C17: Day 129 – Where has all the magic gone?

May 9, 2017

One upon a time, a long long time ago, I used to work for BAA, the British Airports Authority. At the time, they operated most of the big airports in the UK, and I worked in the Retail Finance department, out by Heathrow. I was only there, as a temp, for I think about nine […]

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C17: Day 128 – The bucket

May 8, 2017

Sometimes, you’re just too tired to actually write a blog post, so you just embed a YouTube video. (I suspect the small birds at the beginning are house finches. We have them here, and the male has that lovely raspberry chest.)

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C17: Day 127 – The problem with DIY gel nails

May 7, 2017

As I’ve already confessed mentioned, I recently started using the Gelish “soak-off” gel nail polish system, and overall I’m happy with it. There is just one massive downside though: It’s a bastard to get the polish off. Although I’ve only been doing this a few months, and I’m only changing colour about every 1-2 weeks, I’ve already spotted a […]

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C17: Days 125 & 126 – Consultative democracy

May 6, 2017

So, yes, I slightly forgot to blog yesterday, but I did talk about writing this blog post, so I’m counting that as, well, “pre-blogging”.  There are, I think, several commonalities between the election of Trump last November and the vote to Brexit the European Union nearly a year ago. But the one commonality that I have been […]

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C17: Day 124 – Inspirational Ouroboros

May 4, 2017

I started blogging in 2002, tentatively at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm. There was something very liberating about writing a blog, one that people read and commented on. A group of us bloggers met up, and became friends, and I still know almost all of them to this day. But somewhere in the melee of work […]

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C17: Day 123 – Sorry, Grabbity

May 3, 2017

Last summer, we noticed that Grabbity was having a problem with her waterworks. She was peeing blood, peeing outside the box, washing herself a lot and had little to no control over the bladder. We whipped her off to the vet, who did a urine analysis and discovered she had a slight infection and crystals […]

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C17: Day 122 – What Teen Vogue taught me

May 2, 2017

If Teen Vogue has taught me anything, it’s that girls and women can care about politics and having nice nails. Enjoying dying your hair or fashion or having nice nails is not a sign of intellectual poverty, it’s a sign of being a normal human being. Now, last year, for Ada Lovelace Day, I wanted […]

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C17: Day 121 – How disc-binding made me want to write again

May 1, 2017

April was a quiet month on the blog, because my creative task for the month was to work on my novel and thus was not for daily blogging. And what a productive month it was: I reorganised my notes completely, using a disc binder system which allows me to remove and add pages, and my ideas just […]

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C17: April (Days 90-120) – World-building and novel planning

April 2, 2017

Yesterday, I decided that this month’s creative act would be to learn napkin folding. Unfortunately for me, all of our napkins are rectangular and thus unsuitable for folding techniques that rely on a square napkin. I have taken this as a sign that this month I ought to do something else, and that other thing […]

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C17: Day 90 – Peekaboo

March 31, 2017

Peeking kittehs! This is the last day of cat pictures, and I confess I’ve had a glass or two of wine and these probably aren’t my best. Overall, I’ve enjoyed this month, especially once I let myself draw from reference pictures when the cats were not playing along. I did have a bit of a […]

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C17: Day 89 – Stalking and pouncing

March 30, 2017

Google Images is great! Bottom cat is a wee bit elongated though. I know that part of the point if this exercise was to draw from life, but the last few days I’ve not had quite the amount of time to devote to it, but still there’s much to learn just from drawing from photos.

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C17: Day 88 – Moar jumpz

March 29, 2017

Because Google Images is easier and more interesting than sleeping moggies.

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C17: Day 87 – Run, run, run

March 28, 2017

More from Google Images. The last cat looks a bit goofy, but I swear that it really looked like that in the photo!  

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C17: Day 86 – More leaping

March 27, 2017

I rather liked the kitties in motion yesterday, so took a look at Google Images for inspiration.

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Shetland

March 26, 2017

Warning: This post is going to be just chock full of spoilers, so if you haven’t watched all three series, go do that and then read on! The last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching and re-watching (and re-re-watching) Shetland, the crime drama based on books by Ann Cleeves. It is a truly astonishing piece […]

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