Saw a band...

I saw a band!

Or two or three... I went to Bungalows and Bears on Thursday night to watch Yak but also saw Femur and another band whose name escaped me but vaguely reminded me of the Primitives and Stone Roses.

I thought I would mention this as sadly seeing live music has become a bit of a rare thing since becoming a parent but at least it's still something I can do every now and then. That's the end of that public service announcement.

Best laid plans...

So I thought it might be a good idea to sign up for the blog everyday in May challenge that I do every year but for some reason this year I haven't been able to blog anything.  Not one thing.

A new hair cut selfie that I considered posting on the 1st.

For some reason every time I sit down to write or draw for the blog all of my ideas make a run for it.  I'm hoping to change that but so far this is it. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get chance to come up with something a little more exciting.

Blog Everyday in May - day 16 for the love of books. #BEDM

Today's suggested post idea was date night but that isn't a thing me and my boyfriend really do.  Sometimes we both sit in the study with our computers and chat when the toddler is in bed or watch a film together but we don't tend to schedule romance.  What I prefer is thoughtful gestures like when he brings a book back from the library which he knows I want to read.

Image from: http://www.stephen-baxter.com/books.html

For this reason I was thrilled to see a copy of The Long Mars on the kitchen table on Thursday.  I must say that I've only just started it but have enjoyed what I have read. I like how the climax of the last book has been dealt with and the new story is being introduced.

Recently I have been reading a mixture of fiction and non-fiction but have found the fiction far more enjoyable.  (Then again most of the non-fiction books and blogs I have been reading have been related to childcare so I guess it's understandable that they would mainly be less fun.)  Before reading this book I read Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. 

I digress... myself and my partner both enjoy reading.  We don't always enjoy the same books and authors, he won't entertain the idea of reading Harry Potter and I'm not sold on the Foundation series.  While I like to read a reasonably eclectic mix of books, he tends to stick with science fiction.  We do enjoy some of the same authors like Jasper Fforde and Terry Pratchett so it's great to be able to share these books and discuss them together.  Often I think that a well chosen book from the library is better than a bouquet of flowers and lasts slightly longer. Then again I have hay fever and flowers make me sneeze so maybe romance is lost on me!

Basically I love reading as does my partner and I think that as the toddler is very interested in books, he may enjoy reading too. When he's old enough to obviously... I think there is little better than opening the pages of a book and diving into the world contained within.

Blog Everyday in May day 15 photography - #BEDM

 It's pretty obvious that I'm no photographer although I do take at least one or two pictures most days I don't tend to share most of them on my blog as they are nearly all of my son.  (My long suffering family members are the only ones those pictures are inflicted on!)  Occasionally I consider adding pictures of him where you can't see his face but then end up in a moral quandary so I have decided against doing that on all but the rarest occasions.  I might put pictures up of him when he gets older if he gives his consent but as he hasn't quite got the hang of sentences longer than three words, that's still some way off.

The above photos have been taken using my mobile phone as most of my pictures are but I do have a compact digital camera which I hope to use more often in the future. Watch this space!

Blog Everyday in May - day 14. Cake. #BEDM

So I haven't managed to keep up with the blogging everyday thing very well because I've been busy with work, helping my boyfriend survive the election, counting votes after the election, getting my hair done, going out, looking after my son... you get the picture!
After all of that I haven't found much time to engage in either of my writing projects or any of my other hobbies. Then yesterday the toddler decided to have a nice long nap and enabled me to bake!

Hurrah!

Every cake should be served on a dinosaur plate.

I got to make a sponge cake with some butter cream and I went slightly overboard with the jam. It tastes lovely. "Nice" even... that's what the little monster said about the cake mix and the cake. Little joys!

Blog Everyday in May - day 3 Silly Sunday! #BEDM

So the topic today is supposed to be self care Sunday but I have actually spent today eating buns, bacon butties, chocolate and ramen so I'm not sure if that counts as self care.... It was fun! Although the ramen eating was occasionally interrupted by my toddler trying to feed me some of his breaded sweet potato and butternut squash cake. (I didn't resist very hard.)

I did do a few star jumps after the chocolate mainly because it entertains the little one.  Anything for a laugh, eh?  Thankfully there is no photographic evidence of that but here are a few other whimsical and silly pictures.

The animals have the draining board.

It's not freezing here honest!

Much prettier than mugs and glasses...

I hope that you have had a good Sunday too and managed to at least contemplate relaxing.

Blog Everyday in May: day 2 - adventure. #BEDM

When I was a child I loved the idea of adventure and excitement possibly due to living in the suburb of a town sandwiched between two cities. Nothing interesting seemed to happen there so I liked to dream about dinosaurs, time travel and swashbuckling heroes.  I went through phases of idolising King Arthur, Marty McFly, Indiana Jones, Robin Hood and Peter Pan... I'm not sure why but I never imagined being a princess or bride or anything.

Later I started reading and hoped foolishly to get to Narnia one day... then I enjoyed the escapades of the Famous Five and Secret Seven before moving on to Harry Potter, The Dark is Rising and the Earth Sea Quartet.

Now I'm older I realise that maybe being in a fantasy novel might not be the best idea I've ever had, especially not Game of Thrones or Gormenghast! These days with the help of a little film called UP I realise that there isn't just one type of adventure.

I would love to have a grand adventure exploring the world and experiencing different sights and cultures.  This is not a dream I plan to give up on but it may not be possible to travel the world for a few more years... I may have to stick to the corner of the northern hemisphere with occasional excursions to the south of Spain and parts of the British Isles.

 The other adventure I have is the big adventure of buying a house with my partner Paul and living in it with our cats while trying to raise our son.

I guess it's easy to think of travelling as being the epic scary adventure and general day to day life as being humdrum but life isn't that simple... you get challenging situations everywhere in Sheffield or Shanghai!  For now my planned adventures miniature steam trains, farms, polling stations, public transport and Ryanair.

What are you adventure plans?

Blog everyday in May 2015: day 1 introduce yourself. #BEDM

 It's that time of year again... hay fever season... I mean the blog everyday in May challenge time! I thought it might me fun to have ago at blogging everyday to procrastinate away from novel writing get into better blog writing habits.  The blog a day challenge is nice because there are suggested topics to follow everyday but I may have to deviate away from some of them to other things I might actually be able to write about... more sci-fi than beauty I think!

Anyway, the topic suggestion today is introduce yourself, so here goes. 
I'm in my late twenties, I work part time for a Sheffield based company and I live with my boyfriend, 19 month old son and two cats.

Frankenstein enjoys being photographed.

I have a lot of interests like playing guitar/ukulele, baking, dancing, sewing, reading and hula hooping which I try to pursue in my bounteous free time. Ha ha ha! I also like to watch my local roller derby teams play and took my son with me to their October bout.

Go team!

We've also been to art galleries, rock climbing groups and day time gigs together as well as the swimming baths, cafes, restaurants and cinema...

On maternity leave I decided to treat myself and dye my hair blue, I also tried green and purple but have settled on blue for the time being as it makes me feel like a comic book character. Once upon a time I would've liked to have looked like a 1950s pin up but now I would rather look like a superhero as I feel like one some days.

So that's a bit about me.  I could babble on about independent films and music, trying to learn Spanish from an app or coding from a website or the many parenting lessons I've learnt since 2013 but I won't. The night is here and my bed beckons with promises of sleep and dreams. Good night!

One whole month!

So I started off this month with the aim of writing one blog post every day for a month and whilst I knew that it would be a challenge I launched into it anyway. It turned out that even with all the topics already road planned out for the month that this was a difficult thing to do.  I had technology problems, trouble thinking what to write for some of the topics and in the end will power problems.

Sadly in the end I didn't manage to hit my goal of writing 31 blog posts this May as the will to write them dwindled mid month and I became unable to keep up by the end of the month.  Despite being unable to complete the challenge I'm not writing the month off as an utter failure as I did learn some important lessons!  The first one is that it's ok to write about topics that are outside of your comfort zone every so often or are a bit different to what you'd normally blog about.  While I'm not sure I'd have ever blogged about my morning commute, my first job, a day in my life, advice I'd give my 13 year old self or what's in my fridge normally I now know what I'd put and that these are not topics I want to return to in the future.

It's also helped to remind me about things I enjoy writing about like books, food, travel and music.  This has prompted me to think about blogging more about these topics in the future.  It had also been good to be a part of the #BEDM group on twitter and visit the blogs of other participants who I might not otherwise have stumbled upon.

There's due to be another challenge in November but I'm not sure that I'll be able to try again then or to post coherent blog posts due to my next big challenge appearing in late September... That as well as November being the month of Nanowrimo!  Still I'll be interested to see how other bloggers approach the topics that are set for #BEDN.

Music Love. Blog Everyday in May.

Nearly everyone who knows me also knows that I love music and that it's impossible for me to name my top 5 albums!  This is partly because I have a memory like a sieve but also because I've been lucky enough to hear lots of music when I wrote for the music section of the Huddersfield Student newspaper. Some great... some not so great...

As a child born in the 80s most of the music my parents played was Queen, ABBA, UB40, Eurythmics, Roxy Music and Human League with a bit of Madonna and Kylie thrown in there for good measure. Queen and ABBA seemed to be played most though...  As I got older I had a small pop phase before being introduced to Belle and Sebastian, The Magnetic Fields and The White Stripes as a teenager. At a similar time I also discovered The Smiths.  Something in this music spoke to me, I'm not sure what. 

I think with The Smiths it was a recognition in the music that there were other people out there that were shy, cynical and a tad melancholy.  With Belle and Sebastian I enjoyed the melodies and the fact that this beautiful sounding band were self deprecating too.  That and their witty songs full of humour, jangly guitars and barbs.

My first experience of the Magnetic Fields was through their album 69 Love Songs and I enjoyed the heartbreaking sweetness of some of their songs juxtaposed with the silliness of Chicken with It's Head Cut Off.

The White Stripes were great for their seeming simplicity and some of their foot stomping tunes like Hotel Yorba.  They also had great style and the rock n roll aggression resonated in the angry young woman in me.

 

Another band I discovered at a similar time was The Pixies, a band who are the right kind of mental for me with their surf-punk fusion.  I must admit I still have debates about which of album of theirs I like best Doolittle or Surfer Rosa... I used to maintain it was Surfer Rosa in arguments but I'm not sure if it's age or my hormones that are swaying me to Doolittle more.

 

Over the years I've grown to know and love many more bands like Sons and Daughters, The Long Blondes, Camera Obscura, McLuskey, Monkey Swallows the Universe, Allo Darlin, Slow Club, Flaming Lips and of course Arcade Fire. I could wax lyrical about all these bands forever and a day... ..so I think that may have to be another blog post or ten for another day!  So there you have it I can't choose just 5 favourite albums out of my hundreds of cds but I can pick 5 influential bands!

What's in your fridge? Blog Everyday in May.

This is one of the more unusual topics of blog every day in May. This what lies inside mine and Paul's fridge today.




It mainly seems to be a combination of beverages, cheeses (paneer, hallomi, dairylea & cheshire) & sauces. As well as some other ingredients for cooking like harissa paste, tomato puree & garlic.

So this is what's currently in my fridge I hope it's of interest, is it like yours?

Compliments. Blog Everyday in May.

I'm one of those people who struggle to accept compliments, they're very nice to receive but there's a rubbish part of my brain that doesn't think I deserve them. Sometimes another part of my brain warps things further and turns them into backhanded compliments.  Why this happens is a mystery to me!

Yet somehow this goes out the window when people compliment something I've made or an idea I've had! If someone compliments my sweet making,baking or writing I'm over the moon. I probably wouldn't hear if someone said you've made a delicious cake shame you look like you've been pulled through a hedge backwards... all I'd hear would be the cake bit. My favourite compliments have been when people say they like my novel idea and want to read the finished article or when someone compliments my writing when I've had an article or a recipe published.

So if you want to get into my good books now you know exactly what to say!

13 year old you! Blog Everyday in May.

I don't have any photographs of me as a 13 year old and definitely none that are uploaded on to my computer! If I met my 13 year old self and this didn't cause a rift in both time and space it would be very tempting to try to offer some advice.  The thing is I expect it would be hard to know where to start!

I think the main thing I would tell my past self would be not to worry so much about fitting in and being normal.  I gave it ago once and ended up ignored and bored.  I'd also try to explain that there's a reason you don't fit in with the people your hanging around with it's because they're not the people who you need to be friends with.  Try to stick with the more artistic and bookish people they are your kind, they understand that you read to escape school not to be rude to anyone.  (They also have the best computer games!)

Another piece of advice I'd give is that worrying about getting more confident won't help you get anymore confident it actually seems to have the opposite effect!  I also used to get upset that no boys seemed to like me but this was really the last thing I should've been worrying about... it was just that I was a shy little thing with no clue that reading books hunched up in a corner wearing baggy clothes wasn't going to make me attractive. Seems obvious now but that took me a few years to figure out.

I'd also be tempted to give myself a couple of other pieces of advice like don't worry so much about school. Although might help to focus a bit more in class and stop reading till the early hours...

The last thing I'd do would be to tell myself that my parents are human and make mistakes just like everyone else.  Another obvious point but it was something I didn't get as a screaming banshee of a teenager. It's also something I hope that my unborn son realises when he meets me, that we're all doing the best we can with the knowledge that we've acquired.

I wonder what advice my 39 year old self will have for me in another 13 years?

Dream Job. Blog Everyday in May.

When I was a small child I changed what my dream job was several times a day I went from wanting to be a fighter pilot to a pig farmer and artist to an actress a pop singer to a film director... the list goes on and the possibilities seemed endless! As I got older I put some of these dreams aside as they seemed impossible or I got bored of them and other dream jobs replaced them. When I was a teenager I went from wanting to be an actress to an artist to a film director before giving film making ago and realising that I'm not very good at it.  At the same time I experimented with writing and found I wasn't as bad as I'd imagined... After leaving college I didn't think about a dream job as such I just focused on getting a job.  Once secure in that I started to think about writing again and another silly idea of mine forming a band.

I didn't stay in that job forever and ended up going to university and experimenting with different writing styles and different career paths.  I even flirted with music journalism and sub-edited the music section of my student rag!  Then after uni I threw that experience away and went into one admin job then another and fantasised about training up to become a journalist or writing a novel.  Now I've got a few friends who are journalists so I'm not entirely sure if that's the dream... I still day dream about making a living writing about my travels, gigs I've seen, books I've read and recipes I've created. As well as maybe something to do with dancing, twiddling stringed instruments and crafting things.   Really I want to be a renaissance woman!

Truth be told I still don't really know what I want to do with my life and as I probably won't retire for another 40 years I've still got to time to try my hand at becoming a successful music journalist, travel writer, novelist and/or food columnist. One career per decade wouldn't be bad would it? So that's when I've done sitting at my desk writing letters by day I come home and write blogs and stories by night. There's no fairy godmothers out there... ... might end up a Jacqueline of all trades but I should have fun in the process!