Markus Nummi.
Which reminds me; I've got a number of beautiful bits of shell which I collected at Korora Beach in Coffs Harbour. Rather than collecting an indiscriminately large amount of individually beautiful shells or pebbles, I decided that it could be more fun to choose the items based on specific parameters. That day I chose smooth white pieces of shell which had worn down ridges (the valleys of the ridges were coloured a red-orange).
I should really display them somehow.
pipstar @ 05:03 PM | link | Comments: **
may 31, 2004
she uses tangerines
This afternoon I walked down the road to get some cream so I could make my favourite vegetarian lasagne this week. And I had three important conversations.
i. With Jake the super-friendly, grey cat who let me scratch around his ears for a very long time.
ii. With a small boy and his father. The little boy who was only just about 4 years old was very weirded out by my freshly hennaed hair. I told him that I ate heaps of oranges to make it change colour.
iii. With Scooter the fluffy white dog.
While I'd like to have a fluffy pet or a small child living in the house with me, I'm going to intitially buy a gold fish. Though the house is so cold that I'm a little afraid that the fish may well freeze in the super cool little fish bowl that my mum bought for me yesterday.
pipstar @ 12:11 AM | link | Comments: ****
may 21, 2004
...the sweetly sleeping sweeping of the seine...
damn, the decembrists make me so happy.
(i just received a vinyl EP and their first album in the mail)
pipstar @ 04:40 PM | link | Comments:
may 13, 2004
dancer in the dark
I finally spun fire!
thanks to trisha and mick for teaching me to spin and giving me confidence!
thanks to mick for the great photos.
pipstar @ 12:16 PM | link | Comments: ***
may 01, 2004
we set to sail on a clipper that's bound for south australia
The morning that I left Adelaide I stopped on Rundle St to buy some more henna powder and to pick up a cd which was missing from its case when I bought it at Big Star.
On the cover of the cd there's a sticker with my name and phone number on it and M.I.A underlined. Missing in Action. Quite appropriate for a cd with a song called _This Soldiering Life_.
I absolutely love this cd. Every song is just dying to be sung out loud in some grand singalong. Preferably whilst sailing. Because almost every song has a boat reference.
And while I was reading Peter Duck , Shanty for the Arethusa was stuck in my head.
We set to sail on a clipper that's bound for South Australia
The water's warm there, the natives dark and nubile.
But if you listen, quiet, you can hear the footsteps on the cross-trees
The ghosts of sailors passed, their spectral bodies clinging to the shrouds.
I'd love it if my little red car was a clipper, but despite that I'll be returning to my nubile natives soon. After the weather up here I think that I'll find the water and the air is actually quite cold.
Honestly, ghosts, spectral bodies, shrouds, Japanese geisha, chimbley sweeps and gypsy uncles... Can a band get any better?
pipstar @ 03:11 PM | link | Comments: *
april 30, 2004
au revoir aux chaussures
Don't stress! I'm not going anywhere...
But I'd like to thank my brown suede boots and my black slides for serving me well over the last year. I wore them fairly regularly, glued the soles back on when they fell off and took them on a journey to Coffs Harbour.
They won't be returning to Adelaide in a fortnight as they were laid to rest in the bin at 8.37 last night.
:::...
I'd like to welcome my new brown leather boots into my home! I think that we're going to be very happy together.
pipstar @ 03:30 PM | link | Comments:
april 28, 2004
swallows and amazons for ever!
One of my absolutely favourite series of books when I was young were the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome.
I first found out about them from my friend Tansy, who had the books read to her at night by her father, John. Eventually I managed to read almost all of them.
I still read Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale and Missee Lee every couple of years.
While I was in Byron Bay this weekend I bought a secondhand copy of Peter Duck. I am so excited to be reading it! Forget about Harry Potter, these books are where its at.
Maybe once a year I'd go sailing in John's boat with Tansy and her older brother Tim.
We even crossed over Backstairs Passage from Kangaroo Island to the mainland once. I think that Tim must have told me that we could potentially capsize and drown, because it was a very exciting trip back.
Another year I got stung by a jellyfish while we were swimming off the boat near Grange. I still have the marks on my wrist where the tentacles touched.
There was no sailing for a long time as high school and university overtook my life, then I went sailing with Aidan and his father in the Milang to Goolwa race in 2001.
Damn, that was fun. But sailing is one of those things that you need to have a boat for. And I don't have a boat.
But I want one.
My plan has been formulated...
The proximity of the marina to my current home means that I do my washing at the marina laundromat. And there are people who live at the marina on their boats.
(In fact, the other day at the laundromat I met a family of four with two dogs who lived on a yacht.)
And there are ads for boats. Really, for something you can live in, they aren't that expensive.
One day I will buy a boat and I'll live on it and I'll go sailing in it and I'll go away for a year and a day. Ideally, it would be a pea green boat.
I have to learn to sail and I have to save up.... But one day.
pipstar @ 06:35 PM | link | Comments: ******
march 27, 2004
a suitable book
texture, smell (missing from the screen)
Danny Gregory recently wrote a post about paper.
I also found a short story called by an Indian author, Amitava Kumar. It sits comfortably into my current literary mindset, a world which is populated by the characters of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.
I'm so caught up in the lives of the characters that when Savita gave birth to her first child, Uma, I actually told my housemate Shae how excited I was.
On a number of occasions I have been moved to tears by the writing in many of my favourite blogs, but that is a form of writing which has grown from the computer and internet medium. Blog entries are written succinctly, encouraging return visits, ultimately developing a virtual, often one-sided relationship between a reader and author.
Yet, however much I appreciate computers and new technology, I don't think that I could ever get that caught up in any 1000+ word story which was presented via an electronic book. The bookness just wouldn't be there - the smells and textures of paper would be missing. And the marks which a reader incidentally leaves on the pages and spine and cover of a book wouldn't remain.
Somewhere, I once read that there is a French word which describes the love of paper. I think that it was papaver, but I might just have dreamt the meaning up.
Coincidentally, papaver is the botanical name for plants within the Poppy family which makes me think, maybe I could make a teeny tiny fairy journal made of poppy petals?
It certainly wouldn't be too hard to make a journal out of paperbark tree bark.
I was just walking back up the hill from the cafe by Coffs Creek when I noticed what almost looked like old newspaper on the ground.
It turned out to be a huge sheet of bark which had fallen from the trunk of a nearby tree.
I'd only just avoided having a overly friendly spider crawl over me while I'd been drinking my coffee, so I chose to only take a small piece of bark home, a piece of bark too small to contain significantly creepy sized arachnids.
The bark is very fine, so the paper in the journal would be like the tissue thin pages of 100 year old novels and family bibles.
Such "India Paper" is in my grandmother's copy of Anna Karenina which I brought with me to Coffs Harbour. It contains over 800 pages, but is just under an inch thick and the book is about 3 inches by 5 inches. It's a beautiful copy, but I'm a little afraid to read it and turn such precious, fine pages.
The copy of Anna Karenina that I read while in Europe (and left in a hostel along the way) was two inches thick and standard novel size. By the time I'd finished it I'd dog-eared the cover, folded over corners to remind me of my page and stuffed it into my backpack as I travelled from town to town. It was very imprinted with my reading process. (Hopefully some other backpacker picked it up and enjoyed it as much as I did).
Even though I borrowed A Suitable Boy, I think that I'll have to buy a new copy for the owner (who had only managed to get a couple of 100 pages through). One of the things that paper will always do better than any e-book medium is to provide a physical vessel in which the memories of its reading are stored. I had to leave Anna, Vronsky, Levin and Kitty and some travel memories behind on a bunk bed, but Lata and Maan and Mrs Rupa Mehra (and Coffs Harbour) are going home to Adelaide with me.
pipstar @ 06:06 PM | link | Comments:
january 11, 2004
good things
- i have picked my first non-plagued tomatoes (they're finishing ripening on the windowsill)
- on friday i saw a kookaburra (sitting in an old gum tree). the branch wasn't very high so i got a good look.
- there's a children's birthday party taking place further down the street. i think that it must be a pirate party because i heard pirate songs and yellow submarine being played. it might already be finished because i heard cries of "thankyou for having us!" earlier.
- i baked with aliese yesterday. we also made a super-delicious juice with oranges, apples, kiwifruit and ginger.
i think that i've made princess meg cookies about 6 or 7 times in the last 3 months (birthday, christmas, baking sessions with friends). i need more cookie recipes to add to my repertoire! - chris is back in town
- exciting things which i can't talk about yet are happening. please wish for good outcomes on my behalf. (and try to stop my from counting unhatched chickens)
no, i'm not pregnant. - thick creamy greek yoghurt with honey is delicious
- i am currently infatuated with melanie and danny gregory
pipstar @ 02:24 PM | link | Comments: **
december 30, 2003
blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
i don't normally buy myself stuff with the intention of singing They Might Be Giants' songs about the items recently purchased, but i made an exception today.
i was 70% through creating an Illustrator vector image of the birdhouse in question when the software shut down. so i took a photo instead.
pipstar @ 03:01 PM | link | Comments: *
november 24, 2003
no, not the journalist...
have i ever expressed my love for paul kelly on this here weblog?
because his greatest hits, songs from the south would probably be one of my desert island disks.
go check him out.
pipstar @ 06:07 PM | link | Comments: ***
november 03, 2003
my bonds™ pyjama pants
this morning i slept in. and i missed a lecture.
but after i had my shower i put on my new summer pyjama pants (which are too pretty to be worn just at night) and did some yoga (2nd day in a row after about 4 months off) and did cartwheels on the lawn.
the weather is just perfect and birds are singing and my pyjama pants are so cute.
i may wear them everyday. i may wear them to exams. i may wear them out at night to cool clubs.
people need to see them, and at the moment there's noone who would see me wearing them in bed. and quite frankly if there was, would i be wearing pyjamas?
pipstar @ 01:50 PM | link | Comments: ***
september 08, 2003
stuff i ♥
to drink
it smells like flowers
pipstar @ 08:49 PM | link | Comments:
june 21, 2003
colourful
I haven't had a closeup look at my hyacinths for the last couple of days, but they're all beginning to get very close to flowering, and there's the tiniest bit of hot pink petal showing on one of the plants!
My digital camera is crap so I just took a couple of hyacinth photos with my slr, but i figured, colour is good, and there's heaps of text on my page at the moment, why don't i take a digital picture of my toe socks?
I love buying socks and up until about a month ago I had nine different pairs of knee high stripey socks. That's more than there are days in the week!
pipstar @ 03:41 PM | link | Comments: *
april 09, 2003
things i like
to put on toast 
to store tea bags in 
to drink tea from
pipstar @ 03:40 PM | link | Comments: *
