All things Korean pt 1.

I’m mildly obsessed with things coming out of Korea at the moment…mainly music and makeup, I can’t rate the clothes because they don’t fit me but the colour and the enthusiasm put into their products just rock my world.  I’d like to blame SBS PopAsia for this newfound addiction, without randomly finding it on SBS 2 one day, this would never have happened.

I first saw Lee Hi a couple of years ago and nearly died when that voice came out of that person, and at the age of 16.  From what I can ascertain (not being able to read Korean, or follow a Korean TV show), she won some sort of singing comp and this was her first release.

Then as is the custom with her music company, they hid her for a couple of years after she went number one, staged a comeback, and have since hidden her again.  But not before bringing her back for the same TV show, and doing the competition all over again.  I think.

This cover was particularly good.

Before sending her on hiatus, she formed a subgroup with two of the other contestants, translated as a ‘subunit’?! and made this particularly gorgeous videoclip.

Say what you will about the costume choices and blatant lifting of Western themes, the lady is talented.  It’s funny things you get interested in.  I should do a Japanese post one of these days because Perfume (a girl group) are great.

In other news, I did a great big Korean beauty order the other day which I’ll review in my next post…with brand names like Ultrahard and Mol Girl, you can’t really go wrong…right?

And then she got her own room.

Tonight the baby moved into her own room (she’s 7 months and NOISY). I’d been looking forward to this but strangely my heart is breaking just a little. It feels like they belong to you for such a short time. 

Japanese cotton custom-made sheets dahling.

Or in plainer words, I sewed up a fitted cot sheet for the baby.  I have a non-standard cot size (Troll Sun cot if anyone’s interested), plus I sew, plus I have a fabric addiction.  I don’t have time to sew for myself (garment sewing is more time consuming), but baby sewing is stupidly easy.

Here’s my fabric, a nice Japanese cotton from Etsy (photo from Etsy).

And here is the baby helping.  Sewing with a baby is a whole new world I didn’t contemplate before.  She started crawling properly today and wanted to be a part of everything.  The sewing machine, the equipment (I have to do it all on the floor because I live in a tiny apartment), my laptop.  I got distracted and miscalculated the fabric, cut it too small…

 But luckily it turned out well anyway.  I have a new rule.  Every time I complete a sewing project, I’ll buy more fabric.  Huzzah!

And in case you want to know how it’s done…

DIY Fitted Cot/Crib Sheet (or custom-made Japanese cotton fitted cot sheet dahhhling!)

• You will need your fabric, all the usual sewing supplies (thread, scissors, unpicker), and some 5mm wide elastic (about 3 metres, I just wing it).
• Get your mattress dimensions (in cm) and add 45cm to the length and the width – so if the original dimension was 100 x 70, the new dimensions are 145 x 115.  This is the amount of fabric you need that will allow for the mattress overhang, with a bit to go underneath.
• Cut your fabric to the size above so you have a big rectangle.  If you have an overlocker, go ahead and use that, if not, I cut my fabric with pinking shears to stop it fraying.
• Out of each corner, cut a 22.5 cm x 22.5cm box.

•  Pin the cut edges of the box, right sides together (purple line to purple line), this will create the corners of the fitted sheet.
• Using a 1cm seam allowance, sew the edges together and press open.
• Hem the edges of the whole piece of fabric by turning and pressing the edge 1.5cm and stitching 1cm from the fold – leave an opening at one of the corner seams for you to put elastic through.
• Put a safety pin on the edge of your elastic, and thread it through the whole thing (this takes a while!), then sew it down with the other end of the elastic and close the hem.
• Et voila!  They’re not the most pictographic instructions but if you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them.

Go f*** yourself Cadbury.

If I’m going to practice heavy self censorship I’ll allow myself to swear (it’s a bit of a problem for me in real life and hey, the baby can’t speak English yet so I have some time to work on this).

They changed the recipe for creme eggs.  The chocolate is now salty?!

AND they destroyed the recipe for Red Tulip easter eggs.  That was THE cardinal taste of Easter chocolate.  Now it tastes like sweet gross rubbish.  And they post self-congratulatory stuff on social media when people complain about their focus groups saying how great it tasted.  YOU WERE GIVING THEM FREE CHOCOLATE FFS WHAT DID YOU THINK THEY WOULD SAY.

I wont jump on the bandwagon complaining about smaller family size blocks.  From a public health perspective that’s probably a good thing, and let’s face it, Whittakers Hazelnut is really where it’s at.

And now, as you breathe out.

I read back over this blog today and realised it’s been going since 2010.  The bulk of it was written in internship and residency and it very much reads like someone living their life in between those two years of utter disarray.  And then, two years ago, the snow globe that was my life was shaken and shaken and shaken.  By the time the pieces had settled, so much had happened and the day-to-day vagaries of my job stopped mattering, as I’m sure they do anyway.

It’s hard in medicine to have a blog.  Really really hard.  You have to be so careful.  I still remember Barbados Butterfly who had the best blog about being a woman in surgery until the hospital bloody made her take it down.  There’s so much I want to say about the last two years but just can’t.  All I can say is that 2013 was the worst year of my life.  So bad that I quit the Internet.  Which for long-term readers from the early 2000s is probably inconceivable but it happened.  For all bad events that happen in your life though, things settle eventually and you get to process and box it all up to put on your trophy shelf of Life’s Big Event’s.

The biggest and best thing that has happened for me though is that I had a beautiful baby girl with five fingers and five toes whom I can only describe as being sunlight personified.  To steal a phrase, she is incandescent.  I never thought I would feel that way about anything.  Babies are nothing like what they’re sold to be.  She put everything, absolutely everything into perspective for me and for this I am eternally grateful.

The Internet is weird these days.  Everything is packaged up so you can sell something.  Mummy blogger.  Daddy blogger.  Doctor blogger.  Fitness blogger.  Fake-cancer-survivor blogger.  You’re almost pushed into sieving yourself into one kind of thing and only posting about that.  If you eat healthy you can only post one YOLO meal a week.  Green smoothies compulsory.  Fitness?  God forbid you should post a photo looking like a slob on your couch.  I don’t think I could filter myself even if I wanted to.

I thought about deleting this one and starting again, but then realised that the progression through internship and residency, and then to registrar is probably worth a read.  Even if two years of that registrarship isn’t documented, I can write in retrospect about some things.  So watch this space, and if you were holding your breath, you can breathe out now.