Thursday, May 29, 2008

My own Moving Castle.



After my discovery of a cardboard Moving Castle earlier (now sadly unavailable unless it appears on eBay) I have got the book to read in bed tonight and put the film on to watch while I eat/play WoW.

Watching the film does make me go "Nooooo, that's so not right!" every five minutes or so although I do like the way old/young Sophie blend every now and again), a bit like LOTR really. But I do like Billy Crystal as Calcifer's voice. To honour the film I have been playing one of my alternate characters on WoW - my Blood Elf hunter Sophee and her pet lynx Calcifer.

I have also managed to find this lovely link to a downloadable model of the Moving Castle.

Now all I need is a printer...

Itchy Fingers



When I was at home over the weekend I was looking through a few of the photo albums and in one of the Christmas pictures I spotted a craft book that I remembered very well.

It was one for making gift boxes, and the book had in it all these cut-out shapes that you used to make the boxes. I can remember spending hours making those things, I loved doing it. Another year I had a dragon book and made 9-10 different dragon mobiles, and another time I had an Escher book where you could make these shapes that rotated to show off the tessalating designs.

I bought my two copies of the Unseen University Cut Out Book but I'm nervous about starting the thing when I haven't made anything for such a long while. (The Escher things are the last I can remember making and that was in early 1995).

So I thought I'd have a pootle about on t'interweb but while I've found lots of printable templates for things that I don't really like the look of anyway, I've found next to no books (barring all the Usborne ones).

But I did just find this and I'm now deeply in love with it. Despite the fact it's not the proper castle (the one from the book), I still like the film and would still like to make the thing.
(Scott Pack has just finished reading the book and is being told just how wrong his opinion of it is.)

Prepare yourself for the possibility of more paper model related posts, and if I manage to track down anything I want (and can afford) then there might have to be pictures of work in progress.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Gah.



I am wet. Some twat of a boy racer decided that it would be funny to slow down as though he was going to let me cross the road, and then to zoom past through a huge puddle as I stepped off the kerb. But I was a very good girl and didn't make an obscene gesture at him (mainly cos this is Wolverhampton and he'd probably have shot me).

So being very soggy I have broken my new habit of not sitting down at the computer until 7pm. This was a very new habit as I only started it yesterday, but in that computer-less hour yesterday I managed to make my dining room look like a dining room - you can see the table top! If I can keep the habit up (I do have tomorrow off so I'll do an extra hour then) I should have a tidy(ish) house in no time.

Since my dress post - and thank you for all the lovely comments and hello to the new people - I have been back to Essex for the weekend and I took it with me. I didn't wear it, but my mother likes it and suggested I wear it to my old friend Jodie's 30th birthday party in July. Depending on the weather... I might. I still have not found any shoes to go with it, although I haven't really looked too hard. I shall have to prod my shoe guru and see what she can find me. I'm thinking cream, open-toe, low kitten heel.

In other shoe related news, I have ordered these lovely things to wear to work instead of my CAT boots. I ordered them in an 8 which were too small so I'm just waiting for a pair of 9's to arrive. But today I realised that Jo (who is back working for us again) was wearing a pair of the things too! She agrees that they are very comfortable but that the silly rubberband-round-button fastening is not the best.

Edit: My Shoe Guru is my sister Emily, who just commented to me (on the phone) that she wasn't sure if I meant her or "some weird bit of your brain". It's now going to be one of her summer projects, although since I need them by the 4th of July it had better not take her all summer.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Girlishness - I don't really have it.

My gene for face masks, shoes, earrings, gossip magazines and dresses seems to have been mostly taken over by the one for Warcraft, football, motor racing and CAT boots.

However, I think it's planning a comeback.

As well as that footstool I just mentioned, I also ordered a dress from Additions.

It's from the Trinny & Susannah collection which very much put me off at first as I really quite dislike that pair. They're just a bit too mean for me and I'll stick with the lovely Gok.
But this here dress has changed my mind a little.

I liked it on the page, so I thought I'd order it and if it's crap I can just send it back.

Oh. My. God.

It's beautiful. Not quite as nice as the sexiest-dress-in-the-world but it comes very close. It's not as dressy as that dress which is the main reason (men everywhere will be puzzled by that sentence).

This dress is lighter and floatier, and also much more forgiving.

But the real reason I think it awoke my girly gene...I tried it on and thought:

"I'm gonna need some new shoes to go with this."










(What's that? You want to SEE the dress... sorry. Here it is)

This week I has been mostly...

...squeezing gunk into my eye.

My eye flared up again on Tuesday and off I trotted to the eye infirmary to get them to sort it out. Verdict - possibly an allergic reaction, possibly due to pollen. POSSIBLY bloody nothing, if you don't know what the fuck it is then say so!

Ahem.

Anyways, more gunk for another week and more only being able to see out of my left eye, so yet more pirate jokes from Anthony and more pokes in the ribs from Rich D.

Meh.

------------------

Today however I have been attempting to do some housework. (I hate that word). Washing up and laundry, yawn. But I am also a happy bunny. The other day I ordered a lovely Moroccan Footstool from Additions. I love the look of the things but have never had the cash. Now I have one and it was pretty damn cheap. Ok, so it's not truly perfect, and it doesn't smell of leather (mmmm) but hey, it does the job I need it too and fits with my style.

I was also thinking about my "style" the other day. When we were round at Angie's (my ex-next-door-neighbour) her other half Paul (who'd just driven me and A to and from the eye infirmary) described my style as Swedish something-or-other (I will find out exactly what he called it and put it here). It's what he also described Angie's taste as. He was saying that the number of times he's seen something and thought she'd like it, and then she's seen it and said how much I'd like it is just ridiculous.

Eclectic is how I tend to think of it I guess. I like shabby chic - but not all the floral. I like the New England type of style, lots of white and blue. But at the same time I love the dark wood of my dining table, and long to upgrade my bookcases to the Leksvik ones (which Angie just happens to have too). So my footstool doesn't really fit with the shabby chic/New England bit of my style, it goes in with the jewelled cushions and exotic side.

I think partly my dislike for florals is cos I'm just not that girly (as discussed before). But I do like some florals, in fact I adore my Cath Kidston writing paper - I just don't really want my sofas covered in it. I think it's a case of less is more, I might have some of her napkins but only with a plain white tablecloth (which would be very impractical in this house).

I am rambling now and losing my thread.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Still feeling pants, so here's some more books

My eye is getting better, but is pissing me off. I'm not good at waiting for things, and also not good at squeezing goop into my eye. So having to apply goop four times a day is very annoying and it feels like I've been doing it forever rather than just since Monday. I'm getting used to only being able to really see out of one eye though (due to the wearing of only one lens). Unfortunately my partial blindness means that Rich D can sneak up on me (from the right) and jab me in the ribs...

Bookwise I actually went to the library today, it's been ages since I went (according to my library 'tag' it was Oct) although I have been dutifully renewing my books.

This time I went with a little bit of a list made up by browsing the tables at work for things that I quite want to read but that are very low down on my buying list.
So I have...

Wicked, Gregory Maguire - because Emily will be shocked that I haven't read it yet.
The House of Lost Souls, F.G. Cottam - spotted at work.
French Women for all Seasons, Mireille Guiliano - I have (and like) the first book and spotted this on my way to the desk so though it was worth grabbing.
A Tangled Summer, Caroline Kington - spotted while looking for something else and I liked the cover.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon - I loved Kavalier & Clay and have been resisting this at work with difficulty.

A book I would like to whole-heartedly recommend is Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. I got my hands on a copy of this yesterday and read it all in a gulp. Very very much like Alice Hoffman I think, certainly the setting of the story if not so much of the descriptiveness (is that actually a word?) Anyway, it's fab. Go and grab a copy and read it sitting in a sunny spot.
I didn't get to read it in a sunny spot as I only get to see the sun on my trudge home. I have the weekend off, just as the weather is supposed to turn...meh.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Feeling pants, so here's some books.

I've just spent two hours standing in the waiting room of our local emergency doctors.
My right eye has been sore for a week and last night it started in with shooting pains whenever I looked at light. So this morning we phoned NHS Direct, then went to the centre, then went to the eye infirmary. I haven't got any scratches or anything but it might be an infection...so I have to go back tomorrow for a swab. Since I'm working tomorrow I have to be there at 9 or they can't see me. This Bank Holiday is being a bit crap.

It was also a life changing day. It's the first time I've worn my glasses out of the house since 1997. Seriously. The only reason I did back then was cos I'd lost a lens and had a driving lesson. Even when we went to Spain I put my lenses in to go from the room to the pool, and walked round the water park half-blind.

Before I get evicted to the sofa (where I can't read or sew according to Anthony) here is something I stole from Michelle.

The Top 106 Books Most Often Marked As “Unread” By LibraryThing’s Users.

Strike-through books you’ve read before.
Italicize books you’ve read before but haven’t finished.
Copy and paste on your blog to see how “pretentious” you are.


Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Aeneid
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Total: read 28, unfinished 7. Michelle got a percentage but I can't be bothered trying to sort it out. Basically this list tells me that I try to finish books and that I don't read things "just because I should" - I don't even own things because I should!

Friday, May 02, 2008

Healed...

...by Phish Food.

Ahem.

I followed the lead of wonderful Caroline when on my day off yesterday by adding Google Reader. I spent a happy half hour or so adding blogs to it and then getting it set up to my satisfaction. The only problem with the bloody thing is that when I'm trying to fill in time by reading blogs...it cuts this time right down.

Luckily Michelle is discovering some new ones for me!

Hopefully once my sister gets into RADA (not trying to jinx you, doing the positive thinking thing) then she will blog more (even if it will all be about technical lighting stuff etc).

Now I'm back off to Outland and then early to bed.

Happy happy, joy joy.

So you've had a bit of a pants day but you're being good and not just eating crap when you get in.

Then your mother phones, she asks how you are, you tell her, she tells you not to moan to her...and then moans to you.

Pizza and beer for tea then.

Meh.

(I love my mother really, I really do. But sometimes, just no.)