Should We Buy a Shop?

We're looking for a new house with a bit more room for our us, baby Jones, Lola the rabbit and ideally a lodger or two. Yesterday Dan and I and our friend Joe were chatting about where we might live next and we started talking about living in a shop. Not just a shop, a house that includes a shop, because really who doesn't want to have a big extra room that you could do crazy things with?!

Here is a link to the shop on rightmove

Ok it's decorated like a old people's home, and you can't park outside, and it doesn't have a garden but forget all that and think about all the cool things you could do with the shop! Forget commercial things for the moment as I bet that involves filling in some kind of form. Here is the list of things that we came up with in order of most sensible/ realistic/ boring to craziest.

1) Mini home gym

2) Art/music studio.

3) Home cinema with a ball pool instead of seats.

4) Climbing wall leading around the room to indoor tree house.

5) Indoor camping area with a turfed floor a, campfire a, gypsy caravan and a tepee.

We're going for a viewing on friday, don't get too excited though because we do have to sell our own house first....also Dan might need a bit more persuading. Feel free to help out with that.

Baby Jones :)

So near the end of my last blog I said "that's all our news" That was a lie sorry. We have a super exciting wonderful piece of news that I am so glad I can finally share!

And just in case you're wondering... no it doesn't have a wicked witch's nose and a little Jewish hat, those random bits are apparently 'artefacts' I'm not really sure what that means but they're not real things they're like refections or something.

Baby Jones is due on 4th November. It's currently the size of a large plum and right now doesn't have fingerprints but it will by next week -how crazy is that?! We're looking forward to being a family of 4 (including Lola the rabbit) although she wasn't that chuffed when we showed her the scan, she just sniffed it and hopped off. I think she was a little disappointed it wasn't a carrot.

P.s If you want to hear my new stand up material about pregnancy (and other subjects) come to the Pilgrim for the final of 'Liverpool comedian of the year' this Thursday 1st May 7:30, £3.

Houses, pets and crazy dances

Hello, sorry for not blogging for a very long time, to be honest I'm not sure how long this blog will continue. This used to be my outlet for things I thought were amusing in life, but now I save up those things for my stand up. I don't want to give up just yet though, partly because I'm worried that I can't do anything for more than 5 years. (As I child I did gymnastics between the ages of 5 and 10 then I did drama classes between the ages of 10 and 15 and then I had a boyfriend between the ages of 16 and 21) I've been doing this blog for 5 years and 4 months.

Recently I've been taking photos, making people do silly dances, traumatising rabbits and trying to sell our house. Here's some more details:

I sold my wedding dress and bought a camera, here are some photos I took when visiting my littlest sister in the Isle of man.

So far in my learning about photography, I've mainly learnt 'everyone loves a bit of blurriness somewhere in a photo.' For more top tips for the amateur photographer check out other bits of the internet.

 Also I've been making more people dance the YMCA in arabic.

Because pretty much everyone in the world who goes to a comedy gig and thinks "I wish I got to do a dance on stage today and I wish it was just a touch harder than the YMCA with the english letter shapes that's a little bit too easy"

I also got into the final of 'Liverpool comedian of the year' which is on 1st May this is my performance in heat 2 of the competition, there's not a lot of new material in it but there's a bit: click on this to see it.

 Which reminds me..... HAPPY NEW TAX YEAR EVERYONE! 2013/14 has been my most successful tax year ever! I may even have to start paying tax! I'm exaggerating a bit I do normally pay a bit of tax, but I might actually have to start paying a tiny bit of student loan off, if they can work out who I am....they don't know my married name and they only have my parents address, which is a house that is soon to be knocked down so good luck finding me. My mum says I should phone them and tell them. Mums hey... that's a crazy idea.

So yes that other thing, you know our adorable bunny Lola?

Yes her,

I though "what could a bunny possibly love more than a little trip on a lead to Sefton park?" turns out a lot of things. Like the safety of her own hutch. There are sometimes when I wonder whether Lola likes something, but when a rabbit plays dead for a while before going absolutely crazy and running very fast in circles (because thankfully she couldn't escape) you kind of get the hint she is not loving the park trip. Sorry Lola I promise not to take you again.

We've also put our house up for sale check it out: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-43689877.html

Everyone keeps asking us where are you moving to? but we don't really mind not moving much at all we just want a bit more space, ideally enough for a lodger and children. I'd quite like to move to what I've named 'posh L15' (we currently live in scally L15.)

So that's all our news, (oh yeah and my other sister got engaged- congrats guys!)  one last thing before you depart from my blog. How would you feel about starting a new version of 'lol' for older people? I know I'm only in my 20s but I just can't get on board with 'lol' here are two alternatives. Feel free to use them!

IJAC - I just audibly chuckled
IOLIMHBIWVF - I only laughed in my head but it was very funny

Rabbit "facts"

This is Lola, our lovely rabbit, I wrote some facts about her but then I decided that it was boring to anyone who isn't me so I made some facts about rabbits instead:

Rabbits were invented by Sir Henry Rabbit in 1672, the prototypes were furless and did poos the size of cow pats, but that was quickly changed when the public demanded cuteness as a key characteristic of their pet rabbit. so poos were made tiny and fur was added.

When rabbits and dogs mate that makes kittens. Contrary to popular belief cats cannot mate with other cats just like mules.

Rabbits like many stars in our galaxy are actually dead, but because 'cuteness' and 'cuddlyness' lives on for up to four years after the rabbit has passed away, you can't really tell which rabbits are actually dead.

Rabbits have a gestation period of 4.7 seconds. The average rabbit litter is made up of 25 baby rabbits 4 guinea pigs a furby and a partridge in a pear tree.

When rabbits twitch their noses their are actually communicating in morse code, but because they speak in shakespearian english morse code it is quite had to understand them even if you're fluent in morse code.

In word war two British rabbits were evacuated by hot air ballon to the Galapagos islands to protect them from the Nazis, however they refused to take gas masks because they are incredibly vain.

Most rabbits give birth to live young but lop eared rabbits lay eggs.

Rabbits have their own internet. Rabbit web addresses start with RRR and usually end in .hutch .carrot or .hop

This is the kind of ridiculous stuff I might tweet from my new comedy twitter account that I just set up today. https://twitter.com/comedyhan follow me if you want more nonsense!

Pets and Aliens

Happy New year if it's still ok to say that on 18th January. Welcome to the 5th year of my blog, that's pretty good going when you think I only started it for something to do on the late shift at the bluecoat (a gallery I used to work at)

Last year my new years resolution was to only buy 3 items of clothing during the year. I failed at that massively by buying probably about 15 items. This years resolution is to try at comedy because until now I've just occasionally been doing it in a place where we know people, but I would like to push myself a bit and try doing some new material in new places.  I'm doing some on monday and on a sunday in feb both at new places, so really I've almost already achieved my aim. This is a link to the last one I did on 6th Jan in Mello mello. I enjoyed that one a lot. Especially dancing the YMCA in arabic.

Since I last wrote I made a sci-fi film with 6 and 7 year olds...here are some stills from the movie, in case it's not obvious that's an alien named Michael and a flaming meteorite (made from a chair bed.)

 ...Also I got a bunny rabbit called Lola!

 I got her just over a week ago on the friday before my birthday, it was an odd evening where we discovered that not all people from the internet are peedos.... some are genuinely lovely people.

We'd been trying to make a bit of money selling things on ebay recently, and so were very excited to find a big vintage suitcase in the street by some bins. I thought that kind of thing was in at the moment and that we might be able to get £20 for it. We quickly discovered that's not really true when a couple of days before the end of the ebay bid it was still at 99p and £5 postage. The suitcase was really big and I was worried we would make a loss on the postage so we did something very naughty.... we got our friend to bid a fake £5 for it to push the price up just so we didn't make a loss.  It's not that naughty really, I've done naughtier things.  Anyway it sold for £5.10 and they said they'd collect so bonus we would actually make over £5! The buyer asked a few questions like did it come from a smoke free home. Yes the street is a relatively smoke free space. He was such a lovely guy who was about 18 and arrived on a scooter which was hilarious because the suitcase really was massive! and he gave us £6.10 for it in the end. I felt pretty guilty as he rode off knowing that we had made a profit from something we had found on the street, and that he might get stopped by the police.

Then we left to make our exciting internet enabled purchase (the rabbit) and met the cutest craziest couple we have met for a while. They were in their 50's and they had 23 rabbits 2 dogs 2 rats 6 hedgehogs and 3 sugar gliders which are odd animals that look like this:

 and fly like this.

The couple gave me a birth certificate for my rabbit, and then showed us all the pets they had. We chatted a bit and I said Lola was my birthday present. I paid them the £20 for her, and just as we were going out to the car the guy came out and said Happy birthday and gave me my money back! How lovely is that! If you ever want to buy a rabbit off them here is their website http://www.rabbit-den.co.uk/

Mike and Katie and Snails

This post is mainly dedicated to the lovely Mike and Katie our close friends who have just got married.

It's also dedicated to our new friends Brian and Tracey who are plastecine snails that we made a couple of days ago.

Katie and Mike are a totally brilliant couple, they were totally brilliant as individual people so it's only logical that they are brilliant together. My favourite thing about Katie is that she says yes to everything which means she's always up for fun times/ helping you grout a mosaic/ agreeing to have an armchair you're trying to get rid of. I asked Dan (who knows Mike a bit better) what his favourite thing about Mike was and he said "he's honest, he's funny and he cares about his friends a lot."So they are just a couple of the great things about Katie and Mike.

We wanted to get them a nice wedding present.  When we got married, Katie asked me 'if you could have anything in the world what would you want?' I thought about the time we had a lot of fun messing about on someone's canoe recently and without a lot of thought to practicalities said 'canoes' because I didn't think it would actually result in all our friends chipping in and breaking a van in the process of buying us two enormous canoes. This is them in our garden.

 There was no way we could top that, but I decided to make them a handmade present all the same, it took me a very long time to make this thing and I was still making it on the morning of their wedding day. I didn't leave myself much time to wrap it well. In fact it was just wrapped in cardboard with a mixture of gaffa and electrical tape. It looked a proper mess, and it wasn't as if I could hide it way behind the other presents as it was A1 sized. We took it to the reception venue, using it as an umbrella, only to discover that we were in charge of taking all the presents home, so actually I could have just left it at home and wrapped it better.

Dan was the best man, I was 'wag of best man and Grace sayer' which is a really important role. The grace sayer bit came about because just before we got married Katie said she loves saying grace (of course she does- she loves everything) So I said she could say grace at our wedding, and she decided to return the favour although it was only decided 5 minutes before grace.

 Will Evans introduced the grace and told everyone to bow their heads. It was then a bit embarrassing when the microphone didn't work, and I did what a lot of people do to test a microphone, which is say 'hello' in a slightly awkward way, at that point the microphone did work. Everyone who had bowed their heads looked up at me in an odd way. I think they thought that was the beginning of my prayer, but Katie said she thought I was about to start some impromtu stand up.

Anyway it was a super brilliant wedding, I wish them a lifetime of happiness and I hope we stay lifelong friends. 

But that's enough about Katie and Mike, what about Brian and Tracey our new plastecine snail friends with appalling midlands accents? Click Here to see a very short clip of them that we made using stop frame animation. We want to make a proper little film with them but we are looking for ideas. 

Happy New Year.

Low budget ways to entertain yourself

Hello friends and possibly stalkers.
Last time I blogged I was talking about all the things we could possibly do with our lives now that we're back from the big trip that even I am bored of mentioning now. We have not managed to achieve any of the big exciting things I mentioned yet but here are some of the lower budget weirder things we have been doing:

1) leaving all our skype friends video messages from 'Pablo' and 'Sandra'

2) T-rex tidying - doing normal everyday chores with our arms in the t-rex position i.e. tiny arms.  It makes the chores a lot more challenging but it's also a lot more fun.

3) Having date night which involved going to home bargains to spend a pound each. I got 500g of fake liquorice allsorts. The great thing about liquorice is that so many people hate it, so even though I've offered to share with a couple of people they've all said no.  (that's not the only thing we did on our date night we also had a meal in that new Lebanese place on bold St)

4) Singing 'Mancunian way' to the tune of 'arabian nights' (from Aladdin) last night whilst on  the mancunian way.

5)  Inventing a game that's already been invented. The game we invented, we called 'tilepix'

Everyone has 2 minutes to make one of the words on the cards from 25 tiles.

So for example this is quite clearly a giraffe. This game was born out of my rebellious way of playing bananagrams.  I can never win in spelling games so I just tried to make pictures from the letter tiles instead.

I decided to make 10 of them to start with to give away as presents or sell. But because it takes soooo long to make each game, particularly the box lid, I'm not going to make more than the 10 I've already made. If you want one I have only about 3 left to sell and they are £12. I emailed a games company with the idea and they told me a very similar game called 'squint' already exists. Mine's loads better though.

6) Making up jokes. I've just been in a comedy competition. I was the only girl out of 18 people, and I thought that might give me an extra edge but then a 13 year old entered and was actually really funny. The only way I can compete with that is if I was a dancing puppy or something. Dan helped me make up some new jokes about Movember for my set and I also had some new material on eskimo muslims. Here's me performing it: