the Lady with the Hidden Spoon

Last night Mother's Jam performed at an open mic evening at the Barge Inn. It went phenomenally well. Shutting the pub up is what I aim for as a sign of achievement, and we did it - and it's to be noted that they didn't quiet down for many (which annoyed me actually, but I know how it is - most people go to a pub to have a drink with friends, and they aren't paying for the entertainment so therefore they don't value it, and this is very sad because DUDE, FREE MUSIC, IDIOT!!). Anyway - Mother's Jam were AWESOME and for a band that's so very new, with only a small repertoire, the possibilites are making me very excited indeed!

Well done, ladies. ~beams~

I did a solo set of six jazz numbers (My Baby Just Cares For me, Caramel [sexy bossa by Vega], Every Time We Say Goodbye, My Funny Valentine, Makin Whoopie and He's A Tramp, if anyone's interested) which also went down rather well. :D

Yesterday I serviced my washing machine. Although I regularly remove the filter and clean it, there was a bit of a surprise lurking further than I could reach without the aid of a pair of chopsticks.
...I can now add hairball midwifery to my list of specialised skills.

Also, Oriental cuisine is off the menu for a while. If I ever feel like eating again, that is.

...which was offered to me, for nowt, and about which I mentally dawdled, has already gone on to another home.

I don't know whether to be sad or relieved. I really would like a dog, my favourite being a labrador (although I am not actually fussy if the animal in question is of sound health, young enough to be trained properly and obeys 2 rules: 1] when it speaks, it must bark, not yip. 2] It must have a tail, not a stump or a whimsical corkscrew) but now is not a good time for one to arrive. I can safely guarantee that my parents would not appreciate puppy-widdling in their house over Christmas, and the pup would likely cringe from the sounds of festivities and be totally disoriented by the lack of stability.

No, though I think a dog would be a wonderful addition to our family, it needs to happen when I can spare the time to dedicate, can risk sleepless nights and have the energy to mop up accidents. It will be like having a baby again. Only one that will grow up to hail visitors with a volley of excited barking which one hopes will deter would-be burglars but not friends.

Although one never knows what the harpies will grow up to be capable of. It's quite possible that one of them could learn to bark.


~*~


Last weekend brought about a rather pleasant first - performing Delibes' Flower Duet with my sister... with accompaniment. Oh, we've sung it a capella for years; anyone in our family will tell you that Ems and I have been bursting spontaneously into song together since we were tiny (to quote my dad, last weekend: "They're scary - they'll just launch into a duet without consulting each other on the key or timing, in fact without any sort of signal at all." I've never thought that was weird. Singing for me has always been like breathing, only without the silence.)

The concert went very well - band played excellently as usual, and the children's choir they had were energetic as well as talented. Ems and I sang in the finale as well - Joy To The World for her and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas for me, carol descants etc. And the whole thing went without a hiccup, even when the bottle of champagne Dad was presented with fell through the bottom of the gift bag onto the hard, stone floor of the church...

...and bounced.

I suggest he doesn't open it for a few days, and can only be thankful that it didn't explode and no one lost an eye to a flying shard of glass. Oh, and trusting those gift baggies in the future? I shan't be.


~*~

Finally, I've posted nearly all of the gifts we made this year....APART FROM YOU MIM BECAUSE YOU HAVE MOVED AND YOU HAVEN'T ANSWERED YOUR EMAILS -- PLEEEASE CAN I HAVE YOUR NEW ADDRESS?!?!.....but have yet to actually make a start on the Christmas cards. Oops!

A rather long time ago, when Harpy 2 was a mere babe in arms, I got a call from a woman I had met once or twice, asking me to meet her and a friend in a local pub to discuss an idea they'd had.

After a few too many glasses of wine, I discovered I had agreed to become a choirmistress. Except it wasn't to be called a "choir" and the term "mistress" was the result of much childish sniggering. It was to be a women's community singing group for non-singers. I was excited by the idea, although a bit nervous. At that time I was teaching individuals, but the last time I'd done any sort of group direction had been years ago, in a London stage school. The experience had been hair-raising to say the least. But these aren't kids - these are adults, I thought, as I sporfled into my wineglass at a particularly ridiculous sally. For a given value of adult...

We began, just we three, in Poll's living room. She had an ancient piano that honked and squeaked and rumbled in addition to the notes that occasionally occurred when the keys were pressed. The first session culminated in a chord. Just one, major chord. One singer to a part. They'd said it couldn't be done...but it could. Maybe that doesn't sound earth-shattering, but to people who had always believed they couldn't sing a note, it was major progress.

I wasn't the most orthodox choir-domme. I had them howling, baying like wolves, doing synaesthetic improv' and impersonating gibbons. After a few weeks, the choir's numbers had trebled. We were working on a Zap Mama song; I'd give them each their line to be repeated parrot-fashion - there were no music-readers in the group - and when at one point someone exclaimed with excitement "Oh my God! We're singing!" I felt a real buzz.

By six months, there were twenty members, and we had 16 songs under our belts. We did our first performance at the local community hall. Then suddenly we were being asked to sing EVERYWHERE. I lost count of the number of churches we sang in at Harvest, Christmas, Easter. We did village fetes. We did garden parties. We were even asked to sing at christenings and weddings. It was like a singing explosion and I couldn't churn the arrangements out fast enough.

When I moved to Ireland, I left the singers in the capable hands of an experienced musician. When I returned to live in England, I took up the reins again for a short while while the new director was in Hong Kong, but handed them back quite happily. And never really looked back!

Til recently. I got a call from that self-same woman lately, and she asked if I could pull together a quick "emergency" set for an appearance at the community hall. Turned out that the singing group had become a choir, and with that had formed an attitude of snobbishness about where they performed. The girls had always sung at the community hall at Christmas but this year there had been mutiny. After all, the new choir-domme had them singing (amongst other choirs) in the Albert Hall. After that, the local venues didn't seem so appealing. So would I be interested in helping out? The concert's in 4 weeks.

Heh heh heh. I can't resist a challenge.

So yesterday, the two founder members showed up. It was like old times. Even the gibbon bits. We laughed and chattered and sang, and I don't think there's going to be any problem with our slot in the concert.

Now, here's the thing.

They'd like to start the "not-a-choir" up again, and they'd like me to run it.

:D

It's a month before Christmas trees go up, and yet I traipsed around town looking for a small artificial tree to replace the one that got broken, and all but the most expensive, exclusive "45 quid for a twig in a hessian hankie" shops have sold out.

Even tesco had sold out. Of Christmas trees. In early November.

~blink~

I was only LOOKING, because duh, it's only the beginning of November. And yes, nothing beats a real tree.
The scent!
The authentic elegance!
The hives and swelling lumps under the skin if I go anywhere near a real one.

Also, my house is so tiny that I can only have a mini tree, or the room starts looking like something from Alice in Wonderland.
It's tempting to go for the entirely non-traditional look, go find a long bit from the logpile, wind it round with ivy and holly from the hedge, and stick it in a vase.

An opt out, if you please, for the crubbish into which you have turned the LJ profile.

Now.


Edit
http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/23133.html
http://community.livejournal.com/changeitback/

Or so it seems!

She sent me an email from school saying look mummy, it's you and Vampire Mike (what they've always called their Grandpa, my dad)

And so it is. ( Picspam )


Hopefully next year's photo will be more flattering. And in concert dress. And with my sister! :D

Right - back to PROJECT:LOUNGE

♥ Kait

So my dad's asked my big sis and me to sing with his band this Christmas (actually, it'll be the first year she and I get to do it together!) and I was thinking ok.... right. Now here's a challenge for the not-a-diet* I've been on for the past month:


I will make it a goal to fit into the red dress I wore two Christmases ago (the one I couldn't zip up even a millimetre last year), so I can wear it to the concert.

Curiosity got the better of me - as I was going to bed tonight I thought... I wonder how much I will need to lose before it will fit.
So I dug it out.



( Picspam under cut. )





Soooo.... now I need a new goal ;)




* Spark People.

Today my lovely lovely mummy ♥ came to help me with PROJECT:LOUNGE. The lounge has been the most difficult room to work on, and I've done every other room in this house so far so I know what I'm talking about. It's a thoroughfare from the bathroom and kitchen to upstairs as well as a family room. It's also very tiny. So today, lugging furniture, banging my head rather nastily in the process (and I didn't swear. Although I said three words that began with F as I clutched my head and cried) and then finishing with the wall-prep. Which involved (gingerly) removing all traces of the horrid, hated, badly fitted wallpaper that was ballooning in some places, tenaciously clinging in others.

It's in a horrible state. One wall - the outside one - has been plastered recently (I'm guessing just before we moved here six years ago) but the remaining three are so bad I can barely imagine what that one wall must have looked like!

So we have: new plaster... and in some places ancient cracked lime plaster. And in other places there is concrete. And still others, what seems to be hardboard nailed to the laths and skimmed over with a superthin layer of plaster. It's a hotchpotch of crazy DIY from the past. And I expect people 100 or so years ago didn't have much colour choice when it came to wall paint. But izziewizzie and I were on the case!



( picspam - before and after )

I've just been using my LJ as a food diary, because I have weight to lose and a good shape to get into! :p

Life's been pretty full up with harpies returning to school (omg HOMEWORK for Harpy 1), using SparkPeople to get back on track with the healthy lifestyle, and walking miles and miles and miles and miles. Did I mention I've been walking a little?

I have just embarked on a new DIY mission - Project:Lounge - which has been crying out desperately to be beautified. Now, when the children are out during the day, I can begin...

I'd made a bit of a start previously. This means, I picked at the edges of wallpaper, tried out over 20 different matchpot shades (we swap em around in the village because at 2 quid a pop, they add up) on various bits of wall and brick and wood, and decided on a colour scheme, which shall be warm/calming neutral, because it's a small room and it needs to be as peaceful as possible. I'll have to see what I've got in the archives to represent a "Before" photo, but I have taken, today, some "It Has To Look Worse Before It Looks Better" pics ( which can be viewed by clicking this cut. )

That's all for now! Back to the grindstone :D

♥ Kait

WHAT.

I am absolutely stunned.

I wouldn't have moved the dummy. I'd have added a couple of garters, and stuck a jewel in the navel.
What is wrong with some people?????????????

It's a pregnant belly, folks. We all lived in one for nine months. You'd think people would have better things to complain about, wouldn't you? Like oh, I don't know, violence and war and famine and...and perhaps the fact that a lot of display mannequins are a UK size 4 with perfect (albeit plastic) breasts and a toned midrif?

Cos I know that gets my goat.

Mrrrr.....

( A meme, ganked from O, which delighted me with its randomness. )

I love discovering random images, and Flickr is always worth a browse. :D

In other news, I have been decorating the kitchen! Those of you who have visited this humble abode will know that it was getting pretty dire. The decorators had been in just prior to our moving in six years ago and they did not do a great job. This house was built in the mid 1800s and has a lime plaster ceiling...therefore putting paper over it with wallpaper paste is rather optimistic. The paper started peeling when we'd been here six months. Various attempts to get it back up there included PVA glue, drawing pins, weetabix, swearing. Weetabix was actually the most successful but I worried a little about weevils.

Anyhow, kitchens, as anyone who has a family will know, are one of the most difficult rooms to decorate, especially if the nearest take-away is over 6 miles away and you have no car. And I loathe being BBQ monitor. So, with much dragging of feet I purchased the necessary accoutrements, donned my oldest clothes and prepared to move everything twice a day, in order to be able to feed my kids once I'd spent the day slapping slop on ceiling and walls.

The walls were painted that beloved of rental rooms, Magnolia. I'd touched it up at one point with some more magnolia (see above, couldn't face the aggro of moving all that furniture!) but that's it. Instead I got some better quality emulsion suitable for kitchens (ie grease-repelling, washable) in a rather pleasing shade of rich sky blue.
(  Photospam continues! )

( Music! )

*Huge thanks to opprobriate for the stupendous media-sharing find!

Well, of course, there are all sorts of bad days...so I shall pick one at random.

There's the sort where everything inanimate decides to conspire against you. The washing machine beeps plaintively at you mid load and you can't actually open the door to take out the extra towel that makes it overweight unless you want a floorfull of soapy, lukewarm water. Sometimes you don't care because the floor needs to be mopped anyway, so you mop it and as you finish, you realise that there are dishes to be washed. So you run the taps to fill the sink and get an urgent urge to visit the little girls' room as you do, so you nip in quickly, spot another wet towel on the floor and pick it up, noticing that underneath is a pile of small person's clothes that will need to go into the wash, and what on EARTH is that pen doing there?

The pen is returned to its proper place and then you remember that you had run the taps in the kitchen sink which has now overflowed. So you mop the already clean floor. Then the phone rings and when you pick it up it goes dead because you have forgotten to charge it up and whoever called will now think you don't want to talk and are using the rudest option short of telling them to eff off to let them know.

That sort of bad day is usually best dealt with by going outside and pretending, for an hour or so, that nothing happened. The sort of attitude that a cat adopts when it has just fallen over backwards whilst trying to leap gracefully from table to floor. If you can wash yourself with your paws, this would be the perfect time to do exactly that.

Then, once you have soothed your nerves and your blood pressure has returned to normal, stay outdoors for a bit longer and actually enjoy being there.

Then you can go back in and put the phone on to charge, so you can dial 1471 and apologise, unless it was a telemarketer in which case the eff off option is not only just but positively balsamic.

The other day, I ran out of clean pairs of knickers. Actually, this isn't true; I had plenty of pairs all piled up in a laundry basket, but the basket was over the other side of the room, and there was a box in the way of the basket, and a duvet that was to be recycled on top of the box, and on the duvet, sunning herself, was a very comfortable cat. So it was with a certain amount of lazy hopefulness I stuck my hand right to the back of the knicker drawer, and pulled out...

The C string. (NB link NSFW.)

What? OK, it's barely a step from undercarriage-nakedness, but you have to try things sometimes. (Remember the invisible strap bras? I once owned one...that, however, is another story.) For I had to go out on this day to replenish my electricity meter with the recharging of the plastic key and undercarriage-nakedness was not appropriate in case I was run over by a bus and if anyone saw that I wasn't wearing underwear I would die of shame if I wasn't already.

Anyhow, the C string had been tried on once, for about 2 minutes, had proven reasonably comfortable but not particularly practical for cold season wear and subsequently had been shoved back in favour of the Harvest Homes ("All is Safely Gathered In") and forgotten about. However, now it was spring, and besides, I didn't fancy an obstacle course so I badoinged it in place and went downstairs... could hardly tell I was wearing it!

So I checked to see if I was. And I was. Result!

And as I idly pondered over how one laundered such an item, whether a C string could be described as a "pair" and therefore a "they" rather than an "it", whether it (for surely it could not constitute a pair - a pair of what?) was hand wash only and whether the washing instructions were on it somewhere and if so, where... and if anyone had ever dared to casually throw a dozen of into a machine at the laundromat before... I got ready to go to town.

In town, I windowshopped for a while, made some appointments, and then sauntered casually over the little duck-bridge towards the supermarket.

Even though it costs a temporary pound, and despite the fact that there were only a few needed items, I got a trolley instead of a basket because I hate carrying a handbag AND a basket, for obvious reasons.
Resolving not to then fill the trolley just because it was there, I trotted cheerfully over to the fruit aisle. Oranges. Garlic. Hmmm, what else might I need? Grapes. Ooh. And disinfectant spray for those unfortunate cat accidents, so to the other end of the shop I wended. Past the Aisle of Cakes. Mmm, shouldn't shop whilst hungry, but those look delicious. Too delicious. Dairy aisle. Got Milk? Yup. Ooh. Squirty cream or no? Oh go on, be a devil as the advert said; naughty, but nice.

Anyway, I digress. Eventually, I did get to the disinfectant and then approached the the kiosk, whereat I would purchase my goods, and the electricity. Made the usual joke: "I'd like a bucket of your finest electricity please..." The cashier began to scan my groceries and, bored, I started scanning the tic-tacs, the chewing gum, the magazines. I wonder if the kids would like one?
National Geographic! And Ponies. Great. I made a quick lunge toward the magazine rack, so I'd be in time to add them to the pile before the cashier had finished.

Something red
and shiny
and shaped very much like a C
boomeranged across the supermarket floor.

Something red, and very wide-eyed pretended it never happened long enough to pay the cashier and then...oh sod it... bent casually down and picked it up and slid it into her handbag.

I didn't know whether to cry or perhaps die on the spot, without underwear, in the middle of a busy supermarket
So instead I waited til I'd got to the little duck-bridge.
And HOWLED with laughter.

The masticating sounds of a trio of contented guineapigs provide a counterpoint to the pathetic mewings.

But, see how quickly she found the warm fleece blanket.

See how quickly she curls up and washes herself and pretends she was just seeking a drink.

Of course we will never know that, in order to flee from the other cat, she ran straight through the pond.

For she will never tell.

I am about halfway through the fall-asleep-because-it's-so-boring cleaning. I didn't realise what squalor lurked in corners.

...actually, I knew full well what state they'd be in, but I had to wait until I saw dust bunnies with actual teeth[1] before I made any concerted effort to actually battle with the grime and grue.

However, while I was unstuffing the hanging basket that dangles above the washing machine, I discovered the following:

the 'lost' sunglasses. All 3 pairs.

7 'unmatched' socks, 6 of whom immediately found partners.

a plastic ruler, belonging to Harpy 1

a stuffed Pikachu toy belonging to Harpy 2

a twenty pound note!!!!!!

...nine clothes pegs. (See previous post)

I also discovered five cigarette lighters in the sombre shadows of my handbag. And a moth.[2]

[1] I'm lying.
[2] I'm not lying.

Tesco online have stopped selling Ecover products! Washing up liquid in 32 flavours and then some, but none of them ecologically friendly (to a point where anything can be).

~snarl~

And they don't sell clothes pegs. You can buy eight different types of drier sheets, but not a simple pack of clothes pegs.

I don't own a bloody tumble drier because they're huge power-suckers.


Now, they probably sell those aforementioned items in store, but I tend to do my shopping online as I don't have a car, and the nearest shop is 6 miles away, and the bus services have turned in the past 5 years from Great to Meh.

So 'm a bit annoyed.

And also a bit of a fraud, because Tesco has dreadful policies, and of course it costs in fuel for them to deliver to me.

I shall move, in the next couple of years, to somewhere with a walkable shop. In the meantime, I'm registering with Asda. Who are owned by Walmart. Oh well.

The lovely opprobriate linked me to this site, which details how pond scum from sewage works can be used as biofuel, with the potential to lower the carbon footprint of air travel to zero.

Quoting:

We’ve recently featured the 787 Dreamliner airplane from Boeing, and the Ecojet prototype from Easyjet as examples of environmentally-friendlier air travel innovations. And now comes news from the beautiful land of New Zealand that its biggest airline, appropriately known as Air New Zealand, in conjunction with Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation and Boeing, is testing the waters for a new fuel made from the algae found in pond scums, which could have the capacity to reduce the entire carbon footprint of the airline industry to zero.

The process, created by Aquaflow, involves the harvesting of algae directly from any nutrient-rich settling ponds. This process is usable in many types of waste streams such as the ones created by the transport, dairy, meat and paper industries. The process works by exploiting the capacity of algae to absorb the nutrients available in the settling ponds, cleaning up the water which can then be used on other areas. The algae is then harvested and transformed into an alternative fuel source. So not only can biofuel created from this process, but is possible to clean up and reuse the waste water streams from major industries.

Air New Zealand is just one airline in the industry focused on creating alternative fuels for airplane engines. Last April, Virgin Airlines announced that it will start trialling the use of biofuels in a 747-400.

Exciting stuff!

Ladies and Gentlemen, this post is not locked. :)

( Before and Afters. )

That's all for now, folks. Sorry I've been so absent over the past few months!