A new tallent

The last week I have been learning how to play the guitar. My uncle Rob has been giving up allot of his free time and dare I say it patience to teach me. I believe it is going very well. At least the stuff that I am strumming out now sounds vaguely like actual music, and not just screeching sounds.

I have been learning on an acoustic but the last couple of days I have been practising on the electric simply because of the fact I left the other one over my goddaughter’s house. However the electric seems to be allot easier on my fingers. Let me tell all you non guitar playing people that it hurts, and I mean really hurts. Though now my tips of my fingers are num and hard which my rock ‘n’ roll friends tell me is exactly what I want to happen which I guess I am glad about. The playing is allot easier!  I have really been pushing myself to learn lots of songs that I can play and  sing I believe I am doing okay, at least I haven’t had the neighbours coming around here asking me if I was strangling a cat or something.  Saying that now I bet they are over here first thing in the morning.

I am very much looking forward to the day where I can sit in front of a camp fire and play some decent stuff. Who knows maybe one day I will be a world famous guitar player asked for by all those kids you see on ‘my super sweet sixteen’ demanding that I play at their party.... let’s not hold our breath though, yeah?

A ramberling ramble

I haven’t written a blog in a while and I realise I have got quite a bit to say. First thing my boyfriend is on the other side of the world... well okay Greece but it still seems far! At first I thought that he was dead in a ditch because for the first few days that he was over there he neither contacted his mother or me. I was prepared to be very annoyed at him, until he did get in contact and told us that he had been ill and confined to his room, I suppose I will forgive him for not finding a computer the minute he got there and reassuring me that his plane did not go down in flames, mind you it depends how good my present is. I have to say I am not too happy with Dan at the moment any way, for some reason Matty had decided to hero worship him, he does not want to know me, his Aunty Jess any more he just wants Dan. It’s gotten to the stage where I can’t walk into the room without Matty asking for Dan it’s as if he is saying ‘how dare you come here and not bring Dan.

My Goddaughter how ever is still remaining loyal to me. I love the age that she’s at at the moment because she has just started to play imaginative games. We had a tea party the other day and it was just so cute watching her make pretend tea, she even knows how I like it, milk two sugars.  I feel that this is a good thing for the future.

I don’t know what is up with this weather at the moment, we seem to be going through all the seasons in one day, it’s really doing my head in, it’s hard to pick out an outfit that is going to withstand blistering heat, tropical thunderstorms and the occasional hurricane, it’s just not possible.

Well any way I am off to town, at the moment it is raining but apparently very warm.... ohh I wish we could just all go around naked.

A day our with my Will

Yesterday I went to Hay-on-Wye with my friend Rhys. For those of you who don’t know what this place is, it’s my most favourite place on earth... well at least in this country. It’s a quaint old town with more book stores than you can imagine. It’s miraculous.  I am a great reader, I have grown up among books and I count being able to devour a book in a day one or my talents. Hay for me is like my drug; just being around all those books makes me thrilled. I one day hope to own a house there, not just because of the book stores it’s also so lovely and old fashioned, a perfect county village. Also the sweet shop will see me nicely into obesity.

My friend Rhys is also a great lover of books, and we have now made it a tradition to go there together at least once a year, normally we I have to say we go for the annual Hay-On-Wye book festival. However this year circumstances meant we couldn’t make it. Nevertheless we decided to go up to the village for the day any way.  I am glad we did, spending time with Rhys is a better cure than eating a load of chocolate if you’re feeling a bit depressed.

On our day out however something really bizarre happened. We found ourselves not looking for the next book store, but for the next antique store! Our friendship has changed, we are no longer book friends we are ANTIQUE friends! Believe me no one was more surprised than us. We found ourselves going through the shops decorating our fantasy homes in all these wonderful things we were seeing. And our friendship grew; we were not just united in our love or books today but also in our love of expensive antiques!

Will to my Grace

We'll get the specs and everything

Hay-OnWye

Slippery slope of vanity

I see allot of people on facebook who have their profile picture of them in a bathroom mirror. I never fully understood why you would go out on a night out and stand in a bathroom for a good five minutes to frame the perfect shot of you in the mirror. It seemed in my head stupid, a pointless exercise that takes valuable time away from drinking and talking to people.

 However when I went out last night I found myself in the bathroom looking in the mirror with my phone in my hand pointed at the mirror. I don’t know how it happened! But all of the sudden I was doing what I thought I would never find myself doing. I was into the bathroom framing the perfect photo of me with every intention of it being my Facebook display photo. I had fallen in to the trap. The lighting in the toilets you see was perfect. I looked (I know it might be vain to admit it) quite good. I just had to take the photo.

When my friend came out of the toilets, wordlessly we framed ourselves again in the mirror and took more silly photos off ourselves. I wasted what has to be ten minutes of my valuable drinking and laughing time in the toilets taking photos of myself and friends.

What has happened to me? I have converted into a drunken girl who looks for the perfect bathroom with the correct lighting to take that vital profile picture. When will the madness end? Will I now only go into pubs and bars that have the precise lighting for my picture in the toilet? If they don’t will I be disgusted and leave? I have no idea... but I have indeed gone crazy... I might actually find myself in my own bathroom very soon working on my angles; I think I am on a slippery slope.

the country mouse goes out to the big city.

Last night I and my two best friends went for an evening down Cardiff bay.  It was for my friend’s birthday.  We went to a restaurant/ bar called Tera Nova. It was amazing. From the outside the building looks like an ultra modern establishment. But within it’s a completely different story. It’s like as my friend Katie described a castle. It’s huge. I swear they have used the same technology that the Doctor uses on his Tardis. (What do you mean the Tardis isn’t real? of course it is you silly people!)  The decoration is exquisite and we walked around it a few times just so we could fully see what it was all like. The food was okay, nothing special, but then again not ridiculously pricey which I was expecting from the bay. The wine however... Lovely! And very strong. After one bottle I was texting my boyfriend things that I am now mortally embarrassed about and deny all responsibly or memory off.  By the second bottle me and Katie were happily outside playing in the rock pool, while Becky looked on willing I believe for us to fall in. 

 I am glad to say I wasn’t as bad as Katie who quite happily walked into the centre of an outdoor stage and preformed ‘I am little tea pot’ to everyone who walked past.  I have never laughed so hard in my life.

It was a lovely evening. The bay is full of fascinating places and people, good for someone like me who enjoys people watching and making up stories about their lives. Good for people like Becky and Katie who happily stared at some guys all the way through dinner. Though I have to admit the guys were also staring right back (go girls).

I am not one for going out clubbing, as I find all the people crushed together a little bit oppressive. But I do like the bars they have in the bay. Enough people for it to be interesting but not so many that you forget where your body begins and the other person’s body starts.

I hope to have many more nights down the bay with the girls.

The great escape of a hedgehog

The kitten has managed to free my hedgehog. Maybe I should explain how exactly the kitten managed to released the hedgehog to freedom.  The hedgehog commonly referred to as LP lives in a viviruim with a run attached to it. The kitten managed to knock over a side of the run and I did not notice until I went to feed him Friday evening.  It’s now Sunday morning.  My mother and I have been looking for LP for over a day and a night; in every room we have upturned and destroyed it looking for a possible hiding place. We have found a lot of stuff we thought we had lost years ago, but no hedgehog.

So last night we closed all the doors to the rooms and in each room we placed some food for him, at least this would determine exactly which room the little blighter had decided to take up residence in.  Turns out it was the study as this was the only room that the food had gone in in the morning. But we still couldn’t locate him within the room. That is until I sat down on a bag of clothes and something prickly poked me in the butt. Yes I found my hedgehog by sitting on the poor thing. He’s okay after his travels, maybe a bitter flatter but he’s alive. At least he’s back home in this viv. The kitten is sat looking at me as I type this with an evil look on his face I believe he’s saying “well that was a bit of fun wasn’t it. That will teach you for feeding the poky thing before me”

Potty Power

Today is a proud day! Today is the day when darling little Matty did his first poopy on the potty! He is 18 months! It’s amazing! I never thought I would be so proud of a child going to the potty! But I am! You can probably tell by the over use of exclamation marks!

I should probably point out that this boy is not my own but my dear friend Fiona’s! She was also incredibly proud and is at this moment ringing the nation to tell them of this fabulous news! So this might be a little blog but you should know it’s filled with Happiness and a very very proud Aunty Jess.

Boring Information

So I have discovered that I have an application on my I phone that as far as I can tell lists all the words, terms , names in the human language and possible some alien dialect as well. I have had this app on my phone for a good year or so, but have only just really looked at it. It’s amazing!

For example did any of you know that an ‘abatable nuisance is a nuisance that can be remedied’ or that a ‘Babbitt metal is an alloy of tin with some copper and antimony; a lining or bearings that reduces friction’. Amazing right? I mean Its completely useless and I can guarantee that I will never use any of those words, but it’s still pretty cool. I also find it amazing that an I phone that isn’t so big can house all that data and let’s face it allot more besides! Simply genius!

As you can probably tell I am very bored, and I should probably waste my time in doing something else that boring you lot with useless facts. Maybe I’ll save the world, that seems like a good way to pass the time.

ANTICIPATION

Anticipation, an exciting but cruel feeling. Waiting for something is bad enough; it can never come too quickly. But when you are waiting for something that you want to happen, something that is making you truly excited that’s when anticipation kicks in.

At the moment I am waiting for my friend’s birthday/ house party, it will be a good night, some good friends and some new friends will be there all anticipating a jolly good time.

I am sat here all ready to party, I finally decided what to wear, I have made an effort with my hair and makeup, I picked the perfect shoes, I packed my bag for the overnight stay, checked I got everything. And now I am ready an hour early.  What am I to do? I could fall back on my normal boredom routine of dreaming about Johnny Depp, but I am too wound up for something like that. So I am reduced to sitting here spinning around on my chair, and contemplating if I am stuck in some sort of evil time loop (sure it’s that kitten) the time is just going so SLOWLY!

Maybe I should check my bag again *runs off to do this*.  Nope I have everything that I could require.  This might just be the most pointless blog that you will ever read, but just think for ten minutes writing it, it eliminated my boredom, and you reading it have giving a meaning and a point to me writing it

Shades of Grey

Lately I re-read a book called ‘Shades of Grey’ By Jasper Fforde. I read it again for the Waterstones book club, a brilliant read in itself, even on my second reading of it I could not put it down. One of the fundamental plot devices that are used within the book is the idea that everybody can only see one colour, Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, and purple, or if you are really unfortunate you can only see grey. There is a hierarchy within the book those who can see Purple for instance are what we would refer to as upper-class and those people that cannot see any colour but Grey are the lower-classes, and as such are treated like it.

It got me wondering if I could only see one colour alongside grey what would it be? My first thought was Green there is loads of green within nature and lots of different shades. But then I really got thinking about it and I think yellow would be the colour I would choose for the simple reason of I would miss it, a funny thing to say ‘ I would miss it’ But yellow too me is so happy and fresh that I think I would lament its loss more than any other colour.

I woke up in the night and because there was minimal light within my room everything was grey, I sat and looked around for a bit and it was so depressing!  It made me understand why in the book every one craved colour to see, their own colour they could naturally see or the artificial colour gardens that had been created. Life would be so boring and dismal without colour.  Imagine walking around in a world that is so colour less, no bright flowers, no blue of the sky. How boring.

There’s one guy in the book club called Bob, he’s from America and because I am so useless with names I always, in my mind refer to him as ‘the American’. Bob is a very clever man, and always manages to see hidden meanings within books that to be honest always seem to swoosh right by me.  He made and interesting one about this book, and once I had it explained to me I could understand where he was coming from.  It was about the social politics within the book and how when you really looked at them you could relate it to our own world. How the people that were born into the world, and could naturally see purple were automatically above anyone else, the same going with ‘the greys’ (as they are referred to in the book) they were born without the ability to see any other colour so were naturally the working class. Of course in the book if you married someone ‘up spectrum’ then you would socially advance. It’s the same in our world people who are born to privilege have it automatically, where the other people who are harder off have to continually work at it. He also said some other things that tied into nature getting its own back with man eating plants but I won’t go into that now, on the basis that I don’t think I would explain it as intelligently as he did.

I would recommend the book to any one, in fact any of the Fforde books they are a blast! : D

Lost Kitten

So, today my mother lost the kitten!  I had a frantic phone call telling me this and that I was to come home immediately because he wasn’t in the house and that furthermore  she was now searching the gardens.

My first reaction was, “My poor baby! Alone in the world, what troubles he will come up against?” Then I remembered the fact that he bit my toes this morning and my sympathy waned for a second.  I drove home a little bit too fast with thoughts running through my head of Kit coming up against the neighbour’s cat or, god forbid a bird swooping down and carrying him off to be some feast .  I got home and walked into the house instantly calling kit. My mother answered from the office saying “He’s not here” I walked up the stairs to find my mother frantic and printing up posters by the dozen ready to plaster the village in them no wall would of been safe.  I thought I had better check the rooms just you know to be sure. I came to the living room opened the door and did my customary call of “kit where the devil are you” and low and behold out from under the table comes a very pleased with himself kitten. My mother coming down stairs is all shocked declaring that he wasn’t there before!  I swear if Kit could have poked his tongue out to her he would have. 

After informing the hero Neighbour Jason and his trusty companion Bigz (the dog) that all was well (special thanks to you guys!) and that they could stop searching for him, I sat down with a very nonchalant kitty and chastised myself. I should of known that Kit would not have gone far, after all he’s evil! I bet he planned it all out, the perfect way to drive my mother insane, and to get me to fuss him because ‘he was found safely’. The perfect plan. Brilliantly executed.

The bane of my life: HOUSEWORK

 I hate housework! You make the beds; you do the dishes. And six months later you have to start all over again.~ Joan Rivers

Today I did what every woman fears and hates. What we all hide from and bury our heads in the sand and just pretend it isn’t happening. Housework. 

That odious task of cleaning and putting things back in their rightful place. As you can possibly tell I find this job slightly tiresome. It’s true that just sitting here at the computer I can think of about one hundred other things I could be doing instead, first on the list would be sleeping!

 I had made a start, but then I saw the computer and I thought to myself ‘ooo might as well see what’s happening in the world’. I also stared at a cloud for a good ten minutes because I swear it resembled Johnny Depp! And we all knew where that leaded! A good twenty minutes dreaming about how Johnny would ride in on his ship and save me from house work. After looking out the window and wondering what was taking him so long, and then realising that I lived nowhere near the sea so getting the ship to my house might be proving rather tricky along the canal, I was determined to continue tidying. It lasted five minutes. I was then certain that I deserved a nice cup of coffee. Kit the kitten subsequently thought that falling asleep on my lap would be the best thing for him to do, and for those of you who have read my blog about the kitten you know that he is evil and should not be argued with, so of course I had to sit there until Kit had had his nap.  Following Kits nap he went back to his past time of plotting world domination and the enslavement of the human race, I had no excuse than to go back to tidying. I grumbled and moaned about it but I did go back. I put on some Chilli Peppers really loud so that all the neighbours could have the benefit of some good music and got down to it.

It lasted for twenty minutes. Which I think is quite good, my attention span being somewhere between 4 and 6 minutes. After lunch 9which I dragged out as long as humanly possible) I had an epiphany!   Going to play with my goddaughter would be so much more fun! And after all, the dust wasn’t going anywhere right?!

I would just like to add that I now realise I have been very stereotypical in this blog, I think I expressed my self in believing that women should do the housework. I don’t think this; I believe that men should also pull their weight after all they make most of the mess: P

Fashion!

I love fashion.   Actually no, I don’t think that’s true, I love clothes. I do not follow any particular fashion magazine and I don’t check on line to see if what I am wearing is ‘in’ right now. I just love clothes, I love buying new things and feeling good about what I am wearing. In fact I would say I am a little bit of a shopaholic.  It’s true; I can’t go into a store without my debit card crying or my purse trying to run away. I think the people in town actually feel their commission sales soar as soon as I step out of my car.

Western Fashion changes so often that I often find that what I am wearing now by next week will no longer be ‘in style’. However such places like Persia or Turkey and even China have a longer lasting fashion trend, style rarely changes. Styles started to change rapidly in the Weston culture during the 14^th century and the following century, hair becoming more complex and styles changing from one moment to the next. Art historians can date a picture from these times from just looking at what they are wearing. Up to the 19^th century clothes that you wore would have been custom made, however with the advances in technology creating such machines as the sewing machine the fashion industry was starting to boom.

But what is it about Fashion that makes everyone so mad? Fashion is everywhere! You get ridiculed if you don’t get it right. Even in schools and colleges, you are taught from a young age that what you wear defines who you are; think of your typical stereotypes, Goth and Emos. They all wear black and heavy kinds of clothing or your conventional hippy (which I have to admit I have been referred too) wear bright ‘fun’ clothing. You just can’t get away from what you’re outfit is saying about you. With most clothes being mass produced it’s hard to buy something that’s truly individual. And being a woman I have also hated another lady instantly because she was wearing something that I was also wearing. Not her fault but there you go.

However it’s the world we live in, I’ve not even the right to complain about it! For tomorrow I’ll be going to town, I will get all excited when I walk into a shop, and buy a top that I know in my head that a million other people will have brought, however in my heart there’s only one of those tops ever made... and its mine!

"My name is Mister Evil, but you can call me Kit"

Recently we got a new kitten, Kit is his name. A tiny all black with a tiny bit of white under his chin kitten. Incredibly cute, and also the devil incarnate. I first realised this when I was woken up at 4am to play with him, okay he’s a baby I’ll let him off for that. But no, he didn’t want to play with the toy that I got him he wanted to play the much more amusing game of let’s see how much we can make the human bleed. I have never been bitten in the eye by a cat or come to think of it any animal before, but this kitten somehow new the eye was a vulnerable area and went straight for it.  As  I sat back and checked I still had all my vision intact I noticed the Kitten who was wearing and I kid you not the self satisfied smirk I have only ever seen on my two year old goddaughter when she has managed to twist her Aunty Jess around her little finger.

You might think this is the ramblings of a girl who is not used to animals, I am used to animals. My house is a zoo. There are two tortoises a hedgehog three cats (not including the kitten) and two dogs.  Never before have I had such trouble with a pet. My dog Lady is a bit of a handful, she hates pretty much anyone baring my mother and me, and my friend Rhys has come to refer to her as the PMS dog, for the simple reason of she’s a bit temperamental. However the kitten and Lady have formed what I can only assume is some thought of super allegiance. While one of them attacks you from below for food the other one is waiting above you to pounce, it’s made meal times in this house a military worthy battle plan. Humans against pets.  As I sit writing this the kitten is sitting on top of the computer desk watching me,  I wonder if he knows if I am telling the world about how evil he is, will he be proud that he is being broadcasted as a kitten super villain, or by writing this blog am I somehow making his plans for world domination absolute by warning the world about him. If you never hear from me again assume I have been eaten.