Free music for the soul

Hi All,

I just had a really lovely Mother’s day with all of my kids. We had a most excellent lunch of all kinds of breads, cheeses, salads, meats (lots of non-vegan’s in my crowd 😉 ) and antipasto type veggies plus a couple of avocados, my personal favourites. We also had gourmet ciders and they even remembered to bring Steve one of his favourite brews, Little Creatures beer. Aside from all of the fun (we are a loud bunch) Stewart loaded up a game that he had gifted me a few weeks ago on a free gaming platform called “Steam” where you can play games for free or choose to pay a token amount for all kinds of games. Stewart bought me a bundle of games for $2 and I ended up with about 10 games but hadn’t looked at them yet so he loaded one up called Reus. A most interesting game indeed where you get to be “The boss” and direct the construction of a planet and the direction of its civilisation. I am still working on my PR. You can squash your civilisations if they get too big headed and I am not sure that I am ready for that kind of megalomania!

Sir Earl has appointed himself grand keeper of the cheese…I don’t know if you can spot the small yellow smudge of cheese on the windowsill behind Earl but that’s put there for the Grey cuckoo thrush that comes throughout the day and takes bits of cheese back to it’s mate…Earl HATES the grey (freeloading) cuckoo thrush and as it is ignoring his barking and chasing it down the deck he has decided to defend his territory studiously

“How long do I have to sit here?!”

Stewart also told me about a free radio station called “Spotify”.  I get the feeling that it’s the same radio station that my friend Kym told me about recently but as Stewart was here he loaded it up and it’s a really excellent online radio station that customises to your tastes. I don’t know if you are like me but I can’t STAND jamster music. “Jamster music” is the rubbish phone tunes that came out and disappeared almost as fast as they rose to fame but have left us with a legacy of people who need a machine to sing and who get contracts more for their looks than anything that comes out of their mouths. I can completely bypass the Jamster music with this radio station and that makes me a VERY happy little black duck. You can choose genres of music and then just click play and away you go good music to dance around the kitchen singing into your tea-towel with. Another good feature is that if you like a song that they play you can click “like” and it adds it to your playlist so after a while you can bypass the odd ad that plays completely by just playing your saved list

Part “A” of the delivery of horse manure (which is now spread most of the way over everything under the deck that you can see here thanks to the chooks…sigh…)

Part “B” of the horse manure delivery and an angsty Stevie-boy waiting for the RAC man to turn up as our little 4×4 decided to take Mother’s Day off…

I just made a vegan chocolate cake. I got the recipe from here…

http://www.deliciouseveryday.com/vegan-chocolate-cake/

It’s called a “Deep, dark, rich and sexy Vegan chocolate cake” and it isn’t kidding! A very easy cake to make but just don’t look at the ingredients as it couldn’t be called low fat in anyone’s book but if you want a real luxury gorgeous silky velvet chocolate cake that you would be proud to put in front of anyone give this baby a go. I am going to forgo the decadent coconut cream ganache that the cake is supposed to be iced with as I don’t want to give the recipient a heart attack so will go with something a lot simpler in a vain effort to rein in the calories

“”Ok…so it’s obviously chocolate but sexy? Nope…not buying it narf7…I am going to need MORE proof…

 

“Oh NOW we see it! S.E.X.Y. indeed!” add a smothering of vegan coconut cream and chocolate ganache and this baby is pure supermodel…only thing is that Stevie-boy isn’t a great fan of “so moist it hurts” so anyone thinking of luring him away to paint their garage or tile their gazebo had best use something other than this delectable baby…anyone want half a cake?

Steve and I are working on creating a 16 page booklet in our course at the moment. We are learning how to put content and images within the parameters of a booklet and apparently InDesign does most of the work for us…we shall see about that! If something can go wrong with the program it will do it for us. We don’t mind, it gives us more of a chance to learn how to use it by working our way backwards out of our problem. You learn more through stuff ups than you ever do by acing things every time.

Isn’t this gorgeous? My amazing and most wonderfully generous mate Kymmy made it for me 🙂 I don’t know how, but it makes tea brewed in this little terracotta teapot taste SO much better (even if it IS only tea-bags 😉 )

Mr Terry Pratchett wrote a book called “A hat full of sky” and this is a hatbox full of pretty. Although I have a ridiculously small amount of natural talent when it comes to crafting (please don’t protest, I know my strengths 😉 ) I found a sack of these gorgeous ribbony thingo’s at the tip shop and after untangling them and cleaning them up I was left with half a large hatbox of satiny pretties…anyone have any ideas for what to do with them for the artistically/craftically challenged? Pauline has already given me some suggestions which I duly noted but as most of them involved having a degree of talent that is almost incomprehensible to me I set them aside tenderly for the day when I learn “skills”.

I (foolishly) decided to take my camera out with me on my early morning walk with Earl. It was just over 0C when we set off at a brisk trot as Earl doesn’t like his tender little tootsies to stand still long on the cold soil (that’s his excuse and he is sticking to it!). Earl was very happy to oblige me as I stopped every few metres to take a photo but after a while he got bored and decided to put his muscle into it to get me moving again. I don’t know if you have ever tried to take a photo with a 34kg American Staffordshire terrier doing his best imitation of a Mack truck in opposition to your intents. I did manage to take some good photos but I also took a lot of burred images and a disproportionate amount of images of my foot (cheers Earl!). I even walked all the way to Deviot beach where Earl proceeded to attempt to wee on every single shrub in the area having not been there in well over a month. Sometimes I wonder about my sanity when I choose the places that I am going to walk Earl…but I am never going to need to go to the gym, I guess there is always a positive if you look hard enough for it…

My foolish little brother actually put this on Facebook and I told him (warned him) that I was going to have to share it here. I don’t think he thought I would…”World, meet my brother Jamie…Jamie…World…” 😉

Oh DEAR…someone spilled the beans! 😉

Thanks to a combination of a desire to replenish my poor addled sleep deprived brain by dousing it in 10 hours straight of sleep on Saturday night and my need to get up at 2.30am this morning after going to bed at 10.30 last night (do the maths…I am no longer capable…) I am in a sort of suspended animation at the moment. I just turned up “Can’t Stop” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and my brain is convinced I am in a night club somewhere back in the 90’s. If your days are a little mundane it might be a bit of fun to deprive yourself of sleep for a few days, the world is a very different place when your brain is being funnelled through haze and Van Halen. I can think of worse feelings to be honest 🙂 In saying that, I might head off to bed nice and early tonight…

General tomfoolery when asked to pose for a Mother’s Day photo (note Earl photobombing…)

“OK YOU LOT, STOP MUCKING AROUND!”…sigh…(poor Stevie-boy is NEVER going to hit the bigtime as a photographer with subjects like us 😉 )

Its Wednesday again (why oh WHY did I choose hump day as my blogging day?!) and here I am listening to Thin Lizzy (Oh MAN I am the coolest of the cool!) and procrastinating my derrière off again about studying. If you asked me any other time to hunt down some images to make a booklet with I would be on it. I would be hunting late into the night but tack the harmless little words (“HA”) “for your studies…” onto the end of that sentence and suddenly I need to find something else to do pronto. I think it’s just me being bolshie and not wanting to do what I am told. A problem of mine ever since I was a child. Looks like I haven’t grown out of it yet (most probably won’t). I took some photos on my (drag) walk with Earl but as I hadn’t bothered to bone up on what exactly constitutes a design “principle” or “element” (I foolishly thought that I would remember that from last year’s course…) prior to heading out the door, I mean seriously folks what was I thinking? It wasn’t yet 7am and I was being propelled backwards down a slippery driveway to my obvious doom, why on EARTH wasn’t I thinking!!! I ended up taking some images (too many) of “lines” as that was pretty much the only design principle/element (see I don’t even know where “lines” FIT in design!) that I remember… The rest of my photos are sort of hopeful. They have “things” in them (note to self – STOP USING INVERTED COMMAS AND BRACKETS!) but not anything concrete enough to be able to use for the required purposes.

A great shot of Madeline…me…not so much…but at least I don’t have my tongue sticking out Qi! 😉

I think those hand signals are “DUDE!” in Korean

My creativity in finding things to do rather than study has me gobsmacked. I think I would even attempt complex calculus rather than do what I was told…what IS it with procrastination anyway?! Earl and Bezial are trying their hardest to help me by requesting their dinner 3 hours early. I am almost desperate enough to give it to them! I guess I could pick up my camera, have a vague read over what constitutes a design principle or element (or whatever they are) and actually take a few photos that might satisfy what I need to do but where is the Catholic guilt in that? I am not even Catholic but for the purposes of this post I am a convert. My angst is being somewhat tempered by listening to 70’s music on Spotify. As a child of the 70’s these songs are entertaining me far more than they probably should if I want to maintain my hip cool narf7 image but they are doing double duty as stress relief as I contemplate my rapidly approaching deadline to get this work handed in (and another unit in my inbox this morning…EEK!) so if singing “My Sharona” is going to help me cut the mustard (err…mixed metaphor folks!) then so-be-it!

Me doing my finest Nana Mouskouri impersonation and good try getting out of the shot Bethany, Stevie-boy is onto you!

And so is Nana Mouskouri!

The garden has gone to heck by the way. That’s why you haven’t seen any images of it lately, that plus it is COLD OUT THERE and I am doing my level best to not venture out into the real world aside from my early morning (drag) walk with Earl. Once is enough to remind me that I prefer to be on the inside looking out when it’s cold outside. Brunhilda is doing a sterling job of keeping it toasty warm inside.  You might not have realised it (but you might just have suspected it…) but I just went AWOL to eat my lunch and go to Facebook for a while. I found this…

 

https://www.facebook.com/robertdowneyjr

 

Thank me later. If you don’t like Mr Downey Jr…what the heck is wrong with you?!!! I suppose you don’t think that Mr J Depp is a hunk either eh? Sigh…some people…NO taste…

Stewart appears to have been rendered armless by all of the cider that we drank

Steve demanding payment for being forced to take all of those images!

Ok, I just checked and I have 1675 words. Significantly less than my usual misc. and boobity boo-zillion but I HAVE to do some studies folks. Even sitting here procrastinating for 5000 words isn’t going to get this studies done so I might have to make this post short (boring) but sweet and get it scheduled to post later on when my brain has been turned to mush by too many thoughts about “Design” and “Elements” and “Principles” and pretty much anything to do with them. I ran out of socks to roll, I resisted feeding the dogs (to their disgust) and my lunch was delicious (steamed veggies and dhal) so off to face up to my creative future…wish me luck (I am going to need it, it’s a grey, cold old day out there so good luck to me shooting anything other than “dinge” 😉

I thought I would share a photo taken at the bottom of our driveway taken on that eventful photo shoot accompanied by Earl. At least some of the shots are nice, although not entirely sure how I could use this as anything to do with design 😉 Have a great week folks. You should start praying around about now that I actually “do” something next week so that the next blog post contains something other than procrastination and Mother’s Day 😉