Tiara King's Blog: Jewel Divas Style, page 59

I never thought I would wear jelly sandals as an adult!

Of course I had them as a kid, I had several pairs back in the mid 80s on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast when we lived there. Two pink shoes and a blue sandal, I think. I thought I was the bee’s knees and wore them everywhere, even to school.

I was the coolest kid. In my head anyway, although my friends could never believe I had so much funky stuff and wanted to know where I got them all from, many of it, especially my clothes, were either made by mum or bought from Kmart at the Sands Shopping Centre.

But here I am, in 2016, buying jelly sandals as a 41 year old. Purely, because of the awesome 40% off they had in the after xmas sales!

Of course jelly sandals have changed. Well these have. You could buy similar cheap versions of what I wore decades ago just a few short years ago in discount and chain stores. But these are different.

These are Holsters!

And they’re from the Sunshine Coast at Noosa. Yep, an Aussie company making awesome jellies!

Of course I had seen them on TVSN, and Aussie and New Zealand shopping network channel and after procuring all of my kaftans figured, why not buy something to go with them!

So I did. 

I scoured their website, picked the two colours that best suited all of my kaftans, and bought them. And yep, there’s glitter in the zebra aqua ones!

They came packaged with the latest catalogue and a postcard letting you know to post your shoefies on instagram for a chance to win a free pair.

Have you guys bought, worn, or thought about wearing jelly sandals as an adult? Did you wear them as a kid in the 80s?

 

Have you guys tried Hush Puppies?

The next time I went shopping, after my Frankie 4 Margies, was at a website called Style Tread where I found Alana, what I thought was a multi metallic pair of sandals from Hush Puppies and a pair of aqua butterfly boots from Django & Juliette.

The boots didn’t fit so had to go back, and the good thing about Style Tread is you can send the shoes back for free.

Awesome!

Anyway, I kept the Hush Puppies sandals and they’re more of an antique gold but still really nice and on sale at half price. So they joined my wardrobe! And the good things is, they go with my kaftans!!!

Have you guys tried Hush Puppies or are you loving metallic sandals this summer?

 

When you’ve got bad feet, Frankie4 Footwear may be the way to go! It was for me!

It’s the week of the feet here at JDS, purely because I need to show off the awesome shoes I’ve acquired over the holiday break and talk about the audit I’ve done. Let’s talk about that  first.

I have a feeling that 2016 is going to be the year of the handbag and shoes with me. 2015 was the year of kaftans and kimonos, now I need a decent handbag and good shoes, hence the year of handbags and shoes. So far across xmas/new year of 2015/2016 I’ve chucked four pairs of shoes, have two for sale in The Style Store, have my eye on selling about 10 more and bought 12 just over a few months. So it all equals out in numbers, right? God help me if I find more to buy, I just don’t have the room.

Now, let’s move on.

I spoke about Frankie 4’s last year here.

I started buying these late last year, Frankie 4 Footwear’s that is, an Aussie shoes company, and bought Margie in gold before any others. Soft, bouncy and velcroed up the wahzoo, Margie is great for running around and walking long distances.

Sadly, they’re not so good for driving in. After four wears, the heel had already started rubbing off due to the car mat, so, that means Margie will not be used for driving any more.

Next came the silver Ellies which were back in stock, then the silver Sophies, gold Jennis and gold Janelles. Sadly, I bought Janelle and Sophie in size 11 believing that because Ellie and Jenni were 11s then they’d fit too, but they didn’t so they had to go back, hence I didn’t get Janelle in gold, but exchanged it for the navy suede which is just as good.

All enclosed shoes come with inner soles and arch supports which you can change for each foot depending on your issues. Which is good because I have flat feet and need that support.

At this stage there are no silver sandals from Frankie4, which I could have done with, so I am still on the hunt for those.

Do you guys have feet issues and need innersoles and have had to hunt down shoes made by podiatrists for people with foot problems?

 

The thieving bastards who stole my pictures and won’t remove them regardless of copyright!

 

Let’s get right into Business Style, where thieving Indian bastards stole my photos from my Pinterest page!

As you all know, I was on a kaftan shopping spree last year. I bought them, took pics, blogged about them and then uploaded the pics to my Pinterest board – Kaftan and Kimono King.

I was shopping for kaftans online when I came across one that looked like mine. I clicked the link and found Silk n Crystals, and four more of my kaftans. Yep, MY kaftans.

It turns out they took my pictures from my Pinterest board, removed my copyright, blotted out some of the tags and thought that would be enough.

However, I know my coat hangers, I know my kaftans, and these are definitely my kaftans in the pictures they stole.

I’ve had an online stoush with them and the website for the last two months and no one has done anything. 

Silk n Crystals has threatened me with a lawsuit for theft because they think I am illegally selling their kaftans, they have threatened to make me pay thousands of dollars, and have been a general pain in my arse.

The company running the website has done nothing but laugh in my face. Asking over and over again to prove they are mine. For Christ’s sake, how many times can I direct them to my original blog post here, my Pinterest board here and tell them I know they are mine.

Regardless, they have broken copyright law in Australia as this is the country they stole from, and have probably broken Indian copyright laws as well.

The fight continues.

 

I should be relaxing on a tropical island…but here I am.

Last year I did a life overhaul post and things have changed since then. More so I realise that my life is not my own. It does not matter how hard I work, how much I do, I will just not get anywhere. My life is clearly here to serve as maid and cleaner. It does not matter how old I am, whether I’m lonely, alone or single and childless, I will never have any of that. I will never have my own life, a partner, kids, friends or a nice home unless something miraculous happens, like winning lotto or a RSL Art Union house.

I mentioned in that blog post

“But while I’m changing the small things, there is currently no way for me to change the big things. And those big things are so incredibly important and yet so freakin far away. In fact, at this point, they seem non-existent. That they will never happen, regardless of how hard I hope and wish and dream.

I would love to overhaul my entire life but at this stage of my life, I simply cannot. So it is best to go for the small things I can do, and see whether the big things I cannot do sort themselves out. Although I highly doubt it!”

And I still think that, but after cleaning and scrubbing the way I have, not by choice, but by circumstances, I have realised even more so, that my life is not my own. It’s hard, it’s horrible and as much as I hate the universe for putting me here, the universe is not about to let me get what I want, when I want or how I want.

The universe is going to f@#k me around and make me clean up shit until the day it’s done playing with me. And for all I know, that could be the day I’m dead.

Until then, I’ll blog about stuff, and write and make and create, albeit more slowly so I can write more. Hence the Jewel Divas store is off and on this year. I need to concentrate on small things and not try and run them at a marathon pace because I just cannot cope with that.

In the coming posts, I’ll show you the awesome shoes and clothes I bought over xmas and am still paying for. It’s a lot, but for now, I don’t care. There’s the thieving Indian company who stole my kaftan photos, there’s 31 days of kaftans, shoes, accessories, clothes, sparkle, rhinestones and glitter. Lots of it so stay tuned.

By the time xmas rolled around I was so exhausted my eyes were bulging out of my head! True story!

Christmas sucked!

Thursday and Friday, xmas eve and xmas day, decided to be 38 degrees Celsius and stinking hot. It was uncomfortable and we couldn’t really get into the xmas spirit in that heat so I was the one munching on all of the stuff I’d bought.

Around lunchtime my brother rang and when mum hung up I said, “Do not tell me they’re coming tomorrow.”

“Well, xxxx (not putting my real nephew’s name in) wants to see us.”

I went ape shit on her. “You’ve told me for three weeks you didn’t want anyone here for xmas and now you don’t say no to him.”

“Well I didn’t say yes,” she very weakly proclaimed.

Needless to say I went off my face. I was so f@#king exhausted from four weeks of scrubbing, cleaning, running around back and forth, dealing with tradies and phone calls plus revolting heat so I couldn’t and didn’t sleep that I could barely keep my eyes open. And now we were arguing on xmas day.

I very loudly huffed and puffed while clearing out the lounge room as four weeks’ worth of stuff to go through had piled up there. I had to move my pc and stuff back into the office as I’d been working in the dining room for a week. I threw or kicked everything into her bedroom and didn’t care if I broke it. We argued and yelled and I swore that all I wanted was a f@#king holiday over xmas.

She didn’t even get what I meant.

So I told her all of the above. “You said you didn’t want anyone here, I’ve been scrubbing and cleaning and dealing with tradies and all I wanted was five days off over xmas for a holiday before dealing with it all again.”

And then she said something pretty dumb. “Well you should have told me”

I was dumbfounded. “Why do I need to tell you? It’s a weekend with two public holidays, what else were we going to do?”

And then she said, “well it’s xmas, they’ll come tomorrow so you can still have two days off.”

What the f@# sort of holiday was I going to have in two days!?

Either way, we ended up in tears we were both so exhausted. Didn’t stop my brother and his family coming though.

By this point I’d done a lot of online shopping and just didn’t care. You know how when you get so exhausted from not sleeping and working hard, your brain barely functions and you’re just like, I don’t give a f@#k, I need shoes and kaftans!

So on Saturday they came after lunch and I ended up sitting at the dining table before mum forced me to go and get McDonalds for everyone. I kept saying I’m on holidays but did she care? Nope! I should have said no because in my state I probably should not have been driving, nor feeding a sick woman a cheeseburger and cheesy fries because the next day, Sunday, yep, she was sick again! And so I really didn’t have a holiday because come Tuesday, it was back to ringing up the Housing Trust to get a bloody plumber out to fix the hole in the ground. Phone calls, dealing with everything else, trying to get a month’s worth of stuff sorted, having a holiday, albeit a late one, and the horrible heat. Thank God I’d put the jewellery store on holiday on the 23rd until the 5th of Jan. I needed the extra time…to sleep…and shop!

I found more shoes, more kaftans, more of everything as everyone was having their after xmas sales and I was shopping up a storm buying stuff I wouldn’t normally buy, excess shoes for hundreds of dollars, but that’s not all.

That’s right, by now it had been four weeks that we’d had a hole in our back pathway where you go back and forth from the car. There was a pile of rubble and the original plumber had used our old bbq cover to cover the hole.

How f@#king slack!

But that wasn’t the worst of it; the hole didn’t get done until the beginning of Jan. It had been 6 weeks just to get some piping done, the hole filled in and the patch concreted. As it turns out, the original plumber came to fix it and even he was disgusted that it had taken so long.

To be continued…

It was time to stop, collaborate and listen! Wasn’t it?

Christmas week could have been better.

It was Sunday the 20th of December and my sister decided to ring up and dictate how things were going to be.

“I’ll take you shopping and mum can stay on her own and we’ll do this, this and this,” she said.

“I can’t leave her alone she’s just gotten out of hospital and someone needs to be with her.”

“She’ll be fine on her own and she can call if she needs help.”

Let me tell you now, don’t ever dictate what happens in this household. Mum had been out of hospital two days and had already been sick. She needed care and looking after and you didn’t even want to do that, expecting me to go shopping with you and leaving her alone. Dumb thing to say, and clearly you didn’t remember a damn thing I’d told you on the phone in the previous weeks. She had been sick for three weeks and you didn’t care!

Thankfully mum slept 12 hours and my sister ran late, so mum got a good sleep and she went and did her shopping and then looked after mum while I ran off to the library and did our shopping.

Mum was fine. Until my sister bought her a Sub from Subway and I brought half a cheesecake home for all three of us but they were bad moves on everyone’s part and even though on Tuesday the 22nd I had my last chiro session of the year, I didn’t end up going.

No!

Because mum decided to be sick again and this time I had diarrhea so I had to call and cancel.

Yep, I was now sick and even more in pain. It’s not like it could get worse, right? It’s not like we couldn’t get the xmas cheesecake from The Cheesecake Shop as they weren’t making it and we couldn’t get our Red Rooster bbq chicken meal for xmas eve lunch because mum was sick, right. Just as well we saved money not buying all of that, right?

To be continued…

How much shit can a fan stand?

Okay, so I changed it from wood chucks chucking wood, but I think it works!

After five minutes help finally came. A big burly guy and two nurses with a wheel chair. They tried to get mum away from the car but she was so weak she fell to her knees even though she had told them she was falling and even though they had told her they had her, they let her fall to her knees.

I had to move the car but an ambo offered for me. I quickly cleaned it up and got her stuff back out of the boot and waited while a stretcher was on its way.

Mum kept saying I’m falling, they kept saying you’re not, and then down she went like a well fed walrus onto the carpark ground.

Bullshit they had a hold of her!

She lay like that and the burly guy who had a hold of her..well he just walked away.

Next thing, so many doctors and nurses and people came rushing with machinery from god knows where. They milled around, asked questions, and one doctor said to me “how are you”, I said “not happy” cause I wasn’t and then he had the gall to say, “we’ll we’re here now.”

I should have said to him “and where the f@#k were you five hours ago when she got brought in for treatment?” But I didn’t!

Eventually they got mum onto a stretcher and back into A&E (accident & emergency) where they re-admitted her. I grumbled about the lack of care all the way and stayed until I had to go. And a doctor still hadn’t seen her or given her anything. How f@#king appalling!

This time, she was in for a week. Friday to Friday. She got meds and I got a rest, for the most part, so it was just as well I wasn’t blogging because scrubbing and cleaning had absolutely f@#ked up my back and crippled me. Not to mention the weather was so f@#king horrible with 42 degrees celcius happening and we don’t have air con and I had to deal with tradies not turning up and calls every day to the housing trust and the company doing the window.

It was also the start of my big xmas shopping. I ordered two pairs of shoes from Style Tread but one eventually went back. I also bought my second pair of frankie 4s from their website, but more on all of that in coming weeks.

I picked her up on Friday the 18th of December, exactly one week before xmas. I had to make several trips back and forth to the car to get all of her stuff in, including a toilet riser which is a seat that sits above your toilet and you have handles to use to get up and down. And then she was wheeled out downstairs and I helped her get into the car with the air con on full blast. I was picking her up in the prime heat of the day and the car dashboard said it was 42 degrees. I took her home and got her out, getting her walker from inside. However she didn’t make it inside.

Well, not all the way.

She was so weak and lethargic from not having her meds or food for three weeks that she collapsed in the doorway and I couldn’t pick her up.

So I called the ambo for the fourth time in three weeks.

They rocked up within about 15 minutes and I directed them around the back as it was the back door she was sitting in. I told them I’d just bought her home from the hospital and she’d been very sick for three weeks and had no energy. They managed to get her up with my help and onto her walker and then wheeled her into the lounge room and onto her recliner.

I already had the fan going full bore and brought her a drink. Thank god I had good clothes on cause they were quite good looking.

It was still 42 degrees.

I showered and we settled into the lounge room for the night with me sleeping on the sofa. Well, I barely slept, continually getting up to have a drink and change over her frozen cloths to keep her cool.

Saturday wasn’t much better. Stinking heat, emotions, crap tv. Saturday night she decided that she had indigestion and had a Quickeze (antacid). Half hour later she was vomiting and I was running out the back to clean the bucket out.

Thank God Sunday brought a cool breeze and I opened up the house while she went to bed. I pottered around and cleaned up the best I could but there was so much stuff that needed to be gone through. Piles of magazines and papers that hadn’t been read, meds needed sorting. It all got dumped back on the couch.

I was exhausted and through all of this, I still had to deal with tradies not turning up.

To be continued…

Can even MORE shit hit the fan?

Of course it can.

Because it did again Thursday morning at 5:20 am just like clockwork.

Just like clockwork she was back in the toilet with diarrhea and it didn’t stop for over 24 hours. We spent the night in the lounge room, rolling her up and down the hallway on her walker and eventually sitting in the hall outside of the bathroom. Just like clockwork she went every three hours.

Around lunchtime Friday we rang a health hotline and the nurse recommended getting mum back to the hospital to have samples and tests taken. Mum said no, until she went again, and yelled “call the ambulance”.

The ambulance was called, I got her dressed and they were there in minutes. I told them how sick she’d been and that samples needed to be taken to determine what was going on. They took her back to our local hospital around 2:30pm and after three hours of scrubbing, washing, eating, calling the trust about the plumber not turning up and how we needed a carpenter to fix our side window, and resting, I get a call at 6:20pm from the hospital telling me mum’s fine and to come and pick her up.

I was in shock.

Wait, what!

“She’s sick and needs help she just got in there today. Has the doctor given her something?”

“Yes.”

“Has she stopped having diarrhea?”

“Well she hasn’t had any since I’ve been here.”

“But she’s sick.”

“Well the doctor says she can go home.”

“Okay, um, I’ll be in in about an hour.”

I had a pizza in the oven. I was sitting in my kaftan lounging on mum’s recliner with my ipad and now I needed to rush.

I got there at 7:10. Got mum up and out and then shit hit everything else it possibly could.

Mum was sick while I tried getting her into the car. I was crying, “You need help”, she was yelling “take me home they told me there’s nothing wrong with me.” “I can’t take you home like this you need help”.

Needless to say I’m glad I ran back in to get help even though what that help did next was appallingly disgusting and needs to be sued for it.

Turns out, the nurse had lied to me. A doctor hadn’t seen her, she didn’t get anything for the gastro and they had given her Hydralite which diabetics aren’t allowed to have. What a joke the hospital is!

But that’s tomorrow’s story.

To be continued…

The shit was about to get worse!

The shit was about to get worse!

Tuesday morning she was okay. She still had diarrhea but it wasn’t like it had been. Wednesday she was still going and on Thursday I had to get up to the shops to pay the bills and buy food. When I got back I gave her Imodium pills to stop the diarrhea and thankfully it did.

For now.

Thursday night she had neck stiffness and pain so I gave it a rub and she went to bed.

Friday morning she woke up in pain. As I helped her out of bed her neck pain was worse and it didn’t get better all day. Finally around 4pm, she told me to ring for a locum doctor. They didn’t start until 6 and he didn’t arrive until 8. He checked her blood pressure, her neck, and was worried about blood leaking in her head.

I knew it was from her bad sitting position day in day out.

He rang the ambo and I packed her bag. I told the ambos she’d had gastro for a week and off she went.

Well, the mayhem that followed had to be seen to be believed.

She went in Friday night. During that time they lost her sandals I’d sent her in with, they did nothing for the gastro she still had, and gave her a CT scan which showed nothing. I picked her up Tuesday afternoon and managed to get her in the house and she seemed okay. She didn’t have diarrhea and she was eating food. The hospital had given her a heat pack for her neck and she used it for the pain and stiffness.

She seemed okay.

Except she wasn’t!

On Wednesday morning right at 5:20 am, she fell over from the toilet into the laundry and we needed to call an ambo. Again!

I also got a call from the Housing Trust saying a plumber would be there within two days to fix the toilet. Yep, sure.

Could life get worse?

Yep, definitelty!

To be continued…