{Outfit post} – Birthday Green

Jersey – from a clothes swap
Top – from a clothes swap
Skirt – vintage (1950′s?) pure wool from an op shop
Petticoat – no idea where I got it, second hand
Tights – Columbine
Necklace – gift from Steve
Shoes – Django and Juliet
Bump – 15 weeks

On Friday it was the 10th birthday of the organisation I work for. Our company colour is green, so we all got dressed in green for the day, blew up (green) balloons, and ate scrumptious chocolate cake for afternoon tea. It was rather awesome, looking around the office and seeing a sea of green clothes.

It turns out I have quite a lot of green clothes. And shoes. And accessories. The trick wasn’t finding something green to wear – it was deciding which combination of green to wear.

Sadly I think it’ll be the last day for a few months that I wear this skirt though – it’s just a bit too tight around the bump now.

It’s hard to see in the photo, but the tights are white fishnets with blue and orange flowers with green (green!) stalks on them.

Invercargill

I’ve been a bit absent from blogging lately, largely due to work. Every so often, I need to travel a bit for work, and this month is one of those times.

I was down in Invercargill for a couple of nights this week for work. I haven’t been to Invercargill for years, and the times I have been there before has been either to visit someone or passing through – I’ve never actually explored the city at all. (Something I’ve been meaning to correct for quite some time now! Steve and I have been trying to work our way around a lot of the towns in New Zealand and explore them all – Invercargill is quite high on our list for the next place to get to.)

Since Invercargill is so far south, twilight lasts quite a long time down there in spring and summer. Which was rather convenient, as it meant that after I’d finished work and had a bite to eat, there was still enough light to go on a rambling walk to see the tuatara at the Southland Museum. Sure, the museum was closed, but the lovely lady at the reception of the motel I was staying at let me know that you can wander around the back of the museum and see the tuatara from there as well. So, I went on a walk! Complete with camera, so I can show you some of what I saw.

It had just been raining a lot, there were gaps in the clouds for the sunset to come through. The prettiness of it doesn’t come out in photos, but hopefully you can get the idea. Now just imagine a couple of rainbows against grey sky and sunbeams in the background……

Dee Street and Tay Street are two of the main streets in Invercargill, and where they intersect is the corner of the main shopping area.  I started my ramble on Dee St just before the Dee St/Tay St intersection, then I headed up Tay St.

Sculpture at Dee and Tay St Intersection, looking south

Corner of Dee and Tay St

Putting up Christmas decorations on Tay St

Building on Tay Street

The Southland Museum is at the entrance to Queens Gardens. I saw Queens Gardens from the airplane when I was flying in – it looked like a very pretty area, so I went to track it down. (And yes, it’s very pretty! Next time hopefully I’ll have more daylight so I can explore it properly.)

Queens Gardens streetlamp at dusk

Band rotunda in Queens Gardens at dusk

At the entrance to Queens Gardens was a map of the gardens, where I spotted something intriguingly called ‘Dreamland Castle’. Curiosity made me go find out what it was. It turned out to be a cute kids play area, complete with turrets to climb, slides to go down, a drawbridge to cross, and a queen sitting in her tower.

Dreamland Castle in Queens Gardens

On the way back to Tay St (and where I was staying) was the historic water tower.

Water tower at twilight

And that was my wander around Invercargill in the twilight after a rain storm.

‘Nature’ wardrobe challenge

This week, the Wednesday Wardrobe Challenge was ‘nature’.

I had originally planned to wear my Bookish Willow dress, since it’s all covered with leaves and bugs. But then the weather turned bad. In fact, we reached record lows across the country this week – lowest temperatures since 1976, to be precise. With snow in central Wellington. Crazy, crazy. So clearly, even if I did my usual layering with merino top underneath and thick tights too, a dress made out of craft cotton was far far too lightweight for this week’s outfits! As a result of which, I moved away from the ‘looks like nature’ concept of the challenge and moved into the ‘natural fibres’ concept. After all, nothing quite like a bit of sleet and snow, with some hail storms mixed in for good measure, to make a girl wanna wrap up in several layers of wool!

Outfit Details

• Skirt: vintage wool pencil skirt that I found in the op shop down the road from my house (gotta love having an op shop so close!)
• Tights: black textured tights, probably from chain-store Farmers
• Shoes: my newest pair! I just picked them up from the store on Tuesday, so this was their first outing. Little leather high-heels in a lovely colour with the not-so-lovely colour name of ‘putty’
• Jersey: woolen one from NZ designer Karen Walker
• Merino top: originally from Glassons (chain-store), but I got it from a clothes swap
• Scarf: vintage rabbit fur, from a clothes swap (seriously, I wear this most days in winter, it’s like a giant cuddly teddy bear wrapped around my neck. If it ever gets ruined or lost I will be so so sad)
• Necklace: feather pendant on a chunky chain, from NZ designer Miss G

Since I ended up taking outfit pics at home (again), I did make sure I got a photo of the shoes I was wearing with this outfit before I changed into my going-home shoes. So here they are, along with our office’s carpet…. (I’m still slightly unsure about them, to be honest – they’re not my usual style. I’m fairly sure I like them, though. It just always takes me a while to bond with something new in my wardrobe. Maybe I’m weird like that, I dunno. Do you need time to ‘bond’ with new additions to your wardrobe, or is it just me?)

I was working late last night, and since I had my camera with me, I thought I’d go get some photos of me in my wardrobe challenge outfit sitting in one of the awesome meeting rooms at work. I selected which room, wandered in there, got some pics of the room, and then realised that even though it was 8pm on a Wednesday night, there were other people in a meeting room nearby. At which point I chickened out and took my camera home to get photos there instead. Gah. I thought I’d share the room photos with you anyway, though. We recently moved into a new building for work, with lovely re-done offices, and they made a couple of quirky meeting rooms on each floor. Each one is different, and there are around 6 of them I haven’t gone to find yet. One of the ones on my floor is done up like a park – park benches, a ‘fake’ old streetlight and long grass-like carpet, with a backdrop of trees on the wall. I was calling it the ‘park room’, until a lovely colleague of mine informed me she’d dubbed it the ‘Narnia room’, which is a far better name. Clearly, she’s more creative than I am.

The other crazy room on my floor gets called the ‘retro room’. Or the ‘radio room’. Or ‘the lounge’. Or the ‘record room’. Getting an idea of what it’s like yet? Here are some photos – I adore this room. It’s also great for eating pizza in if you’re working late.

That brown chair is a swivel chair. It spins around rather well.

Yep, two of the walls are lined with records. I forgot to get a photo of the one that’s a 70′s exercise record to ‘slim down and increase your sex appeal’. Yes, really.

I also forgot to get a photo of the lightshades – they’re super awesome, woven balls like they’re made of raffia or something like that, and hanging at two different heights from the ceiling. Maybe I need to take my camera in again some other day…. (Or maybe not. Is it weird that I’m posting photos of a meeting room from my office? Hmmm.)

The wallpaper they’ve used on one wall is fabulous. Soft and white, and the orange bits are indented and smooth. Texture and colour, love love love!

Anyway, that’s enough about my office. (Not what you expected from a wardrobe challenge post, right?)

Want to join in the challenge next week? The theme is ‘pink and red’. Yes, together! Go on, break those silly ol’ “fashion rules”.

Argh! It’s raining on the inside!!

Random things to have happen on a Friday – turn up to work, to be greeted by a big whiteboard in the doorway informing you the office has flooded, there is no power, so just go home. Heh.
Since I figured I needed something from my desk so I can actually do a bit of work at home (and out of sheer curiousity, naturally) I wandered on in. Lots of cleaner types everywhere, with those big vaccum cleaners that suck up water. Water dripping from the ceiling in various places, including directly over where my desk chair (well, Swiss Ball, but you know what I mean) sits. Had a little puddle on my desk even! And damp and soggy paperwork stacked in piles in dryer parts of the office. All slightly eerie in a way, since there was no power so it was all dim and gloomy and filled with men in cleaning uniforms and the sounds of vaccums sucking up vast quantities of water from the carpet. Erk.

Personality types and things like that

Just got back from the Wairarapa, where I was hanging out for a couple of days on a course for work. A ‘Leadership Essentials’ course, in fact, where we got to learn all sorts of things about ourselves, our personality types and leadership styles and tools and techniques we can use to play to our strengths and improve our weaknesses. Much of which (particularly the personality types) I happen to find rather fascinating, so it was a good couple of days. (Although I must admit that I didn’t learn overly much new, coz as previously mentioned, I happen to find that sort of stuff rather interesting so have delved into it a little bit in the past. Still good to have the ‘professionals’ delve into it, however. Yes indeed.)

Apparantly I am an INFJ type. Which means I am (I)ntroverted (get my energy internally, i.e. can find it hard in large social situations, and like to think things through before I jump right in and say them), i(N)tuiting (look at the big picture, and not so good with the details), (F)eeling (emotions and people and empathy weighs in more than logic), and (J)udging (I likes my lists and forward planning. There is a catch to this one though – I am a Pressure-prompted Judging, which means even though I write lots of lists, I leave things to the last minute. A fact which I am sure irritates and frustrates many people I know. Sorry ’bout that, folks.)

Beautiful place, the Wairarapa. Woke up this morning, wandered outside from the cute not-so-little cabin I was assigned, and smiled at the flat lands with sheep on them and the mountains in the distance, the silence and peace and calm of a crisp early morning. Gorgeous. Almost worth the commute if one lived out there, even…..

Webstock 2009

So, last week I was at the Webstock conference in Wellington. A fantastic gathering of web-involved people, such as developers, designers, project managers, interaction specialists, usability and accessability folk, font geeks, etc, etc, etc. Brilliant conference – I highly recommend it!

This year I made it along to a full-day workshop on the Tuesday, run by Jackson Wilkinson, on designing balance into Agile processes. Very glad I went – I got out of it what I was wanting to get out of it. Namely, confidence that I know what Agile is all about and how it is done, and where usability activities can fit into it all. Really want to try my hands at an Agile project now…. *fingers crossed* won’t have too long to wait!

The conference proper ran on Thurs/Fri (19th/20th Feb). Lots of the talks this year were centered around communities, particularly online ones, and how to get people to communicate, interact, and generally form, grow, and nurture online communities. There was also a strong focus on ways to share information, and how online communities can foster this, as well as nurture human interactions. Very interesting talks, which have given me quite a bit to think about. Not too sure yet how I can apply a lot of the online community stuff to my work, but hopefully in the future I’ll get a chance to. In the meantime, though, I have some great works from Damien Conway’s presentation on usability which I am taking back to the team.

Met lots of fantastic people, and was able to put faces to some of the online names, which is always kinda fun. Also got hooked on Twitter. Hmmm. It was one of those sorts of gatherings, where everyone seemed to be using it (to the extent we had ‘On Twitter my name is:’ labels on our name tags) and many of the conference updates were on it as well. Micro blogging. Too much? Or not? Still making up my mind about it all……