Tuesday 29th May 2007, at 23.23 exactly!!!!

No, I didn't plan that. It's just an accident! But the real wierdo thing is in the background as I type this, is a tv programme on surrealism.

So - surrealism. This sends me sort of thinking about St Mungo's Museum in Glasgow, a museum of religious beliefs. They have a painting there by Salvador Dali, one of the magnificent crucifix paintings, Christ hanging on his cross above the world which hangs in a black space. I can remember sitting there and just gazing at this thing. But oddly enough, the thing that I remember most clearly from visiting the museum was a piece of Indian art. It had been made more or less in what we think of as the medieval period, perhaps as far ago as the 1100's. The makers had used the lost wax method - they had made the pattern in sand, I think, poured in wax and made a mould over that, and then used it to cast the piece. Now the truly awful thing is I can't remember the name of it - well It's rather late at night, and I truly hadn't intended to start rambling on about this when I was browsing Flickr, which is where I was before I started blogging - but it was one of those huge round pieces that the Indians make, and it was a Kali, and I'm fairly sure it had been associated with a Thuggee cult. If not Thuggee's, (which I hearby admit I'm not entirely sure actually existed, and may have been an invention of Conan Doyle's) a murderous cult at any rate. Regardless of it's origins, it was a very dramatic and beautiful piece of art. Funny how things just pop into your mind isn't it?

It's been a funny old day. I had to go to the Occupational Health for my 'back to work' check up - ha, I've been back at work a month or so now, but you know how bureacracy is. A very charming doctor of the old school saw me, he seemed to be very thorough in his check up - all the responses, checked the sciatic nerve for damage - to be honest, I've had sciatic damage for years now, and it's been pretty quiet on this current injury so that's a relief. He seemed to be very happy about how fit I am at present, and I promised to try and loose some weight. Well to be really honest I've been trying to loose some weight for a little while now. You know how it is, you have this nagging thought at the back of your mind. I'm not a great dieter. But I've done the things that I know one should, without being stupid. Upped the fibre intake, cut out the chocolate - ha, that went bust over the weekend, but I've been eating a lot more fruit. I even had a nectarine for breakfast this morning, with a couple of pancakes without any butter on them. Hardly pat on the back stuff, but it's better than a fat free taste free ghastly bar of manufactured crap that they try to sell you as 'food' for dieters. I abominate that stuff. If you're going to diet, you should eat real food, that's my feeling. Just less fat and sugar.
Actually the real problem I have with dieting is trying to force myself to eat more. You know, the sudden large quantities of vegetables that go with all this. I find that extremely difficult, along with breakfast. I am not a big breakfaster, it has to be said.

Anyhow, after the doctors, it was off to the Post Office - man, there was a queue and a half. I was stuck there for at least half an hour. And by the time I left, the queue was worse than when I came in. Then I rushed off to the bus, and had one of those perfectly awful bus journeys - the first seat I sat on was wet!!!! I mean god only knows what with, one can only hope it's water...!!!! Anyway after I moved, there were two or three small children in the back who decided to have one of those who can shout louder contests - the mother's were trying to do their best to quieten them down, but needless to say did not succeed until after I'd finished speaking to my brother on the mobile.

So come the time to make dinner, I left the spinach in the pot on the stove for too long - long enough to be inedible, not quite long enough to burn the place to the ground, thank heavens. Still I like spinach, so it's off to the shop for more tomorrow, since that was the last of the pack. There's been nothing to watch on tv, but I've got about three pairs of earrings, a necklace and two bookmarks made - all for my Xmas stock box. Got to build up that xmas stock! I had a couple of fat envelopes of findings arrive today after the bank holiday, which is always nice - chain, a mass of jump rings, some triangle bails - nothing drop dead exciting, simply the things you cannot make jewellery without. So as you can see it's been a funny old day - neither one thing nor the other, not way exciting, not way dull.

Sunday 27th May, at just gone one p.m.

Well I'm off to work in a couple of hours. I'm doing a couple of short shifts over the weekend, a day shift on Monday, and then I've sort of got some time off. I say sort of, because I seem to have packed the week up with places to go, and people to meet - like on Tuesday I have the occupational health appointment. This is strange, considering I'm pretty well healed. But it's taken so long to come through, that frankly it's now a waste of every one's time. As far as I can see, the practitioner who's done me the most good, and who has really got this back thing under control is Becky the Physiotherapist. She's very good, always cheerful and friendly, and has given me the most practical help. Even after this business with my calves - I don't know if you know but if you get injured, and can't move about for any amount of time, the rest of the muscles in your body go rapidly downhill. So when I could move about, I started to get the most awful cramp-like sensation in my calves when I had to go anywhere quickly. Clearly the muscles had atrophied, or shortened, which can happen. Anyhow Friday last, she gave me a set of quick and easy exercises, that I can do pretty well anywhere, and low and behold, I'm already feeling the benefit. Not quite so crampy, and takes longer for the crampy sensation to come on. That's the benefit of physiotherapy for you. My aunt was a physiotherapist, and it's a brilliant profession. We don't say thanks often enough, or appreciate the efficacy of the work they do.

Anyhow I've been working hard, and thought I'd put up some photo's of what's currently on sale in my Ebay shop - the links over there on the left hand side!

This is an orange and green beaded bangle. It's been worked with silver wire, and is 3 and a half inches across - 8cm for the metric among us. It's got a low start at just 99p - bargain or what?! The auction for this one ends on the 30th of May, so plenty of time to get a bid in!

This is a lemon and lime BagCharm. It's kicking off at £2.00, and the auction ends on the same day as the bangle above. It's packed with wonderful beads including a huge lime green silver foiled heart bead at the base - it'd be great on a bag or your jeans in the summer.

This is a fabulous heart and flowers BagCharm. Isn't pink just about everybody's favourite colour? Well, lots of people's anyhow! The main beads on this are lots of pink coloured crackleglass, and on top of those are some wonderful big glass flower beads. I've made centres for the flowers from small crackleglass beads and silver spacer beads, so each flower has a perfect centre to them - and then at the base is a lovely big pink heart bead, in silver foiled glass with a bit of lampwork in pink and green. It's got a £2.50 start, and it ends on the 2nd of June - plenty of time to go over and have a good look at the details before you place your bid!

These are lovely earrings - very delicate, perfect for a summer occasion. Silver plated earwires, and silver plated chain lead to Swarovski crystal hearts in Tanzanite, the most lovely delicate lilac shade imaginable. You can see the wonderful sparkly effect in the photo - see those little light coloured spots? That's the sparkle of Swarovski Crystal. These are on Buy It Now, at £2.50 each - they come in a presentation box, and I've got four pairs of these. So if you happen to be looking for earrings for bridesmaids, then these are just what you need.

Well this is just a little sample of what I've got in my ebay shop. Why not hop on over there and check it out? Bound to be something that you fancy!

Monday 21st May 2007

Well another Monday morning is here. It's been a rather profitable few days off, profitable in the sense of time used well. Over the past what, three, no four days, I've made about five bagcharms, three necklaces, a bracelet, and about ten bookmarks. Those have pretty much all gone in the box for Xmas stock, particularly the bookmarks. One I'm particularly happy with, it's a gold tone one, and I've used a vintage brassy coloured leaf, and some left over flower beads, these are cup shaped beads, and with the addition of some small beads, beadcaps and so on, you can make really interesting insides to the flowers. I'm definitely going to buy plenty more, and make up a lot of flowery bookmarks. I think that they will do really well at Xmas.

I was up reasonably early this morning, as a chap has arrived to paint and decorate the upstairs flat. I have a good relationship with my landlord, a nice chap, and part of that is that I let people in and out of the house - initially I thought we were going to have problems as I had it fixed in my head that I was supposed to be at work today. But then when I re-checked my diary, of course, I'm off today and back to work tomorrow - another week or so of day shifts, and then I have time off. I'd booked it off almost last year now, thinking we were going to be off to Glasgow for a reunion with my university mates. However, frankly, this has simply never happened. You know how it is. You start of full of enthusiasm, and everyone saying yeah, what a great idea. Then the sheer hard reality of dates, commitments, family etc kicks in. Oh I can do this week, you can't do that week, I'm available on these weekends but X can't make then.. it simply never came off. It's really sad in a way. But it also shows how people are growing - changing, etc. I was a mature student at uni, ha, very mature in fact, so old I barely made it to three cheesy disco's in the entire four or so years I was there! (Don't know why that was, it was a damn good cheesy disco!) The people I met there, were, for the most part, young free and single, out for a good time along with their honours degrees. Personally I reckon for me, it was a bit like a second childhood. I don't think I've ever been so free of demands in all my life - all I had to do was turn in an essay every now and again, and turn up to a few lectures! I freely admit, I went to pretty nearly every single one, I mean for heaven's sake, there were what, three, four a day? Who wouldn't? You've spent the last twenty years doing the nine to five thing, and suddenly you have four whole years of three to four lectures a day, half a dozen essays every three months or so? Yep I'll say it. Students simply don't know they're born for the most part!!! But then it's they're few years of freedom before they end up where they are now - doing the 9 - 5 thing, with mortgages, baby's, partners and all of the stuff that goes with it. I'm looking forward to the first one that turns round and says oh I'm off back to uni, or gap trekking etc when they're the age I was then. Got about another seven to eight years I reckon, but what the heck. It was fun for me, and it'll be fun for them.

So anyway having got up to let in the painter chap, I've spent my time doing some Fimo work. I've never had hands quite as green - yep, two shades of green fimo. I've made some pendants. I'm waiting for the oven to heat up to bake them as I type, I've done some rather nice stripey one's. Chopped off the bendy bits in a few paper clips to make the hooks to hang them from, might put a few of them onto Etsy if they turn out nice. For sure, there'll be photo's on Flickr by the end of the day I expect, if you want to check them out. I'm still on my Fimo Learning Curve with these, they're my first pendants, and to be honest, I expect them to turn out better than the beads. I'm not so hot with beads. I mean the one's I made - hang on, I'll post a photo -

well, as you can see, they turned out very well. But the honest truth is I don't know how to use them. Sure I could put them on a bag charm, but would they look right on a bagcharm is what I ask? I've put headpins on them, they're all ready to be hung, but I dunno. I just don't see it myself.

Now to my mind, pendants are where it's at. I want to make pendants. I can see those, on a nice suedey type thong, and these that I've made this morning are a really good step in that direction. I'm not saying that these will turn out to be good, or even worth hanging, but they're the first step in the direction that I think I really want to go in. Also I've seen from the Flickr groups that I belong to that there's some kind of transfer method that you can do, to transfer actual photograph type things onto fimo, and yep, that's what I'm going to try and master. Why? Text. Text is next for me. For years, ages ago, I used to make collage style pieces using different texts, words and so on, and I think the time has come to revive my interest in text and words, and start making text pendants. I shouldn't really be saying this I suppose, there'll be some horror out there who will nick my idea, but since I haven't said what that idea is, in it's totality, and no one has exactly the same brain as I do, then I don't really care. Besides which, ideas are free. We all make our own unique contribution even if we're using the techniques etc of other's.

Anyhow when I woke up this morning the very first thing I heard was about the fire on the Cutty Sark. What an apalling thing to happen. And the police seem to think it's suspicious - who would set fire to the Cutty Sark? If anyone did, then frankly I hope they throw the book at them. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. Better still, have 'em out there, every single weekend for the rest of their lives putting right what they've done - they can go fundraise for it's restoration. We could put them in stocks and throw tomato's at them, I'm sure people would be most generous in contributing for an opportunity to throw a tomato at them. Now there's creative sentancing for you.

19th May 2007

Well, it's a good old Saturday evening - the FA cup's been won by Chelsea but I have to say it was quite a boring match for the most part. About the most exciting thing up to Drogba's goal was the parade of FA Hero's before the match. Now that was interesting. I mean, there were all those really rather gorgeous young men who rushed around the pitch and scored goals and stuff - somehow replaced by middle aged men. But on the other hand, Dennis Law is still looking good for his age, so it wasn't all bad news!

Anyhow, like I said, the football was a bit so-so, but at the end of the day it's probably best for Chelsea to win. No one wants to see Mourinho leave, he may not exactly be as special as he seems to think that he is, but he's good value for the money in anyone's terms. But what I was going to post about has nothing to do with football at all - it's all about pasta!!!

Yes, dear reader, I made a pasta sauce yesterday that has to be tasted to be believed. It's the sort of sauce that with the addition of a bit of extra liquid, and a few garlic fried croutons would make a heck of a good soup, and if you like your soups thick, then frankly don't bother with the extra liquid.

I'm going to call it End of the Month Sauce, because basically that's what it is - the best way to use up the left over veggies in your fridge to eke out your paycheque till next week and live life in style whilst you're doing so. I'm mean just check this out -

Doesn't that look good?

So how do you make this sauce of wonder? Its a doddle. The ingrediants are:

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic

1 can of Italian tomato's, with a couple of good squirts of tomato puree

1 medium sized courgette

2 medium sized carrots

a teaspooon of oregano

Olive oil

Chop all of the veg into small pieces, of roughly 1 inch dimensions. Heat the oil in a pan large enough to hold everything, with a lid. Leaving the lid off, sweat the onion off until transparent, on a low heat and chop the garlic into small pieces - toss the garlic into the pan once the onion has just started to frizzle. When the onion and garlic have become soft and white, add the carrots and courgettes - I peel my carrots, but always leave the skin on the courgette. Give it a good scrub first though!

Give it a good stir, and pop the lid on - leave it to sweat off for a good five minutes. Give it another good stir, and add the tomatoes & puree - another good stir and pop the lid on again for another five to ten minutes. At that point I add a reasonable quantity of water, enough to top up the tomato liquid so that the vegetables are all floating in water but that the top layer is poking through. If it looks weak, add more tomato puree, and add the oregano. Put the lid on, and bring to a simmer. Let it simmer away for a good twenty minutes before giving in another good stir. At that point, I give it a good hour on the top of the stove, checking it every fifteen minutes or so. Keep the lid on, give it a regular stir when you check it - you don't want anything catching on the base of the pan - and don't let it boil. You want a nice, low, rolling simmer.

At that point, turn the heat off and let it cool. When it's cold, get out your blender, and blend the mix up - I do mine a couple of ladlesful at a time, and give it a good couple of pulses lasting approximately 15 seconds each. I always give the blender a small shake in between pulses, so that everything in the blender is well mixed and you don't have a hard piece of carrot stuck under the blender blades - but do remember to turn the power off when you do this, and never be tempted to stick a knife in there with the power still switched on. We're clever cooks here, not cooked cooks.

When it's all blended, put it in the fridge for when you're ready to eat. For the first meal, I'd made up some burgers recently and had one left over - I say a burger, but it was minced pork and grated apple, and grated onion, so it was a large flat pork ball really! I'd cooked it, what.. Thursday, and had the one left over. I put the sauce into a pan, and bought it up to hot before I put the burger in there - so the pork went straight into a hot environment. I had a few juices on the dish I'd stored the burger on, so I scraped those up and added them - a little gravy stock never goes amiss. I had it with plain boiled rice and it was lovely.

Today's meal was the sauce with ravioli - these are four cheese ravioli. I'm not a huge cheese fan, but there's no reason why you can't coat the top of this with grated parmesan if you want. And of course a good sprinkling of parsley. With a nice glass of wine (if you're not still taking the painkillers!) it's an extremely good meal. Tomorrow, I may throw in a tin of tuna and have it with plain pasta. It's incredibly versatile, and like I said, why not chop up whatver you've got in the fridge? Any vegetable will do, so long as you don't try serving it to a small child with spinach in it. On the other hand, frankly, I think this sauce is a fabulous way of concealing vegetables from children. We all know kids who won't eat them - because this has carrots and tomato's in it, you could just about throw in all of the spinach you want, and I reckon they'd be hard put to taste 'em. And I have to say that if I'd had it to hand I would have put in a good deal of shelled broad beans. I have a passion for broad beans, even the frozen ones. Boil them up for about 3 - 5 minutes, rinse under the cold tap, and then sit down with two bowls. Pop the luscious green innards out of each little shell, and keep on going. When you've done the whole bowlful, you've got a vegetable of the gods there. Try tiny ones in salad, with feta and cherry tomatoes - toss in a few anchovies and mm-mm. For a special Sunday lunch, even Christmas, de-pod them the night before, cover them with clingfilm and store in the fridge overnight. The next day, melt some butter in a large pan, on the lowest possible heat, and arm yourself with a very large potato masher. Put the beans in handful by handful, mashing as you go. Add some double cream to liquify it a little, a bit more butter, and as much fresh ground black pepper as your grinder will produce! (Or to taste, actually...!) This is the little known real recipe for Ambrosia, the food of the gods! It will reduce you to a shambling addicted mess within a very few spoonsful, forever stocking up your freezer with bags of broad beans, and urging your family out of the house, so that you can make an entire bowl of this to pig out with in front of the tv.

Yes. Right. Ok, back to normal here. We all have our little food fancies now don't we?!

Saturday 12th May

Dear me, I've logged onto this thing, and I'm thinking whatever am I going to write about... truth is, right now, life is taken up with moving from one place to the other - get up, go to work, come back from work, go to work. I'm so out of the habit of work, and still struggling to get back to full health. I get home so tired that it's about as much as I can do to log on to Ebay and wrap up what's sold that day!!!! I have made one or two pieces - I have to, have to stock the shop somehow!
But I am sort of sticking to my plan for the summer months, I'm re-listing whatever doesn't sell as inventory, and trying to organise it so that at least one item ends its auction per day. That drives traffic in to the shop - people look at whatever's at the top of the list. I wouldn't exactly say that they're flooding through my virtual doors, but it's ticking over.
The most important thing is to build up a stock for autumn and Christmas. I did well last year, better than I'd expected, and as a consequence I want to prepare for this year. I want lots of things to be popping on sale at the right time. And in order to do that, I have to make the time to make these things - which means less to put on sale now. But that's not so bad - I'm getting savy to this. I need to load things at the end and start of the month, when people have money to spend on such things. Just like me, buying my supplies!

Anyhow, I trot off to work in the mornings, back on the old 57 bus. I've been somewhat devastated to find that my usual 10 journey ticket is being withdrawn from use. It's going to disappear at the end of June, I think it was, which means I now have to make alternate arrangements to buy my travel tickets. They - the Abus company, are moving to a flat rate of a pound a journey, which is still the cheapest, but if I can't buy it in advance, well - ridiculous. So I've been investigating the dreaded Farce bus season tickets. They are shockingly expensive. £700 for a twelve month ticket!!!! Seven Hundred Pounds! That's roughly, what, £58.30 a month. But what's my alternative? Farce to, do a ten journey ticket. I normally pay £7.50 for my Abus 10 journeys, with Farce I'd have to pay more than double that. If I buy a weekly season ticket, it's fit for five days and then it stops working apparently. I don't work a five day week, I work a 24 hour, 7 day a week rota - I could buy one of these things, and use it for say four days, and then I've got three days off, before starting the next rotation of however many days on that chunk. If I bought one of these tickets, it would run out on me and I'd only have four days use out of it. Since the cost of this is in the mid-twenties, I absolutely refuse to pay for bus journeys I'm not going to use. On the other hand, apparently they do do a 26 week season ticket, along with the 12 month one, so I shall have to look in to the cost of this. But to make matters worse, I can't go to the travel shop and set up a direct debit to get one of these things, I have to arrange for it to go through my employer. My employer doesn't do anything like this, I've asked our wages staff before. I have to get the information, I have to talk to the wages office, and in all probability my manager too, and they will have to go to all the trouble to arrange for the money to be deducted from my wages. What's wrong with a standing order I hear you ask and my answer to this is I honestly don't know. The only thing I can tell you is that Farce Bus are well known for their rip off policies when it comes to their wretched tickets. This is the result, the absolute result, of the Conservatives and their nasty little policies on selling off everything of any value in this country. It was allegedly going to bring competition into the fields of local transport etc - in actual fact it seems to have resulted in the iron grasp of a local monopoly. And if you put that to a Conservative, they just shrug and say well that's not our responsibility. And have the Labour Party done anything to rectify this? Have they heck. Blair's been too busy off bombing Iraq at the behest of Bush.

Now what was I saying about not having anything to write about? I have to stop here, before I blow a gasket with sheer fury!!!

thursday 2nd May

Gosh May already... isn't that mind boggling? I was talking about it with Lisa at work today (Yippee I'm back at work!) and we agreed that it feels funny because of the seasons being so out of joint.
No proper winter - not even a long period of dreary rain filled days, and if we had a spring, I feel that I missed it. Perhaps because I was trapped in the flat for so long with the back problems. It felt very much as if I emerged from it to find that summer had arrived, out of nowhere. It was very much, bang, here's summer, get the fan on, get a sunhat, buy new tee shirts because nothing you wore last year is fit to wear this, and get ready to suffer in the heat for the next 8 months until the temperature sinks to bearable again.
I mention temperature because where I live is a well-known local hotspot. Just how I, of all people, ended up here is a mystery to me, because I hate heat! Hate sunshine, hate heat, love autumn - I get prickly heat, I get a mystery skin disease if I go out in for longer than what, fifteen minutes, I get sunstroke... and yep, folks, I'm a Leo. I'm supposed to love sunshine and heat. Atypical is what I think you call this..!

But yes, back to work. Boy was I shattered by the end of the first day. Still, every one's been terribly nice, I have space to go do my exercises which is cool.. (who wants to do their physio exercises to the collective amusement of their colleagues?!) But of course, what should happen on what, my first day back? Yes, I get a water leak in the bathroom, and have to send for the plumbers! Of all the times when the plumber could have come at whatever time suited him, and I wouldn't have had to make any kind of special arrangement, any day over the past 3 months would have been fine - but no, the leak chooses to turn up on my first day back to work! I really, really think there is some kind of malevolent force controlling such things.
As for the physical side, it's been three days now, and I must admit I do feel rather sore and slightly as if I've overdone it slightly. Nothings pulled, or worse than it was before I went to work, but I am experiencing a good bit of pain, and the thought of tomorrows physio appointment is not one that I'm chuffed to death about. I'm kind of hoping that she'll have good suggestions to make about how I control this degree of pain - yes I'm taking the pills, but I can't medicate myself out of being able to work, that defeats the object. My tens machine doesn't have enough leads or pads to be able to use it effectively. It's really quite funny. Do you remember that dreadful old film with Kenneth Moore as Douglas Bader, Reach for the sky, I think it was called? When he's teaching himself to walk on his new tin legs, and stomps around all over the place? That's me getting on and off the bus every morning right now! You'd swear I was wearing those old style calipers. Frankly, it's awful.

On another topic entirely, I must just say that I've received some beads from America recently that are just gorgeous. Really, really gorgeous. I'm so happy with my American beads! I'm taking a slow month this May to get a bit more stock up and together. So these wonderful beads are really thrilling, because whatever I make with them is going to be gorgeous. Anyhow it's late, and I'm very tired... so I'm off to bed.