Emergency Posting Protocol B

First off, apologies for being more silent than usual recently. It looks like this summer is going to be very busy on the work front, which means I’ll be blogging less. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly,  when I’ve been writing all day, I just want to switch off the computer and do something mindless in the evenings (currently: watching episodes of Lost back to back). The second problem is that a lot of what I’m working on is so interesting and consuming that I’m itching to tell people about it, but I can’t because of confidentiality agreements.

So… rather than feeling guilty about not posting, I have decided to announce that I will only be posting at weekends. I will check everyone’s blogs each day and comment at random (because it’s the nicest way I know to take a break from working, you all being such fascinating ladies), but will only post here at weekends.

Having said all that, I am taking the morning off from work to hang our new bedroom door with my father-in-law (who made both doors as Christmas and birthday presents for us). We hung the bathroom door last week, and I have also bought a new front door*. But you’ll have to wait until the weekend for pictures.

* Once this is hung, I will have replaced every single door in the house, which is a Good Thing and also a Milestone, as the old ones were cheap, damaged, badly painted and generally abused by the previous owners. 

Common and Garden Variety Memes

SCB is back! And she’s posted a wonderful meme - or rather, two memes. I have just spent an hour playing with both, and here are the results.

Firstly, the Garden Variety meme:

1. Name a gardener, any gardener.
2. What is your favorite vegetable?
3. What well-known garden have you visited?
4. What is your favorite flower?
5. What garden would you like to visit?
6. What water-feature would you put in your garden?
7. What country epitomizes gardens for you?
8. Is there a special type of garden you would like to incorporate in your own garden?
9. Show us something that you think would make a great pattern for a flower garden.
10. What do you love most about gardens or gardening?
11. One word to describe your garden.
12. Give your garden a name.

(Click to see bigger version).

The Flickr “answers” are: 

1. Gertrude Jekyll, 2. Parsnip, 3. Prospect Cottage, 4. Allium, 5. Sissinghurst, 6. Babbling Brook, 7. Merrie Olde England, 8. Miniature Knot Garden, 9. where the snail lives, 10. springtime, 11. Weeds, Where Someone Used to Sit, 12. The Secret Garden

I also did the Common Variety meme. However, I’m going to be all coy and not post the picture credits as that would give a bit too much away about me. Instead, I just give you the questions and the mosaic. You’ll have to guess the answers…

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Thanks, SCB. That was fun! I’ve now to got go and have more fun, as we’re off to a wedding this afternoon. It’s nearby, so we’ll be coming back after the ceremony so my husband can have a nap, as he’s still recovering from his surgery, before heading off to the reception (which promises swingball, a ceilidh and other fun stuff). ‘Tis a pity it’s raining…

A very quick update

I’ve just got time for a quick post before I head out for a day’s work. My husband is now back home and doing well and able to shuffle about a bit, so everything is looking good. Thanks for all your kind comments.

I’ll be back to post about gardening and DIY later…

Ola!

I’m back in Ol’ Blighty. Madeira was wonderful and it was great to get away. Not so great was the fact that I managed to incapacitate myself on the second day, so we couldn’t do much walking. We managed one levada walk, which was amazing, if terrifiying in places (as I’m afraid of heights). Jim took these two photos after I had managed to shuffle along a particularly scary stretch, with much hyperventilating  and swearing and thoughts of lemmings (I was safely around the corner clinging to a tree at the time the photos were taken).

This was probably the worst part of the path:

And here is the view down:

Yikes.

I did enjoy the walk immensely. Unfortunately, when we stopped at a bar for a drink at the end of the walk, I managed to trip on a two inch step outside the loo and heard snapping inside my foot. A trip to hospital for x-rays showed nothing was broken, but that the tendons and ligaments and ‘meat’ (as the Portuguese doctor put it) were badly torn. So, not more walking for me. Instead, I learned to sit around doing nothing.* 

Whilst doing nothing I had three revelations. The first was that I had massively underestimated my capacity for consuming chick-lit. The second revelation was a bit more useful (and probably blindingly obvious to everyone else). This was that I really make life harder than it need be by trying to do everything myself. DIY. Clothes-making. Everything. Having studied my toes (which were more in my eyeline than my navel) for a few days, I have come to the conclusion that this ‘must do it myself’ attitude is a mixture of perfectionism, a misplaced quest for ‘authenticity’ and an outdated sense of poverty. This must change.

The third revelation was that I’m too fat for my own taste, so I’m going to lose two stone. Once I’m back to my normal weight, I’ll be more up for a bit of real wardrobe therapy. Doing my work-at-home wardrobe has been very useful, as it is one step up from PJs and made me put the WT approach into practice, but it is very much an example of ‘It’ll do”.**  However, I am still left with nothing to wear in the Big Wide World, which I have to admit is because I am a Big Wide Girl and unhappy about it. 

*On the foot front, I now have beautifully purple and blue toes, but the swelling has gone down and I can get about now. I just have to be careful for a few more weeks.

** I’ll post photos of the work-at-home wardrobe this weekend, so you can all be underwhelmed and struggle to find nice things to say.

A Murky Past

I have always had a perfectly normal relationship with my office phone. I polish him once a week and, in return, he chirps merrily whenever someone rings.  But, as of this morning, our relationship lies in tatters as it has come to light that one of us has a dark and murky past.

Today I received a letter from a police force in another part of the country saying that my phone (bought from Ebay) was stolen property. It could have been written with slightly more tact, as it was only in the fourth paragraph that it stated the letter was for information only and that I was not criminally liable and could keep the phone. By the time I got to that part, I had already half-planned my escape to Brazil and mentally buried the incriminating evidence in my neighbour’s garden.

Although it is heartening to know that the police do take action on these things (apparently, the seller has admitted all and is being prosecuted shortly), with all the talk of the amount of paperwork the police have to contend with, was it really necessary to write to all the unwitting buyers like me and inform them of their new “victim of crime” status?

The benefit to me of knowing this, when no action is needed on my part, is pretty much nil. In fact, I would rather not know, as now I find myself looking at my poor little phone in a new light, wondering if we will ever rebuild that vital circle of trust necessary for human-phone interaction. I think I will start today by giving him an extra polish and adding a few numbers to his memory. After all, he is the real victim in all this and who knows what trauma he went through on the night he was snatched?

News from the Workhouse

Still here… still alive … still typing my little fingers to the bone.  In the past few weeks I have been working on so many topics, from man traps to Victorian replicas of archaeological finds to the history of postcards that my brain is now officially in a complete state of befuddlement. I even got my centuries mixed up while on the phone to a client this afternoon, which is not a good thing for a jobbing historian to do.

On the house front, I am making some headway with developing new habits, like picking up after myself and washing up before bed. I’ve also done well on the creating new outfits and will try and post pics of January’s outfit soon. This weekend, we’re off to visit some friends in Wales, which will be a truly welcome break.

Anyway, I don’t think the work is going to let up until the end of March, so I shall probably continue to be quiet on the blog front for a while. I am reading everyone else’s blogs - I’ll try and be a bit better on commenting!

Creativity Resolution No.1

Not content with merely whipping our wardrobes into shape, Wende has now thrown down another gauntlet - Creativity Resolutions. So here I am, rising to the challenge. (It’s not that much of a challenge, really, as I have been pondering such things recently and have almost completed my annual Mind Map of things I would like to do over the coming year.)

I have an idea for three creativity resolutions, but need to think about the second and third ones a bit more, just to check I’m not trying to do too much. A lot of my thinking over the past few weeks has been about how I can learn to chill out a bit. I tend to be a bit over-ambitious; while it serves me well some of the time (vide my new kitchen), as a general way of life, it’s all a bit knackering. Next year, I would like to sleep more.

Anyway, without further ado, my first Creativity Resolution is that I am going to start keeping a scrapbook. I don’t mean the type of scrapbook Alana enjoys creating (and which I suspect may be popping up in her resolutions, now she has an organised space in which to do it, hmm?), but something more Old School. I’m more of a ’snip it out and slap it down’ person, anyway, and I thought it would be fun to fill a scrapbook with whatever takes my fancy - images, newspaper cuttings, sketches, squashed objects from nature, and what have you. It would serve no other purpose than allowing my magpie tendencies a little outing. Also, I like cutting things out wonkily with scissors and using glue sticks and, since leaving primary school, decent excuses for doing so have been few and far between.

One problem I have encountered, though, is that it seems virtually impossible to buy a scrapbook of the type I’m after. If you search for ’scrapbook’ in Google, it come up with all sorts of archival quality stuff. The whole scrapbooking industry is really big business, it seems. I just want an old-fashioned sugar paper one, mainly because I like the texture but also because the cheapness does away with Pristine Blank Page Syndrome. I don’t care that it’s acidic and will yellow my cuttings and eat away at my ink. Anyway, should my scrapbook, through some bizarre turn of fate, ever find it’s way into the vaults of the British Library, I want the archivists to work hard for their money. Enough of them have irritated the hell out of me over the years (as I have them) that it seems fitting to leave their profession an acidic, decaying (and, while I’m indulging this fantasy, may I add priceless) manuscript to deal with. So, the mission is on to hunt down the most non-archival scrapbook available. It’s out there somewhere.

Thank you

Many apologies - in my haste to return to the real world, I completely forgot to say a big thank you to everyone who posted ‘get well soon’ comments while I was under the duvet.  It was really lovely of you all. Thank you!

Still Alive

I’m just peeking out from under the duvet to post a quick update. My surgery on Monday went very well and has hopefully sorted out the problem with my ear and associated dizziness, etc. I’m a bit wobbly on my feet still and doped up on strong painkillers and antibiotics, but it’s all looking good. I’ve spent most of the week asleep so far, but seem to be waking up a bit today. Having said that, I’m going back to bed for a nap now…

I’m going to bed…

… and I may be some time.

(If only my bed looked like this… Photo from alibaba.com)

I have been trying to keep up with my work, Wardrobe Therapy, finishing off the little DIY tasks and a myriad of other little things, but life has now got the better of me. I’m having an operation on my ear in ten days time, which will prevent me from doing anything for a few weeks while I recover and, because I am so run down and tired now, I am taking a week off to build up a bit of strength before the operation. Mostly, I need to sleep. The pain in my ear has made sleep very hard for the last week or so.

So… I probably won’t be participating much in the rest of Wardrobe Therapy. I’ll try to do some token bits and bobs and keep up with everyone else’s progress but, as my brain isn’t really working well at the moment, I don’t know how much that will be. I’m sorry I’ve got to step back from actively participating, but I’ll still be around cheering everyone on (and helping out with links to resources, etc, where I can)!