Right then, let's play:

Guess which cack-handed idiot dropped her mobile phone into a 5 litre bucket of high quality acrylic formula masonry paint for exterior walls!

I'm sure it'll be hilariously funny in about six months time. At the moment, though, it just seems to demonstrate more than ever what a ludicrous joke I am.

I'd post a photo of the pathetic looking, paint-mottled phone, and the drops of yellow paint spattered across the floor of my flat marking my dash back inside to grab a cloth to wipe the phone with; but of course the paint-choked phone is also my only camera, since I haven't been able to afford to replace the digital camera that was nicked in last year's burglary. Waaaaaaaaaaaah.

All this, and I STILL haven't finished painting the fucking pebbledashed wall. FAIL.

Wow, I'm going to see almost Hefner!

At Clwb Ifor Bach on Sunday June 15th. Crumbs. Anyone care to join me? Llandaff welcomes friendly visitors!

Hooray to Liz Love for putting the gig on (and for supporting semi-Hefner with her band The School).

The last time I saw Hefner live turned into one of the most traumatic nights of my life, so let's hope this gig can somehow counter and make up for that. Not that the trauma was Hefner's fault, of course, but, y'know, tainted by association and all that.

Nearly four months, that should be more than enough time to psych myself up for gig-going, lose three stone, let my eyebrows heal, conquer social anxiety &c., no? No. Ah, well.

Bah. We've had a glorious run here of days and days of clear skies; it's been brass monkeys cold out there but with such brilliant sunshine that at least the cockles were warmed, if not the flesh. Even the chill in the weather didn't put me off from venturing outside into the light, where (over several days that have now turned into several weeks) I've been painting the garden wall and the rear wall of my flat, putting up trellis, and constructing a new flowerbed with roofing slates and bags and bags and bags of compost. Several days in a row, the fishpond remained frozen over the whole day through, yet I stuck out the cold in multiple layers of old clothes, making the most of the sunshine while it lasted.

So when does this splendid weather break, making way for fog and cloud and overcast skies? Now, of course, just when there's a total lunar eclipse happening on high, with the moon meant to be turning blood red. I say meant, because outside the sky's just a great big expanse of murky dismal, with nary a star twinkling through, let alone an excitingly lurid full moon. After I'd stayed up for it especial', too. What a swiz. Thanks for nothing, The Weather.








p.s. Just to reiterate, though, I really did appreciate all that sunshine. I can forget just how much SAD comes into play with my depression until there's a sudden swing in conditions. Any further blue skies and sublime exhibitions of natural light in all its finery would be most welcome, and received with much gratitude. Ta!

Oh dear. Edna has never liked wearing collars. When a collar was first put on her, when she lived with her previous owner, she apparently scratched at it so much that within days she'd pulled a tuft of fur out, and had to be decollared. Since she's lived here, she's noticeably scratched at her collars far more than Branwell does, though without having done herself any damage (till now), and twice while out gallivanting has managed to slip collars altogether. Whether that's been by sheer persistence - her continual scratching away at her collar enables her to gradually loosen it, which I've had to keep an eye on - or by getting it caught on something, I dunno, but since the opening of my catflap is operated by a magnetic 'key' attached to the cats' collars, when Edna slips a collar she effectively locks herself out, as well as rendering herself unidentifiable for the duration of her collarless wandering.

I finally had her microchipped last month, having had to delay it for a while due to uncertainty about whether she'd be living with me longterm, as well as uncertainty as to whether my address would change, which means she's now EDNATRON!! and can make scanners beep when they pass over her, like a barcoded box of cornflakes at the supermarket checkout. More importantly, it means that, collar or not, should she stray and end up in a vet's surgery, she can be identified as belonging to me. I still think it's important to keep a collar on her, though. Magnetic collar key aside, a visible ID tag is still the simplest way for folks to know with whom a cat lives. Not everyone knows about microchips, and would realise that an uncollared animal could nevertheless be identified if taken to a vet. And it's much less faff for the average good Samaritan to phone a number on a tag, or pay a visit to an address given there, and get straight through to a stray animal's owner, than it is for them to have to locate a nearby veterinary practice in order to check out whether an animal's chipped, and potentially have to look after the critter themself in the meantime. Even just having an animal's name displayed on an ID tag can make a passerby more inclined to 'make a connection' with it and to look out for it, if they find it stray, rather than dismissing it as a feral animal with no owners worrying about their missing pet, as they might should they find it collarless. For Edna, particularly, whose darkness renders her nigh on invisible when the sun's gone down, a reflective collar has also been a reassurance that drivers will be more likely to spot her at nighttime.

Er, anyway, enough of my justification for having my cats microchipped AND collared, and onto the point. Evidently Edna now sees NO justification for remaining collared, and has been scratching at the hated article with renewed vigour, as this was what she looked like when I took it off a week ago:



Oh, Edna! :-(

I feel awful about the fact that I failed to notice she'd rubbed so much fur out until it'd got this bad. When I took the collar off, it was so dazzlingly obvious; her skin is so pale beneath her black fur that the contrast is even more stark. But truly, the fact that the fur had been rubbed off beneath the collar was completely concealed by the collar covering it, until that small bald patch a little further down her back (over her withers, were she a horse) appeared (as shown in the second photo). Whether she scratched that out while worrying at the collar, or if it got yanked out completely coincidentally in a fight or something, I don't know, but I took her collar off to get a closer look at it, and discovered her poor bald neck, and was horrified.

The skin was very slightly broken in one place, so I applied antiseptic, but touching her on the bald area doesn't seem to hurt or bother her at all, and since the cause of the baldness was blindingly obvious, I thought that there would be no point going to the vet about it unless removing the cause (that hateful collar!) failed to help things. So she's been happily pawloose and collar-free for the past week, the broken skin has healed over and shown no sign of any infection, and the fur seems to be growing back well. I'm still worried about the area, though. Healing skin and regrowing hair can be very itchy, and should she scratch her neck now, there's not even a collar to shield her skin from her claws. Fret fret. I'm keeping a close eye on it, of course, and will get her to the vet should anything dubious arise.

I'm worried about letting her outside without a collar, too: after keeping her inside for the first two days of collarlessness, when the broken skin still looked tender, I've since taken the magnetic strip off the catflap and let her go back outside again. Her cabin fever was mounting to a point where it felt cruel to keep inside and potentially stress her out (after all, one of the commonest responses to stress in animals is pull or pluck out fur or feathers, so it could just have exacerbated things). She can come and go without needing a magnetic collar key, but it still means she's roaming outside with no ID and no helpful reflective hi-vis clothing. She is microchipped now, but that was only done barely a month ago, and I haven't yet had the paperwork delivered to me, so I don't feel too secure about the security of that.

Probably the worry is disproportionate and mostly to do with my own guilt about failing to notice the silly mitten's depilatory activity till it got so extreme. I feel like such a BAD CATMOTHER :-( I do cwtch and cuddle and cosset her aplenty every day, honest, her baldness was just well concealed... Even without her collar on, it's possible not to notice it unless her neck is turned or craned at certain angles. Look!



Yeah, alright, in the second one you can't even see her neck anyway, I know. But she looks cute, so. Oh my little black cat, I love her so. Looks like she'll remain a minicat forever, as she's around 16 months old by now, and the vet last month said it was unlikely that she'd grow anymore (unless it be fatter), and that she was naturally a small and slender puss. There's certainly a lot less of her to lug to the vet's in a cat basket than there is of Bran, I can tell ya! :-p

Yeeeeah, it's an old photo I've shown here before, and as ever I'm a day late and a dollar short for it to actually be pertinent. But it looks like my heart feels, especially thinking of all that's passed since I pressed the shutter button on the mop and bucket, so I'ma gunna post it again anyway.

I had vague plans back several weeks ago to ask if anyone else in a similar position to me - single and cynical, but romantic nevertheless, valuing love in all its many manifestations,¹ and deeply appreciative of demonstrations of affection - would be interested in setting up some sort of Secret Santa-ish thingo online for the purposes of furnishing one another with February 14th warm fuzzy glows via the wonder of the post. But obviously I never got round to it, because I'm rubbish and I suck. Well, I suck at the interpie at the moment, anyway. I still like the idea, anyway, and I daresay I'll still be a wistful spinster once the world's wheeled awound the sun once more, so someone remind me of it next January, okay? Thanks. Obviously referring to it as a 'Secret Santa' is well off the mark, but nothing appropriate rhymes with Cupid, and Clandestine Valentine (about the best I've been able to come up with) feels faintly sinister - stalkerish, even. Anyway, we've got a year to come up with something more fitting, and in any case I'll doubtless forget anyway, so, um, yeah.

I meant to do something tokenistically romantic or at least heart-shaped yesterday, but spent most of the morning asleep for no good reason, and the afternoon procrastinating about washing up/tidying up/reading &c. and which I should do first, and consequently doing nothing of anything. In the evening I went to my new evening class² for two hours of mermaids, selkies, and other watery hybrid beasts and sprites, underwater worlds and drowned towns. Not very romantic, but subjects very close to my heart anyway. Came home longing to immediately re-read The Republic of Love by Carol Shields and Possession by A.S. Byatt, beautiful books, both, but had neither to hand, worst luck. I watched ER instead, then spent several hours reading about the Zennor mermaid, nixies, huldrer, the Rhine maidens, Melusine, Lorelei, &c., followed by several hours reading about '80s bondage (yes, there is a logical progression here - it turns out there's a bondage model/director going by the name of Lorelei, and my capacity for getting sidetracked and temporarily fascinated by areas I stumble across while cross-referencing is legend).

Damnit, now I'm running late for counselling.

I'm sorry for not having been around much lately. There's been quite a lot going on, on the quiet, and when there hasn't it's been as much as I can do to sit there, staring into space. I've missed you, though. Have some Arthur Rackham Rhine maidens:








¹ Well... let's say, all the generous ones, anyway. Not so much love where it's jealous, selfish, self-serving. Though, of course, 1 Corinthians 13 would have it that that ain't love at all. No, I didn't know the reference off by heart, I had to look it up, but I've sung many a hymn and sat through many a school assembly based on those verses in my time, and they're kind of etched into my soul, somewhere.

² It's not actually new at all, last night's was the third class, but I haven't written about it here or even talked about it with more than a few people, so I'll call it 'new' here for now, to differentiate it from the Sugarcraft class that I've been doing for several months but still haven't got around to writing about either, sighity sigh. Anyway, it's ace and it's free. Doubleplus good.

My mardi has been very very very gras. Thus now I also have a tummi gras.

Very very full. Oof.

Naturally I will be fasting throughout Lent so all the gras will melt away in no time! Well, maybe not, but I'm going to give up meat, and am interested to see if that will have any discernable impact on my waistline. I'm sure it'll do my soul no end of good, at any rate. Or if not that, either, then surely at least my conscience.

Then I can celebrate at Easter with sacrificial roast lamb, rabbit pie, and chicken nuggets! Cover a brood of 'em in breadcrumbs, and I reckon those fluffy little yellow numbers would be just the job...¹

Time to sully the conscience with guilt f'shure, by evicting Branwell from my bed. Usually both cats have free range of the flat while I'm asleep, including the bed, but Bran's pawed me awake at silly o'clock wanting food/letting out/attention for too many days in a row now, so I'm going to banish him from the bedroom for a few nights and see if it'll break him of the habit. When it only happens every once in a while, I don't mind so much being biffed in the face by a cat at the crack of dawn (or earlier), but given that it's happening every morning, and with unsheathed claws at that, I'm going to have to start withdrawing privileges. I don't think BBC3 has commissioned a first series of Cat Borstal yet, so it's down to me to try and sort this one out.







¹ /trying to make a funny

This news story, about McDonald's (as well as Network Rail and Flybe) being granted approval to offer courses leading to vocational qualifications sounds like something announced on The Day Today. Given that that show's radio predecessor, On The Hour, is currently being repeated on BBC 7, I had to wonder which radio station I was actually tuned into when I heard it reported on The Today Programme this morning.

Will there be modules about McFlurries? Big marks available on Big Macs? The possibility for individual grades to be Super Sized after moderation of marks overall? The jokes and headlines just write themselves.

I haven't posted properly here for ages, firstly because there was too much Stuff happening and it was overwhelming, then because too much Stuff had Happened and I was overwhelmed, and the thought of writing about it all when I'd only just had to get through it all, well, it all felt a bit much really. And then for the last week or so I just haven't been posting because I hadn't been posting.

But! It's now bedtime, but after a day of yawning I no longer feel sleepy, because I was stupid enough to watch a film (Woody Allen's Match Point, on BBC2) which ended with a lot of tense wincing oh-my-God-he's-going-to-get-caught-out-NOW thrillery type business and now I can't untense myself from it. Damn you, Allen. Not least because the film was overlong and definitely not up to the four star rating the Radio Times gave it. And seemed rather bizarrely split into one hour of a drama about relationships, fidelity, and studied social climbing, and one hour of Morse, minus Morse, as it were, even down to the blaring operatic soundtrack to the ruthless brutality of the crisply suited, Sophocles-quoting murderiser. Obviously with James Nesbitt and Ewen Bremner standing in for Morse and Lewis, and nary a cryptic crossword in sight, it was never going to have as neat and tidy a wrap up as the real thing, but I wish it hadn't left me quite so wound up instead.

Oh well, at least I got to spend ages looking at Jonathan Rhys-Meyers wondering if he really is all that fanciable or what (he's beautiful, but always comes across as cold to me - I don't know if that's down to the parts of his that I've seen [fnarr? yes, I think so - fnarr!] or if he really does have a splinter of ice in his heart and a void where a soul should be.

Um, yeah, and Matthew Goode, who should really have been at my school, a few years above me, so that I could have had a hopeless crush on him. He'd've been just right - he'd've really suited our school uniform, too... Maybe I'm thinking about this a little too deeply. Irritatingly, he was a posh dullard tonight in Match Point (I think I first latched onto him when he played Lawrence Durrell in a BBC adaptation of My Family And Other Animals - a posh smartarse, much more up my street), but excitingly he's set to play Charles Ryder in the new fillum version of Brideshead Revisited - hoorah! down-at-heel posh wistfulness and homoerotic yearnings, what more could a girl want?

I'm also pleased that they've cast Emma Carter as Cordelia, since it's always nice/weird when an Archer gets a big break, and she is far too beautiful not to work a bit more outside of radio drama. Plus Cordelia (especially as a child) was my favourite character, Aloysius excepted. I hope they've cast a nice Steiff in his part. I've never seen the much lauded '80s telly version, so I have only the book for this film to try to ruin for me. At least seeing Emma Carter (and seeing her talking posh instead of moaning about who's looking after George and how she's rapidly becoming the Freda Fry of the future) will be distraction enough should the film prove to be really off the mark for me. Her and my schoolboy crush, like.

Anyway, enough talk of fancy pieces and members of the Archers cast trying to make bids for freestardom. I didn't plan to waffle away with all of that, I was just going to do a meme as a pleasant winding-down exercise after being all tensed up by the Woody Allen film, since crunchcandy tagged me for one an' all (we called it tig when I was at school), and it seemed as good a way as any to try to start posting properly again. So yeah, here be meme:

a. list seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself
b. tag seven people to do the same
c. do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag "whoever wants to do it"

1. I always leave the teaspoon in the cup when I make myself a cup of tea/coffee/hot chocolate/whatever, and if someone I know is making me a cuppa, request that it comes with a teaspoon. I feel too daft to ask people in cafés or barely acquaintances to do so, but I feel a lot more comfortable with a teaspoon, and can begin to feel fractious without one. God knows why. It's not even as if I have sugar to stir in. I can only think it's something to do with wanting a hand-prop to twiddle with (as smokers have their fags, &c.) during spells of nervousness, but it still seems a bit odd. I don't even know if I do ever play around with my teaspoon.

2. One of my middle names is Polly, and it's used interchangeably with my first name by my immediate family (especially my Dad, who probably calls me 'Poll' more often than he calls me Ceri) and a couple of close friends who picked up on it and began using it as an alternate name for me. I always knew that the name Ceri had been my Mum's choice, and Polly my Dad's, but it was only a month or so ago that I learnt that my Dad had initially really not warmed to Ceri at all, and had spent some time facetiously referring to the small me as Lurpak (a word association football thing deriving from there being a brand of butter called Kerrygold, and another called Lurpak). Git. Doubtless he also kept on referring to me as Polly at the time, in a bid to make the middle name take precedence over the first name, but he didn't quite manage it. I'm still as much a Polly as I am a Ceri, though, just a bit more secretive about it.

3. I have a crazy thing about plucking my eyebrows. I don't know if it counts as an OCD related behaviour, or a self-harm related one or what, but certainly I can spend up to an hour or more at a time attacking my eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. It's certainly not primping out of pure vanity, as I pluck and pull and work away at breakthrough bristles till the flesh starts to bleed, and almost always have scabs or sore patches on my eyebrows from deranged assaults with the tweezers. I have 9 pairs of those, by the way, I've just counted. Every few months I try to crack down on myself, and hand all the tweezers over into someone else's custody, but before very long the prickle of new eyebrow hairs coming through has got me so agitated that I have to run out and buy any old cheapo tweezers, just to get the worst of it awaaaaaayyyy!!! Then I get frustrated with the crappy tweezers, and end up buying a slightly better pair, then another one, then I just give in and reclaim my whole collection, because then at least I'll have some decent ones to use, rather than just mangling my flesh with rubbishy tweezers that don't grip the hair properly, forcing me to tweeze closer and closer to the root... Erm, anyway. I've also plenty of times ended up with infections in the hair follicles from overzealous plucking. I'm a freak, yes.

4. I really fucking hate dried fruit. Currants, raisins, sultanas - UGH, no. Biting into a stray dessicated vine fruit in a bowl of muesli I thought I'd successfully segregated can make me gag. I've tried and failed to get past this dislike on numerous occasions, but I think it's here to stay. The idea of having to bite into a densely packed wodge of dried fruit makes me feel like heaving. Nevertheless, I happily made two Christmas cakes, four Christmas puddings, three jars of mincemeat and a batch of rum'n'raisin fudge in time for the Christmas season that's not been long behind us. It was probably the part of Christmas I enjoyed the most.

5. The first book I ever read (after graduating from flash cards) was called Red, and it was by Sheila K. McCullagh. It was part of the Village With Three Corners reading scheme (of Billy Blue-Hat and Jonny and Jennifer Yellow-Hat et al fame), I should think, and had a picture of something red and a sentence describing it on each page. 'A red roof'; 'a red door'; 'a red hat'; that sort of thing. Must have served me well, because that was in reception class, and by the following school year I was well away onto children's novels. The first 'big book' I read, in that year, was Five On A Treasure Island by Enid Blyton, closely followed by Five Go Adventuring Again, since it was a two-in-one volume thing. I think I read them both over the course of a weekend.

6. For a couple of years when I was a pretty small child, I was terrified that I might turn out to be God (or, at any rate, be expected to be God). Probably I got the wrong end of the stick during RE at school, about Mary and Joseph not making a big fuss about Jesus being sooooooo special while he was growing up, and treating him like any other kid, and mixed that up with something I'd heard about the Second Coming, 'and He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead'. Anyway, I was desperately, secretly worried that my parents and teachers and so on might be expecting me to have Messianic importance and Jesus-style superpowers, that the whole world around me was an elaborately constructed Truman Show style conspiracy to try to lull me into a false sense of security and blissful ignorance while I was growing up, but that really everyone was expecting me to do lots of amazing stuff when I got old enough. And that I'd disappoint them all, because I was nothing special. Seriously, the possibility of that worried the hell out of me for several years while I was at primary school. Yep, I'm a weirdo.

7. I only realised a few years ago that Bernard Manning and Bernard Matthews were two entirely separate individuals. I'd always sort of mentally conflated them into one vague idea of a turkey-farming sweaty old racist who was on telly sometimes.



Edited the following day to correct the wonky htmlage that garbled the whole entry (I noticed it as soon as I'd posted it, but since I finally WAS sleepy by that point, I thought 'feck this for a game of soldiers', and went to bed), and to, y'know, actually tag people for the meme like what it told me to do, since I plain forgot about that last night. Oops.

I tag, erm: alicated, glynnis, mrs_leroy_brown, randy_gibbons, en_god_tanke, remote_control and classytart. Get to it.

Hooray, 2007's buggered off at last.

Happy New Year to all of you! I certainly plan on having one if I can possibly help it, anyway.

Now I'm going to make some hot chocolate, pick up a good book and head to bed, where the two loveliest cats I know are already curled and kipping. Hopefully with the help of these things I too will soon be deep enough in sleep sweet enough to break 2008 in gently and peacefully.

Listed more or less in the order in which I've read them. Well, as far as I can remember it, anyway, and as many books as I can remember too, for that matter. I only started keeping a written list about a third of the way through 2007, so I may well have missed out a few from the beginning of the year. God knows, reading lists weren't the most pressing things on my mind at the time, after all. This is the first time I've tried to keep a record of a year's reading, and it's interesting to look back on, for me, anyway - as far as reading trends go, this seems to have been The Year Of Reading Series Of Books In Sequential Order for me. I'd say I'd go for A Dance To The Music Of Time next year if I could be sure that I could find all the books in the the Cardiff library system and charity shops in time, but that's probably not terribly likely.

The majority of these books are ones I've bought second hand from charity shops, library 'discarded' shelves, or the odd independent second hand book shop. Another few have been passed on to me by friends or relatives, or have been simply left at my place and not retrieved by their owners. I'll leave you to guess which are which. At a quick count, nine of 'em are things I borrowed from the library. Oh, and one of 'em (Waugh's Vile Bodies) I bought at a greatly reduced price from the remainder section in a non-second hand shop (Waterstones). Crumbs, apart from A Christmas Carol, I haven't read a single book this year that I've bought first hand for its RRP. That's a pretty bad record.

I've linked the titles of most of the books to their pages on Amazon.co.uk for the most part, and to the edition in which I read them where possible. When neither Amazon.co.uk nor .com could provide a semi-decent synopsis or bit o' context, I tried to find something of the sort elsewhere on the web, as an aide-memoire for myself as much as anything else. I've added comments in footnotes where I've felt obliged to out of guilt or embarrassment or a desire not to let anyone else make the same mistake! I don't have the time or inclination to write reviews of or thoughts about every single title, though, but if anyone fancies asking owt about any of 'em, I'll be happy to respond where I can :-)

In summary: I wish I was a faster reader, and/or spent more of my wasted time reading. On the other hand, I'm grateful to have been able to read as much as I have done this year. In the couple of years that preceded 2007, I suffered from some awful periods of reader's block, when I couldn't even manage to read Enid Blyton books I'd read scores of times as a kid without it being a huge struggle for me. Torturous.

( 50 odd bookses )

Hrrrmm, it seems I'm not fated to sleep tonight, even though I actually went out and DID stuff for a change, rather than just sitting inside and thinking about all the stuff I needed to do, and not getting around to doing any of it. Maybe that's the problem, then? Maybe I've been overstimulated by having a semi-active day? In any case, I went to bed just before midnight, and while I usually find myself nodding off after about ten minutes of bedtime reading, tonight I was still hard at my novel nearly four hours later. So I've got myself up again in search of some distraction, but obviously there's sod all on telly. Even Dave, my trusty standby of late, has turned into home shopping. Pah.

I've been so rubbish at LiveJournalling again lately, and am wondering whether I shouldn't oughta have another shot at posting something everyday, regardless of quality or content, just to get myself back into the habit. The fact that I got burgled about a week after starting my last attempt at this isn't too encouraging, mind. Anyway, since I last posted, I've been preoccupied either with (a.) having a horrible, horrible headcold, (b.) being busier than I can cope with, but with largely uninteresting stuff or (c.) being hideously depressed and crying like a wet.

In the meantime, I haven't managed to get to sleep yet tonight. I did manage to find this on the BBC news website, though:



It's the long-eared jerboa! An elusive rodent found in deserts in China and Mongolia, and recently recorded on film for the first time. There are two excellent video clips of it here, one showing it hoppity-hopping about like a tiny kangaroo,¹ and another in which the little creature is burrowing in the sand. In the latter you can see its tail, every bit as extraordinary (to me, anyway) as its ears - so very long, with a stripy tassel at its tip, that it looks almost like a bell rope. Lawks.

I know that the cuteness or otherwise of animals is far from the most important thing about them, but really, this little animal is breathtakingly darling, with tail and ears of such striking proportions when compared with its tiny frame, that it looks like a real life Pokémon creature or something. I like it exceedingly.

* * * * *

Later

Hooray, from around 6am I managed to get some sleep in. Only about four hours, because I wanted to try to get up at a semi-sensible time, rather than sleeping the day through as is so easy with days as short as these winter ones, and yay! I'm glad I did, because it's actually dry and sunny out there for a change! The idea of being able to leave the house without taking my ark with me is greatly appealing, I must say.

First, though, I've got to a have a quick look for Christmas deckies. I know I brought a few over from Norman Street when I moved here, but so few that they wouldn't have warranted an entire box to themselves. God knows what they got packed with, and God knows where they've ended up now. But I'll have a look. Thanks to the kindness of the sister with the car, three_wishes, I ended up going out Christmas tree shopping yesterday arvo with her and LK (J's uni friend with whom we'd lived in a house share in my 2nd year of uni), and now have a 5 foot Nordman fir at one end of my living room, still arrayed in its naked greenery :-) My first Christmas tree of my very own! Somewhat amazingly, neither of the cats has tried to scale it yet. This may however change when I load its branches with tantalisingly trailing lengths of spangly stuff, and baubles which wink and twinkle as they catch the light...







¹ I had a pair of Mongolian gerbils as a young Jackson, aged 10 - 13 or thereabouts, and always said that there was something kangaroo-ish in their bearing. I knew what I meant, even if no one else did, so hooray that Actual Proper Zoologists make the same comparison of their long-eared cousins. It makes me slightly less fanciful, anyway.

It's my birthday!

~waits expectantly~

Nope, still no tingles of excitement.

Many thanks for the birthday messages and kind words I've had of late, ye who've sent them, they're much appreciated. Sorry I haven't got around to responding to 'em individually yet: it's been a pretty full on week, as my weeks tend to go. I've had a psychiatric assessment, a counselling appointment, a fairly unsuccessful new-home-hunting session w/ a support worker, my third sugarcraft class (I haven't written about those yet, have I? Well, they're the one bright spot in my blighted existence at the moment), as well as multiple phonecalls trying to figure out what the hell was going on this weekend, Christmas shopping, Dad-birthday-present-shopping (he turns 59 next weekend, so I wanted to have his things ready to take to him today), oh, and a load of other stuff, apparently, as I'm exhausted. Lots of sobbing and weeping and feeling sorry for myself, I suppose. Yeah, a lot of that. Oh, and last night I suddenly got so irate at my hair w/ its lame 'really obviously recently grown out fringe' look that I started hacking away at it myself in front of a tiny mirror on my desk. I make such great decisions late at night. There are soft little heaps of golden glinting fluff all around the desk now... I'm 26 years old, but have hair that looks like it's been cut by a three year old. I grow ever older, but never wiser.

Hey ho, however old I get, I'll never be as old as my big sister (three_wishes), which is some small consolation. We're off on a whistlestop trip to Brum and Brom, to see our Dad and Mum in their respective homes; I'll also be seeing Ms. Siâni M. at some point tomorrow, though whether that'll be at her place in Stourbridge or at my Mum's house or what hasn't yet been decided.

Jen and I will be taking Dad into town to distract him from his workplace woes look at the Frankfurt Christmas Market and the good ol' Museum and Art Gallery so that I can revisit my beloved penguin painting and the Greek nymph bronze that used to like when she was the 'bare lady' on a traffic island somewhere in the city centre before it all got torn up and rebuilt. Doubtless Dad will enjoy complaining about the soppy excesses of the worst of the Pre-Raph collection, viz. Millais'spoor blind girl who can't see rainbows or butterflies and Ford Madox Brown's Pretty Baa-Lambs. Yes, they really are that lurid. Both of 'em.

Then a birthday tea and playing with Harry the lovely lovely dog and being showered with gifts (aherm. Though I bet she gives me at least one of the following: i.) a little pinky purple silky sequinned/beaded purse or zip up bag thing; ii.) something pretty from Accessorize; iii.) something pretty, dainty and sugary for cake decorating purposes) at my Mum's, where we'll stay the night. Sunday, Jenna will scoot off early, and I'll see Siân somewhere, somewhen, for the first time since Christmas (I suck at being a friend), then catch a train back to the 'Diff.

Here are some photos I took in my back garden earlier this morning. They're not very good, just illustrative.



Pink sky at morning = my birthday dawning.



The pond was iced, the late strawberries frosted.



I broke a shard of the ice off the edge, to measure its thickness.

...so I'd feel bad about writing a new entry proper before writing replies to those. Thus go my vague and unwritten rules about LiveJournalling, anyway. Christ knows what new guilt trips Facebook has in store for me ifwhen [sigh...] I eventually concede defeat and set up a profile thingy there, n'all. Even Tom Archer's on it these days, after all...

Half the internet seems to be broken today - well, a few sites that I visit most days, anyway, which makes me wonder whether it isn't that I've inadvertantly somehow blocked myself from looking at Achewood, Questionable Content and Flickr like the goshdang fool I am? Flickr especially seems weird, because though I get 'Problem loading page' if I try to look at the site itself, I can still view pictures hosted there, ie. that in my previous journal entry, as well as newer Flickr-hosted pics posted w/in journal entries on my friends list.

Have I clicked on something wrong? Or is the god of the interpie telling me to stop spending so much time reading webcomics and admiring other people's photos? Just coincidental after all? Can everyone else get onto these websites?

Right, must get off the internet and go watch Holby City. Shut up.

Amend ancient picture of self to pastiche staling intertrend.

It's a LOLpol, you see. My middle name is Polly, often used as an alternative to my first name and abbreviated to Poll or Pol by some of my nearest and dearest. A LOLpol! Or even a POLcat! Do you see? Do you? Ha! Ha!

Well, anyway, people were complaining about excessive release of cats onto the internet, and I did start to feel guilty about my feline footprint. I do what I can...

(picture: 'unexpectedly savage haircut', c. early 2003. Minny Street, Cathays.)

SMS exchange between my holidaying mother and myself

Mum ---> me
Have just driven on route 66 and now going to vegas via mohave desert.nice and sunny.big brown mts and sparse vegetation .hope u all doing ok.x
20-08-07 16:50


me ---> Mum
Have just unblocked drain by front door again (wearing rubber gloves &dust mask against the foulness &stench - v. necessary!) &am now cleaning bird shit off exterior sill of bedroom window. Oh the glamour! Hope you're having a lovely time xxx
20-08-07 17:17




Hey ho.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Working internet once more.

I feel like a teddy bear who's just had a missing ear sewn back on, a week after it came loose and was tucked in the button box for safe-keeping, distressingly close at hand but unusable.

I don't know what to do first - reply to the backlog of unanswered e-mail and the like, Listen Again to all the radio I've missed, look up bus times to my heart's content, check the BBC Weather Centre 5 Day Forecast (erk, maybe that wasn't such a good idea...) umpteen times a day to help with my procrastination about what to do, when, and what to put off, read up on what you lot have been up to/on about, renew my library books, piss around cross-referencing things on Wikipedia for hours... Oh, the possibilities!

Actually what I need to do is find out the phone number for my local CMHT and demand to know why I haven't heard a peep from them since my GP referral over a month ago. Or possibly the address so I can try to force myself to walk there and look all depressed and anxious at them in person, thus perhaps helping my cause, and giving my legs a stretch (and cannily avoiding my having to use the phone).

TV is working again, too, which means I can resume my habit of finding lots more old films showing ont' telly to look forward to watching, but somehow forget all about at the relevant time. Today's target: Once Upon a Time (1944), featuring Cary Grant and a dancing caterpillar, on More4 at 4pm. Ooh.





(In translation/explanation of the above whittering, I was away in Pembrokeshire from Monday 6th to Wednesday 8th, just about managed to check my e-mail when I got back on Wednesday evening before collapsing into bed, exhausted, then woke up the next day to find NO INTERNET!! and, much later on, NO TELLY!! either. I spent Thursday and Friday feeling utterly rotten, and hoping it'd get better by itself, before accepting the inevitable on Saturday and phoning Virgin Media. Who are useless fvckers, by the way, but I'll not get into another shoddy service rant just now. Maybe later, though. They really are unhelpful tw@ts...).





Time now for an Y Fenni, lettuce, tomato and salt-and-vinegar crisp sandwich, anyway. Tell me something interesting in the meantime?

Oh, God. Let's hope this foot-and-mouth infected farm in Surrey proves to be an isolated incidence of the disease, for all the obvious reasons - animal welfare, farmers' welfare (personal and financial), rural Britain being able to operate as normal without chaos, disruption, being broadly declared a no go area, the collapse of domestic tourism &c. What with all the flooding, storms, unremitting rain and general weather gloom, it's already been a pretty bloody dismal summer here; and with the spectre of the pall of smoke hanging generally over the country from thousands of pyres of burning carcasses back in 2001 now looming unavoidably into one's thoughts, it seems all too likely that this could become the grimmest summer ever, or certainly the worst I've experienced, anyway.

Hmmm, maybe I exaggerate, maybe I'm being unnecessarily fatalistic here. I daresay this perceived cloud of doom is considerably darkened for me personally by having been burgled, various sadnesses and bad things going on in my family, and the person closest to me all but disappearing from my life over this summer, let alone the fairly obvious fact that I'm a depressed depressive w/ SAD. But my own shit aside, it's definitely felt as if there's been an all-pervading atmosphere of, well, shittiness, permeating things round this way lately.

I shall try to hope for the best re: this case foot-and-mouth disease, anyway, 'localised outbreak' and all that, and hope that mass hysteria and media fingerpointing and blamelust doesn't get too out of hand. And at least try to suppress my sniggles every time I hear mention of Chief Veterinary Officer Debby Reynolds on the radio. I haven't heard her burst into song yet, after all.

'Cause counting yr blessings can help you to appreciate 'em:

1. Margaret Atwood interview on Front Row yesterday evening. So many revelations! How one of the world's greatest novelists might have gone for a successful career as a children's party entertainer rather than booking her way to the Booker! Margaret's past as a decorator of 'interesting' cakes! How crucial the word gutted (when used as an adjective) was to The Penelopiad making it into the bookshops! Margaret's pivotal role in the development of the Pop Tart! The ancestress of hers who wasn't quite hanged as a witch (the neck wouldn't break)! And lots more. Oh Margaret A, so wise, so dry; this interview really delighted me and put a spring in my step (I was listening to it on my mobile phone - which still feels bizarre - while walking to the shops). Made me want to finish off reading all of her writing, and then reread all the books I've already read. Because they're ace. Fortunately, I took Curious Pursuits out of the library last week, so that's that one sorted. Yay yay Margaret A.

2. Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie's Radio 2 show, which makes me feel all warm and cosy remembering days of yore when Mark and Lard did the graveyard shift on Radio 1 (which I listened to religiously during the mid '90s years I was getting into music in a big way, and introduced me to so many bands, as well as films, poets, tv, books... &c. Oh, and was extremely funny, to boot) which Mr. Maconie came onto as a correspondent every now and then. The Radio 2 programme is a different animal, but with enough features in common w/ the old show - friendly banter, decent records, bands live in session, a Northern slant, much daftness, Noddy Holder - for it to be a welcomely companionable soundtrack to many of my weekday evenings.

3. Meeting up w/ Bill yesterday for the first time in Gawd knows how long. It was really good to see him, and to catch up a bit (even if I didn't make for the most cheery conversationalist - sorry!). I'm glad I took the chance to pop by on the off chance :-)

4. The fact that I was able to get myself up, washed, halfway presentable and out of the house in sufficient time and w/ sufficient success to propel myself as far as Canton Tesco and back (about 40+ mins walking), and w/ enough bravery to call in on friends of my own volition while I did so. Given that, in recent weeks, I've mostly been either in bed, skulking about the house in my nightie, or getting myself ready to face the world only just in time for all the shops to have closed, this really counts as an achievement for me, however slight it might seem to many of youse. It sucks being sick; but it means you kinda have to celebrate the small stuff, or you'd end up topping yrself.

5. I made PIE.

Apple and blackberry. Yum yum yum.
( click for pie editorial and more pie pics!!12!  )


Okay, that's it for the list. Most of everything else is really pretty awful, still. But at least I managed to get up to five.







¹ By me, to me. Being a Polly No Mates at least means that the answer to Who Ate All The Pies? is always gonna be a given.

Oh, I'm so dozy. I managed to extract some photos from the NuPhone and get them onto the computer not all that long after I'd got the phone (I have anxiety-related issues about getting my head around new gadgets - usually the longer I put off trying to figure them out, the more scared I get about BREAKING THEM with my BIG CLUMSY BEING, or losing some small component of crucial significance in my big chaotic existence, and the more likely it is that I'll never get around to learning how to use them. Everything has to be calm and clear and ordered before I can feel safe about broaching whatever NuGadget it is. Hence the MP3 player I got for my birthday remains as silent a little black shiny lump as it was the day I got it :-( Yeah, I'm rubbish. Yeah, this parenthesis should probably be an entire separate paragraph in itself. Yeah, I'm good at digressing).

Anyway.

Got photos off phone and onto computer, so long ago now that the procedure for doing it feels all unfamiliar and scary again, then put some of them up on Flickr, then promptly failed to stick any of 'em up here, or experiment any further w/ the phonecam, or with transferring files betwixt mobile and computer, or to write anything ever again on LiveJournal, or to finish filling my form in, or, indeed, to do much of anything bar sleep the clock around and feel all the joy left in my soul ebbing away each time I managed to stay awake for any length of time. It's been all excessive sleeping, depression, anxiety, avoidance and black and white films round here, but mostly the OTT sleeping. Seriously, it's been ridiculous, I'd have started to think I was pupating if it wasn't - but here I go digressing again, when the point was meant to be pictures.

So yes, pictures!



cuttlefish-coloured Branwell, wisting the night away


The phone does that automatickal monochromification thing, see, if you tell it to, or else it can sepiafy or negativise or whatnot if you'd prefer, or even provide comedy end of the pier images with holes cut out for your face to go in should you be so inclined. All fairly daft, and most of the pictures I've taken so far have been coloured as Nature intended. But!! I'm actually pretty darn impressed w/ the quality of the photos it can take - this one of Bran is shown here at less than half its actual size, but you can see it in its full size gleaming-whiskered glory if you click on it and follow the helpful links once you're taken to Flickr - so am glad on the whole that I paid a bit more for the phone. It's never going to be anywhere near like using an Actual Camera, but till I can get around to replacing my poor ol' stolen digicam, this should at least tide me over pretty satisfactorily.



'Whatisit whatisit canIcatchit canIeatit shallIpounce???'


Later on the day this was taken Edna slipped into the fishpond. Ahahahah!! You've never seen such a surprised looking cat in your life. Ohhhh how I laughed :-) It all happened too quickly for pictures, though, so her dignity is safe (or at least it is until I make her model the lampshade style stitch-scratching-proof collar again, for some better quality shots now that I have DOUBLE PIXELS at my command...).

( + 3 more phonecam pics, inevitably of the same 2 cats )

I was going to make a big batch of bolognese sauce tonight, but instead I made a load of little interfacing fabric sachets and parcels, filled with bicarbonate of soda and essential oil, and stuffed my shoes w/ 'em, because Jenna said this was meant to make them stop being stinky. Kim and Aggie had said so, or someone like that. I hope it works, cos I'd started to notice the other day that they really ronked when I took them off on a hot day. None of my other shoes smell like that! But none of my other shoes are nice neat little flat black leather pumps that by the powers of elastic actually stay on my stupid-shaped feet, either. Even if they are squeaky. So I've pulled out the old insoles and packed out the shoes w/ lavender-drenched sodium bicarb sachets, and have new insoles to go in 'em before I wear 'em again, by which point they'll either be fresh and flowery fragrant, or smelling of stinky shoe stink overlayed w/ essence of old lady.

I was going to put 'essence of old lady's knicker drawer' there, but then thought it would sound unintentionally crude, and was worried that someone might think the crudity intentional. No no no. I thought only of freshly laundered linen tucked about with lavender bags, honest. That is all I mean when I talk about smelling of old ladies' knickers, yes! Oh dear.

I also stumbled upon the word sniggle this evening, and thought myself very fine for it. If someone's already coined it before me, kindly refrain from bothering me with the knowledge. If it's not obvious, a sniggle is a particularly girly sort of snigger; or else, a really rather disrepectful - nay, even dirty! - giggle. I tried to find a nice Searle scrawl of some St. Trinian's gels for illustrative purposes, but there's a film remake in the works so everything's coming up thatwise. Ho hum.

It's Friday the 13th, the skies are grey and overcast, I'm off to a funeral, and I've just had to sew one of my shoes back together. I've never heard that the latter's unlucky, but it certainly hasn't made my morning any breezier. Wish me luck!