The Lakes

Hello, how are you? I hope you are well and enjoying this lovely sunny evening, but I know your not, your inside on a laptop procrastinating just like me. Oh well as you and I clearly have nothing better to do I will write down some of the recent happenings in my life and you can read them.

I've just got back from 4 days camping in the lakes. Not actually in the lakes obviously, underwater camping does not exsist yet. I was camping on grass in the lake district. The lakes are beautiful obviously that's why people go there, but they are not a place you can actually live in for long. There are no corner shops, if you want milk you have to extract it from an actual cow, and a lot of the roads don't have names. A man I met who lives in a YHA hostel still has dial up internet. On the plus side they have lots of things out of picture books like mountains and rivers and a lack of crime. But how often do you think 'I need a mountain right now', and how often do you think 'we need to buy more milk?'

Weather wise we had two good days and two bad days. One of the bad days was spent mainly in car parks and cafes and in an old lady art exhabition. I quite enjoyed that bit, not because there was any good art, I just find old ladies amusing and I think one day I would like to join a old lady artist club and I would do especially contraversial art just to see there reaction. On one of the good days we went for a really long walk with Lydia and Amber. Which included a heroic moment when Amber rescued one of my wellies that was floating down a ford we were trying to cross.

On the other good weather day we hired a tandum from a very cool campsite that has a hot tub. Unfortunatly that wasn't the campsite we were camping in. We cycled to wastwater lake and then I made the slightly irresponsible decison to swim to the other side. I based this decision on the fact I could see the other side. However there was nothing to show scale on the other side and it was a lot futher than I thought, at 3/4 of the way across I couldn't even see Dan and he could't see me. There was no way of him retriving me from the other side so I had to swim back. The whole thing probably took about an hour and a half.

On arriving back in to civerlisation we discoved our house had been broken into, which is not very civilised at all. My laptop was missing and the house had been searched through, Dan's laptop had been looked at but they obviously decided it wasn't worth it. Thankfully we don't have much worth robbing, we don't have a tv and although they did look through our board games cupboard nothing took their fancy. The police told us that PVC doors have to be made with a removable pannal in case of fire. Good one heath an saftey. There are many youtube videos showing several ways to get through PVC doors, always handy if you forget your keys/ are a criminal. We spent that evening with friends making mildly rude words in a game of bananagrams, which was very theraputic. Christians just love to go mental like that when they're angry! I spelled out Tampax, pubes and kex.

The next day Dan was very concerned that our chocolate cereal had been stolen as well lukily it was safe and sound.

Embarrasing Myself in Asda

This week I have embarrassed myself twice in asda once while I was trying to buy scissors and once while I was trying to twin my armchair.

What do you mean 'trying to twin your armchair' I here you cry....don't worry I will tell you. We have an armchair that was donated to us when we got married because when you get married everyone wants to unload their unwanted things onto you. At one point we had 2 washing mashing 2 tumble dryers a three piece sweet and 2 other sofas. I am grateful for this stuff but there is a limit to how much furniture we can fit in our house and the limit is 2 small sofas and one armchair. So we had an armchair to get rid of, and for one night only we had a van. We texted round all our friends trying to give it away and then gave up and went to the pub wear we met Katie Hunt - the girl who says yes to everything she's great. She really had no need for an armchair she lived in a shared house with an abundance of armchairs but she kindly offered to take ours because she says yes to everything.

Katie has since moved house and took her armchair with her, so every time we go and visit her or her housemates we can go and visit our armchairs' best buddy- katies' armchair. Then we decided we should twin them. We originally wanted to have a live video link between then so that anytime you were sitting in one of the armchairs you could see what was happening in the other one. However we decided against this because their were some concerns that me and Dan might get up to some chair hankie pankie that the residents of Halkyn ave did not want to see. Oh yeah and financial reasons. So we made these instead:

This is what lead to me having to explain the whole thing to the guy that works in the Asda photo department. I hope this is a craze that will catch on, there's loads of things that could be twined with other things. My mum has actually twinned her loo with a loo in somewhere like Burundi, we have a photo of their loo in our bathroom. It was a charity thing though, I think she gave the charity enough money for the loo to be built. I don't think they have a photo of our loo in their little toilet hut.

The second time I embarrassed myself in Asda was today, I kicked off a little bit. I'm not even that embarrassed actually their the ones who should be embarrassed by their ridiculous policies. Today I got ID-ed for buy these:







Kids Scissors! Can anyone else spot the bit that says 'FOR KIDS' so how stupid is it that you have to be 18 to buy them and that have to ID anyone who looks under 25. Apparently they could be used as a weapon. Please remind me that next time I go to Asda for the soul purpose of attacking someone to either bring a weapon from home or if I plan to attack someone with a weapon bought in the store remind me to take ID with me.

Art can save the world (part 2)

"Art has the power to turn people who previously egged you into your admirers" was probably the message of my previous blog...this blog is more along the lines of

"Art can save the world, if random people saying funny things to you whilst your doing art constitutes saving the world"

I have finally finished my house mural it looks like this:

Here are some funny things that passers by have said to me whilst I painted and in brackets is what I should have said back

'Are you Banksey's Mrs' (Maybe I am Banksey)

'Is this Graffiti' (It's middle class home owner's graffiti)

'Are you a little artist?' (I'm kneeling down, but I'm an adult it's my actual job it says community artist on my marriage certificate and everything.)

'Your talents being wasted' (how do you know? are you just assuming that I have some boring job and I'm doing this for fun, or are you assuming that I have another talent that I'm wasting by doing awful art instead?)

'Dat's decent girl'

'My dog can draw better than I can' (well you have a very talented dog...I did actually say that)

It was a lot of fun and I'm a little bit sad it's over but I have started a new similar project in the back garden of a lovely old Swiss couple who saw me painting this one. I'm so glad to be doing some paid art work during the summer holidays. This little commission could have all gone very wrong before it even started but thankfully the man was too Swiss to realise what was going on. I shall explain....

My husband Dan like to phone me and put on silly accents about 2 weeks ago he managed to totally fool me by phoning from his work phone and putting on an Indian accent. A few days later the Swiss man stoped me in the street and asked for my contact details. I had given out about 5 business cards whilst doing this work and everyone who took one said something like 'I'll be in contact' but a week later no one had contacted me. Then last week I was stuck in traffic when my phone went, at first I hung up but they phoned back so I answered. As soon as I heard the foreign accent I said 'Dan I know it's you, ha ha ha I'm driving phone me later.' luckily the man ignored all this and continued to talk, I was about to hang up thinking it was someone trying to sell me something, when I realised who he was.

p.s. I just spell checked this an it is amusing to discover that the spell check for this blog doesn't have the word 'blog' in it's dictionary, it suggests I mean bog.