Faster than the speed of blog

You may recall my pathetic little pansy in a can that moped around for a while before finally carking it. Unimpressed by its ineptitude I sprinkled a few cornflower seeds into the can, covered them with the weird growing medium that’s as difficult to get off your fingers as glitter, watered them and went on my merry way.

Yesterday evening, just four days later I noticed that the first seedling was up. Woohoo! I snapped a photo intending to blog it (because I know it’s THRILLING to everybody out there), but then something happened and I didn’t. I don’t remember what. Quite possibly I just got stuck in my bean bag and couldn’t leave the TV.

So this morning I came down ready to tell the world of my triumph and took a look at the can, only to find that suddenly the seedling had friends. Eight friends. I was now officially behind the times as far as seedling reportage went. But now I’m up-to-date. So there.

Click for the set

Because if they do, I’ll just have to walk

A while ago I made the plans for my first jaunt abroad of the year: a one-night trip to Saarbrücken with Suzy, getting in just in time for the concert, spending the night in a swanky hotel (a free 500ml bottle of water? Oh, you shouldn’t have!) (16 Euros for breakfast? Oh, I don’t think so!) and then scooting back to Zweibrücken airport late morning to come home again. The flights and hotel were booked, tickets reserved.

Then yesterday Ryanair emailed me. Attention: we’ve ruined your flight plan, hope you don’t mind. We suggest you fly out to Zweibrücken the day after the concert and then catch the next flight available back to Stansted. What you do with the full 25 minutes between arriving and departing is entirely up to you, but may we recommend boarding the plane?

Fortunately Suzy can take an extra day of holiday, so now we’re flying out the day before the concert instead. At least this way we’ll arrive with more than 6 minutes to spare before the house lights go down and we might see more of Saarbrücken than just the 400m between the hotel and the train station.

But there’s no way I’m letting on which flights I have planned for July. I really don’t need a Ryanair executive wandering in here, reading my carefully laid out, grey hair-inducing plans and working out how best to balls them up for me.

Disappointment in a can

Just over a fortnight after the only seedling in the can appeared … it keeled over and died. Well, that was fun. So much for “Pansy Watch”. I’d even made it its own category, so there’s gratitude for you. That can was meant to contain 8% seeds to 92% growing medium. The distributors of the product used to be my grandparents’ neighbours in Essex, so I totally know where they live and could well go and ask them what they mean by disappointing me like this. Or I could just stay here, ’cause it’s raining and I don’t want to get wet.

At a Bonfire Night celebration last November I caught a packet of cornflower seeds, thrown from a gardening float in the procession. I’ve sprinkled a few of those seeds into the can to see if they’ll do anything. The packet says they should be sown in April and May, but rules are for fools. Unless I’ve made up the rules, then rules are to be followed to the letter. Immediately.

Snowball hat

So that’s another hat off the needles and into my Etsy store. I had some white yarn and some silly white frondy stuff that I’d been eyeing up for a while and finally cast on for a hat a few days ago. I only have enough patience to knit a couple of inches with the frondy yarn, but that works out just fine for a fun brim.

I’ve also been wanting to make a pom pom for a while too, having never made one myself. Clearly pom poms and I are meant to be though, because I managed to cut off exactly the right amount of yarn to fill my cardboard doughnut the first time. More evidence of my great edumacation.

I followed these instructions, not least because the yarn used in their photos is so pretty. For my pom pom I used both the plain white yarn and the frondy stuff, thereby ensuring optimum mess when I came to cut through the yarn and fluff it into a ball. It’s not proper crafting if you don’t get covered in whatever it is you’re working on.

So with everything sewn in and fastened I had made a white hat with a frondy brim (ooh, like little icicles!) and a snowball on top. Now I’m thinking about making a matching scarf. It would be the perfect outfit to wear while having a snowball fight with Bethany’s snowballs, don’t you think?

Click for the set – or take a look at doow.etsy.com

Wandering in Kent

I would have posted this earlier, but electricity got in my way. You see, there was a nice big power surge at John’s office which blew out a few power supplies (great, thanks!). One of the power supplies took care of his server and so I couldn’t get hold of the video in which I star.

John had needed to test a new piece of equipment for his professional video camera – a newer and better version of the equipment that was being tested when we made this video, my master’s guide to ballet. So Dad, John and I headed out into the countryside where only goats and horses could see us messing about and filmed this and that for a while and generally goofed around. Then John went home, edited the film and made us look all serious and accomplished. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that at the end of each day? Just go back and edit it a bit. And maybe add in a bit of appropriately soulful music.

Scientifically proven to save lives. Maybe.

As with so many things I want to just get on and do, it really didn’t take too long to finish this little project.

That’s right, a mere year and three months after I found this warning sign on a visit to Norfolk, I’ve finally cleaned up the image and put the design on a variety of T-shirts in my Cafe Press store.

So for any of you wishing to give those you meet fair warning as to your mild manner and sunny disposition, here’s your chance.

“Danger of death if interfered with” T-shirts available at Cafe Press.

Living the part

When John and Sam were here at the weekend we played Articulate, at first following a version of the rules, then when we’d been round the board once, we made up our own game with the cards. Being someone who would be unable to talk were my hands to be cut off, I was challenged to perform the action words on a pile of cards using only mime. No problem, but I still couldn’t believe it when John correctly guessed “hunting” when I’d taken barely two pantomime-style stalking steps forward. Then I looked down at my hands and saw that without even realising it I’d already been miming holding a shotgun.