Project Chio-ier part 2

Already forgotten what I officially called it in part 1 but you get what I mean.

Anyway part 2 is a long term strategy - the way I sleep.  I sleep on my stomach but I'm trying to learn to sleep on my back.  A few reasons:

• Gotta learn to sleep on my back before Tooth Week anyways - sleeping on my face will be wayyy too painful
• Sleeping on your face hastens the appearance of wrinkles
• Face-sleeping also contributes to skin congestion

So I started trying to back-sleep on Monday, and it... has not been going well.

Monday.  I started the week with enthusiasm and good intentions.  I went and bought a new memory foam pillow.  I explained to the saleslady my reasoning for buying a new pillow so that she could help me choose one.  She was supportive ("good idea!  It will stop you from having saggy boobs!") but hedged her bets a little bit ("it will take you a long time to get used to it...").  Undaunted I continued on.

Monday night.  Realised how uncomfortable my back and hips were without something under my knees.  Tried old pillow.  Too big.  Tried a rolled up towel.  Too... towel-y.  Blanket also too fuzzy and awkwardly shaped.  Give up and roll over.

Tuesday.  Anthony's birthday.  Had to drop by IKEA and thought it would be an excellent opportunity to buy a bolster pillow.  Could not find.  Asked sales assistant.  She did not know what a bolster pillow is.  "Booster pillow?  For a chair?"  No.  Couldn't find a reasonable substitute.  Went out for dinner, got home late and forgot about the back sleeping entirely.  Woke up with enormous pillow creases on face.  Bah.

Wednesday.  Tried several other shops for booster pillow.  Target would sell me a full-length body pillow, but nothing more suitable.  Tried rolling up a towel and putting it in a pillowcase, which alleviated the texture issues and worked ok.  Woke up about a dozen times lying on my face.  Turned over and drifted back to sleep each time.  Eventually.

Thursday.  Woke up feeling like death.  Which brings us to now.  My resolve is wearing somewhat thin.  I will try again tonight, but I'm not hopeful.

*****

The second part of this initiative is silk pillowcases!  I have read for many years that silk is better for your face and hair than cotton, so I thought I'd give it a try as I want to try growing my hair out again.  They arrived today and they feel lovely :)  Maybe they will help with the back sleeping?  (Probably they will just make it nicer for me to sleep on my face.)  I will post a picture of them once my bed looks nice (right now unmade and covered in clothes due to general life disorganization at the moment - things will get back to normal after this weekend's kids' camp is finished.)

Abrupt end!

*****

EDIT:  I had to edit this to add that the NuffnangX preview text for this post is "Tried old pillow."  HAHAHA very enticing I'm sure.

Wisdom teeth

Ughhhh wisdom teeth.

About four weeks ago, I had a crippling headache and had to take a day off work.  I'd also been sleeping quite badly for several nights, and had been studiously ignoring the fact that my jaw was aching.  Having to take time off work was a bit of a wakeup call for me though, so I grudgingly booked into the dentist.  He recommended an x-ray, so I did that, and as it turned out, you see the bottom left panel up there?  That's what both of my bottom ones are doing, and the top ones are kind of like the top left.  (I tried scanning the x-ray but it didn't turn out.)  I took it home and showed it to Ant, and his reaction was "What the HELL??!", which made me feel a damn lot better about the whinging and whatnot.

So I saw an oral/maxillofacial surgeon, and he agreed with Anthony's expert assessment, so I'm having all of them out under general anaesthetic next month.  Also, due to the super helpful placement of the bottom ones, some of my jawbone may have to come out too.  Yaaaaaaay.

I received my hospital admission papers in the mail the other day, and there's lots of really cheery advice like "do not make any important decisions or sign any legal documents for 48 hours following your surgery", which is helpful I guess.  Another gem was "if bleeding from your gums persists, take a piece of cotton wool the size of your fist, soak it in ice cold water, place firmly over site of bleeding and bandage jaw closed for three hours.  Repeat if bleeding is not controlled.  If bleeding persists after second attempt, seek medical advice."  So six hours with my head bandaged shut, and then off to hospital again?  Sounds like a treat.  Also I will not be able to eat anything remotely solid for at least a week afterwards.  Even congee is dubious because it's still a bit chunky.  At least I will lose weight (?)

The thing is though, my teeth hurt so freaking much that I am actually looking forwards to having the surgery done in spite of all my misgivings.  And it's still a fortnight away :(

To finish, here's a pouty filtered picture of me, because pouty and filtered sums up my feelings about this whole situation.

Pout.

Perth pros and cons

Edit: drafted this in April -_-;;  better late than never I guess.

So last week I had a short twitter back and forth with Cheesie where I whinged that Japan pwns Perth really hard, but also noted that Perth has good beaches.  Hahaha.  But anyways later that night I got to thinking about what's good and bad about Perth/Australia, because I do like living here, but there are things about it that I hate too.

Pros:

• Seriously, great beaches.  I don't actually go to the beach much because I burn a lot, but they are super.


• Lots of unspoilt natural environment, and very little pollution.  Clear skies all the time etc.


• Kings Park is one of the best parks in the world I think.


• Perth feels like it's on the verge of becoming a really awesome city, culture-wise, though it's not there just yet.


• Not prone to any kind of natural disasters.  Occasionally there is a bushfire threat, but that's just the Hills anyway.  (Yeah, take that Hills, but you're not actually part of Perth in my mind, so feh.)


• People are generally friendly and welcoming.


• A very multicultural society.


• I have a good job and so does Ant!  Australia (WA in particular thanks to our mining boom) has really been shielded from the worldwide financial crisis.


• Family is all here, and most of our friends, too.

Cons:

• So damn spread out (seriously, the city is like 100km long for only 1.7 million people; our population density is 1/6th of Sydney's) and rubbish public transport that isn't keeping up with how the city is growing.  Bah.


• Cost of living is very high, even for Australia.  I think we are the highest now.  The price of food is still quite surprising to me.


• The things I despise about Australian culture - basically boganization.  I hate that most people don't respect authority, I hate that getting so drunk you glass a girl in the face, vomit and pass out is the only way people know how to drink here, and I hate that people tend to not think how their actions affect anybody else in any way.  And the pervasive low-level racism that exists here really gets me down.


• Um, the shopping is a bit meh.  This is also improving but it has a really long way to go.  I think if some multinationals like H&M or Topshop opened then it would force the market to improve.  Everything is quite expensive though :(

It's the second last point that gets me down the most about Perth (I don't know if it's true of all Australian cities - probably.)  Whenever I come back from Japan it really hits me how little people here respect social order.  I don't really want to speculate on why that is, but it's the flipside of the "she'll be right mate" coin and it irks me no end.  I think it's probably more prevalent in the suburbs than the more inner parts of the city where I live, but my neighbours sure do love making a crapton of noise at 2am all the same.  Australians are very bad at living in high density housing!

Anyway, Perth is home, and I do love it here.

The vanity project part I

Spring is definitely in the air in Perth, and thus begins Project Look Better Than I Do Now In The Very Near Future (title subject to change).  Actually let's name it Project Chio-ier in honour of a friend in high school who liked creating unholy hybrid words.  Step one commenced yesterday - I had some IPL done to remove broken capillaries on my nose.  I'm an idiot because I forgot to take a "before" picture.  Anyway here's the after:

(Debated with myself for like 10 minutes on whether or not to upload this as it's quite ugly and given how infrequently I blog, it will likely be the first image on the blog for several months.  Decided to do it to give myself incentive to blog again in the near future hahaha.)

ANYWAY.

You can see that I have a few freckles that have gone quite dark due to the IPL.  Apparently the laser sees them as blemishes (correct) and has zapped them too, so they will flake off over the course of about a week.  I still have one visible squiggly vessel (top left bridge) though this has been much reduced, and one red spot vessel (below the lower freckle).  I'm going back for a repeat treatment in four weeks, which should resolve these two entirely.  One thing that I'm quite amazed by is how tiny it made my pores!  Compare nose to cheeks - very nice!  (And truly my cheeks are not very bad - it's a bit exaggerated by the lighting I think.

As for how the treatment actually went - I've had IPL hair removal before.  The technician warned me that the intensity they use for blood vessels is stronger than for hair removal, so I was prepared for the sensation.  On the bridge of my nose it was very tolerable, but when she treated the side of my nose (the crease where the nostril meets the face, if you know what I mean) - whoa, I was not prepared for that!  It hurt a lot more than I was expecting :(  I jumped when she treated the first side, which was a bit embarrassing.  But anyway it's all over very quickly and certainly will not deter me from going for the follow-up treatment.  I had a sunburn-like sensation for about an hour, but that passed without me really noticing it at all.

I had my treatment at Skin Resus in Floreat.  They're very nice, and you get a $50 voucher if you join their VIP program.  I definitely recommend them!  (This is not a paid ad - nobody would pay for ads on a blog with hits so low or photos so rubbish.)

Happy Palette

I was stocking up on Rohto Lycee eyedrops when I noticed that the eBay seller I buy them from also stocks the Estencia Happy Palette that Jenny blogged about a month or so ago.  I'm a sucker for novelty individual-serving type things, so this one is right up my alley and I decided to give it a try.

The immediate effect is very tightening and brightening!  I applied it after removing makeup and then cleansing with my Clarisonic.  The Clarisonic is great!  It definitely makes serums etc penetrate much better.  Once it had sunk in I followed it up with Hada Labo whitening lotion.  My skin feels lovely and smooth now :)  I definitely recommend picking this up if you see it.

New home

Hi all!  Just a quick note to say -

• I've migrated over from Wordpress; and
• Maybe I'll update a bit more.

But no promises.

Actually things are crazy busy right now.  We're rehearsing like mad for a church concert on the 22nd of this month (and if you're in Perth you're welcome to come along; 3 Dunraven Drive Yangebup at 7.30pm), I'm running some huge experiments at work, and I'm also running around preparing to have my wisdom teeth removed next month.  I'll blog a bit about that shortly - suffice to say, my surgeon looked at my x-rays and pronounced them "impressively bad".  Ha!  I don't do things by half.