Mary’s 3rd Birthday – postponed (by sarah)

So I am being a bad Mummy and being stressed - we have a broken home at the moment and budget wont stretch to a party outside the home so we decided to postpone Mary's birthday celebration - she is not old enough to know different.

But we did have a little picnic tea with her - Daddy made her special pizza she can eat and she opened the cards and presents that arrived in the post.

I also made cake pops in the afternoon with her.

She likes cake.

Father and Daughter Soldering (by sarah)

Jeany got an electronics kit for Christmas - her and Al had a great time building it. It was a little musical instrument which she now keeps making me play! I got a different musical thing which Al is going to help me with. I believe this is all his cunning plan to get us both good at soldering as there are now off the shelf units to do the kind of LED lighting I wanted to put in at The Bakery. We've been eyeing up our living room 😉

Plans are to give her a bit more formal programming training now too.

p.s she did do most of the soldering herself but this bit was tricky and she was helping hold things in place.

An Allotment At Last! (by sarah)

Today we went and signed for and paid for a plot of ground to grown things on - it is not an allotment as such but is on a farm - I would still like an allotment round the corner but have gotten hacked off with messages being ignored etc...

In the photo Jean is marking on corner and Al and Mary the other - I'm taking the photo from the apex.

Anyway - it is a large plot if an odd shape and comes with raspberry canes already in situ. They have of course died back now but there was shrivelled blackened fruit which I rubbed to get the smell and yep - raspberries.

Of course everything is water logged around here at the moment - Jean wasn't complaining though. She even got Daddy and Mary to join her 🙂

Tea Cups in the Garden (by sarah)

We've been busy building paths to the chicken run though Al keeps miss judging how much concrete we need so it has spanned out several weekends now! He's found an easier way of mixing the concrete though and that is by using a tarp 🙂

As you can probably see from the photograph the garden is a mess with the old rabbit run and soil that's been dug out to make the run area and the old oil drum that the people who lived here before left and which is full of stuff and bin bags of stuff that got damaged by leaking ceilings and so on. So I cheered myself up by putting up the nice teacup garden ornaments my friend Ulrike gave me and envisioning what it will look like after a few more weekends of hard graft.

I really love these and they will be the main feature of our garden food area. I may assess how easy the cats can get to them and put some bird food in or maybe a little pot plant - at the moment it is far too rainy for either option!

The Art House Bristol (by sarah)

Thursday I headed off to Bristol with the lovely Nick Short, the aim - to read poetry at the Art House. We had a little bit of trouble finding it, the Art House is a lovely little cafe with a cellar/entertainment area. There are arty pictures on the walls and yummy foods to be had.

There were some wonderful musicians playing, I especially liked the Vampire guy though I failed to get a photo of him 🙂

We bumped into an old friend from Cheltenham who had also come up and ended up in a conversation with a woman at the end who wondered why we'd come all the way to Bristol to perform. It is a weekly event at the Arts House and Bristol simply is bigger and has more to offer was the answer. Cheltenham has a great poetry scene but it is not weekly or even every night like it is in Bristol. We spoke of the poetry society and the Festival and then moved on to art in general.

I read an arch of poetry starting with a Fist Full of Nitro and ending with Star Stuff. From the individual and depressing to the optimistic future of all was the way I saw it.

It was a lovely night.