All posts filed under: Miscellenia

Australia: or, How blogging helped me overcome my fears.

Published by The Dreamstress

From tomorrow the blog will be on autopilot while Mr Dreamy and I take a well deserved holiday and spend a week on the beach in Australia. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of posts, and even a ‘Rate the Dress’, but it will all happen without me. This holiday is interesting, because  I’ve lived in New Zealand for six years (seven if you count the non-continuous times) and I’ve never once been to Oz.  I’ve even refused to stopover in Oz on my way to Hawaii and the US. For someone living in New Zealand who travels a lot, this is very unusual.  Oz is where Kiwi’s go on holiday, and for a bit of big-city, big-world right on their doorstep.  There is a stunning Baha’i temple in Sydney that I would love to visit.  People rave about Melbourne as a vibrant, artistic ‘Australian Wellington.’ There have been amazing costume exhibitions in Oz while I’ve lived here; great stage shows; once -in-a-lifetime concerts; but I haven’t gone. Why? I’m afraid of Australia.  Really, really, …

Weta on a Wet Day

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week it was raining, and I was hurrying off to give a lecture on textiles.  As I dodged raindrops down the sidewalk, heading for my car, I almost stepped on a peculiar New Zealand native, the weta. What is a weta?  It’s kind of like an awesome, freaky, spiney, scary grasshopper. Oh, and some of them are 4″ long, and that isn’t counting their legs or antennae.  With those they are almost a foot long.  And they can weigh as much as a sparrow.  And the males hiss and bite when threatened. Luckily, the weta I found was a more common, garden variety female Wellington tree weta (I think – my weta identification skills are pretty rudimentary), but even the garden variety weta need protection, so I reached down to pick up the weta so it wouldn’t get squashed on the sidewalk. Unfortunately for me, my weta decided it liked my leather gloves, and didn’t want to let go. What was I going to do?  I had a weta on my glove that I …