A Lovely Forgetting (by sarah)

Last year I went for a walk with Alaric, just the two of us as my parents were around to look after kids, it wasn't anywhere fancy just around Gloucester especial they area around our house. There was a kind of urban fairy tale about it - so I wrote him a song which I then recorded initially with guitar but that bit for some reason came out mangled so I took it out. And I posted it to FaceBook and gotten his feed back on the guitar bit etc and blasted it around the internet in various ways whilst I was working on it and then... I kind of forgot about it.

And it also turns out I forgot to tell Mr Al that it was written for him!

Yesterday morning whilst sitting in a camper van visiting family in Essex I mentioned it too him, realising that I had never actually presented the song to him I played it and explained about the photo and where I'd taken it (down by the rail way with the sun behind the Cathedral - near his work place).

It made him smile - it's cheesy and naff and about us and were we live and so on. Alaric was so happy and the fact I'd told the world but not him and he'd missed it made him laugh as it is typically me.

Last night he said that one of the things that attacks him to me is that I am always creating something - he sees this as amazing. I kind of see it as scatterbrained ooo shiny. From his reaction I'm realy actually glad I forgot to tell him 😀

Moping, Tori Amos and Death (by sarah)

Post is not about suicide honest!

I am sitting here moping around in a hello kitty onsie listening to Tori Amos and reading a graphic novel called Death written by Neil Gaiman. I have lots of stuff that needs doing but it is the weekend and I have already done a huge chunk of domestic stuff this morning.

I am trying to frame my thoughts, to prepare them for some comic book art later today. I haven't worked on the comic since Monday and I need to work on Cuddly Science as it now has a second booking. The issue is I am feeling very nervous about all of it - about my own capabilities and talents.

Alaric normally boys me up with this sort of thing but he has gone to London today and I am missing him and am also feeling strangely alarmed that I have been with him for over a third of my life. I wrote this and I think I may end up constructing him a poem out of it at some point - I posted the first bit on twitter and then when I put it on Facebook it grew - he liked it which was a relief 🙂

I don't like my men to be beefcake - oh no I like them to be nut roast.
I also like my coffee like I like my men - white, sweet and tall preferably with caramel but I'll put up with vanilla, decaf but not weak
Must also have dodgy dress style and be able to be cast as an elf in LoTR
Add in the brain power and the essential we must be FRIENDS and I think it's a good job I found Alaric Blagrave Snell-Pym
Next month is 10 yrs of marriage, I've been with him for over a 1/3rd of my life - this morning I felt this was an insane fact - now feeling lonely as he's gone to the big smoke and the girls are playing on their own and the cats have gone out

I am annoyed with myself and project jumping - true I get the projects finished but it takes longer than other people as I'll focus on one thing for six weeks and then jump to another project. They tend to be the same projects that I flit between but it means instead of getting a finished thing and then moving on, I get three things all finished at the same time.

This is not the best tactic for several reasons - firstly there is only so much of my stuff everyone is interested in and I need to give each one a far chance and not over load people and what I do is kind of the worst of both worlds. What I should do with my varied focus and projects is do a bit of each, each day or week to keep the skills honned or to just learn the skills do the project and then move on to the next thing. What I actually do is spend 6 weeks on something, the first week or so being me remembering what it is I was doing with the project/cleaning the rust of my skills.

And at the same time of course I can't actually focus on what I want to for those 6 weeks as there are workshops, performances, stuff I've promised to people, kids and animals and health problems.

Alaric doesn't see my way of working as a problem but I also get incredibly distracted once I am in the 'zone' with a project and start to resent time not spent on it. He says this is just how my brain works.

I am also being mentally hungry at the moment - I want new things and everything seems to just be combinations and reiterations of what's gone before (yes I know its the combinations that make things new, it's just the way I feel at the moment). This goes for books, films and music - I found Tori has produced a whole new lot of music since last I looked hence the morning marathon!

At the same time I feel incapable of learning at the moment - my mind just flits away or I forget what I was doing, like the first half of the instructions etc... this happens if I don't get to focus on a project, it's like my mind can't hold anything else - I obsess about a project but only for a limited amount of time. I think that is why things like NaNoWriMo appeals to me so much - they fit in with how I'm happiest working and so far I've gone back repeatedly to the same project but that means my life has to worked out on an annul basic and not weekly/monthly etc... and EVERYTHING is long term :/

I'm feeling elated and panicky about performances and fear that I'll stop coming up with ideas.

It's kind of bizar. Also I seem to have lost the ability to sing in front of anyone :/ Just thinking about it makes my throat clam up - my solution to this is that I am dam well going to start singing again - some way, some how. I fear it will affect the way I do my performances as well so I have been making myself practice the guitar and have attempted to learn the Let It Go song from Frozen - it seems to kind of be helping.

And...

One blog post without a focus - I love Tori's music and I love Neil's work and this entire thread of thought was sparked by 'oh look I'm reading him and listening to her and they are at the British Library together today looking at comic books - ooo comic books wasn't I doing something with that... or was it a song I was supposed to be recording?'

Now I am off to spray the chickens as one of them is being naughty and pecking the others :/

A Weekend of Epic (by sarah)

This bank holiday has been amazing. Below is a picture of our haul and that is not all of it!

For me it kind of began on Friday with a trip to UWE to see a friends talk on memristors (resistors with memory!) and then staying on for her leaving bash at a beer and cider festival - I had a Toffee Apple cider followed by a meal in a chinese place. Then we got up early Saturday and prepared stuff to go to the allotment but first there was Free Comic Book Day at Proud Lion in Cheltenham.

We arrived about 15 minutes before the shop opened which turned out to be a good thing as people were beginning to queue! We were ninth into the shop though and Jean knew instantly what she wanted - I was startled to see her pick up a hello kitty comic until she announced, 'it's not for me! It's for Mary.' She didn't take one of everything like she did last year which was interesting, she also got a hobbit poster and I got an XMEN badge.

I also got two pints and me and Al got a selection of comics like 2000 AD. I got to say hi to the people who are running the comic book convention I am launching the first Punk comic next year and I also bought Death by Neil Gaiman.

The girls couldn't wait to start reading and Jeany was moaning that I was taking too long in the shop! Mary I don't think gets the story form of comics - she just spent the whole time excitedly announcing there were lots of Hello Kitty's 🙂

We then nipped to the allotment and did two hours of weeding - discovering that the bit of the plot that we had planted the runner beans on was again cursed and they were all gone. We have decided that it is obviously a cursed bit of land and we will be putting a bench there in future. We also found that the stuff the farmer had sprayed for us to try and get the dandilions under control had killed the grass but not the dandilions!

I deflowered all the dandilions in our plot and then dug up a small bin bag full of plants, roots and all. The flowers I have dried and the plants the rabbit and chickens have been working their way through.

We popped home to drop off allotment stuff and pick up my new camera (as seen in the first photo), this has been an amazing discovery and I am not yet sure how I am going to share it with you! It is a 3D camera and reduced to less than my standard camera was. I decided to invest in it as they were over £400 to begin with. I think there may have to be an exhibition or something maybe with my friend who showed me her one in the first place.

Then it was off to Bristol to catch the food fair/festival 🙂 We came away with waxed cheese and chocolate coated coffee beans. Queuing for food was a bit of a nightmare though!

Mary decided she was Hermione out of Harry Potter and found herself a stick which she waved shouting the levitation spell - it seems to have worked!

Then we nipped to Costco and picked up some cling film and bits that we like to get in bulk and headed home to have a TV dinner of Lord of the Rings 🙂

On Sunday we got up and packed a cooler box, a wicker basket and the pic nic ruck sack and headed back out the door to the allotment. Where we spent all day from just after ten! The guy who likes to go there in the morning and the evening was well impressed 🙂 Of course I got sunburnt though Al and the kids didn't.

We both had to have lots of breaks and Jean and Mary helped a bit.

Jean beheaded all the newly flowering dandilions and cut a bag of lemon balm for me - along with pretending to eat the spring onions and actually trying to eat the asparagus! She also watered everything.

I dug out and chopped down weeds - I filled four large buckets of the things - this is the bucket that carries all our wellys and smaller tools! I also cut a bag full of lemon balm down and produced a good but not full bag of dandelions for the the rabbit et al. Alaric spent his time digging over a new bit of ground then hoeing it and then raking it. Between me, Al and Jeany we then planted carrots and parsnips in one half of the newly prepared section.

The hoe is called Katy and she is dutch 😉

We had an epic picnic and also went over to Primrose Vale for an ice cream and coffee whilst the girls played on the toys - I'm a cheap skate so I had a flask of decaf coffee. I also had a herbal tea made from lemon balm with me that I sat on the tyre at the end of the allotment and drank whilst reading my book, waiting for my pelvis to be ok again to do more stuff.

Jean spent a huge chunk of her time reading two books and Mary made a den in the hedge row 🙂 Al used up his phone battery in his breaks - the pacing worked well and we got a load of stuff done!

I also found some epic shrooms to photo (bigger versions will be appearing on Orange Monster and Photo Salaric).

Monday was our day off, so I processed some photos and planted out most of my tomotoe pants in pots in the garden. Al fixed the door in the girls room and Mary's little chair and did computer stuff. The girls played in the garden and board games, Jeany played Stratego with Al and then they watched films whilst I napped (me and Al were pretty achy!).

The I went off to take part in a lovely improv workshop run by Joy-Amy - you could tell I was involved as there were Romans, babs and bird eating spiders, there were also deranged hair dressers and moons being caught!

We finished the weekend off with a pear cider and some minecraft 🙂

Allotment Stuff (by sarah)

We are loving our allotment but we still want a walkable one that I can attend with the kids after school and plant the stuff that needs lots of watering etc... so I prodded the council again - found that their email system has apparently changed which might be why I've only been getting bounces back lately. Anyway I pointed out that I had been trying to get an allotment since we moved in which is now well over 2 yrs ago (I should probably stop calling it the new house!). Apparently we are registered as having asked about it last year and they will pass on that we are still interested. :/

So I think we made a really good choice, going for the private one on a farm - at least I can grow something! And hopefully more than dandilions!

We have so far (and when I say we I mean poor Alaric as I have had course work or been ill) dug over one section of it and have planted the pumpkins out in a little cold frame or mini green house we have hobbled together out of bubble wrap and bamboo canes - it wont take strong wings but then neither will most of the polythene and metal frame ones you can buy.

The pumpkins are tad insane - half of one of the pumpkins started to go off and when I went to compost it I saw that the seeds where germinating so I bunged the whole thing in a pot and popped it on the top shelf of the propogator that is in the dinning room at the moment. I'm hoping one or two of the plants will live to maturaty.

The girls love the allotment and Mary calls it The Mud, Jeany has gotten over her fear of worms and actually held one! (I think Al took a photo of that on his phone so I need to extract it!).

Jean has requested the old tyre at the end of the plot and wants to grow flowers - we have compromised and she is growing edible flowers. I have lots more seedlings and a rota written out for which seeds need to go in next 🙂

Also there is an amazing view and the girls like having picnics there.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair (by alaric)

I took it upon myself to translate the following into Lojban:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I decided I wanted to aim for an idiomatic Lojban translation, rather than a word-for-word translation of the English (which would probably result in quite clumsy Lojban). However, this was a challenge, as it would mean making up new good-sounding idioms for things that I either didn't know, or hadn't actually developed as idioms in Lojban yet!

Here's what I came up with. There's plenty of problems with it, which I'll explain below, in the hope that jbopre will read this and suggest improvements. However, even if you don't know Lojban, please read on; I think you might find the breakdown of it (I give literal English translations of it) interesting:

.i .u'e re lo barda tuple ku se stuzi le cantu'a
.i cpana le canre fa lo se porpi be lo flira
noi .iiru'e lo du'u ke'a frumu ku
     .e lo du'u ke'a tolpluka turni cisma ku
   nibyti'i lo du'u lo zbasu ku pu te smuni
      le se cinmo poi lu'e ke'a za'o renvi
           zi'e poi fu lu'e ke'a xraci'a fi le na jmive
.ije rakci'a fi le zbepi
     fe lu ga'isai mi'e la'oi .ozymandyus.
           .i mi turni lo turni
           .i .a'onaidai ko catlu tu'a mi doi tsali li'u
.i zo'e bi'unai po'o renvi
.i lo .o'ebe'udai pinta canre ku po'o diklo le barda se daspo

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