The Cat that Thought She was a Shoe (by sarah)

Dad went to the shoe rack in the kitchen to change into his slippers to go upstairs and read to Jean when he noticed that I had a new pair of fluffy black boots that I had inconsideratly placed upon his slippers.

He grabbed hold of said boots to shift them only to find he had a hand full of a very miffed Mini. To make things worse - he had hold of the the bit with teeth in it!

It made him jump and go 'arg!' and Mini retreated further into the shoe rack where she still remains pretending to be a shoe! Albeit a very cross shoe.

Minni In the Flower Pot (by sarah)

Minni is always getting right where she shouldn't be which includes sitting on my land cress - it is now a doomed plant. I'm afraid she did get shouted at.

Silly puss mog!

Cranham Country Fayer (by sarah)

Today we went to the Cranham Country Show which is basically the school fete but in a truelly grand and exciting country village way!

No I'm serious!

On top of that Alaric arrived home with Seth and Hamlesh! Seth was getting his motobike MOTed to take away with him as he has finailly gotten his liscense!

So we headed up early as there was the Scout recruiting stall to set up and Barbara had to get Mag (her MG convertable in sunshine yellow) into the classic car show. So we headed up on mass. Dad parking the orange van in the car park which was a bumpy lumpy field with me stating we'd probably get stuck (I shall say no more about this other than when it came time to leave - guess who had to sit over the rear axil? Thats right all of us).

Seth took one look at the classic car show and brought his bike in to join in the fun!

BBC Gloucestershire radio was there much to our amazement and they had this car with a humungous aerial on the top of it! I just had to take a photo of it!

Painswick Fire department turned out again though they didn't appear to be giving out free smoke detectors like last year (ie the origin of our smoke alarm - I wanted to pick one up for Barbara).

At some point we were pounced to enter into raffles and a pound pot thing. We only had £10 on us and hadn't had lunch so we had to be a bit sparing! Seth and Hamlesh where horrified to be told they had sold out of veggi burgers at the BBQ about 5 minutes in - someone miss calculated but this was also a little fib - there was one left but the BBQ people were saving it for Alaric!

Anyway there was lots of fun things there like dogs for a dog show where they ran round a course with jumps and things - I managed to somehow not get any photos of them but did get this photo of a dog driving a car with canine passangers!

The first thing we actually did when we arrived was go to the cheek/face painting - 50p a design! There was a board of designs and I was expecting her to go for the hearts or pink at least but she has been abit obsessed lately with 'canoes and so she picked the volcano and was quiet adamant about it! I am a proud geology mum 😉

Barbara was ecstastic as there were horses/pony rides and she got Jean on a horse - Jean hesitently picked the brown one but was unsure - they went round came back. She got off had her helmet taken off and asked to go on the other horse now! Barbara hastily paid another pound and off she went again :/

I was most impressed with the Think Bike Dudes who were doing some cool tricks - some of which I was never brave enough to even attempt on my BMX! I wish I'd had time to get some better pics of them and the dogs.

Jean followed Barbara around everywhere - this is a photo of them waiting for the dog show to begin - shortly after this I found Barbara giving Jean a skiff of cider which I confiscated :/ For some reason round here some of the older generations think of cider as non-alcoholic :/

This photo looks very similar to the last but there was actually quiet alot of time between them! Instead of waiting for the dog show they are eating Jean's hot dog! Though Barbara had filled JEan up with sweets at this point.

Jean's day was completed by her being the youngest climber on the climbing wall - She actaully managed to climb a bit herself though she had alot of help! She loved being swung around in the harness and went on all the different climbing faces! Proud ex-instructor mum 🙂

At the end of the day there was the dismantling of the marquees and the like which Jean wanted to help with - I on the other hand had managed to start shaking and had to sit down and have my cup of coffee brought over - I was not happy and felt a bit stupid about this but then Jeany was having such a great time I was glad I stayed the extra - I had been going to go home earlier on!

And off course there was the slight thing of we had run out of money and then - we won £72! Which is very fortunate as there was a slight incident of me forgetting to pay our water bill and getting two at once and one of those scary red telegram things :/

It was a fantastic day which ended with us all going for a meal as well which was great 🙂

Kitten Cam! (by sarah)

There is not only a blog but now a Kitten Cam with live feed of the cute little furies! Alaric has already had to cut the home LAN in order to get me to stop watching them!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/KittensGalore

Twitter Poetry (by sarah)

I have found a home for all those tacky rhymes I came up with about everyday stuff - and that is twitter. I started typing the poems into tweets and found that there is actually a communitee of poeple tweeting poetry which is interesting - Ella who has just joined pointed out that it was something that occured to her straight away although she was thinking hikus not the tacky dross I produce.

Mainly they are the sort of thing I make up to entertain Jean but I am chuffed that one of them has been pilfered (with credit mind!) onto my friends blog - I just couldn't resist making something up about the cat who had too many kittens (and yes I am going to keep on about baby animals - between pregnant cats and guinea pigs and people I seem to be surrounded by an over load of cuteness at the mo!).

Poetry is the one thing that I have had published multiple times - I think actual anthologies/peotry collections that have a poem (one has two in) from me is now at 4 and then a couple in newspapers (nationals 🙂 ). I haven't actually sent any poetry off for a long time last attempt was Myslexia which was a no go though I got a lovely letter from them.

I have been submitting short stories but have found this a bit of a struggle as the stories want to expand them selves into novals and this has obviously been evident in that the responses I've been getting are 'we loved the imagery and the characters but it needed to be a longer story it read in places like a summary' etc...

I'm taking the fact that people are responding positively about the writing even thought it is ultimatly a regection as a good thing?

Poetry quiet frankly doesn't pay enough for me to pay out the postage costs and the like. I have been unable to go to many poetry readings since christmas becuase of my course and stuff but found that was far more rewarding - plus I was reading it out so didn't have to worry about the spellings and gramma - I know what its supposed to sound like so that is how I read it.

Most of my poetry is also niche - it is sciencetific/technical so arty peeps tend to not understand what the poem is actually about and the science peeps go - why are you writing the concept in an unclear way? Sigh.

Short stories just quiet frankly don't want to be short - I am thinking that I need to face the fact that I am a novel writer. This is a bit depressing as when I was writing the Drs Wife I was obsessed with it and could not leave it alone - I have perposly not started another noval becuase of this - for a start I have seen 0 back for the invested time - I hope purely becuase I wrote the whole thing in long hand and have only typed up the first 30, 000 words! That was all pre-flood and I haven't typed up a single word of it since which is disgraceful - its a short novel at 85,000 words approximatly - obviously this is a guestimate I have avearged words on lines etc... I did this for all the different note books its in and there are alot of them :/

But why am I writing about writing again? I am concidering my future yet again - if I am just stressed out then I need to think about academia seriously thats if I can go back after ending up in hosptial a second time on them :(. The same goes for business plans - stomach ulcers and IBS are both apparently acted up by stress so I need to actually look at my life and not fall apart.

I want to achive something with my life but writing is a gamble - especially as I can not spell for toffee and I do try (well most of the time my blog posts on here are a bit erm... I just want to write what I'm thinking and send it live and so is often not spell checked). The spelling is my bottle neck - I have missed submission deadlines waiting for people to spell check things for me which is frustrating and not their fualt they are busy people and there's no way I can pay for proper proof reading at least on shorts.

This has turned into a bit of a ramble hasn't it?