Bread Puppies! (by sarah)

SO... I found an idea/recipe for bread puppies here yesterday and today I have baked them for a friends birthday present!

They are not the best bake ever and I used sour dough and we don't have a bread maker etc... but I'm happy with them 🙂

Poor Goldy – Poor Jeany (by sarah)

So at the Queens Jubilee Jeany rescued a goldfish from the fayre and proceeded to care for it in a manner that astonished me and Alaric.

She would panic if she was running late for school and had not yet fed it. She was keen to clean the tank out and had selected a friend in the form of Slimey the pond snail for it.

Having gotten out of the initial first few weeks I thought we were safe but alas last night Jean came done the stairs sobbing that something was wrong with her fish. He wasn't moving and he was floating at the top of the tank.

She took me back upstairs and yes poor Goldy was a goner. I took Jeany back down stairs and sat her on the settee, 'Do you understand why Goldy isn't moving Jeany?'

shakes head

'He's died sweety' - clingy hug and hysterical sobs up several levels from the previous crying.

We had conversations (very wet conversations involving hugs) about death and about how she made Goldy's life really good and it would have died sooner etc...

She remembered Betsy and Minni and Eve and Percy and Cosmo and the Ginue Pigs. And we sent Goldy on a journey to the sea where Goldy's body would become part of the Great Cycle of life and nourish other creatures and were it's soul would swim in kinder different waters.

Jean was very scared of why Goldy was floating so I explained about how the tummies of the dead get filled with gas as they can't poo anymore and so the stuff starts decomposing meaning they turn into a sort of balloon. Part of me wondered why I was resorting to science and thought that Jean probably just wanted more cuddles but it actually calmed her down.

It's been knitting a fish which Jean asked me to finish so she could hug it in bed - so I did.

We sang Goldy a goodbye song.

Jean slept after being assured that any little ghost fish would be one that loved her for taking such good care of it.

This morning her main concern was that Slimey would be sad and loney.

Dad’s 65th Birthday – A Discworld Adventure (by sarah)

It was my dad's 65th birthday (his actual birthday was the 3rd but what with all the well everything that we've been doing - we decided to post pone it!). My dad is a massive fan of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchette - I introduced him to them when I were back at university.

SO I themed his birthday. We had:

The luggage and Friends:

Wizard Hats and white chocolate stars:

I made one or two of them 🙂 If my Bro and his wife could have made it I was going to do chaos butterflies and Death cupcakes but as it is I already made far too much!

And of course we had the main cake - the Great Star Turtle A'Tuin rinding through space with the world on his back, held up by four elephants - who admittedly look like some sort of elephant/mouse cross bred.

Dad seemed very please even if we did have a clash of the culinary cultures over his macaroni cheese and fried onions (Alaric put them in the actual macaroni cheese which was great but as we had never had that before and the only thing like it had been a horrible celery in the macaroni cheese - we initially all reacted with horror which we tried to cover up as he had been cooking for ages making all the sauce and everything - poor Alaric). We had pear cider and opened the Cider Brandy Alaric's Step brother Simon got us.

Dad's reaction to the cake was great - he says he loves the elephants and the fact I put the mountains in too 🙂 The Luggages didn't not come out as well as I wanted but Jean who had been watching The Colour of Magic and The Hogfather with Ferfer came into the kitchen and exclaimed 'Mummy you've made Luggages!'

I think the box set of Discworld films was greatly appreciated by Dad as well 🙂

Me Bucky Balls and All (by sarah)

Thursday the 12th of July saw me at the Grain Barge performing geek poetry, throwing knitting and inflicting my sense of humour on people.

We turned up and there was some classical science equipment set up - which is always 'ooooo do you think there will be fire and explosions and glowing stuff?'.

The show got started with the comedic Steve proclaiming he had super powers - he the guy who organises and entertains between the acts.

The first act was Jim Bell with his spiders which the brave Suze who is very scared of them, managed to hold momentarily with lots of squeaking.

Then it was time for the fire and glowing stuff but alas no explosions 🙁

Then it was on to Sophia with her set on why parents are so annoying.

At some point a red nose appeared just to remind me that Clowns exist shudders

Then we had Joe Wright and a very funny sketch and video about Darwin - including all the mistakes in the video 🙂

Then we had Nicole Slavin and opera about STIs.

We then had a break were instead of talking to the people who had come to see me I was hovering waiting for a laptop to work so that my first power point in 6 yrs could be shown and to make it worse it wasn't actually a power point :/

But then we had the Science of Cocktails and me being me I announced to the room that I like the frothy head :/ Which Suze who was doing the talk gracefully sailed over.

Then there was Sam Phippen with his funny stories of Robots that kids build.

Then there was me - I was so nervous

Here is the video

And yes I corpsed and yes I got flustered and yes someone nicked my knitted bucky ball!

Then we had a talk on Viruses!

And then to finish off we had the halarious nerd rock of Mark Lewney.

Postcard Art (by sarah)

As part of the Art Tournament mini festival in August there is a picture on a post card competition organised by Sabre Arts. Here are my two entries:

Jean did her own postcard though she is not old enough to enter, she decided to do a space theme too 🙂

The cards are going to be auctioned for charity after the comp is over :).