Jubilee Cakes (by sarah)

So Jean wanted to celebrate the Queen's Day so we have been 🙂 We have been to lots of fantastic events and I've even done a poetry reading at the Stroud Water Festival which was lovely. But before I write all that lot up here are the cakes Jean baked and I decorated 🙂

This was my first attempt at these sort of cupcakes 🙂 Technique learnt from The Baking Bird and Lakeland Youtube videos. It was also my first attempt at using cooky cutters for making the decorations something inspired by my friends at Centre Arts in Cheltenham. The big cake is a rich fruit cake with brandy soaked fruit.

As an aside The Baking Bird is doing deliveries throughout the UK and she is giving a chunk of her profits in June to Shelter Box. If they do a big bake again next year I may take part 🙂

Write up on cake making will appear on Salaric Cooking shortly. Also just click the photos if you want to see a bigger image 🙂

Music Corner (by sarah)

So this is music corner in the house - off course there is also the hammond organ as well. I love having the instruments there and accesible. The only sad this is that a few weeks back I dropped contessa and she is not really repairable at least not for the sort of money we can pay out 🙁

This had actually been more of an issue for my guitar playing than it should be - basically I am now being a little worried about picking up the electric and playing it incase the guitar strap gives way on it (which is what happened to Contessa).

But after watching some hot guitar playing today I am psyched to get going with the guitar again.

I think having the instruments as part of the room rather than a thing that is put away and hidden has made a huge difference. I feel I am developing musically - I know I'll never be a professional person or anything like that but it means I can do little twiddly things for my poetry collections - like the recorder for the Easter Collection and the Organ for Shy.

The girls also love the instruments especially Mary who plays with them probably more than the baby toys we have for her!

Even Alaric has been caught playing cords on the organ 🙂

Princess Alice and Mary Calvin (by sarah)

It is the schools Queen Jubilee Lunch today and so Jean had to dressed in red, white and blue or as a member of the Royal Family. Being Jean she chose to be a Red, White and Blue Princess. That combined tiredness has made her very much Alice out of Alice In Wonderland. This strange state of affairs was increased by Mary being a mischievious little grump - when ever she wears the little baby grown with tiger cubs on, I can't help but call her Calvin. Especially as in the caffuffle of getting Jean ready for school the baby decided to get down and eat the cat biscuits. On all fours with just her mouth like the cats do :/

So I had a precious little madam and a mischievious little monster this morning!

Here are more pics of Jean:

This has made me realise that Jean's idea of princess is mainly Indian - she loves the Princess out of 80 Days Around the World and wanted to go to school in a sari. But she was happy with this get up in the end though she wasn't happy with the pasta salad me and Daddy had stayed up late to make - mainly as it had spring onions in it :/

Merry Mary (by sarah)

I have a rogue and a half these days and part of me thinks that Jeany is the half and Mary the rogue! She wants to do what everything she sees me doing and this includes microphones 🙂

We have been attempting potty training which has resulted in her asking for the potty being taken too it, sat down on it, when my back is turned she gets up puts the lid down on the bear chair potty and then goes :/

She pretends to bite and then grins cheekily at you. She is very clever about getting what she wants even if you've said no - including my special dairy and soya free chocolate and she knows she's been naughty! The grin is so cheeky it's unbelievable.

She is still only picking at food though and is the snottiest creature ever and the exma is worse which means she still demands hugs for hug amounts of time reducing what I can do during the day. But she laughs and giggles when we have song time and she loves playing musical instruments and 'helping' with cooking and gardening 🙂 She instantly steals Jean's school bag removing the reading book which she then "reads" to us 🙂

Creativity the River of Intent (by sarah)

I decided whilst pregnant with Mary to make our lives what we wanted and began to think how we could get out of the negative feedback loops we had found ourselves in. I wanted to guide where we were going rather than just reacting to events - having decided on what was needed and what was wanted and examining the intersection luck and family and friends helped us out.

I love this guys thoughts on this especially as I grow my creativity networks via Artournament Glos and Centre Arts (for arty-ness), Hack Space Bristol and friends for geekery and social networks for interest groups and publishing oppitunities - I am now in the Positive Creativity Feedback loop and am nearing my tipping point.

More over today I reached my crowd funding target for the my Sensory Cave and have in fact exceeded it! Excess funding is going to be used to run a Science-Art Exhibition in March next year - which I confirmed with the Centre Arts yesterday. So feel free to still sponsor me 🙂

I really feel that things are starting to take off. The last few months have been amazing with winning medals for songs, getting invited to other counties to read my poetry, having my art work shown in science cons, getting short stories published and being booked for more and more festivals to do my crafts. I am completing projects that I started at Uni. It really is amazing and it seems to fitting in with having the girls as well.

But more than this - part of the issue is that we really were in a feedback loop of negativity before - if things are on the edge like say finances are tight when things go wrong there is no buffer, no safety net and so things are worse and the impact of the next thing to go wrong is even worse. Now you can try and plan for these but most people will not be able to cope with more than two big things going wrong at once or in close succession - even on the business course I took they admitted this, including the bank guy.

The issue is breaking out of the loop, to a certain extent you have to reboot the system, you have to crash the situation you are in. In giving up and going to the CAB we basically began to take control of our lives again.

It is a bizar apparent contradiction.

But I gave up struggling to follow the career path I felt SHOULD be followed, the prescribed course that was supposed to happen - it had been shot in the foot by circumstances out of my control. In trying to cling to it I made things worse, in trying to maintain the apparent control in the increasingly ever desperate situation, I helped send us off even more erratically into the network of fail loops that bound us.

We forgot to assess things, everything seemed running away with us and to be pivoting out of control. But it became apparent that the core of us was resilant to this. The US was still an us, we the family and so the reassessment - the important thing?

Me, Al and the girl/s.

Strip it back to basics and build the new system on this.

But there was something else - I needed to do what I enjoyed, the things I was passionate about that I could still do. Moon rocks and impact lithologies denied to me I turned to the more arty things -things that began to grow. They had been growing before but when I tried to force things it didn't work. So I just enjoyed it and it began to flourish.

And opportunities began to present themselves to me. Alaric's theory with this is that if you do what you are enthusiastic about the more you notice or are noticed by those who provide the opportunities in that field. Getting to meet the right people in the first place can be hard and then you can find yourself up against the Old Boys Club. But we are lucky, there is the internet and I have verbal diarhea (even if I can't spell it!) and so things found me or dropped into my radar senses on the internet and now the networks, real and electronic are meshing and melding and growing new constructs which appear to be a career for me.

Also just as a little aside many of you know that I feel that creativity is above Science and Art and that they are simply different uses of the creativity. The thing with feedback loops is that I do very much feel that science and art feed into each other - this does not mean one is the other but more that they support each other and are essential for the continued development of each other.

Science needs art - to communicate and teach and to show the wonders that are there or are being hunted for and Art is forever in need of new inspiration and on a more practicle level new substrates and mediums to work in.

Increasingly I note science friends who are artists on the side or as full time and art/writer friends who have found science isn't the dead subject they were shown at school and who have gone back and have or are currently studying science at some sort of further education level.

Wibble over.