2012 Summary :) (by sarah)

January

At the beginning of 2012 we were moving into our new house, so January was a mix of boxes, crates and buying things.

The cats liked it

January also saw my birthday and friends helping us move.

And Mary's which saw me hosting the first party in the new house!

February

February saw my cousins coming to visit 🙂 And we dressed Alaric up as Gotye and created a spoof video.

It also saw valentines day when Alaric bought me a microphone which has lead to me producing recordings of my works 🙂

and pancake day

March

March saw World Book Day were Jeany dressed up as a dinosaur for the book Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs!

And Mothers Day when we all went off to Gloucester Cathedral to look at some art!

Alaric also upgraded the hardware running our Internet stuff (such as this web site) to a more powerful single box, rather than the previous two-box setup, which has simplified administration. It was a lot of work merging the two configurations, but this means that future upgrades will be a lot easier!

April

April was an excessively busy month and set the pace for the Summer!

There was me reading at Not The Oxford Lit Fest

Jean was in the Stroud Dance festival

April is of course the month of birthdays so we had a BBQ for Alaric, my Brother and some friends who all have April birthdays 🙂

Alaric took a day off work for his birthday, and spent it sorting out his workshop.

Then there was the Cheltenham Poetry Festival!

And as if that were not enough for one month I also won a bronze medal in the Gloucester Creative Olympics for my song Windy Gloucestershire 🙂

Alaric wrote a toolkit for building 9P servers in Chicken Scheme.

Easter

Visit to Petersfield

May

Cake pops! As a moving in present to ourselves we got a cake pop machine which we have had lots of fun with 🙂

We enjoyed our garden 🙂

I read at a National Flash Fiction day event in Oxford

I read at the Stroud Site Festival

We went to the Olympic Torch Relay in Painswick.

Mary's Christening

and House Warming

June

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee - we made cake

And went to Party in the Park in Gloucester

One festival I was performing at was canceled due to the site flooding but a last minute booking was made for me to read at the Stroud Water Festival. It was very wet!

My textural science art was in an exhibition at Centre Arts in Cheltenham.

Fathers Day:

We attended the Cheltenham Science Festival

Our garden started to seriously feed us 🙂

I drew a picture for Mid Summer and we made solar cakes.

We made a Turing Machine cake for the centenary of Alan Turing, the father of modern computing.

Wychwood festival were I was running a workshop making pompoms 🙂 We hung out with same of our friends and had a great time 🙂

Alaric finally caught up on all the overdue financial returns and dissolved our company, Warhead.org.uk Ltd, a lump of work which had been hanging over us ever since life became crazy after The Flood.

Wedding Anniversary we went to Bristol and found a hill to slide down and went on a bridge tour and lots more.

We went to our friends Zaphire's House warming and we made cake pops 🙂

July

I became a poetry installation in a manor house in Oxford for the On Form Sculpture Garden

We all went off to Cornbury Festival as I was running a craft workshop - this time sock puppets and monsters 🙂 Jean beat the IQ elves and as did I so we got a signed photograph 🙂

I drew a picture to mark the 'discovery' of the Higgs Boson

I learnt to solder 🙂 So did Jeany at Bristol Hack Space

I drew postcards for a charity auction

I went to Bristol to perform during Science Show-Off, I knitted a buckminsterfullerene which was nicked by an audience geek!

It was my Dad's 65th Birthday so we organised a Discworld themed party, including a cakes of course and films and books and of course a BBQ.

Alaric took up Krav Maga.

I made bread puppies for my friend Ella's birthday in Bristol 🙂

Alaric wrote a turtle graphics system to help children learn programming in Scheme.

August

I ran Centre Arts an art gallery for 2 weeks - it was lots of fun.

We went to my friend Claire's Birthday and we made English Rose cakes for her 🙂

Olympics

I took part in a wonderful city centre festival called Art Tournament - part of this included the fact that I had been short listed for Gloucestershire Poet Laureate.

Cranham Feast

My friend Buko and her family visited from Australia!

Off we went to the Hullabaloo Festival which had been rained off earlier in the year - it was very wet but again but there was one fantastically sunny day and the ran was fun in the Centre Arts Markee anyway 🙂 We did face painting and a junk music workshop.

We went to the @ Bristol Center to see Robot Football and meet up with my friend Ella - we managed to miss the actual event as we picked the only half day to arrive on but it was ok as we found them testing and repairing the robots outside the centre and the students who had made them showed us how they worked 🙂

At the end of the summer I was too too tired and went for a short break in Essex where we chased ducks round a trout pond and everyone bar me went swimming and we camped and had BBQ's and it was lovely.

September

Jean moved up a grade in Ju Jitsu - she is now a Yellow Belt White Stripe, she also attended the National Seminar.

Jean started Junior School!

Jean's Dr Who Birthday

We went to the 1000 Kites festival.

Alaric's Dad visited from South Africa

Hosted Chicken UK

My cousin Sheila visited from Australia 🙂

October

I released The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry

Took the girls to the farm shop for half term fun 🙂

I performed in my second ever slam which was part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival!

Took part in the first Green Unconference in the UK, I talked about Upcycling and Junk Art and ran a workshop.

We took Alaric's cousins to Legoland as a thankyou for help with the deposit for the house - it was amazing!

Halloween

November

The end of October is a cluster of anniversaries of various types which we celebrated with my Brother and his Wife having just celebrated their first wedding anniversary and it being mum and dads and mine and Al's first going out anniversary. Michelle and David got cake, mum and dad the picture I had returned from the Cricket Club.

Released the audio book of The Little Book of Festive Poetry 🙂

Bonfire Night

The whole family took part in NaNoWriMo and writing fever took over the house; even Alaric did some work on his existing fiction project 🙂

We celebrated 10 yrs of being together by going for a four day holiday in London which was amazing, we saw Gotye at Hammersmith Apollo 🙂

We had a house full of Pudseys for Children In Need 🙂

I went to an improvisation workshop which was lots of fun and helped me with my stage skills 🙂

I went on a one day writing retreat which did result in 10, 000 words of my novel being writing in one day 🙂

Millie came to stay bringing my friend Becca and her sister along 🙂

We went to the NaNo Finishing Party 🙂

December

I performed at the first ever Cirencester Poetry Slam

Mark and Lucy's Wedding

Wrote, recorded and illustrated Percival's Christmas Wish in an attempt to raise money for Shelter and homeless kids.

Tish and Clare's Wedding

Released the e-book of The DoomsDay Collection and celebrated the Winter Solstice marking the dawn of a new age.

Visited all my Essex cousins.

Went to the Island for the Snell Family Christmas Meal

Friends Christmas Party (I forgot the camera)

Had friends over for Mulled Wine and Minced Pies

Celebrated Christmas

Had a belated Pym Christmas

In little dribs and drabs throughout the whole year, Alaric's managed to tidy up his home directory, which had become terribly fragmented after several hurried fresh starts with new computers due to previous ones being stolen over the past few years, with restoring stuff from backups not being an immediate option but happening later. This had led to different projects being in all sorts of different places, so it was good to bring them all together and organise them. As part of this, he rebuilt the Kitten Technologies site, and reorganised and rewrote the ARGON Project web site. And, finally, he continued his part in the standardisation of the next version of the Scheme programming language.

New Year!

Dreams of Bizar (by sarah)

Ok so last nights dream... this guy called Matt I know who is a fantastic musician was setting up a performing arts space which needed loads of work, the building was shambolic and dark with wires hanging out of the ceiling. I was the manager and it really was a big rambling old building.

Creatures from the nth dimension had broken through these sort of crab-dogs which I was shooting whilst trying to prevent tenticles rising from the basement in a Cthulu type manor. Mean while Alaric had gotten himself trapped on the elysian fields which were accessible through the attic windows (these are the Greek/Roman version of Heaven). He was in the van and was trying to avoid the giant that was smashing it up whilst not driving off the edge.

Matt was wondering around doing DIY serenely whilst smashing mosters with a bit of two by four whilst asking me if I thought that we should put a climbing wall up in the hall way. Then one of my uni friends James (another fantastic musician) knocks on the door to ask if he can borrow the recording studio - I tell him to talk to Matt and it is all agreed but then he is followed by the backing choir, which was a 60 + strong hippy choir run by Jesus. They all wore technicolour coats made of patch work or knitted.

I was starting to get a bit frazzeled at this point so had to shrink Jean and Mary and pop them in a travel coat with two magical mice for protection. Mum and Dad then turned up looking grim with a credit card given to them by James Bond for me - I used it to hire a paranormal assassin to kill the giant and retrieve Alaric and whilst doing all of this I was making drinks and food for everybody and fretting over the fact I couldn't find any disinfectant to clean the crab-dog gunk up :/

Oh also it was tipping it down and grey outside in the dream and only the fields in the attic were sunny. There was flooding occuring and refugees began to turn up expecting food but Jesus told me he was out of miracles and that it was up to me.

When I told Al the dream he said, 'Ah so the fret about organising the big family meal has started - I thought you'd been rather calm.'

Merry Christmas On And All (by sarah)

Merry Christmas on this dreary Christmas Eve!

Here at the Snell-Pym Household we are recovering from mulled wine and minced pies with friends and are about to under take some lovely craft activities followed by christmas food prep!

Until then here is the outline of the Cathedral I have drawn for Percival's Christmas Wish. I have only so far managed two complete drawings both in outline but will attempt some more later on! I have a confession - I'm not very good at drawing buildings - I've never really done it to be honest and it took a lot longer than expected and I'm not entirely happy with it but it will none the less be going up on Wiggly Pets with the story a little later today!

The Homeless Babies (by sarah)

Today I am doing the front cover of Percival's Christmas Wish as part of my Draw-a-thon to raise money for Shelter. I have only been sponsored £10 so far but that is half a family who wont end up homeless in the first place! So it is all good though making it a whole family by the end of today would be brilliant 🙂

In total I need to draw 14-16 pictures before Christmas Eve! I am currently on number three which is the hardest of the pictures as it is the one for the cover as well. So far all pictures are only sketches and some of that quiet rough but I am going out later to pick up some new colouring pencils as mine were damaged in the move.

I would like to just emphasis that there are over 75, 000 homeless children this christmas the likes of which has not been seen since the 60's! I know it seems like a sea of faceless people but it's not - those people are people like you and me, things can change so quickly where finances are concerned.

Also last week a baby bunny was dumped outside a pet shop near us in a cardboard box, which we said we would take if it was adopted by yesterday - it hadn't been adopted so we now have a new addition to the Snell-Pym zoo - Fluffy Obsidian!

Guess which part of the name was mine and which bit was Jean's? :/

She reckons that rock names are too hard in that they are not fluffy and they are hard to say! She gave Alaric the option of Hedgwig or Fluffy for the rabbit and he opted for Fluffy as a bunny isn't an owl and though it is also not a three headed dog it's genetics would be closer to that than a bird.

If we could adopt the homeless kids we would but they don't need adopting - they need to be with their families and taking them away would be taking us straight back to the horrors of Victoriana, therefore we help the whole family. I am really hoping that someone will donate another £10 so that we have helped one whole family instead of just half.

Here is a donate button.

And thankyou so much for the donation/sponsor that I have already received 🙂 The money goes directly to Shelter so they can start doing stuff straight away 🙂

Third Time Was Not Lucky :( (by sarah)

Ok so I've been bleeding since Mary was born and as she is going to be two next month that is a long time, I've had hormones and scans and a coil and then a scan which showed the coil is in the wrong place and then I was waiting for biospies and re-coiling as the womb linning is too thick etc...

But the appointment kept being rearranged or the Dr was sick etc... so today I finally get in to have the coil removed, biopsy done and new coil put in but... the coil is stuck. They are worried that it is in the scar tissue from the C-section so am now awaiting a phone call from another clinic were they can scan me whilst trying to remove it.

I am actually quiet freaked out to be honest.