Thursday 28th August

I started out writing a whole screed of stuff about something that irritated me earlier today - piles of it there was, but you'll be pleased to know that I've deleted it. Now you won't have to be bored by my going on about something that doesn't bother anyone but me I expect - but it kind of leaves me at a loose end as to what to blog about!
But then I do have something to talk about. Firstly, I met up with some old friends this week - Sonia, Georgie and Vanessa. We all worked at the Box Office of the Theatre Royal, must be going on twenty years ago now. It was a nice night out, great to see them all again. It's great to catch up, find out what's going on in each other's lives.
I spent today making bookmarks for the Xmas box - I have a small box of things I've put away for the Xmas market. It's a fair part of my investment in my little micro business, and I was thinking, what am I going to do if no one buys anything this Christmas! All this credit crunch stuff, it's frightening when you think about it. Fingers crossed though.
Anyway it's going to be a busy weekend, working right the way through and a good part of next week. There's fun for you. So I thought I'd blog early for the weekend!!!!

My week in pictures!

Sunday 17th August - went over to Winsley for lunch. Mum was having a good day, and posed for a few photo's - took these on my camera phone, so the lighting's not very good!










Monday 18th August - got back from the shops to find that this parcel had arrived from Amazon!









Tuesday 19th August - A good dinner puts you in the right frame of mind for the night shifts to come - this is a lean chicken breast on a bed of rocket and baby beet leaves, with a lemon & chive dressing.







Wednesday 20th August, a little bit of sunset over Arnos Manor Park.













Thursday 21st August - a lovely day, full of bright sunshine, makes a walk to the post office much more enjoyable. This is Sandy Park Road, in Sandy Park Brislington, where my local post office is.









Friday 22nd August - woke up late following my last night shift of the week, and wasn't up to much beyond sitting and watching the Olympics whilst I made a few bagcharms!









Saturday 23rd August - I went into town as I needed to do a little shopping, and I met a friend for coffee. This is Colston Circus in the middle of Bristol and this apalling round thing with sails on it is apparently the city council's idea of a modern sculpture. I have to say I love sculpture but I think this thing is a huge disappointment.

Sunday 24th August - One of the books from my Amazon parcel! So far I've read, what three of them? I got into Henning Mankell's very good Swedish detective books whilst we were on holiday, where someone had been wonderful enough to leave Before The Frost behind for other's in need of a good book!

Saturday 16th August!

Now that exclamation mark above makes me feel I'm presenting myself here as being bright and alert, all that sort of thing, when frankly the exact opposite is true - yep, another night shift takes it's evil toll of me!

Still, that's the last of them until next week - tomorrow I'm off over for a little Sunday lunch with the family, which will get me out of bed pretty well bright and early, so that might get me back onto a normal sleeping track. That'll be just about in time for my next night shift I reckon!

Still one positive thing about doing night shifts at the moment is the grand opportunity it's given me for watching the Olympics streaming on the Beebs website. Flicks off at the touch of a button if a call comes in, yet it keeps you bright and awake when they don't. I think I've seen just about every swimming heat that you could possibly want to see - enough to suggest that swimming is having difficulties attracting people from the ethnic minorities anyhow. And dear God, at about what, 4.30, 5 am this morning I was watching what I think was a 100m heat for women, which had a British entrant in it, and the poor girl was wearing one of those bikini style running get ups. She's running in the full harsh sunlight of the Birds Nest Stadium, and for an appallingly long period of time the camera seemed to focus on this poor kids stomach muscles. Nothing wrong there, she had the requisite musculature and all that, but the white pastiness of her skin..! You'd think she'd have 10 minutes to slather on some of this self tanning moisturiser or something. It was not unlike seeing the unroasted flesh of a ready to cook chicken out there on the track rippling in protest at being prepared for the oven. I couldn't tell you who this unfortunate woman was, because not 2 minutes later she was replaced by another British athlete, similarly affected. So it could well have been some unfortunate camera aspect, but if it was, frankly I'd sue. If not, the British Olympic Association should be rushing an emergency flight of self tan spray out there, because a more unhealthy look you've never seen in your whole life. It looked like the BOA had been locking its athletes away in a cupboard for the last 12 months and not letting them out in to daylight. And given the results, I regret to say that a pact with the devil is clearly not the cause. Not in the athletics anyhow. And somehow I don't see Bradley Wiggins or any of that ilk cosying up to the parchment and blood inked quill either!

Anyhow, on a totally different subject, I've started this new set of photo's on Flickr - 365 days of the next year. The point of this is to take a photo every day of the next year, and to have a visual record from one birthday to the next - so I have a weeks worth of photo's to produce a little diary of the last week! I won't bore you by reproducing them here, but zip on over to Flickr and check them out. But I do want everyone who reads this to have a bit of a look at this:

This thing lives on the table we have out in the car park at work. It was dug up by our building manager when he was making the little garden that we have there, and it's clearly some kind of root or tuber. It's incredibly light, but tough as hardened steel - you can't force your finger nail into it, although clearly some sort of root has been broken off one end of it. It's dead, we think, because it's not shown any signs of growth. Have you ever seen anything like this before? It's got the most incredible whorling on it, almost like the whorls on fingerprints. I don't think my camera's very good at picking them up, but you can sort of see the indications of them on the photos.

If you know what this thing is, I'd love it if you could email me. There's a whole building full of workers who want to know what it is!

7th August 2008

Well, I'm taking it easy this morning because I've got a night shift tonight! Got to shoot off to work a bit earlier than that for a team meeting as well, so it's going to be a moderately busy day.
The birthday went very well - we ended up not visiting the nursing homes that we'd planned on, but no doubt that'll get itself sorted out in due course. Things usually do.
I just feel a bit cross with myself because I've had to turn down an offer of work. This is jewellery work, to make wedding favours, but the quantity is just way to much. 250 pieces - I've been working for what 8 months or so now, making stuff for Christmas and I only have 170 odd bookmarks. No way could I fit in 250 without it affecting the time that I use to make all the other stuff for the shop, and I don't want to loose that. But I hate having to turn something like that down! It's very frustrating. Mind you, making pieces in that quantity does tend to turn in to a bit of a production line, because there's not much variation in what you do. I like making the things that I do because they're varied, they depend on what beads I can buy, and how I choose to put them together. And not to mention that I've got a job to do as well!!
And talking about fitting things in, I've got to go to the supermarket as well today - I spent most of yesterday waiting for the plumber, and then working on making some bagcharms. I made six, which is good going. Mind you, I'm waiting for some new bookmarks to arrive from the supplier, I'm running out of the blanks.
I also thought, this being my 5oth year, that I would run a little project on Flickr. I thought I'd try to take a daily photo - my mother always said that I was born in time for tea, so I thought I'd try to take this photo as close to 3pm as I could. It'd make a pictorial record of the year, which'll be fun for me even if not necessarily interesting to anyone else! Click on the link over there on the left, it's called 365 days of the year, see what's there!

Saturday 2nd August 2008

Long week - back from the family holiday last weekend, and back to work Monday - only to get really rather sick on Wednesday. I can only assume I picked up a bug down south!
Well - the holiday. We went to this rather lovely little cottage just outside of Wareham, in Dorset - Isolation Cottage it was called, which was a originally the isolation ward of the local hospital. The National Trust bought them, tore them down and re-built them - just as well, as it had formerly been where the smallpox patients had stayed. And, no, it wasn't smallpox!!! We had wonderful weather, and we think Mum enjoyed herself - it's just a bit difficult to tell.

Anyhow as a result of her failing health, we've decided to look for a nursing home for her. It's very distressing, but at least the holiday allowed us all to see how increasingly necessary this has become. We're going to see the first on the list on Tuesday - without going in to any details here, Tuesday is my birthday. I think given the circumstances, it promises to be one I'm not likely to forget for a while!
Dementia is the most terrible of diseases. It takes everything away from the victim, all shreds of dignity, even personality really. For instance, Mum quite enjoys watching a programme on tv called MonkeyWorld (or something like that, I've never seen it, so I couldn't actually say.) It turned out that the place that this is made was near to Wareham, so we took her. It was quite an adventure, Mum, me, Martin and Nick - we'd arranged it so that Jo & Ken got a day off - we packed up the wheelchair and off we went. Admittedly, we should have thought a bit more carefully that the monkeys might not be at their most active in the middle of the day! However, we did push her round, and looked - the monkeys are all rescued from all over the world, mostly from labs, and they have the most wonderful enclosures and houses. Some of the houses have walkways through them so you could see them inside their shelters - which is where a lot of them had gone too! A good few of them were enjoying having a good look at us. It must be rather confusing for them, sitting there and watching this endless parade passing by. There was a large orangutan who definitely gave me the impression this had all been organised for his benefit!
Thing is it was hard to know how much of it Mum had actually taken in. When we got home she didn't seem to have any memory at all of having been there, and whilst she did seem to enjoy herself whilst she was there, I'm pretty sure she probably doesn't even remember having been away for the week now.
I can remember going to look at nursing homes when Dad was ill, and they were thinking of discharging him from the hospital to a nursing home. I have to say it was one of the more distressing experiences of my life - some of them are just dreadful. But like all in life, some of them are really good too, packed full of good staff, who take an interest in their patients. The one we're going to look at is new, which I think is a positive thing. Still we'll see.