Oops

So, it's probably about time I blogged again.

So right, let me summarise the last two months, since we were on holiday, in easy to read bullet points:

• did some proofreading assignments
• did a little bit of rubbish writing
• did some good cycling - some longish distances, and one very difficult climb
• spent a lot of nice time with the boys, including doing some really good homework
• experienced single-mumming and rather liked it
• spent a lot of time procrastinating, yet again

So nothing out of the ordinary, all the usual stuff, with the added extra of cycling.  I actually haven't done as much cycling as I should have done, on account of two bad colds and a bad back.  Can't cycle with either of those.  Bit of a bummer, as I'm getting a little behind with my training.  I'm supposed to have done a 50-miler by the end of October, which is in six days.  Fortunately, I have a beautiful new trainer for use in the home - phew!  I plan to stick the kids in bed early on Saturday night and cycle my way through two or three films and get my 50 miles done that way.  I stick my bike on this thing that lifts up my back wheel, pop my front wheel on a stationary stand, whack a DVD in my laptop and off I go, cycling in my kitchen, with snacks and drinks on hand :)  I don't have to stop, can cycle on and on.  It's brilliant.  But I have only used it once so far.  Really I need to get using it, to keep my fitness up when babysitters are scarce and the weather is rubbish.  It's all very well braving the gales and the torrents, but if they just serve to get us wet and cold without becoming any fitter, then I think we may as well cycle indoors!  There's a goal in sight - albeit eight or nine months away - and I haven't got time to enjoy the scenery, I just have to get mega fit.

This is interesting, as I'm the fattest I've ever been in my life, and had never imagined that there might come a time in my fat life when I might actually feel like getting fit - never mind mega fit.  But I'm quite enjoying it, and am already fitter than I was when I did my first cycle.  I can now sustain a speed of 18mph for quite some time on the flat.  I am now only ten or twenty seconds behind Terry on the bigger hills, rather than thirty or forty as I was at the beginning of my training.  It's like Rocky!  Getting stronger... 

Ah, thought I might be tempted to go on about cycling.  Didn't really want to as I suspect that it might be quite boring to read about.  But it's going to be a big part of my life next year.  I just hope I've still got time for writing as well - I do love cycling, but I hate that it needs to take up so much time.  It's not just the cycle itself, it's the fact that you have to warm down when you get home, have a shower and then eat because you're starving afterwards.  Then you get really sleepy and don't feel like doing anything for the rest of the day or the evening.  I'm very often tired the day afterwards as well.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong though, because I thought exercise was supposed to energise one, no?  Perhaps that happens when you get much fitter.  Perhaps that will happen when I get rid of my jelly belly.

I am also now working on a different novel.  I was switching between two projects, alternately hating and loving each one.  My mum asked me to look at the one I started in January again, the one that I did for the NaNoWriMo January project.  I did look at it, and I loved it.  I'd put it aside thinking that I'd never look at it again, it had gone very bad and I thought it had no potential at all.  But when I reread the first 20-30,000 words I saw that it was good :)  There's a lot to work with, lots of possible threads to follow, lots of really good characters, already quite well drawn and easy to visualise.  I've decided to work on that for a while.  It's not like anything I've ever written - but mind you, everything I try is new because I've not been writing for all that long.  But anyway, this new project is going to be good fun, as the story's just ridiculous.  It's quite funny, quite farcical, a bit like a Carry On story, a bit like a St. Trinian's, a bit like Terry Pratchett, and a bit like Thackeray (I'm now reading some Thackeray, because I bought quite a lot of his work when we were in Alnwick - see my hub on the subject of Secondhand Book Shops) which author I love more than any, ever; he is my definite favourite.  I am now a collector, of a particular set of Thackeray's works - very beautiful they are, and possibly a little bit rare (I don't really know whether they are, but I've just done a little search about for them and could only find a couple on ebay that were in dreadful condition - mine are in beautiful condition, especially considering that they're nearly a hundred years old :) )

Well, I think that'll do.  I've no pictures to share with you, because I haven't used my camera since we were in Alnwick.  I must start taking photos again.  There are lots of things that I must start doing again, lazy so-and-so that I am.

Night.

P.S. Forgot - we have two new cats, Bellatrix Lestrange and Narcissa Malfoy; surprising how many people don't know where those names come from.  My girls :)  They're gorgeous.  I have no photos of them, because my phone camera is rubbish and the cats won't keep still enough, and Bellatrix is completely black which seems to make her invisible on photos.

Alnwick, Bamburgh, Beal, Ulgham and Warkworth

Places in the North-East that we have visited over the past week and a bit.  We've been having a really marvellous time, but today the energy has run out a little.  There are only so many days out one can have before one burns out.  So today we are still sitting in the house at lunch time.  No castles today, no beaches, no gift shops.  Actually, that's not true, because we're going out for a walk around the town of Alnwick this afternoon.  The town is two streets away from the house we're staying in, 'the lady's house'.  I wish I did actually live here.  It's beautiful.  Beautiful aesthetically, but also beautiful because beautiful people live here and beautiful people holiday here, and the whole place just feels good, feels nice, feels pleasant.  It's idyllic really, and now that I think about it I cannot remember how it happened that I decided to book a holiday here last year.  I remember trawling through websites of cottages, but cannot remember why I looked at this part of the world.  Perhaps it was on a recommendation.  Anyway, I'm glad that I did.  I will live here one day.  I don't know if it will be soon, or if it will be in a couple of decades' time, if it will be with my family or if it will be alone, but I will live here one day.

I have pretty much no photos to share at this time, because all of them are on Kev's computer because his Apple has a card slot and mine does not, and I didn't bring my lead.  I have only this one, from Bamburgh beach, which I managed to pinch from Facebook, where Kev left it.  This is me in the pit that Thomas asked me to dig - this is only a half-dug pit, we managed to make it quite a lot deeper, and reached the water table and turned the pit into a pool.  But the boys soon filled it in again, because they are destructive (I love my boys, but I do not like their destructive sides).

Oh, now that I see this picture again I can see that the water is just visible at the bottom.  This is as deep as it got.  Funny how this angle of this photo makes the pit seem much shallower than it actually was.  From another angle you can see that the pit is almost as deep as I am tall.  When the boys were in it the top came above their heads.  Matthew made himself some steps to get out :)

We're expecting some rain, so our planned trip to Bamburgh beach tomorrow may be cancelled.  I would have liked to have had one more beach day, since the beaches here are so much nicer than the 'beaches' at Morecambe, but if we can't, we can't, and we'll have to do something else.  No matter.  We'll be back :)

Ahhhhhh, sigh of deep contentment.  I just wish we could stay for an extra week.

More photos next week, when I get home to my lead.

Not my usual Monday morning

Usually, on a Monday morning I'm full of beans, and looking forward to a good week, and bursting with ideas and creativity.  Not today.  Today I am boring.  Today I have no energy, and I'm annoying myself.  What I should have done is got up early, piled us all in the car, and taken us off to the Lakes for a good walk.  But I didn't.  I just didn't do anything.  We watched the final Harry Potter DVD in preparation for watching the proper last film at the cinema this week, and then the boys tumbled out into the garden and played in the rain.  They're still there now, though the rain has stopped, much to their disappointment.

I have done nothing.  Well, I have done boring stuff, such as the washing up, making lunch, and folding some clean washing.  Now I have itchy hands.  I'm not allergic to washing up liquid, no, I just need to do some writing.  It's been a good month since I wrote anything worth showing to anyone, and I do start to feel a bit down when I haven't produced anything good for as long as that.

The solution is clear, as it always is: I must make the most of my evenings.  When I produce good writing of an evening, my days are always better, and I always have more patience with the kiddy-winks, and I always feel more motivated to play with them.  I must start tonight.  I must get something written.  I will do it.

Though I'm a little worried that I haven't got time in my life for writing, and cycling as well.

SLAP!!!!

That was me, giving myself a slap.  I know better than to say things like that.  How ridiculous - of course I've got time for cycling and writing.

In fact, I could do some writing now, since the boys are happily playing in the garden, and actually do not want me to play with them - who could blame them, when my face alternately looks like this:

zoned out,

clinically depressed,

pathetically mourning the loss of a dear pet rat,

discovering the pair of dirty socks stuffed down the side of the couch,

noticing that someone has folded the towels incorrectly.

I'm only looking like this very occasionally:

a little bit demented, on discovering the chocolate hidden at the back of the cupboard 

(it's past its use-by-date, but we're not fussy when it comes to chocolate).

Aren't you, reader, in luck today?  You've been given the rare treat of seeing me sans hair products!  What a blinkin' state I look!  An uncanny resemblance to Cliff Richard c. 1963.

More sketching

About half way through with my sketch now.  Didn't get chance to work on it today, though was itching to pick it up and have a scribble.  

I am actually itching to do something creative for a longer period of time than ten minutes without being interrupted.  But this is the way it is in the holidays when you have three young children (or any number of children - I'm sure it's the same with one as it is with three).  It wouldn't be fair of me to expect to have lots of time to myself, so I resign myself to the fact that I won't get much done for six weeks.  No problem really.  I do get twitchy hands though - I'm dying to sit with a coffee and do a bit of writing for a couple of hours.  Too tired in the evenings though.

Instead, the holidays are a time to do other things that we might not really get chance to do at any other time.  Cloud watching is a good thing that we've discovered this week.  The clouds were amazing yesterday (we didn't see them today as we were ridiculously lazy and stayed in all day!), and the boys were fantastic at spotting different shapes and animals and fantastical things in them.  James was particularly imaginative, and he saw things that I would never have thought of, such as bird skeletons and wolf eyes!  I took a couple of pictures of the clouds.

Maybe if the weather is nice tomorrow we'll get to lie in the garden and look at clouds properly.  Oh, it's a very hard life, he he! :D

Sketching.

We've had a lovely day today.  The boys have been great - heavily influenced by the lovely, and well-behaved kids that they played with on our camping weekend I think.  It was so nice not to be breaking up the fights and bickering, which is what I've been doing a lot lately.  I think that nice weather that allows them to stay out in the garden all day really helps.  Oliver was in in the afternoon, so I didn't see much of them for a couple of hours in the afternoon, so chatted with my dad for a while and then decided to find something to sketch.  It's not easy to find time to write in the holidays, I don't like to sit in front of the computer for a long time when the boys are all home with me.  But I'm finding that I need to find some kind of creative outlet so as not to start getting grumpy.  I can't write much over the next few weeks, but I can sketch.  I can do this because the boys like to spend a lot of time drawing and writing: Thomas is still producing work at a rate of knots, and the work is becoming more detailed and more mature; Matthew usually joins him once he's finished whichever bit of mischief he's been working on; James doesn't draw as much, but when he does he creates masterpieces with no effort whatsoever.  I'm thrilled to bits that they can all draw so well - they may not use art to make a living (although they may, I don't know, of course), but it's nice that they each have a good eye, and the ability to see the world in colour and form.  

Anyway, this is how far I got with my sketch today.  It's a small section from a photograph of King's Circus in Bath.  I'll show you it again when it's finished.  I'm quite pleased with it.  It's not perfect, but it's amazing how easy architecture is to draw.  I'm really enjoying it.  I've been wanting to sketch for a long time, but I just can't do people at all, I'm terrible.  So I'm pleased that I've found something that's within my capabilities!  I'd like to try to complete a sketchbook of drawings of buildings - but you should know me by now: I never stick to one thing, and rarely finish anything!  Though saying that, I do feel as though I'm settling down now, finding a bit of a niche, and being comfortable exactly where I am, and doing exactly what I'm doing.  That's nice :)

King's Circus, Bath.

Just keep going...

It's not a lot, but it's something, and it leads to more things, and before you know it that's everything on the list, and a new list of more things can be made, and you can start all over again with a brand new thing.  Easy really, you know?

I was sitting about this morning, having palpitations about all my little writing jobs that I wanted to get through, and I spent ten minutes staring at a page that contained the beginning few paragraphs of a hub that I could not really be bothered to spend time on right then (ironically, it was a hub about positivity, the ability to move on, and the will to keep motivated!).  Sometimes the task that you've set yourself just isn't going to work if you're not into it at that precise moment, and there's very little you can do about that.  And then you have to just have a look at all your notebooks, and do a mental check of all your tasks, and decide which one takes your fancy.  So I started on a letter; actually I started on finishing a letter that I began a few weeks ago.  And that's all it takes really: starting something, anything, breaks the stalemate and allows you to begin again (strictly speaking, I don't think that a stalemate can be broken, but it's just a little metaphor to illustrate my point).  A letter, or a diary can just remind you how to write if you'd forgotten.  I forget all the time, or my words just can't be bothered to come out.  So if I started scribbling down any old thing it's like a warm-up for my brain.  The writing muscles get a little stretch, and they're ready to go.  I still didn't work on the hub that I wanted to finish, but I did write a blog entry for my other blog, 'From Austen to Woolf', so it turned out to be quite a good morning.  I don't think I wrote a particularly good review of Inkheart, but at least I wrote it.

This leaves me with an evening to go through some proofreading notes, and to possibly get on with a little bit of my novel.  I'm well on with preparing the story, and have a good solid synopsis now, so I can really just sit down and write it.  I'm happier with it now than I've ever been, and I'm quite itching to get the first draft done.  I think it's going to be good.  Whether it will be sellable, I have no idea, but I don't really care.  I just want it to be good enough for me to be pleased with it.  I doubt a publisher will touch it because it's probably not original enough.  But I have to write it anyway.  And in any case, I've lots of ideas for other stories, both fantasy and literary, so I'll not be dismayed if I finish my masterpiece and no-one wants it.  My kids will enjoy it :)

I tell you what though, this no-telly thing in the evenings is brilliant.  I'm not missing watching the telly at all.  We watch a very little bit each week, maybe one or two hours, but that's it.  I don't have any programmes that I regularly watch, I just stick the telly on if I'm in the mood for just doing nothing, and see what's on.  Usually I'll resort to Dave and watch a bit of comedy because there's sod all else on.  Or there might be a documentary that grabs me.  But you can keep all of the CSI whatever-they-ares.  I'm sure they're great and all, but I can't be bothered!

Just killing a bit of time now, while I wait for it to be 5o'clock.  Err, think I'll go and finish that letter then.  Ta-ta.

Here is a blog that I love:  Kristin Cashore, This is My Secret.

Lx.

Cor, I'm ace today!

That might have just been my most productive day, ever!  It was good, and now I am quite tired, but good tired.

Let me just quickly brag about all the things I've achieved today:

1. Getting up early enough to let the boys cycle to school (them cycling means me walking and pushing Matthew in the pram of course, as Matthew can't do the distance quickly enough - we think it's about a mile from our house to the school gate).
2. Walking all the way back home, without getting sweaty!
3. Cleaning our hellishly messy living room, which took four hours (the mess was a year's worth of Thomas's doodlings and writings - there were great piles of papers lying around - he's creative and that's wonderful, but I think it's about time I taught him to tidy up after himself).  Very hard work, I am great.
4. Cooking a healthy and nutritious hardly-any-fat-at-all toasted sandwich for me and Matthew, which we ate with salad, whilst sitting outside in the healthy fresh air.
5. Having much fun talking and talking with Matthew, as he pottered about and helped with the tidying or played with some freshly found lost toys that I had just rooted out of a mountainous pile of stuff.
6. Walking back to school to collect the big boys.  The sun had come out now, and it was too hot for walking to school in jeans - had I known the sun would come out, I would have put my shorts on.
7. Sitting down to do homework with Thomas (only bad thing today: lost patience with poor Thomas, because he's stubborn about maths homework; must remember that losing patience does not help Thomas to learn maths, and also that Thomas gets half of his stubbornness from me!) and did manage to teach him one or two useful things.  Thomas left the table smiling :)
8. Cooking very healthy and nutritious meal of tuna steaks, with very special olive oil and dill/chervil/parsley dressing with prawns, and jacket potatoes with sour cream, and crunchy mange tout.  Now that was very special.  Kev missed it because he had to go out with work people - poor Kev.  
9. Dancing with the boys, when some very funky sixties jazz tune came on the radio.  We danced like loonies, which is one of our favourite things to do.  We always like to leave the blinds open in the living room when we dance, just to make sure that the neighbours can see us and know that we are loonies.
10. Putting the boys to bed, and although starting to get rather tired, still persevering and doing the washing up!  How's about that for motivation?!  I usually leave it until the morning when I'm this tired :)
11. Being a very clever girl, and doing my second, very difficult, proofreading assignment from start to finish.  (I have just finished it now, and although it's very difficult to say, I think I have done quite well.  I'm sure I haven't spotted every mistake, and there will probably be things that I've marked up incorrectly, but I can't expect to get full marks.  But I do have a feeling that I've done quite well.  I seemed to spot a bit of everything that I've been asked to learn so far, and I believe that I have made sure that I have not made the same mistakes as in the first assignment.  But I've got a couple or three weeks to wait until I find out my marks.)
12. Oh, and another little achievement - writing a blog entry about my day :)

Here is a low quality picture of the high quality tuna that I cooked for tea this evening (which the boys loved, and devoured!):

Mmmm :)

Back to a nice routine.

I'm not usually all that keen on sending the kiddie-winkles back to school after the holidays because I miss them.  But this time, I was very happy to have the house to myself again.  We didn't have a bad half-term, but I did shout more than usual: my babes were tired all week, and all they wanted to do was to stay at home and play with their toys, and in the garden.  I indulged them, because I had no money to take them anywhere anyway!  Well, we could have gone to the beach for free, but the weather, as you all know of course, was not great for the beach for most of the week.  I offered to take them to the park, but they were just content to stay at home.  I did drag them out to Holly Farm one afternoon, and we did have a lovely time, as we always do.  And there were a couple of parties.  So all three of our outings involved soft play areas.  Not my usual preferred school holiday activity, but there we are.  To be honest, I was quite bored, and boring, throughout the week.  One Easter holiday, a couple of years ago, I wrote out a list of activities and we ticked them off as we'd done them, and that worked perfectly - we had the best school holiday, like, ever!  But since then I've not bothered with the list, and I should've done.  I will do the list in the Summer holiday (I'd better start saving up now though, as not much on the list was completely free).

I think I also found this half-term to be quite boring because the boys were sometimes at their friend Oliver's house.  He lives in the house behind us, and we've removed a fence panel so that they can come and go as they please.  Usually they're at Oliver's in nice weather, because Oliver has a trampoline!  And even when they're at our house, they're up in the bedroom, and I'm left out!  I want to play!  I've been discarded, for a younger friend.  Hmph!  Wish we'd never removed that fence panel!  I'm jealous of a child!

That's enough exclamation marks!

I've come up with a plan though: I've bought some inspiration - yes, you can buy inspiration now; actually you can buy just about anything if you have a computer and a paypal account - I have bought a pack of Usborne 'Games to Play on Holiday' cards.  And I'm going to lure my children back into our garden with promises of fun and hilarity.  Who needs a trampoline??  Not we.

These activity cards are brill.  Lots of the games only need you and your body, and the rest only require household items that most of us have in the junk drawer.  We're not waiting until the holidays come around again though, no, no, no; we're going to try out some games at the weekend.  It'll probably rain, but that's alright - we can do some puddle jumping instead.  Or, we have a fairly big space in our dining room, we can play some games inside.

Now, I am going to have a lie down, because I think I am coming down with a chest infection!  Hopefully, if I'm nice to it, it will go away very quickly (can't see my mum when any of us have germs - she ends up in hospital when we give her bugs, poor mummy).

I'll just sort of tail off at the end of this post then...  dum de dum...  bye then...

Sunshine. That's nice. Now go away.

I'm not good with hot weather (yeah, yeah, I know, this isn't even really hot - but much hotter than 20ºc (68ºf) and I start to melt, become very grumpy and headachey, and am generally pathetic).  I hate being outside in unshady sun.  Thank goodness we don't get very much up here.  That makes me happy, the thought that the scorchiness never lasts :)  I'm supposed to be outside and playing with my kids, but I just end up lying in the shade somewhere and asking to be allowed back in the house.

This is what I think of when it's above 20ºc:

That is all I have the energy for today.

I am supposed to get on with the next unit of my proofreading course this evening.  I will do that, as long as it's not still scorching hot.  My brain is sweating.

Incidentally, in my car is said that it's 27ºc, which is considerably more than 20ºc, so I'm not being soooooo totally pathetic.

Plodding along, as usual :)

Well hello there!  I'm busy.  Just popped on to say that really.  Always got something to do, always got something to write, got many books to read, many magazines to pore over, quite a bit of studying to do, and some decisions to make.  All good, all fun, all invigorating, and all exciting (for me anyway, quite boring for everybody else).

Still not doing very well at getting all the things done that I need to do though - but at least I have got out of the habit of sticking the telly on and switching to 'Dave' and watching repeats of comedy panel shows!  That was silly.  My life might have been full of humour, but it wasn't moving anywhere.  You can't stay in Daveland for ever; after a few weeks you've seen all of the repeats and then you're watching the re-repeats, and that's just stupid.

Mmm.

Here is what I'm listening to this morning:

'Sanctus' by Karl Jenkins.  Make what you will of that :)