Cheer Up Bristol

Because, why not?

Something Completely Different

Other than a blip in March, I've not written anything for a while. Or, at least, I've not written anything here. This is mostly due to Reasons.

A couple of years ago I attended a scriptwriting class. I never intended it should come to anything but it was definitely an interesting experience, not least thanks to my radio drama obsession. But, in October, a new theatre company started up in my town, meeting on a Thursday night.

Seeing as how I was bored most Thursday nights, I went along. Since then I've had my own short play put on, stage managed a play by another writer in the group and I've made a lot of new friends. Now I'm trying something even more different: I'm acting!

So I have been writing. A little bit of drama and a little bit of blog - still very much a little bit actually. But, if you're at all interested in the doings of a small (very) amateur theatre company in a seaside town in Somerset, please take at look at our blog: http://princesstheatrecompany.blogspot.co.uk/

And, if that doesn't interest you, I shall try to post some more knitting related stuff soon as I've recently knuckled down to a couple of more complex projects including completing what is possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever knitted!

Quotes

Dublin airport knows how to do literary quotes. Each display is formed from the words of varying size to create the light and dark patches. So much nicer to look at than large phone company adverts!

Because

I think this may be all the explanation anyone needs in life.

Glaucus atlanticus

For reasons that will become apparent when I (eventually) post photos of my current knitting project, we were discussing sea slugs in work today.

I still can't quite believe this one is real.

2013: The Year of Booze

A couple of years ago, my sister gave me the fantastic gift of a homebrew kit. Delicious cider soon followed. I got a bit out of practice last year but the warm summer seemed the perfect incitement to cider.

In June I made an elderflower cider kit. I'm a strong opponent of fruit flavoured cider (cherry 'cider' is not cider!) but the result is deliciously appley with a subtle extra taste of elderflower. For the first time ever, I actually had enough bottles for the whole batch and I ended up with more than 40 bottles in the cupboard.

In July, I experimented with elderflower champagne. Finding the elderflowers proved to be the biggest hurdle. Burnham was bare so I snuck round to my parents and thieved some from the back field, suffering retribution in the form of extreme hayfever. Although I followed the recipe, the champagne fermented out entirely so I primed the bottles as I normally would for cider. 

The result was interesting. At first I wasn't impressed, probably because I subconsciously was expecting something more like the sweetness of elderflower cordial. But, once it was refrigerated and reasonably sparkling, it turned out to be refreshing and delicious. And, most importantly, non-explosive!

Now it's autumn and time to think about sloe gin. Ignoring the nonsense about waiting for the first frost, I headed out to my secret sloe locations and ran out of boxes before I ran out of sloes. I was raised to ignore quantities when it comes to sloe gin so the recipe is simply: fill a jar with sloes; fill the gaps with sugar; fill the gaps with gin. Wait.

This put me in the infusing mood so, when my mum offered me a reasonably large quantity of plums going spare from her tree, the obvious solution seemed to be alcohol-related. Gin? Vodka? How could I consider anything beyond the fabulously rhyming plum rum! Fortunately, I'm not the only one to attempt plum rum and this blog has a fascinating recipe (plums, rum and tasty spices!).

Due to a miscalculation, I bought a bit too much rum for the recipe. Now spare rum isn't really a problem but I also had a kilner jar spare and spare rum + spare kilner jar = a challenge. Fortunately, this blog gave me the solution (while also helping me use up a spare orange in the process). So now I have a jar of 44 cordial in the cupboard too!

Rubies, Roses and Procrastination

 

Last year I took three very different evening courses: VBA, scriptwriting and sugarcraft. Of the three, sugarcraft was the least rewarding but the one that has been of most practical use to me so far.

This year is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. With only the small sample bouquet from my sugarcraft course to go by, they asked me to make some flowers for their anniversary party cake. Even though my skills are restricted to roses, carnations and some generic foliage.

They asked in October so, naturally, I only started in earnest on Christmas Eve, four days before the party. My Christmas was a quiet one and I spent a few hours each day on the arrangement. I finished it up in plenty of time: the night before the party.

2012

So this blog is over a year old. Who would have thought? When I started it just before Christmas 2011 I was wondering whether I'd actually keep it up. Well, evidence would suggest no. That's not to suggest that it hasn't been fun to write, quite the contrary, nor that I don't intend to pick it up again, only that 2012 was the oddest of odd years.

One of the reasons I started the blog was the fact that I had time to think and I figured I might as well put that thinking into writing stuff down. As the year progressed, I had less time to think and less time to write stuff down. For a while I wasn't even listening to much radio and even my knitting dropped off for a bit.

While I've been going through my quiet phase I missed the opportunity to write about some top quality radio and the months before Christmas are probably my most high-volume time for knitting in the build up to our Wateraid charity sale. I've got a lot to catch up on.

I know it's a little late but I'd like to wish a happy new year to everyone that took a look at my blog in 2012. May 2013 be wonderful.

A Seagull Ate My Hard Drive

Okay, so he didn't actually eat it. But he's definitely planning to.

Blue is the New Green, Red is the New Brown

- 1 green corsa in need of a steering column

+1 blue corsa with fully working steering column

But, in less mixed and far less expensive news, I have fulfilled a long-held desire for exciting hair.

When in Cheddar

Never pick the disturbing wild animals. You have been warned.

Do visit though. Everyone there is lovely and the man in the cheese dairy knows some fantastic cheese facts.

Temptation. And How Not To Resist It

I have just discovered a table of unattended and clearly abandoned scones, complete with clotted cream and jam in the empty canteen. I challenge anyone to not resort to theft in those circumstances.

Wild Mountain Thyme

Here is a video of our community choir singing Wild Mountain Thyme in an attempt to get into a contest at Glastonbury (Abbey, not Festival). We're not very good so I'd reccomend skipping to 2:14 where our conductor falls over some chairs.

Things To Do

Things to do on your smartphone when you're on a train by a field somewhere north of Worcester waiting behind a train that may or may not be stuck on some points that almost certainly aren't working even if the men in orange jackets go and frown at them:

• Check your e-mails
• Check your blog stats
• Look at the time that the train time app predicts that you'll get to Bristol
• Try to work out a new connection for your colleague
• Check your e-mails
• Work out what time the loud woman on the phone opposite will get to her station
• Check your blog stats
• Download a sudoku game
• Mutter about how the sudoku game doesn't work how you wish it did
• Force your colleague to help you with the sudoku game when you realise that you haven't played sudoku in three years and have completely lost the knack
• Find the button that makes the sudoku game work the way you wish it did
• Check your e-mails
• Show your colleague your blog stats
• Speculate why people would have been googling "what is a shape of a tortoise" or "I found my finger reaching" in the first place
• Wonder how someone from South Korea ended up reading your blog
• Find the location of the train on a map
• Search for knitting shops nearby
• Consider planning a trip to Worcester to visit a knitting shop that you nothing about except for that the fact that it is fairly near to the train line
• Check your e-mails
• Check your train times

Under no circumstances dwell on the fact that the stuck train has now robbed you of one of the eleven hours that you will be both awake and at home this week.

Apocalyptic Asperatus

Things have been a bit knitting-heavy lately so, while I listen to a bit more radio, I thought I'd post something completely different: some photos of asperatus clouds from my drive home yesterday.

I wasn't driving (obviously) but they are taken from inside a car so the quality of the photos aren't great.

I've not done anything to these photos, the sky really was that colour. Needless to say, it rained quite a lot last night.

Snuffbox

I'm not sure what is more impressive: the fact that this is actually a teeny tiny mosaic or the fact that it features a polar bear apparently about to get into a fight with a dog over an apple.

Freedom

Are they lost? Or do all hula hoops secretly long for the day when they might return to their natural tree-top habitat?

A Mini Disaster

A little like a mini adventure, only smaller and with more situations of mild peril. I arrived in work this morning and was shocked to discover that my lego minifigures were just minutes away from drowning in a ball of yarn:

Not sure if the cheerleader in the background is cheering on their escape or their impending doom.

And, if that wasn't bad enough, my werewolf had lost his hair in my coffee.

There is Custard Where My Milk Should Be

I don't have much of a readership but, what few readers I do have, have been pointing out that I haven't posted much recently. This is because I've been busy. Not so busy that I haven't listened to any radio or done any knitting, only so busy that I haven't had time to write about radio and I haven't done any interesting knitting.

I'm now less than a week away from my far-too-over-hyped trip to London, during which all attempts to keep this blog on a knitting and radio theme will be entirely abandoned. As will any attempt at making posts of a sensible length as it turns out that my phone is incompatible with all but the most costly bluetooth keyboards. Is it a good thing if your phone has more expensive tastes than you do? Probably not.

This weekend I have been finishing off a prototype for attaching bunting to pillars in work, following a staggeringly bargainous find in St Nicks market in Bristol: 25m of 1inch elastic for £4! I'm not going to attempt to describe just how excited I was to get 25m of elastic for £4 and, quite frankly, I'm not sure it would do me any favours if succeeded. I'm not certain that anything you can buy in St Nicks market justifies that level of enthusiasm.

Still, I now have seven little buntlettes/bunts/buntlings/flags/pennants (delete according to taste) mounted on a pillar-sized length of elastic and, if it works, I'll post a picture tomorrow.

In what was left of the weekend I have cooked a pork and cider hotpot (containing more cider than I'd happily admit to) and I've baked apple crumble slices. This has resulted in the scandalous appearance of half a tetrapack of cold custard in my fridge's milk area, typifying the reckless disregard for the normal order of things and the general decay of everyday life that is probably only natural in the run-up to a holiday.

Anyway, although I've been listening to plenty of radio while I've been knitting and baking, it turns out that all my thoughts are rather boring at the moment. So, instead, here are some pictures of the thing that has been keeping me busy over the last few weeks. I proudly(ish) present an amateur masterpiece illustrating what happens when knitting is combined with over-ambitious development and liberally seasoned with a lack of any coherent design:

The part that I'm quite pointlessly happy with is the exporting. Depending on which options you select, you get very different results from the same canvas. But for some strange reason, no one seems quite as excited about this feature as I am.

All these sections come from the same starting pattern, just exported differently (yes, I'm aware that the colours are hideous, that's not the point)

Should anyone have a lot of patience and an unquenchable enthusiasm for amateur pattern programs with insufficient error handling, I'm more than happy to share.

Springtime in the Twenty-First Century

After spending the last few years insisting to myself and anyone that would listen (plus a few that wouldn't) that I had absolutely no need for a smart phone, I have bought a smart phone. I'm not sure how my usual two-texts-a-week phone use will change now I have 5000 texts per month on this plan.

5000 texts. That's at least 161 texts per day. Assuming I get 8 hours of sleep, I'd have to send one text every 6 minutes, all day, every day. It takes me longer than that to write some texts, especially on this little phone keyboard.

So now I've joined the 21st century I can take photos of things, write very slowly about them and then post them. All from something smaller than my first calculator.

On an entirely different subject: if you have to spend the first sunny Sunday of spring working on a VB project for college, I'd recommend that this is how you do it:

Chilled glass of cider not shown