Ode to my Yaris

Oh little yaris born in 2003,
I cannot say how much we love thee,
I love your effective heating system,
Dan loves your insides, your cogs and pistons,
I love how you're cute and easy to park,
when you carry our canoes it's such a lark,
you can't speed coz your engine is too small,
but I wouldn't swap you for any car at all,
you took a turn for the worst,
when a ford mondao did a speedy reverse,
you were written off category D,
we considered a new car for me,
but I could't ever sell you for scrap,
the idea of that is total crap,
no other car could quite compare,
so we are getting you repaired!

Making Children Bleed

I made a child bleed today, not on purpose of course, I attually pride myself on the fact I have never purposly made a child bleed. Except when I was a child, but that's sort of allowed isn't it. I'm doing a mosaic project in a school. Mosaic sounds like one of those 'awww what a cute hobbie' kind of things that old ladies might do, but in attual fact mosaic artists are well 'ard. To get a good mosaic with any detail you really need to cut the tiles which invoved flicking tiny splinters of glass around the room. I pretty much spent all day kneeling glue and tiny shards of glass I cut my hands a couple of times and I also noticed a little red blob of blood forming on my tights. I had to have a bath when I got home to wash the glass off me. I felt like I'd spent the day rolling in that yellow fluffy stuff people put in their lofts.

I'm doing a residency in the school which is attually really fun, I've worked with all the children in the school making paper mosaics and now they are a bit involved in helping me make the big school mosaic. Today 6 children came to help me do some of the easier bit of the mosaic, the non-cutting part. I swept the whole floor before they came in but that doesn't really elimanate the chance of children hurting themselves. I had warned the teacher it was dangerous but she was still suprised when she had to take glass out of a child. I kind of thought it was enevitable, should that fail a risk assesment?

Did You Know?

Did you know that getting an MOT is not the same as going to the dentist? you can't just put it off because you don't have the money or you don't feel like it. You actually have to do it and there are consequences if you don't. And did you know that if you go to one of them silly petrol stations that you have to pay before hand and you say '£40 please' that the pump does not stop at exactly £40...and that if £41.25 worth of petrol goes into your car and then you drive off....you really should go back and pay for it, or at least make your husband go back and pay for it if you're too embarrassed to go. Especially if the car your driving isn't really your car because a total divvy has driven into your car and crushed it and then driven off.

But did you know that if you have £3.80 and a bit of spare time and the registration number of the guy who smashed your car you can type it into a website and it will tell you his address and you can go round and have a polite conversation with him about why he's such a loser.

Not having a lot of luck with cars in the last few weeks, I feel a certain nostalgia for the simpler days when I rode semi disposable bikes. At least once a year my bike would be stolen or vandalised or would die of natural causes and I'd leave it round the back of some bins in town and go out and spend £2o on a new bike off a mate. Yes there were days when I'd arrive at work wet through to my underwear and shiver all day, but I never had to fill in vehicle related forms and I think given the choice I'd rather spend a day shivering than filling in forms.

On a happier note I'm having a lot of fun doing a mosaic project in a school at the mo, a boy from year 3 even came up to me and said 'Hannah - thank you for being an artist' aww...that made me happy because even though I love being and artist, sometimes I wish I worked in Asda just for the regular money coming in. He was a really cute kid I want that type of kid when I have kids.

Tell Tale Signs

What are the tell tale signs that someone is blind? they have a dog, they don't look at you in the eye, they have a computer that speaks to them, my dissertation tutor has all these signs and yet it still took me way too long to work it out.

I am the opposite of blind, I don't mean just fully sighted I mean pictures are my primary means of communicating and I think in pictures and it annoys me when I sometimes have to explain things in words.

I emailed this guy my dissertation and it was all colour coded so that I could see what paragraphs were about what topics etc, obviously that was no use to him because he's blind but I didn't know so that's hardly my fault. I kind of should have twigged when I had a meeting with him and his dog started sniffing me. I did register that as weird that he had a dog in his office but the dog didn't look like the guide dog kind it just looked like a normal dog. Maybe my dissertation tutor was scammed when he went to get his guide dog, I mean it must be easy enough to sell a fox or a badger to a blind person and tell them it's a dog.

My tutor asked a bit about me and my dissertation I told him I'd found one good book on autism but there wasn't enough other relevant stuff. He asked what the book was and not wanting to say 'I don't know it's brown and its got a picture of a cow on the cover' I said 'I've got it here and placed it on the desk' he then asked me to read the title which I still can't remember but in Hannah English it's something like 'The book about a girl who's a wicked drawer even though she's autistic and can't talk or tie her own shoe laces' He made me read the long and boring title to him, which I read in the style of a primary school child (with lots of pauses) not on purpose I'm just a rubbish reader.

His computer made a weird babble noise which I did recognise as the same noise Dan's blind friend's computer makes, and he didn't look me in the eye but he almost did sometimes. He said I should label my paragraphs so that I could move the around more easily and I said 'that's why I colour coded them' and that's when he told me he was blind. I said I'd just worked that out which was true but I don't think he believed me.

Poorly or Horny?

yesterday I was very ill, at first it was the fun kind of ill where you watch t.v all day and then it went to the not fun kind of ill where you can't look at light and you want to chop your head off, luckily Dan suggested phoning NHS direct instead. Now I'm back to the fun kind of ill where you sit in bed at 11.32am writing a blog and sneezing.

When I first got ill the night before last I went up for a rest just after tea and lovely Dan did all the cleaning up. My throat got scratchy and I got a bit of a headache and I didn't want to shout downstairs to him so I did a very lazy thing and phone the hose phone from my mobile. I said 'I feel poorly can you come upstairs' in a really pathetic voice. Unfortunately he heard 'I feel horny can you come upstairs' and he was up in a flash. He may have been a little disappointed to be sent out to co-op to get soothers and paracetamol, but as it says in the marriage vows:

when I'm skint and when I'm loaded,
when I'm poorly when I'm horny,
if it life's wicked or if it's pants,
you have to love me till I die (and probably for a bit afterwards)
and I will too.
lets spit on it. (because that is what a kiss is really)

Love you Daniel. xx

Oh My Gosh!!

So we were driving back from creative writing the other day where I had just written a semi-autobiographical piece about my littlest sister. If your one of the few people who read it- yes I did take my baby sister in for show and tell, but no I don't have a step dad that works in a plus size fancy dress store, or a nan with a toy boy.

We've had a few problems with our car lately it had a new clutch a couple of weeks ago and then last week we found out the clutch wasn't put in properly and so a thing to do with the clutch came out of another thing and that made the car stop and people beep at me. (I wonder if when people were beeping they were just beeping because actually they were swearing but it was 4pm and there were children around so they had to beep their own swearing out. Is that what car horns are for?) Anyway Dan was driving a few of us home and then he suddenly went 'OH MY GOSH!!' I thought the car was going to break again but it turns out he just has a moment of realisation.

'OH MY GOSH!! A MUSLIM CAT CAN HAVE 9 LIVES AND 9 WIVES!!'

after a lot of lol-ing we discussed whether if we were Muslim cats with 9 lives and 9 wives would we have one wife per life or have a few single lives and a few 2 wife lives. I think actually Muslims are only allowed 5 wives but I'm not sure about Muslim cats.

The Joyous Job Center

I'm in a bit of a backlog of blogs. Since the wedding we had a honeymoon in crete which was great it was 'better than reading a book!' I'd love to tell you more behind that story but I'm only allowed to tell 'one or two people' and I've already told four. There's no restrictions on those for people though so if you want to know what happen ask Helen Rachel Danni or Grace. It's hilarious.

Since then we moved into our lovely new house we came back to a brilliant surprise of two kayaks in our garden! Dan thought it was a wedding present from my rich relatives but then we saw the card signed by all of our real life best friends none of whom our rich, and soon after we saw the photos of them carrying the kayaks quite a long way to our house.

So we've settled into normal life again now, Dan's been hard at work and I've been making ikea furniture and stuff. I was hoping to start doing my art workshops in schools again but no work was coming through my agency I tried contacting schools directly but without much luck. I had a job interview to be a part time nanny but I didn't get it so I thought maybe I could go on Job Seekers Allowance, I phoned up to ask 'can I go on it ask I'm self employed and have a tiny bit of work?' They didn't directly answer that question but they asked me a million questions about myself and my financial situation. Including 'does anyone care for you?' I know the answer to that is no but I didn't want to say that I wanted say 'yes my husband cares for me, and my parents and all the friends that chipped in to buy us kayacks'

So after about an hour of questions and him taking every boring detail of my life he told me that I had an apointment at 10.50 at the job center on Monday and they will sort me out with JSA. I've been on JSA 3 years ago and I know if your later for an appointment then you can get benefits cut off so it got to 10:40 and I was trying to choose whether to go by car or bike or legs and I picked legs...I started walking then I started running then I realised even if I run I will still be late so I ran back and got the car. I couldn't park that near so then I had to do more running but I just made it on time.

When I arrived I then had to wait in a queue before finally going to my appointment, and the first thing the woman said was I can't get JSA because I'm self employed! she did tell me that if I wanted to continue with my claim then I could but I would get any money.

'errr I think I've wasted enough time thanks'

'Ok well then you need to fill in this form saying that you formally want to withdraw your JSA application'

'but the first thing I said on the phone is can self-employed people with no work get JSA!'

'it's not their job to answer that question, it's only their job to ask you questions'

I think there are some job cuts that need to be made in job centers! stupid questioning man that is being paid with my taxes!!!!!