Maiden Monarch

I am not having the most productive of days, I am such a stick in the mud but I hate having appointments in the middle of the day because it doesn’t feel like I get much done either side of them as it is official, the school day is so short (I know it never felt that short when I was at school). I had planned to do quite a bit today but other than the dentist (the aforementioned appointment in the middle of the day) I got just one thing done, this

I should point out that of course I didn’t do all of this this morning, this is just one of my many pieces of embroidery that needed sewing into something, so in this case I sewed it on to a little drawstring bag.

The pattern is called Maiden Monarch and it is currently free over on the Urban Threads site as part of their coloring contest.

Other than that I’ve taken some photos of some pond life, only because I felt I hadn’t used my camera in a while and the pond I walk past on the way too and from the dentist is the one and only highlight of going to the dentist.

The allotment will have to wait till tomorrow.

or the emboss of the whole

I’ve joined in with the Embroidered Digital Commons project, I’m in Mr X Stitch’s Fractal group and this was my bit of the phrase to stitch. I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out, I think the ‘emboss’ looks almost embossed and I had my bit of the phrase repeating within the letters of emboss because when you look at fractals the further you look into them the more you find that the pattern is repeating over and over again.

I have so many completed or almost completed embroidery pieces that need sewing into their new homes right now, that it was a joy to do something that didn’t need sewing into something and I like how it is a piece of embroidery that just ‘is’.

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In other news I am mostly better, for the moment anyway, I suspect at least one maybe two more wisdom teeth will need to come out but my mouth, right now only feels slightly strange (although my jaw still twinges if I open it too wide, something went quite wrong with it I think with all the dental stuff I had done the week before last and it is still mending). I am also largely over the cough / cold / fluey thing I had and I’m finally getting some sleep, although I could do with lots, lots more of it. My first decent night’s sleep in over two weeks came on Sunday night and consequently I had the energy on Monday to spend all day completely blitzing the flat (which so needed it) but as a consequence to that I was completely wiped out again on Tuesday. Today has not been too bad, although I had to traipse over to Surbiton (two buses there, two buses back) with Boy Lacer for an audiology appointment which turned out to have been double booked (thanks NHS centralised appointment system!), which was very frustrating, as although Surbiton is probably only half an hour away by car, if that, because I don’t drive it takes an hour to get there and it can be quite a tricky hour because Boy Lacer is quite slow to walk between the bus stops and he’s got quite phobic about buses again, thanks to some idiotic bus drivers who screech off from the bus stop before all their passengers get to sit down, throwing them along the bus, which terrifies him, as he’s not the most steady thing on his feet. Anyway not that even if I could drive would it be more comfortable for Boy Lacer, as he’s even more phobic about cars . . .

Oh well, ballet in a minute and then work straight after, as you can imagine, right now my poor allotment is getting very neglected, but at least it’s raining a bit more now.

Our Tragic Universe

I am so very partial to a spot of Scarlett Thomas, like my recent misadventure with Iain Banks, I think Scarlett Thomas books have to be read with a certain mindset and although I tried and mostly failed with Iain Banks Transition, after a little bit of effort I absolutely loved Thomas’ latest offering, Our Tragic Universe.

Once again this is another Scarlett Thomas book where the main character Meg is a frustrated creative (this time another writer). She lives in Dartmouth in a damp house with a bit of a waste of space boyfriend scraping a living writing genre novels and the odd  review for a newspaper, whilst constantly deleting words from her literary novel she’s been writing for years. As the story opens she is reviewing a particularly bizarre book about how to survive the end of time itself and through doing this events begin that well, if I told you what happened to her, you wouldn’t read the book would you? Anyway as you will often find in a Scarlett Thomas book there is lots of philosophical angst, flower remedies and very possibly a little touch of magic. There is also in this one, knitting and lots of talk about the differences between the three act structure and the storyless story and how these can be applied to life, it’s that sort of book. I read this (actually I listened to it as an audiobook) thinking for most of it, that Our Tragic Universe, whilst good, is not her best book (I really like Pop Co. and am very fond of The End of Mr. Y) but actually by the end of this book I think this may actually be one of her best books after all, in my opinion anyway, it really grew on me and I found it’s message quite affirming.

Ours are the streets

I can’t remember the last book I’ve read where I’ve been so desperate to find out what happens at the end, I’ve had to fight really hard to control myself not to flick to the end and read the last page. Ours are the streets by Sunjeev Sahota is set between Sheffield, Pakistan and Afghanistan and is about Imtiaz, born and raised in England. Imtiaz, a young, married father, goes back home to Pakistan for his father’s funeral, there he makes friends and they go on a road trip where he finds himself being prepared to be a suicide bomber. Written almost as a last letter to his family, the book has an incredibly convincing voice as it explores how someone can almost fall into being a suicide bomber, how someone can do it for the ‘wrong reasons’ (not that there is a right reason for being a suicide bomber, but it appears that Imtiaz is doing it more for acceptance from his friends at first) and the sort of emotions someone would go through as they approached the day itself.

I read for many reasons, entertainment mainly but I do enjoy a book which can open up a window so outside my realm of experience and I feel through this novel that I can understand a little more about this world. This book, is I think a Young Adult book (trying here to remember which part of the bookshop I picked this up in), but really I’d recommend this book for anyone aged about 15+, it really is excellent.

Catch up and The Doctor’s Wife

Image from BBC

Just a quickie, I’m still not particularly well, my mouth is getting better although still sore (and I still need work doing, including I’m increasingly suspecting, another wisdom tooth out). It took a week for me for my mouth to open wide enough to be able to brush my teeth properly (disgusting I know) as something was up with my jaw. Now my mouth is a bit better I’ve caught a bad cough from Boy Lacer and I have the combination of a bad cold / bad hay fever attack, along with today, for no apparent reason, my muscles killing me. All this and I’m still working, although I do seem to have lost one client, careless I know.

Anyway, onto something cheery, I loved tonight’s episode of Doctor Who, written by one of my writing hero’s, why wouldn’t I? I’m still not up to writing something really coherent but some points I liked:
* I loved how this episode felt quite old school and cerebral.
* Talking of old school, those corridors!
* The Doctor getting all choked up at the end, *sniffle* I did to

However much as I liked this episode (and it was far better than the pirates last week), with all the hype that this episode would be up there with Blink, nope not up there in my eyes, I think there have been quite a handful of better episodes, including this series’ two parter The Silence opener.

(One final non-Doctor Who related note – someone left a very nice comment on my gnome cushion post last night but before I could approve it WordPress seemed to eat it, sorry and if you’re reading this, thank you)

Transition

My not particularly good week continued with me having my wisdom tooth out on Saturday morning and whereas previous teeth out weren’t too bad, this extraction has been horrendous, so I haven’t been up to much, not even really embroidery, so the only thing I could do was catch up on my reading, using my current very slow going read as a tool to try and help me get to sleep and so, in this manner, I’ve been able to eventually finish Iain Bank’s Transition.

Transition is set roughly in that period of time where we didn’t exactly realise we had it so good, between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, although other than one of the characters being a very hedonistic hedge fund trader, the choice of era didn’t seem to have that much to do with the story. It is about a group called The Concern, an organisation of people that can flit across alternate realities and apparently seem to be changing realities so that there is a better outcome but there are power hungry figures at the top who want to use The Concern for their own means.

This is my first Iain Banks book that I’ve read and I may just not be used to his style, however nothing really seems to be happening plot wise till about page 200, we do get to know some great characters, as the story is told from their different view points and there is some mystery about who some of these characters may be, so I did like the character building but there just seemed great tracts of the book which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the over all storyline. I suspect I’m making myself look a bit of a cretin here, not ‘getting’ this book but I think it really just wasn’t my style. A comparison kept cropping up in my head as I read this, reading Transition was like watching one of those highly stylised sci-fi movies, you know the ones that have gone to great trouble getting the art direction just right, Transition was like that and as I actually quite like those sort of movies, if I tried to put my head into watching stylised sci-fi movie mode, I could go with the flow of the book a bit more and appreciate it a little more for what it was. However it did seem to me that there was a decent plot hidden under a lot of not particularly related stuff on issues as diverse as religious terrorism and the care of people in care homes.

‘His and Her’ pencil cases

My apologies for my slight blog absence, I’ve had such a busy week, nothing really in particular, it’s just with yet another Bank Holiday on the Monday, with work that night, all day out of the flat on a boring course Tuesday, followed by a client that didn’t turn up, Wednesday was getting Boy Lacer to and from his paed appointment in Chessington (two traumatic (for Boy Lacer) bus journeys either way to get there), followed by back to ballet, then more work and missing the last direct bus home, so had to get two buses and the second bus was very late and it was very cold, Thursday was allotment, dentist for the kids and more work and today was Mr. Lacer having to take Girl Lacer up to casualty with a suspected broken foot (bad sprain luckily and it’s already healing quite well, just didn’t look too good even after a night’s sleep this morning), whilst I had to go and have a root canal on a broken tooth which has to beat childbirth I think on the scale of painful experiences (ok actually, thinking about it, it was more painful than giving birth to Boy Lacer, Girl Lacer was two days of hell which I luckily seem to have forgotten about – most of the time). Anyway, I am absolutely and totally exhausted (specially as the broken tooth had kept me up unable to sleep with the pain for several nights). When I was making the pencil cases you see up there, this afternoon I could have very easily have leant forward, rested my head on my sewing machine, closed my eyes and gone to sleep, I could still do that now, but I know going to sleep at 8.30pm will totally throw my sleep patterns out, so I’m not.

Anyway one of the pencil cases is a birthday present for Girl Lacer’s best friend S (who she’s known since she was 3 years old) and the other one (the pink one) is for Girl Lacer herself, as, well, I couldn’t resist buying both colour schemes of the gorgeous Tiny Town fabric (from Fabric Rehab) and I still remember the year when Girl Lacer sweet talked me into buying her a pink pig torch because I was also at the time buying one for S for his birthday.

The dangly things are turtlies, the first thing I’ve made from Aranzi Aranzo’s The Cuter Book, which was one of the books I bought in my craft book binge at the beginning of the year. I buy pretty much all of the Aranzi Aranzo books and The Cuter Book does not disappoint, with smaller felt versions of many of their familiar characters and some new ones. The turtlies I made are about a third of the size of the pattern in the book, so that they wouldn’t be too big for the pencil cases, their very small size made them a little fiddly to make. I must make more Aranzi Aranzo stuff (proper size this time), as I always make them for other people and never for myself.

Meanwhile my dental trips continue (wisdom tooth to be removed tomorrow, one that should have been removed last year), there’s more boring course, lots more work and lots more weeds to fight. I also have some hats to sew, clothes I really, really want to make and a mounting pile of finished embroidery pieces that need sewing into their new homes Oh well.