Under Construction

I'm playing.

So if it looks a bit of a mess, just...I dunno, shut your eyes and go away. Count to 100 and then shout "ready or not" and...it'll probably be in exactly the same state when you come back. *shrugs* You can but try, though.

And I would just like to say that it is entirely all your fault (*glares generally at everybody, although most specifically at Myo and oh yes Kepp*) if I screw this up and my blog disappears into the black hole of html-ignorance.

*sighs*

This is an ex-potential. It has ceased to be.

Only kidding.


Everything is in pretty much the same place it was in this morning, in case anyone is trying to match them up...although why you would...well, anyway, they are.

In my living room: birthday tulips and Remains of the Cake. (Cake is from the weekend - I didn't eat all of that just now.)


And for Kepp - quite shiny, yes. Also incredibly neat.


Birthday nearly over. All round, a good one, I think.

Potential

Later. After work. *controls self*

Top Dog

Blame Em.

Cara thought it was most thoughtful of me to have bought a futon purely for her use.


And all together now: Awwwww.

Delusions of grandeur

If someone is thinking of giving me the money to buy a stately home, then it would be much appreciated if they could dig deep enough to allow me to purchase Chatsworth.


All it really needs to achieve perfection is someone tall, dark and handsome striding across that lawn to meet me...let's call him Mr Darcy...

There was a man standing fishing in the river. (I didn't take a photo of him because I was scared of retribution.) However, I don't think he could have been Mr Darcy, as I don't see Mr Darcy in waders. (Oh, now I do, and...)

Anyway. Mother, dog and I went for a drive up to Chatsworth on a Sunny Saturday (once the remains of a Foggy Friday had left the sky). Unfortunately, when we got there, the sun went and hid behind a cloud and stayed there for nearly the whole 2 and a half hours we were there. *glares at evil slow-moving cloud*


There was plenty of blue sky, just no sun. In fact someone had even left some blue sky lying around in the river.


"Goodness," quoth my mother. "I think it's time they had some venison for dinner."


Look...there's some sun way over there...*sulks*


We also discovered the perfect way to give your family crest that little je ne sais quoi - use real antlers on your heraldic animals. That'll teach 'em.


Cara does not feel she was made for such grandeur, and takes the first opportunity to go off and investigate more interesting woodland walks behind the house.

Where, after another hour or so, the sun did finally come out (just in time to set) and illuminated a very old tree whose parents hadn't taught it how to recognise a good seeding spot.

Maybe I don't want to marry Mr Darcy after all - these aristocratic drivers don't seem to take much care around pedestrians.


Also, another drawback became apparent when we realised that the Snowdrop Army had followed us even here. Poor Cara was ambushed and only rescued by incredible deeds of derring-do, and a hasty alliance with the aconites.


Ultimately, however, the day ended up with us on the wrong side of an about-ten-feet-high estate wall, which we had to scale (passing Cara between us) and getting very odd looks from the cars on the road the other side. Clearly I am not suited to move in the upper echelons of society. Maybe Mr Darcy could come and live in my flat?

Can you imagine us, years from today, sharing a park bench quietly?

Friendships are odd, aren’t they? They’re hard to predict, hard to understand and even harder to live without. They often come from nowhere and too frequently fade into awkward nothingness through no-one’s particular fault.

I find it incredibly hard to imagine being 70 and no longer being in contact with any of my good friends from now. Yet it’s more than likely, isn’t it, really? Probably even the norm for people who don’t live their whole lives in one town. And I know that several of my closest friendships from school or university have either died or are slowly dying the death due to lack of communication/interest/etc.

I also find it kind of hard to imagine making new friends. I mean – I have the friends I have now. How could there be more than that? Even though I know there will be, surely, some day.

It is just…kind of strange…to realise how dependent I am on something so very changeable.

But then, sometimes I can be wrong. I remember this time last year thinking how strange it was that I’d meet Em and jes and then probably never see them again in my life. And yet here I am now, looking at flights for New York…

Soggy Sunday Sus

Yesterday, my friend from work and I went out for a Sunday drive in her Triumph 1500. It was very nice of the cloud base to come down and provide her grey car with such handy camouflage, don't you think?


We went to Hopton Hall

(skit would appreciate it if someone gave her the money to live somewhere like this)

to see the snowdrops.

to prove to ourselves that Spring really is on the way.

Other things we happened to see included an exotic and apparently one-legged pheasant in a cage
and his very scary wife.

Also a statue who had lost his flute/piccolo and had it replaced with a twig. Or maybe he had it stolen by another statue in a case of wind instrument envy. Never mind, he has his fig leaf to comfort him.

If funds were insufficient for the main house, skit might consent to live in the stables/coach-house conversion nearby.


In wandering around the grounds, we found an evil red twig-tree (I think it is radiating evil snowdropicidal vibes - look how they flee from it)

and a pre-pubescent formal garden.

But oh no - what's this? Boxicide!

*points finger dramatically* I accuse the Snowdrops of Mass Destruction! Look at them massing, ready to take over the world at a moment's notice.


But a single clump, in the dampness and dullness of the mizzle - beautiful. Better than any of the rest of it.


(until I crushed them into nothingness with my giant Pythonesque foot from the sky, moo-whahaha...ahem. No, not really.)

Parental Advisory

Never take photos of your spawn for which they will have good reason to swear blood vengeance when they are older.

Televisual Imponderables

Do vampires ever need to go to the toilet?

Does Scorpius ever wash his cooling suit?

Does Simon trust River with razor blades or does he shave her legs himself?

I think we should be told.

Mind the Gap

This is something that has been going round in my head for quite a while now. It’s been going round because I’ve not been sure how to present it – as a question, or an essay, or an appreciation of the world – but now I’m fed up of it going round in my head and it’s going to come out as just a general blurb of thoughts.

The usual chant of depression is ‘nothing ever changes.’ And, in many senses, it’s true. People, as a species, don’t change much in many ways. But when you sit down and think ‘well, what has changed, even in my lifetime?’ the answer is quite a scary amount.

Okay, there is a wide range of ages reading this, so let’s take a benchmark. Let’s consider a chunk of 50 years. Most of us will expect to live to 50 – most of us will even expect to have 50 years where we are us, not babies or young children or senile dementia patients unconscious of the changes going on around us.

So over the last 50 years, what’s changed? On a major political or ideological level….a fair few things. On a personal level…damn near everything. It is hard to think of a part of my everyday life which would not have been different had I been living 50 years ago. I am an engineer, a woman living in a flat on her own, who spends her evenings watching tv and using the internet. And I could count the number of times I wore a skirt last year on my fingers.

50 years ago we hadn’t sent an object into Earth orbit, nobody had colour tvs, nobody had invented the mini-skirt let alone the internet. Osama bin Laden hadn’t been born yet and Winston Churchill was still alive. The international tension of the time was the cold war, and the Berlin Wall was still 5 years in the future. Elvis hadn’t been in the charts yet and the Cavern Club didn’t exist. Unmarried pregnancies still had huge amounts of stigma attached, and Martin Luther King Jr hadn’t told us he had a dream yet. A truly amazing number of things were very very different indeed.

And, going back further by a multiple of that 50 year chunk – only 8 50-yr-chunks ago, the political tension of the time was the just-failed Gunpowder Plot, and Shakespeare was busy writing King Lear. Only 8 reasonable life-spans ago.

So I still don’t really know what the purpose of this post is. I think it is just to express amazement at just how much people can change. And yet we still stay people – I can still watch King Lear and get as much out of it as an audience at the time did. But how much everything else has changed. And I think that’s amazing, in its own way – that we can survive and prosper in such different circumstances, and that even in the course of one lifetime we can adapt to so much change without hardly even noticing it’s happening.

Thought-blurb over.