Something interesting at last

Spent this morning doing something pretty cool and exciting.

Recording a charity single!

I'd explain it but I can't be bothered, so just read this article instead.

Tomorrow I'm having my hair coloured (probably red, but haven't decided yet).

And Friday I'm out with some of the girls from choir. We'll all be dressed as fairies.

And I now have a new little studio/workshop as I've taken over our tiny third bedroom with my polymer clay/jewellery stuff, which means we can actually use the kitchen table again. Yay!

Well it's not as boring as last week, anyway...

A house guest

So I'm in the dining room making polyclay beads a little while ago (I know, it's really late, but my sleep is fucked up still), when I spot something out of the corner of my eye, in the kitchen. Not that my eye was in the kitchen, the thing I saw was.

Anyway, in front of the sink cupboard was a mouse. A pretty big, healthy-looking one. It had a look around. It sniffed the air. Then it disappeared, presumably under the sink cupboard.

So I got up and grabbed our multi-mouse no-kill trap from upstairs, baited it with peanut butter (that got Summer's attention), and set it on the floor by the sink. And went back to the beads.

A little while later the mouse (well could have been a different one I guess, it was a mouse anyway) strolled on past my chair, along the wall. Behind the rabbit's cage and round the other side back towards me. I tried not to move, because despite not really wanting mice in my house, I'm interested in how they behave. I often spend time watching them eat the food I put out for the birds. Cute little things, but destructive and rather unhygienic. Rather like children.

Anyway. This mouse either didn't clock me, or just didn't care that I was there - it practically ran over my foot at one point. Then it headed out into the hallway and I lost it.

Presumbably it went into the understairs cupboard.

Which is an absolute tip.

It's full of the vacuum cleaner, tools that are so essential that they don't live in the garage (like the big torch), dry dog food, dry cat food (for Basil the hedgehog), rabbit food and wild bird food. All in open bags. The little mouse must be having a field day in there!

Annoyingly this means I now have to clear out that cupboard and buy storage containers for the food and probably throw a lot of it away because it will be contaminated with mouse doings. Because mice are continuously urinating.

There must be a market for incontinance pads for mice.

Typical, when I have stuff I really need to do tomorrow, I've got to deal with the black hole under the stairs which may now be home to countless mice and spiders (not that I mind either, but still...) and possibly a small third-world country. When i should be making cute little cakes with glitter to take to the Activities Fair on Thursday, so we can bribe freshers into joining SingSoc.

That and doing something which I can't tell you about til Sunday.

Oh and while I'm here, are there any birders who want to play Guess Which Completely Unexpected Bird Turned Up In My Garden Last Week Which Isn't A Garden Bird And I Think Must Have Been Having A Rest During The Start Of Its Migration - before I post pictures of it?

Hell, non-birders can play too if the want!

Miss me?

It's like Kay said to me the other week, when you're busy enough to have stuff to blog about, you're too busy to, well, blog.

So, I guess, bullet points or something. And I'll try really hard to catch up with all your blogs too. Especially you Sayre! Probably Sunday, when I don't have anything I desperately need to do.

* Did Dido and Aeneas the other week in Sheffield cathedral. Went well, witchy voices and cassocks and everything, and when we went wrong we did it confidently so the audience didn't notice.
* African Sanctus/Carmina Burana (our huge mad £10,000 concert) is tomorrow. I really need to do some work on both pieces. But on the plus side, David Fanshawe (composer of Sanctus) is coming to work with us tonight, and we sold out, over 500 tickets, in three days. Exciting.
* I stood for the committee again - as Administrative Assistant. And as no-one stood against me, I got it. Now I'm in charge of pencils and milk and tea-making rotas. And here's the proof.
* Garden is good. Things are growing - I'll do a proper post about it later with photos once things are not so mad. We've already had three salads of baby leaves, yum.
* I ripped the skin off the back of my heels last week, hurrying in silly shoes. It hurt. I have scabs, and can't wear trainers again yet. That'll learn me.
* I also got myself sunburned last week, and I was only outside for a couple of hours. Trust me to forget the sunscreen. My shoulders went red and were quite sore, made sleeping difficult. Until I remembered a little tip we heard from a Greek bloke once while on holiday, and rubbed half a cold fresh tomato onto the affected skin. Scarily, it works really well, and the next day the burn had faded to pink. Now it's just tanned and for some reason it itches. It's driving me mad.
* Baby robins. In our garden. Cute. One of the parents has taken to flying into the house through the open back door and stealing mealworms from the container I keep by the door. Photos will happen at some point.
* We sorted out and painted our bedroom, bought and assembled new wardrobes, cleaned the carpet and put everything that doesn't fit or we don't wear in a box for eBay/charity shops.
* I got Wii Fit. I've lost 3lb.

Doesn't sound like I've been up to much, but I have.

Another only vaguely veg-plot-related post

Garden news - second bed is dug and now needs the frame putting together and the topsoil and compost putting in, and stuff planting. The first seedlings are up in the first bed, little salad leaves. All the indoor stuff is doing well, and the peas are desperate to be planted outside with some support! I can't believe how fast they grow.

I've spotted two bumble bee nests in the garden, and we have a pair of robins making a nest in one of the small conifers - strangely the same one as last year, but on the other side. Different robins though I think. They've been taking advantage of the worms uncovered by the digging, and are getting quite bold. In other bird news, we were thrilled to see a pair of bullfinches in the orchard yesterday, such gorgeous birds which aren't seen all that often as they're pretty shy. I'll post a pic once they're uploaded. The garden's full of birds now, with about 20 different species regularly visiting and singing away like mad. I'm spending a fortune on sunflower hearts, but it's worth it.

Pictures soon, I promise!

Sorry Sayre, been far too busy to tidy my closet/wardrobe this last week - but as I don't have a linen/laundry cupboard maybe I can try to do it this week some time? Told you I'd end up doing this - in my defence I did have a wedding to sing at on Saturday which I had to rehearse for!

Some garden pics

Right, well I'm trying to post some pics, despite the fact that my computer is being an twat.

This is my garden. It comprises three main areas - the bit directly behind the house, the orchard to the side of the house, and the bigger lawn area which kind of joins up the two other areas. Very hard to describe what I mean, but the pics might help.

Satellite pic which I blatently stole from Google Maps, on which I've marked our boundaries in light green. It's pretty big, and weirdly shaped.

Views from the back of the house. There's a small decked area and a square lawn, with a patio, barbeque and another decked area beyond that which has become rather overgrown. You'll notice that the whole garden is a bit of a mess, needing some serious tidying and weeding.

The overgrown area, and the walled patio. I think the patio's silly, and I want to convert the thing into a raised pond. The barbeque can move somewhere else.

The main lawn. The green cage is Basil's pen.

Taken from the far end of the big lawn.

The awful spar-dashed structure is the garage, which true to English tradition houses everything but the car. The awful black thing is Summer. This will eventually be my wildflower area, with plants that will attract bees and butterflies and birds.

The orchard, with its three apple trees, two pear trees, one plum and one greenage. I'm always amused by the leaning trees, which are probably 50 years old and obviously never staked. Guess which way the prevailing wind is around here? ;) I'll be sowing woodland-type plants here, to brighten the place up a bit.

Oh yeah, and the rhubarb's coming up. It'll be small and pathetic, like the last four years, but it's growing.

So that's the garden. We've got a bit of a challenge this year to get it looking good, I think.

First stage is my raised veg beds - more on that later!

Feeling better now

I usually see feeling/being depressed as my brain's way to telling me I need to to make some changes.

So Thursday night I made the decision to get my life sorted out.

True to form, I haven't worked out how I'm going to do it yet, or what I need to do, but just making that decision has made me feel better.

Probably a good way to start is to be healthier. More fruit and veg (I already eat loads but more can't hurt, right?) and less cake/biscuits/sweets, more exercise, more "quick reward" type tasks that don't require too much mental energy to get my brain back into work mode.

And in that vein, the garden is my big project this year. I want a pond, a wildflower meadow/wildlife area, and an organic veg plot/herb garden. I've bought a healted propagator, in which seeds are germinating, and I've ordered a shedload more seeds. I've concentrated on non-hybrid varieties so I can collect the seeds to sow for next year, because I hate the idea of paying a vast amout to seed companies every single year.

There's a fair bit of room for me to play with - for an English suburban garden mine is pretty big (something like 1/4 of an acre), with an orchard (three full-sized apples and two full-sized pears, one young plum and one young greengage). Unfortunately we do have heavy clay soil which isn't ideal, but just means I need to only grow certain veggies, or buy loads of manure.

I'd love to keep ducks and/or ex-battery chickens for eggs, but Michael isn't keen. I'll have to persuade him, they don't seem to need much looking after - I'd fence off the whole orchard for them and build them a house (and a paddling-pool pond for ducks), and they'd just need feeding and shutting in at night and cleaning every so often. Easy.

Anyway, apart from the fact that I actually like gardening, I like the idea of knowing exactly where my food has come from, what chemicals have been used on it, whatever. I'd rather get my hands dirty and produce my own food than pay silly prices for tasteless, uniform veg that's been flown halfway across the world, which the poor farmer has been paid a pittance for so that supermarkets can make vast profits.

I'll take some pictures so you can see what the garden is like now.

A visitor and some new possessions

Needing a wee earlier this evening, I saved my Pokémon Diamond game and wandered upstairs to the bathroom.

The light switch, annoyingly, is on the wall outside the bathroom, next to the door. I clicked on the light and pushed open the door.

To be confronted with a small dark fast-moving object with a tail running across the floor. A mouse! It ran behind the cupboard under the sink. It made me jump.

And having on full bladder, that can have an unfortunate effect.

Yes, I did wet myself very slightly.

Not that I mind mice. I'm in no way scared of mice. I just wasn't expecting one!


And on a completely different note, I've ordered myself a shiny food processor, on the advice of Which? magazine and several internet reviews. I've never owned one before. I think it's about time, and the formal has given me the incentive to bite the bullet - it will save me a lot of time during food prep.

The frugal part of me (the bit that channels Michael - I never had a frugal part until I started seeing him) said it was silly to spend the best part of £100 on a food processor when you can get them for £30. But the sensible part of me knows that you get what you pay for with these things. A £30 machine will either break after a while, or just won't perform well, so I'd end up buying a new one anyway. False economy.

I also ordered a waffle iron. £15. Bargain. Because I've never had a real waffle, only the supermarket ones you put in the toaster. Plus I recently found out that you can make savoury waffles! How cool is that??

Both should get here some time this week.

And then I will pig out.

Here it is, the new sofa

Forgive the crap phone pic, but apparently the light from the window made the pic all grainy and dark. Still, you get the idea.

Only problem is, now my old carpet looks really dirty and horrible. So we need new flooring too.

Waiting for our new sofa

Self-explanatory really.

It should be here any time, as they said early afternoon.

I'm kind of excited, especially as I can't quite remember what we ordered!

It's a fairly standard, modern-but-not-trendy, 2.5 seat sofa, in a pinky beigey fabric. It's been made especially for us, with our choice of fabric and everything, to the design specifications we gave them.

Then we can get on with buying the last few bits and pieces for the living room. We need two chairs......something like this will do the job. Another cupboard to match the ones we've already got, for the corner by the door. And a light of some kind to sit on top of it. And then the living room is finished! So off to Ikea pretty soon I guess.

Taking a breath

Well, it's been a busy few weeks.

As I've mentioned before, we were aiming to get the house looking like someone owns it (technically looking like we own it, rather than looking like the colourblind tasteless bodge-it merchant that used to own it, owns it) before the Hallowe'en party (which was last night).

Which actually did happen. Here's some before-and-after type pictures.

The walls in the living room, before we decorated. It's okay I guess, in a council-house sort of way. I never liked the dark wood though, it looks pretentious in a 1960s house.

We leave the fireplace dark, but paint the skirting boards and dado rail white. I also clean the carpet and got new curtains. We're waiting for the new sofa to arrive, once it does I'll do proper pics of the room.
A corner of the dining room, and some of my recipe books. Note the awful silver wallpaper and silver dado rail. Yuk. We decide to strip the walls and paint them.

The walls are stripped, and we realised how bumpy they are. Nightmare! My dad comes in and skims them.

Note the tasteful wallpaper over the patio doors, which had just been papered over with the blue/silver.

After some deliberation, we decide on this laminate flooring, and me and my dad start to install it.


Dining room nearly finished, we carry on into the kitchen (they are separated by an archway), and ultimately the utility room.

Kitchen gets floored. The fridge moves into the dining room until the floor in the utility is finished.

Summer tries to find a space to lie down out of the way. Daft dog.

Dad very selfishly goes on holiday, leaving me to finish the utility room floor all by myself.

Summer tests the new floor.

I paint the walls cream, and the silver radiator in sensible old white.


Now onto the hallway/landing/stairs. And perhaps the most distasteful décor in the entire house, with the possible exception of our bedroom.

We rush around and find paint. I start painting the walls. I decide I don't like the new paint. So we get different paint which is much darker than I wanted, but I really like.

Pretty.

I'm going to put up more photos later... this post is big enough already!

And the party was good by the way. :)

Slightly overwhelmed

I've suddenly realised how much I have to get done before the party on the 27th.

Not to mention whatever I need to do before starting back at uni.

And I need to learn a whole piece of music (Dvořák's Stabat Mater) by 6th October, for the first rehearsal of the Midland Festival Chorus thing. It's the first time I've sung with MFC, and I'm really looking forward to it and I want to know what I'm doing. Unfortunately I've left it very late to start, so I'll need some serious work to get myself up to scratch. I do have a CD with my part played on keyboard which helps, and an actual recording, but I can't help but think that a recording of a single voice singing the alto part would be much more useful because it would help me place the words properly.

I've spent about an hour and a half on it tonight and familiarised myself with the first (long!) and the second movements which involve the choir. So far I'm liking the piece, it's rather fun (except that the altos have high Fs which I'm not so keen on), even though in general I'm biased against anything that has a lot of solos because I find that many voices sound much nicer than just one (and I get bored waiting until I can sing again).

I'm kind of ambivalent about this music-learning thing. It's the first time I'll have learned a piece entirely my myself, and while part of me is panicking about how much I'm struggling, another part is proud of the improvement I've made with my sight-reading. Pitching is much easier, as well as getting the "feel" for the direction of the music (which helps a lot with the pitching). I'm still struggling with rhythm, but it's better than it was. I guess these things come with work, and I can't expect to be great with only two years of "proper" singing behind me.

It's not like me to be pissed off, but I am

So my dad asked me yesterday how long I've got left at uni.

I hadn't actually told my parents about repeating, because I knew I'd get hassle.

I told him 2 years, as things had not gone well last year and I'm repeating year 2. His reply?

"Oh, here we go again..." (obviously referencing either my brother, who is repeating year 3 this year, or me dropping out of uni the first time round, and implying that this means I won't get a degree this time either.) "What do you mean, things didn't go well?"

I explained about the not sleeping and the being tired constantly and struggling with mornings, therefore not getting to lectures.

"You ought to have got out of that pattern years ago." Like I haven't tried? "You want to stop all that other stuff."

I asked what stuff he meant.

"Choir."

Oh, so that's the reason why I'm ill! All these years I've thought it was fibromyalgia, but obviously not. Obviously two evenings of choir practice a week stop me from getting to morning lectures. Also obviously that's what's been wrong with me for the past 10 years even though I wasn't even in a choir for 6 of those years. All I have to do is give up my ONE social activity and stay at home every evening studying and cleaning the house and tidying up the garden and all the other things he thinks I should be doing.

Okay. Thanks for the support Dad. Thanks for believing that I can do this, and being so constructive with your criticism. Thanks for constantly approving everything I do. Also thanks for having a clue what you're talking about, and listening to me when I explain how things are, and believing that I'm actually ill.

Of course, you're in complete control of my life, and that's the way it should be. You're always right, and I never am. I need positive people like you in my life.

Anyone detect any sarcasm there?

Winning the pub quiz every week does not make you the expert on Anna. Neither does it qualify you to be a doctor, or to tell me how to live, or how best to get my degree (btw he has no qualifications apart from a certificate in welding or something from about a hundred years ago).

Fuck you, Dad. Shut the fuck up already.

Bah

I'm just not in a good mood.

The sum total of my progress today has been grouting maybe 2 square feet of tiles. I fecking hate grouting, it hurts my wrists and it's dull and tedious and boring. I'm gonna leave it for Michael to do I think.

Michael's off to Edinburgh tomorrow with work, for the fourth time in three weeks. It's pretty bad timing, because I'd like him to be getting on with some house stuff here rather than sitting on his arse all night in a hotel on his own. And I'm so used to him doing certain jobs that I forget about them when he's not here, so the bins don't get emptied and the dishwasher doesn't get unloaded, simply because I don't think about it.

It worries me a bit that I don't really miss him. I seem to just get on with it. I think I'm just not in emotion mode right now, as I'm not feeling anything very much, like just emotionally beige or something. I guess it's better than being depressed, and it's probably a result of me not doing anything fun for ages.

Another thing that's winding me up is my left wrist. I had a ganglion removed from it 5 or 6 years ago and I have a lovely little scar and a lump there now, which swells up and hurts a bit occasionally. Basically it's not the same wrist as it used to be, but it's pretty much okay. Took me months to be able to use it properly after the op though. It was bothering me last night, and I noticed another ganglion has popped up to the left of the op scar. It's quite tender and achy and annoying. I don't know whether I want to have it treated or not because of the pain and inconvenience of the op - maybe I'll wait to see how bad it's going to be. And if anyone else tells me to hit it with a Bible I'll scream! First, I'm an atheist. I don't have a Bible. And second... I have no desire to be hit hard on the wrist with a heavy book. Call me weird.

So yeah. I'll try to be productive tomorrow. I certainly feel better when I'm doing stuff. Or am I doing stuff because I feel better? Either way - I'm not happy today. Just frustrated and tired and blergh.

I was going to post this in Pirate-speak, considering what day it is. But I really can't be arsed.

Progress

Okay, so here's what's been happening.

• Living room painted
• Living room carpet cleaned twice
  
• New cupboards assembled in living room, with 26 white cardboard storage boxes which had to be put together
  
• CD/DVD/video collections organised and stored in said cupboards
• New curtains hung in living room
• Living room fireplace re-grouted
  
• Kitchen and utility tiled
• Half of kitchen tiles grouted
• New bookcase assembled in study
• Roleplaying books, my uni notes and loads of magazines (mostly New Scientist) stored in new bookcase
• Clothes which were littering the main bedroom stored in folding boxes, until we get new wardrobes

Now I come to write it, it doesn't sound like much. But we're getting there. Next on the list is getting a new sofa, disposing of the old sofas, decorating the kitchen/dining room/utility and some general tidying and clearing and sorting stuff out.

I'm tired. And I'm back at uni in two weeks. And my scalp, behind my ears and the back of my neck are all flaky and scabby as my eczema's playing up. On the plus side though, I've lost another inch from bust and hips, and an inch and a half from my waist.

I've also created a new blog, where I'll keep track of all my uni stuff. I plan to post my lecture notes there, and my timetable (newly created in Google Calendars and almost completed), and any other stuff related to uni, or psychology.

And on a completely unrelated note, I've recently started stitching again. I found a 3/4 finished tapestry of two dolphins when I cleared out the living room, which I'd actually forgotten I started, and I'm determined to get it finished. I used to do a lot of cross stitch and tapestry and the like, but haven't done any for years. I also ordered a sampler of British tits (that should get me a few dodgy searches over here!) which looks great, and I'd definitely recommend the site if you like cross stitch because they have some lovely bird ones - mostly UK but some American too.

And now I'm off to exercise.

Sorry for the silence!

I've been so busy the last week, haven't had time to blog. And I haven't been reading blogs either - hopefully I'll catch up in the next week or so.

The source of the busyness? Decorating.

Mostly because I'm having a party at Hallowe'en and I'd like my house to look like someone owns it, but also because I'm sick of it. So far we've managed to decorate precisely 3 rooms in the 3.5 years we've lived here, one of which is the bathroom.

Although we have a new kitchen, it looks a mess because there's no floor (bare concrete) and no wall tiles. The dining room needs the wallpaper stripping and decorating, the hallway is a horrible yellow with an orange border (I hate it), our bedroom is the messiest room in the world and consequently is filthy because there isn't room to clean. The whole house is full of stuff that doesn't have a home and needs sorting out and storing. Oh, and dog hair.

Mostly I just put up with the fact that I hate it, because I'm too lazy/tired to actually do anything about it.

But not now. The exercise thing is working I think, I actually feel like I have energy. Some energy at least.

So I cleared out the living room. I planned what it will look like - the colours, the furniture, everything. It was decorated with wallpaper - okay wallpaper I guess, but not what I'd have chosen. A beige-ish background with green patterns above the mahogany-coloured dado rail, and green stripes below - to be fair, it looks like a council house living room. The sofas (one two-seater, one three-seater) came with the house, they are a kind of tapestry effect of mostly yellowy-beige with greens and pinks mixed in.

But not any more. I've painted over the wallpaper, a creamy colour on the top and a pinky-brown underneath. All the woodwork's now white. I've bought new fake suede curtains which are a similar colour to the lower walls, and we're giving the sofas away to an organisation which redistributes unwanted furniture to those in need (e.g. families rehoused because of domestic violence). In their place we'll get a nice new two-seater in brown or camel or similar, and two chairs like the comfy wooden ones they sell at Ikea, as most of the time there's only the two of us here anyway and two sofas take up too much room. We're getting some cupboards as well, to hold all our videos and DVDs. And when it's all done I might have a nice calming grown-up room that I'm not ashamed to invite people back to.