Another Hectic Bank Holiday (by sarah)

It started Friday with a friends leaving the country do in Bristol where I chatted about politics, scifi, fantasy, gaming, art and science. Then Saturday it was up relatively early to go to an audition to sing at the Gloucester Pride in June (more on that later), then it was home to work on festival trollies and to bake cakes 🙂

We found a broken trolly a few years ago and we decided that this year we were going to get it fixed in time for festival seasons 🙂 Al has slowly been buying and finding the bits to do this with. He has spent the weekend welding, sawing and tightening things 🙂

He insists it's not a gokart.

I made chocolate orange cake, diary free choc cup cakes and lemon zest cupcakes for the family fun day to raise money for the Play House Theatre in Gloucester (more on this later too as it was a fab day with lots and lots of photos!).

Sunday was pretty much taken up with the Funday which ran from 11 until 4, we had pizza and film time when we got home.

Today I got up, cleaned out chickens and sorted the wormaries a bit - one of them had an ants nest in it 🙁 But fortunately it hadn't done that much damage. I then had a shower and we headed out to the climbing wall for Jean's Rock Mice season. She was in disgrace for wearing her shiny school shoes and the wall don't tend to give climbing shoes out for mice seasons :/

If she wants new shoes before next term she is buying them herself!

I worked on the design and illustrations of the comic book whilst she was in climbing and Mary and Al went shopping for various bits including a drill bit and strawberry plants!

Last week me and the girls cleared up the old grow bags and put the soil in the girls old laundary basic to make an upcycled strawberry planter. Jean then helped me plant the strawberries Al had got.

They weren't quiet the kind of strawberry plants I had in mind so not sure how well it is going to work but hey ho!

This then lead to the issue that Al had managed to get far more plants than I had expected for the tenner I'd suggested (he actually spent 12 but close enough). So this meant that we had to find homes from the remaining plants - and this meant finally getting around to mounting all the disused cabinets on the wall that I have collected since we moved in.

As you can only really use good solid furniture for this sort of thing it took two of us to mount them on the wall - this meant I got to play with the power tools too as the cabinets were too heavy for me to hold up for any time.

I'm really quiet pleased 🙂

And I have space for more stuff to happen.

We were then going to head down to the allotment but alas the weather got in the way so instead we headed to the garden centre to get some planters - we found some galvanized ones on half price sale so got four of them plus some more terracota pots. So it turned into an expensive weekend. But I then spent the evening repotting my sage, tyme, comfrey and sorrel. I also weeded the blue wooden planter I have and put four pots of margaram, golden margaram and oragano into it. The pots I freed up I then used plant out more of my tomatoes that I have grown from seed.

I cleaned the decking up where I've put the planters and am chuffed 🙂 Also though not this weekend - this week I also cleaned the smaller planters I had and brought them in for the window sills. I planted them up with salad mixes as I have been cheerfully eating home grown salad. One night during the week I made basically the whole dinner from home grown stuff - true most of it we have to thank the person who had the allotment before us but still!

Feeling guilty we didn't make it too the allotment though :/ We plan to go after work this coming week.

Moping, Tori Amos and Death (by sarah)

Post is not about suicide honest!

I am sitting here moping around in a hello kitty onsie listening to Tori Amos and reading a graphic novel called Death written by Neil Gaiman. I have lots of stuff that needs doing but it is the weekend and I have already done a huge chunk of domestic stuff this morning.

I am trying to frame my thoughts, to prepare them for some comic book art later today. I haven't worked on the comic since Monday and I need to work on Cuddly Science as it now has a second booking. The issue is I am feeling very nervous about all of it - about my own capabilities and talents.

Alaric normally boys me up with this sort of thing but he has gone to London today and I am missing him and am also feeling strangely alarmed that I have been with him for over a third of my life. I wrote this and I think I may end up constructing him a poem out of it at some point - I posted the first bit on twitter and then when I put it on Facebook it grew - he liked it which was a relief 🙂

I don't like my men to be beefcake - oh no I like them to be nut roast.
I also like my coffee like I like my men - white, sweet and tall preferably with caramel but I'll put up with vanilla, decaf but not weak
Must also have dodgy dress style and be able to be cast as an elf in LoTR
Add in the brain power and the essential we must be FRIENDS and I think it's a good job I found Alaric Blagrave Snell-Pym
Next month is 10 yrs of marriage, I've been with him for over a 1/3rd of my life - this morning I felt this was an insane fact - now feeling lonely as he's gone to the big smoke and the girls are playing on their own and the cats have gone out

I am annoyed with myself and project jumping - true I get the projects finished but it takes longer than other people as I'll focus on one thing for six weeks and then jump to another project. They tend to be the same projects that I flit between but it means instead of getting a finished thing and then moving on, I get three things all finished at the same time.

This is not the best tactic for several reasons - firstly there is only so much of my stuff everyone is interested in and I need to give each one a far chance and not over load people and what I do is kind of the worst of both worlds. What I should do with my varied focus and projects is do a bit of each, each day or week to keep the skills honned or to just learn the skills do the project and then move on to the next thing. What I actually do is spend 6 weeks on something, the first week or so being me remembering what it is I was doing with the project/cleaning the rust of my skills.

And at the same time of course I can't actually focus on what I want to for those 6 weeks as there are workshops, performances, stuff I've promised to people, kids and animals and health problems.

Alaric doesn't see my way of working as a problem but I also get incredibly distracted once I am in the 'zone' with a project and start to resent time not spent on it. He says this is just how my brain works.

I am also being mentally hungry at the moment - I want new things and everything seems to just be combinations and reiterations of what's gone before (yes I know its the combinations that make things new, it's just the way I feel at the moment). This goes for books, films and music - I found Tori has produced a whole new lot of music since last I looked hence the morning marathon!

At the same time I feel incapable of learning at the moment - my mind just flits away or I forget what I was doing, like the first half of the instructions etc... this happens if I don't get to focus on a project, it's like my mind can't hold anything else - I obsess about a project but only for a limited amount of time. I think that is why things like NaNoWriMo appeals to me so much - they fit in with how I'm happiest working and so far I've gone back repeatedly to the same project but that means my life has to worked out on an annul basic and not weekly/monthly etc... and EVERYTHING is long term :/

I'm feeling elated and panicky about performances and fear that I'll stop coming up with ideas.

It's kind of bizar. Also I seem to have lost the ability to sing in front of anyone :/ Just thinking about it makes my throat clam up - my solution to this is that I am dam well going to start singing again - some way, some how. I fear it will affect the way I do my performances as well so I have been making myself practice the guitar and have attempted to learn the Let It Go song from Frozen - it seems to kind of be helping.

And...

One blog post without a focus - I love Tori's music and I love Neil's work and this entire thread of thought was sparked by 'oh look I'm reading him and listening to her and they are at the British Library together today looking at comic books - ooo comic books wasn't I doing something with that... or was it a song I was supposed to be recording?'

Now I am off to spray the chickens as one of them is being naughty and pecking the others :/

Domestic Sunday (by sarah)

When we are not away doing events, we are trying to have a whole day focused just on domestic stuff. In reality I am often slopping off to catch up on work I can't do with small people around me but I still aim to spend at least the morning on domestic stuff with my family.

So today we did some house tidying that needed doing, sorted the chickens and rabbit out, fixed some door handles and I got stuff ready for the allotment. In the end when we saw how time was going it was decide that Alaric would not take the seedlings I've been growing or the fizzy drinks bottles to turn into mini green houses, as I needed to get some work done. So he just dug the plot and planted the marigold seeds in the tyre with the girls (I say just but that is huge work). And tomorrow after school I shall go down there with Jean and my dad and plant things.

Alaric took eggs to his aunt and attempted to sort her printer out and the girls came back with play dough and a pick nick hamper, which they love!

I mean while sat and drew pencil sketches with construction lines - female manga heads and worked on my comic book. The comic book and my last assignment for college mean I need to remember how to draw and illustrate. So I am steadily working my way through my how to draw books. I think there is a marked improvement from the line drawings I did earlier in the week.

People interested in the design and/or creative process, I am using the Complete Book of Drawing Manga at the moment but have a stack of other drawing books and more in depth updates will be happening on Purple Monster.

In the evening Alaric cooked a wonderful stir fry - though sadly we couldn't use the funky sauce he had bought as Jean noticed the ingredients included the chillies that kill me and fish sauce, meaning it wasn't veggi for Al 🙁

On the other hand, him and Jeany made cinnamon swirls which we ate warm and drizzled 😀

Busy in the Garden dispite/inspite, becuase of the Weather (by sarah)

This weekend we have put more bark chippings down in the chicken run as it had again become water logged, there has just been so much rain! Then we set about emptying the compost bin to take to the allotment - or rather I did whilst Alaric cut stakes for the pitch markers, out of scrap wood. I filled up both our wormeries and had a good chunk left over, which had to go into our green bin (we are not currently putting the green bin out though and are using it as an extra composter.

However this was all I managed for the whole 2 days of the weekend. I was so tired from being ill 🙁 Al had to go to the allotment with just Jeany. He said it was even more flooded so he put the compost bin in place - weighted down and marked the boundary and that was it!

Also part of me wondered if it was really worth the work as the compost bin had cost me £20 (it was on sale) but I only want wormeries in the garden as the compost bins simply take too long for the rate of chicken bedding production!

On the plus side, the chickens are producing epic numbers of eggs and we now have two regulars, which we are selling eggs to, each week.

Tea Cups in the Garden (by sarah)

We've been busy building paths to the chicken run though Al keeps miss judging how much concrete we need so it has spanned out several weekends now! He's found an easier way of mixing the concrete though and that is by using a tarp 🙂

As you can probably see from the photograph the garden is a mess with the old rabbit run and soil that's been dug out to make the run area and the old oil drum that the people who lived here before left and which is full of stuff and bin bags of stuff that got damaged by leaking ceilings and so on. So I cheered myself up by putting up the nice teacup garden ornaments my friend Ulrike gave me and envisioning what it will look like after a few more weekends of hard graft.

I really love these and they will be the main feature of our garden food area. I may assess how easy the cats can get to them and put some bird food in or maybe a little pot plant - at the moment it is far too rainy for either option!