Giving Up

Today I have decided to give up on my new years resolution of only buying 3 items of clothing this year. I decided I would get more enjoyment out of breaking the goal than keeping it. My heart wasn't really in it.

I decided to do it in the first place because my mum said she was giving up buying clothes altogether this year because she didn't need any new ones, and I felt that I didn't need many I had a lot of winter jumpers and stuff, but I did need a few more t-shirts so that is why I decided 3 items was enough and I thought I would get all t - shirts. Then I bough a hoodie and a dress so I only had one item left to buy and that really should of been a t-shirt.

Then I bought some padded cycling shorts which I decided didn't count because they were horrible but necessary. Then the zip on my coat broke, and I also decided that instead of taking muslim appropriate clothes all the way though Europe to Istanbul on my trip that it would be better off to save on weight and wear strappy tops all through Europe and buy a couple of covering up things in turkey ready for the middle east part of our big adventure. Also right now I'm not poor enough to stick to my principles. I can do it when I have to, like once I lived on £5 a week food and bought no clothes but right now I don't have to so I'm giving up giving things up.

Other things I've given up in life are the clarinet, my MA, gymnastics and ballet and drama. Out of those things I only regret gymnastics.

This is me wearing my new coat last night:

I recently read a book called the moneyless man, about a man (Mark Boyle) who lived without money for a year, he lived in a caravan and cycled everywhere and ate stuff he grew or food that supermarkets were throwing out. He was all about swapping his skills for things, and community living and stuff. It was quite inspiring but he was a bit to into the environment for my liking. I could never do that challenge...that's quite obvious as I can even go a year without buying more than 3 items of clothes. The one thing I massively disagreed with was when he started chatting on about women and how they should get through their time of the month in a environmentally friendly way. I don't want to go a huge feminist rant .....but I'll bleed on whatever I want to bleed on thanks Mark.

Money isn't all bad, in my opinion it's actually quite a convenient way of swapping things. For example I did a mosaic workshop on in a school thursday which paid for the coat a bought on saturday. How annoying would it have been if I had to take all my mosaic stuff into the coat shop and force the woman who sold me the coat to make a mosaic with me instead of giving her the money? I don't think she'd be down with that.

Me an Joe Fred who has also read this book have been discussing what year long challenges would be interesting, I don't think we're going to try any of them any time soon but here are our ideas:

Buy clothes only from charity shops.

spend 6 hours a day outside.

make something everyday.

live with only 50 items e.g 10 items of clothes 5 items of entertainment, 7 cooking and eating implements, 1 transport device etc ect

Joe is having a no electricity party next week. There are no cameras allowed so I will be documenting the party in the style of a court room artist, and I'm going to bring along all my sculpture stuff so that anyone who wants can make a breeze block sculpture. This is Frank who I made about a year ago:

Procrastinate with me!

Hello....I'm putting off doing borring jobs right now you probably are too, I think 99% of people on the internet at anyone time are procrastinating. So here are some things that have been going on in my life.

1) I went sailing.... I would tell you about it, but I've made a video of the highlights with my super cool underwater camera. It's the first time I've used it in real water ie not the bath. As my Dad keeps pointing out there's not a lot of sailing in it, but the best bits about sailing holidays are the rope swings, and the swimming and the bbqs. Check out my Dad's special boat bbq. In case you're wondering why the boat isn't in the sea...it was low tide... when the water came back we sailed off again.

2) We are having our first ever couch surfer to stay tonight. If you don't know couch surfing is a website that you sign up to and make a profile about yourself, and then you can go and stay with random people for free when you travel (which is what we will be doing on our big trip) but for now we are having a few random people stay with us.

3) Last night Dan told me he loved me so much that if I was a bit of poo on his shoe he wouldn't scrape me off. Aww true love. To be fair to him just before he said that I said that if he was a boggie I wouldn't flick him.

4) Dan decided to run to work this morning! What a mental man I have married. He's not going all the way to southport he's getting the train as well but he's still mental.

5) I did a bit more stand up on monday which included me revealing my new invention 'The He-wee.' If a she-wee makes weeing more easy for women (that is a real product) then the he-wee makes weeing more difficult for men. It really is an amazing product. To hear a bit more about it and see a prototype watch this. A few days ago Dan asked me what I wanted to do for quality time together at the weekend and I answered 'film a advert for the he-wee.' That was not his idea of quality time. I wonder what normal people do with their lives.

Dan's Birthday

Tuesday 30th April was Dan's birthday he was 27 and therfore officially moved from his mid twenties to his late 20s. When I say officially I really mean 'by my definition.' I organised a lovely surprise for him because I'm lovely. Although Dan tells me that when you do something nice for someone you shouldn't say things like 'I saved you the best chocolates because I'm lovely' you should say 'I've saved you the best chocolates because YOU'RE lovely.' I'm working on that.

Anyways I booked a surprise night in a hotel followed by a go karting experience, the hotel had a swimming pool, sauna, steam room, jacuzzi and gym, and would probably be a lovely hotel to stay at when all their building work is finished. They said as we were leaving, that next time we come it will all be ready, seeing as we are not particularly planning on coming again I can only guess that it may never be ready. We came drove from coventry where we'd be visiting my sister to the hotel in chester.

WARNING: This next bit is a tangent: My sister Sarah was doing a fundraiser for her gap year this weekend, I preformed some of my comedy while everyone else did musical things. Sarah- who is about 60% more middle class than me has a friend that plays the harp. That harp playing friend (Jo Lloyd) is about 178% more middle class than me. There was a super cute bit to the evening when a five year old girl wanted to dance to the harp with my friend Doug and he couldn't really say no, so he just got up and danced with her at the front infront of everyone.

I started my comedy with the joke:

'I controversially wore a tie yesterday...I suppose you're wondering why that was so controversial is it because your a girl. No it's because I saw a man from Thailand  shoot him, skinned him, made a coat and then wore it. so it was a little controversial.'

It was met with a mixed response.  I'm not going to tell you the joke that went down really well because I will preform it at mello mello on 13th May and you should come! (end of tangent)

We tried to get the most out of the hotel experience by using everything that was free to us, as soon as we got there we used the pool and steam room. Then we went out for a meal had a bath...(the bath was enormous.) The next morning instead of having a leisurely lie in like you would normally do on a day off, we got up at 8 and went to the gym. I've only been to a gym once on my life, I've even written a blog dissing exercise bikes, but I'll do anything that's free. While the normal gym users did half an hour or so on one machine,  I made use of all of the exercise mashines including the hola hoop within half an hour. Then we went for our big breakfast where we stuffed our faces and also stole 2 cinnamon roles wrapped in a napkin for later.

I then had another bath just for kicks and we left (with all the free shampoo etc) at precisely 11am which was their kicking out time. On the way out I remembered we needed water for the day so I got the receptionists to fill up our water bottles. (Dan was too embarrassed to ask.) She told me they actually have still and sparkling water on tap so it's all free - and she didn't just mean she wouldn't charge us, I think she actually thought it was free. I'm not an economics expert but I do know that even normal tap water is not free.

Right it's time for me to have a hot squash and go to bed. Night x