Happy Holidays

Just a quick message to anyone who reads this blog - I hope you all have a wondeful holiday and a stunning New Year. I think this is going to me my first white christmas - 1981 doesn't count!

Even if snow doesn't fall, there is plently on the ground, trees, houses, and cars to look at.

If I don't blog before I'll see you in the New Year.

Star of Wonder

Last night I finally finished the ‘topper’ for our Christmas tree. As we are in our new flat and this is our first Christmas together, we’ve had to buy a new tree and decorations. Although I’ve been looking for months I’ve still not found a ‘topper’ that I like. So I made one.
A little bit of card, PVA glue, tissue paper, wire and some metal leaf and I’ve made what I was looking for.

Also last night we went to a talk about ‘The Star of Bethlehem – fact or fiction’. It was really interesting and I would have happily listened for longer than 40 minutes. The thing that really amazed me is that there are only 4 references to the Star in the Bible and yet it is such a large part of Christmas as we celebrate it now. How many Christmas cards have we received with the star featuring? How many carols will we sing either about the star itself of things to do with the star – We three Kings, Star Carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem to name a few.
To sum up scientist believe there were things happening in the skies around the time of the birth of Christ, so the Star of Bethlehem is fact.
A very enjoyable, if late, evening.

The Last Writers Group

Today was the last Writers Group Meeting with Anne as chair.
A sad day for all. We’re still not 100% sure how we will go forward in the New Year.

But first we had to celebrate the time we’ve had with Anne.
When she first announced that she would have to stand down there were a lot of emails from the members of the group wondering how we could show our appreciation for her hard work. We finally decided that putting together some of the work we had completed under her guidance as a reminder might be nice.
As I had nothing else to do I thought I would take this on.
The selection of poems and short stories which I received were stunning, meaning in the end our little ‘anthology’ is a good 27 pages long.
I formatted it and turned it into a little A5 booklet which everyone was very pleased with.
But even with presenting the ‘anthology’ to Anne and eating many mince pies she still managed to get some work out of us.

First we folded our paper to make 8 squares. In the left hand 4 we wrote nouns, for instance a stapler or a car. In the right hand 4 we wrote sentences beginning with ‘is’ to describe the noun, for instance 'is something to attach paper together' or 'is a vehicle to make me free'.
We then cut the paper in half and gave the sentences to the person on the right of us. Then taking our favourite noun and sentence we started to write.

A bottle of gin is what you get when you stick your finger in an electric socket.
Well that’s what happened to me. Of course I didn’t mean to put my finger in the socket, it was an accident as I unplugged the hover. One minute I’m doing house work the next I find my self laying on the sofa with a strange buzzing going through my body and my husband standing in front of me with a bottle of gin in his hand.
And what I’m really thinking is Silly goat, doesn’t he know that I don’t like gin, why doesn’t he bring the brandy.
But you can’t say that, after all he looked worried. I’m not sure why. It was only a little shock; I’ve had worse off the electric fence before now.

CIW Associate

Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been revising hard. ‘im outdoors has had the sofa to himself while I’ve been sat in the study reading up the course notes from my Web Design course from 2 years ago. (you are advised not to take the test till you’ve completed the course)
Yesterday I finally took the test – CIW v5 Foundation Exam.
This is the first of 5 exams if I want the qualification CIW Website Design Manager and covered Internet Business Foundations, Site Development Foundations and Network Technology Foundations.
Its years since I’ve taken a test and to be honest I found it pretty nerve-racking.
Half way though I really thought I’d failed as there were so many questions which I had to guess.
But in the end I came out with 63/85 – 10 above the pass mark. Yay!
So now I’m a CIW Associate, exciting stuff.

Now the revision is done I can get on with all the other things I need to do, like TMA 02, finish my Christmas shopping and tidy the flat ready for Christmas…

Thrive website finished

Wow look its December and nearly Christmas!
Like you could have forgotten.

Amongst all the shopping for gifts online, odd bits of writing for A363 and revision for my first web design exam I’ve finally got ‘im outdoors website up and running on a proper address. So now you can visit it on www.thrivelandscapes.org. It’s a real relief to have it all finished and it means we can start to think about new business cards – a good start to the new year I think.
One thing ticked off a long list…

Fish for Dinner

Yesterday, among other things, I had the penultimate writers group. It was very strange to sit in a room with people you are scheming with but saying nothing about it!
Anyway although we’d been given homework I was inspired by something else that Anne sent out about a travel writing scholarship – more info here.
I was inspired by - 'A Memorable Experience Involving Food in a Foreign Country'.

If I was in a city this would be silence, but in the middle of the Ecuadorian rainforest this is the hum of a busy jungle.
Flies buzz, mosquito’s whine, birds call to each other from the tree tops surrounding the ox bow lake and monkeys scream at each other far off.
I am sitting in a long wooden canoe made from a single tree.
Something plops into the water to my right, but I have no idea what; an anaconda or caiman maybe.
In the distance thunder rumbles. But we’ve been here for three weeks now and the constant thunder and heavy down pours are just a fact of life now.
Out on the water the flies don’t follow us and we enjoy the luxury of having nothing trying to eat us.
There are six of us in this canoe and we try to sit as still as possible.
We are trying to catch piranhas and if we don’t we’ll be going hungry tonight.
I’ve never been fishing before. Not real fishing with a line and hook and bate, and I’m fully expecting to be one of the hungry ones.
Knowing there isn’t really much I can do to encourage the piranhas to bite I enjoy the calm of floating on the murky water. The rainforest is thick here and although I know the rest of the group are in those trees I can see nothing to give them away.
I have even dared to roll my sleeves up, so can feel a touch of breeze on my skin, a relief from the humidity of the forest.
Sudden movement behind me means someone thinks they’ve caught something. From here I can’t see it, but someone has dinner.
When my line pulls I think maybe I’ve snagged it on a dead branch under the water. But pulling it up I can see the sparkle of silver and before I know it I have a piranha on the canoe bottom in front of me.
It looks fierce and doesn’t want to be my dinner, but with a carefully placed welly boot and pen knife I stop its wiggerling.
I can’t believe I’ve caught a fish. And quite a big one too. It’s diamond shaped, about the size of my hand and it looks like some over enthusiastic kid has covered it in glitter.
With some instruction I manage to gut it and scale it and as it gets dark I put it on the camp fire with a selection of other fish.
While we wait for them to cook we sing songs in the dark, and I keep a careful eye on my dinner. The white fish is bony but with nothing else to eat, I’m not going to moan.
No one will go too hunger tonight; Alberto caught extra fish and made it look easy.

Suggestions were made on how to improve it, but everyone seemed to like the most of it. So I shall tinker a little before sending off for the 21st Dec.

(this is based on a trip I made to Ecuador in 2004)

Operation Christmas Child part 2

Shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child need to be in on Wednesday.
Due to the kindness of my local Clarkes I have a lovely orange shoe box which I’ve covered with Christmas paper. It is now filled with toy cars, pencils, chalk, a tooth brush and tooth paste and a toy bunny, among other things. Things that a 5-9 year old boy would like, I hope.
So all I have to do now is drop it off a one of the many places that are collecting the boxes and it’ll be on its way to some deserving child.
I hope someone enjoys it.

Jane Eyre, Zombie Killer

On Saturday I made my way down to Southampton University for my first OU day school. This means that you get to meet your tutor and fellow tutees, which is really useful, especially this close to the beginning of the course. The forum is great, but its still hard sometimes to ‘get’ what people are saying if you’ve never met them.
Carmen was a great facilitator, giving us quick exercises to work on – minutes only.
We started by interviewing a character that we are working on or thinking about. Just random questions like, what’s your favourite season? Or what would you save from a burning house? This gives you a really good idea of your characters mind set.
We then had seconds to write a quick monologue, before sticking them on a tube train with the character of the person sitting next to you and having a bit of dialogue.
Even more fun was taking the key points of Jane Eyre and changing it a bit. What would you keep? What would you chuck out? And what would you add? We added some zombies, got rid of most of the romance and had great fun kicking zombie bottom. We called it – Jane Eyre, Zombie Killer, much to the disgust of one of the other ladies. Sadly the two ladies I was working with aren’t from my tutor group.