Rainbow's End!

This morning I noticed that there was a rainbow on the wall and what's more there was a pot of gold there!

In the pot are these:

So now I know what's in that pot of gold at the rainbow's end.

Getting a better night's sleep

Last October I spotted this fox sleeping in broad daylight in my neighbour's garden. I was amazed that he wasn't being mobbed by any of the magpies or crows - they normally let me know when a fox is about.

I'd not been sleeping so easily as this fox recently and all my old tricks and techniques just hadn't got me well-rested. Then I turned to this book - Healing Yourself with Self-Hypnosis by Frank Caprio, M.D. and Joesph R. Berger, revised by Dr. Caroline Miller. I've read various other books on hypnosis but it was quite a while since I'd actually tried it properly. I read this one to re-inspire me and last night before I went to sleep I used it to suggest to myself that I recharge my batteries whilst asleep and feel well-rested when I woke up.

I woke up feeling good and had loads of energy all day. I was even singing whilst I emptied the dishwasher! And believe me that was a big difference!

Something that this book emphasizes is that one first uses the hypnotic state to explore what the problems behind the symptoms really are before planting useful suggestions like "When I awake I'll be fully rested and ready to go". If you too have had difficulty sleeping the sort of question to ask yourself whilst under hypnosis might be "Why do I keep waking up tired?" or "Is there something I need to change about my sleeping habits?"

Some of the general questions they give when introducing this idea of "Autoanalysis" are ones I'll be tackling in future sessions like:

1. How is my health affected by the way I think?
2. What plans have I made for the future?

The first is obviously worth checking out - the second is one of their suggestions that surprised me at first but of course it is the subconscious self that is being asked and I may well have some plans I planted one way or another long ago and that I'd like to undo or at least know about - in fact it seems rather important to check this out.

Have you any other suggestions for things to explore this way?

Overcharging Synchronicity

Wow! Not a Bargain! - spotted in a shop window last summer.

For the first time last week I heard about someone being overcharged on their credit card by mistake. She'd paid £325 instead of £25 for flea spray at the vets. Luckily for her the vets spotted their mistake and have refunded her the £300.

Now, talking to another friend, I find that one of her friends has not been so lucky. She was charged £99.95 for a £9.95 plant. She only noticed when she got her statement and on contacting the garden centre they are claiming that their till shows that she bought more than one plant and has not been incorrectly charged at all. She, unfortunately, has lost her receipt....

The moral of this story is always check the amount is correct before you type in your PIN!

What I don't know is whether this synchronicity has anything else for me... any ideas?

Tinth Anniversary Card

A photo-collage using:KB35's "Tin Man", Hamed Saber's "Engraving (Qalam-Zani) Vase", LinBow's "GREEN TIN HOLES" ,
z e n's "squared circle wood plug"

Last week was the wedding anniversary of Jim's brother, Dave. Dave and Jo have been married for 10 years. I discovered that the material often associated with the 10th wedding anniversary is tin. So I searched for suitable images to create this with.

These images (from flickr users) - all have creative commons licenses that allow manipulation - and came up when I did an advanced search for such licensed images with tin in their descriptions, headers or tags.

Their actual anniversary date is January the 3rd. It turns out this is a really difficult date to go out for a meal. Most of their local restaurants are so busy for New Year that they close on the days following it. Even on Saturday, the 5th, the restaurant they'd been hoping to go to was closed!

Before Christmas, Jim and I went to his work's Christmas do. There is usually a competition and this time it was team-based. Despite my total inability to answer any of the questions correctly I was very lucky to be the winning table, as was Jim. The prize was £40 each in amazon vouchers. On Saturday evening Jim spent them both to buy me an external disk drive - I'd pretty much run out of space on my internal disk which was severally cramping my style especially when doing collages like the one above in Painter. We were amazed that despite having ordered it at the weekend it arrived today!

As I mentioned in my previous post he's handed in his notice so its unlikely we'll be going to any more IMDb do's. They were always fun and I did mention we'd be happy to accept any future invitations if they felt like extending them :-) If they'd been willing to offer Jim part-time work he wouldn't have left but he felt unable to continue full-time and do the things we are planning to do.

Thanks for all your welcome back greetings - I'll be visiting your blogs soon!

Happy New Year!

Sorry my blog has been closed for so long. I really wasn't expecting to be so anti-social for all these months.

Review of 2007

• The early part was dominated for me by Soul Collage and builders.
  I thoroughly enjoyed the collaging of cards and going to Ireland for Imelda's Soul Collage workshop. I'd spent 3 months solidly making cards before I went. That seems to have exhausted the seam for me.
• The builders were in because we'd had a very minor leak in our dining room ceiling - they managed to take months to sort this out, needing two rooms completely clear and did a lot more work than I'd imagined was necessary.... I found their presence very difficult - they were all pleasant people it was just the fact that they were in my space and we had all our furniture crammed into the rooms that weren't being worked on - that's what was hard. As Jim works from home and I don't go out to work either there was no escape!
• Whilst I was in Ireland Jim was bagging the last but three of his Munros and then when we were in Scotland in May he collected those as well. The last one was celebrated with as many of his Munro bagging companions as could make it.
• The summer was one of the wettest I've experienced (good job we'd had those builders in to fix the earlier leak) and consequently much cooler than the super-hot summer of 2006. My sister lives in Cheltenham where there was flooding - she'd had a minor flood in 2006 so she'd nagged the council into clearing their street's drains after that - rather tellingly their street was okay when many surrounding ones were not. So their house was not flooded. (One of the most cost effective remedies would be to fund drain clearing properly, that and stop building on flood plains of course. Nothing can help you if you are in standing water but many places were only flooded because of the drains not coping.) They still had to cope with no running water for weeks as the whole area's water supply was hit.
• We took up archery and throughly enjoyed it, even though our club shares its field with chickens.
• In the autumn one of my brother's had a minor heartattack - he had keyhole surgery and is making a good recovery. He's only 47. This and the earlier death of one of my ex-work colleagues brings home one's own mortality and the need to make of life what one can whilst still alive.

Jim and I have always planned to live in Cornwall sometime. We got married there seven years ago as a way of marking this. We've decided that 2008 is the year to do this. Jim's given up his job and we have some things we want to do to this house before we sell it. We've been living here since '96 and although we have done quite a lot there are a few more things to do before we call it finished.

Then we'll cross our fingers that someone wants to buy it despite the gloom in the papers about the property market, after which we'll be able to move to Cornwall and start the next phase of our lives there.

Where am I?

I've turned comments off on this blog as I'm getting quite a lot of spam. I've been able to keep on posting on flickr but haven't the time and energy to manage to be an active blogger. Sorry not to have been visiting your blogs.

My best wishes to you all!

Update: Comments are back on and I'm back!

Playing with photos in Painter

On flickr there is a group called Noise and Dust Through The Viewfinder - on it I found the overlay I've used here by Nesster

The idea is to fake what one sees through the viewfinder of a camera.

However I also played with multiple exposures of the same subject as I thought that this was the ideal place to use the HDR effect. Most people use either specialist software or photoshop to create this type of image - as I haven't got either I'm having a go imitating it in Corel Painter IX.5 and not getting close but loving the effects anyway!

HDR is intended to create an image that is more like what sees than what the camera sees but mine are coming out a good deal less real.

Here are some more:




How real is your life?

What's in my bag?

Jo has just divulged the contents of her bag and suggested other do so too... so here is mine.

A couple of months ago I moved from a relatively large bag to a really small one, however that one couldn't take the strain and I soon had to buy a new one. This is a good size, big enough for what I consider essential without being so big that I'm tempted to put in things that really would be better put in my backpack or shopping bag.

My bag contains:

paper hankies, a camera, sunglasses, mobile (which is almost never switched on - for emergencies only!), comb, keys, wallet and pen

I'm interested to know what you keep on you, what is essential to your existence - in either your jacket pockets or bags... so go on tell me what's in your bag (or those pockets)... or better yet blog it and then let me know you have!

Buying a Car...

Photograph of a Q-reg car (which means its one of a kind) altered in Painter IX.5. I like to think the Q stands for Quirky. I don't know whose car this particular one is I was just drawn to it in the street and love the radiator grill!

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We've been trying to buy a car. We haven't got one yet.

For the last ten years or more we've been very lucky and had Jim's brother's second company car for which we paid monthly, but for which we got a real bargain. Now, at long last, his wife wants the second car - I'd imagined that we'd stop having it as soon as they got married so that's about 7 years extra we've had it!

Now its bye-bye super-duper BMW (even if we always did go for the cheapest!), new every 9-12 months, taxed, insured etc without more effort on our part than simply paying the monthly charge and hello... well what?

• Jim wants a car that he can easily put his band gear in (bass amp, bass, loads of other bits and bobs...).
• It must fit on our drive (which is not long).
• We need something reliable as neither of us knows the first thing about fiddling with cars (and that's despite the fact I grew-up on a garage... my father would be horrified at my total lack of knowledge in this area!)
• And no where near as expensive as a BMW!

The first question is should we buy new or used. In the dim and distant past I've done both before. I was happier with the new car in many ways as the second hand one had problems which it was much harder to get the dealer I bought it from to fix... though they did in the end. (Even longer ago I also had absolute wrecks and have no intention of going back to one of those if I can help it!)


As I said I'm not a car person - but I can get into researching anything (or so I like to think!) - so I have the current issue of What Car?. What caught my eye was the "Shock Report" on the cover about who gets the best deal from car dealers - men or women. Then I read the report.

How many men and how many women would you send out to find out whether its men or women who get the best deals?

And what other aspects do you think you might need to take into account? Maybe age, perceived class, accent, perceived wealth, perceived attractiveness, smell, knowledge about cars, car currently driven, postcode, previous experience in negotiation, shyness...

So how many of each sex would you send out then? 100? 50? 20? 10?

What Car? clearly think they can tell from sending out just one man and one woman! In the report they do admit that negotiating skills vary from person to person but they continue to plug their result as showing that its men that get better deals than women.

Given this abstracting from an overly small subset what use is the rest of the "information" in the magazine? Am I right to abstract from this single example of a very poorly researched article into assuming that all their car tests are equally one-sided?

Of course two cars of the same specification from the same manufacturer are a lot more likely to be similar than two randomly selected men (or women) - maybe that is where they have gone wrong.

My main conclusion is that if there are two of you - go and negotiate separately and take whichever the best deal is that you can get between you!

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So far we have test driven a nearly new Vauxhall Meriva - it has fabulous storage space - Jim especially liked the flat space available when the back seats are down. But it seemed hugely expensive compared to new ones available via brokers on the web. And the salesman wasn't budging on price for either of us!

Have you any experience of buying via a net based broker?

And any suggestions for other cars to look at?

Some art at last!

Wire and wooden beads plus the wooden table below.

Inspired by Elizabeth Berrien's Wire Sculpture Tutorial I got doodling with some wire - however I really wanted to add in springy bits and other objects so I did.

Ever since Jim and I went around the Sculpture exhibition at Trull House at the beginning of May I've been getting more and interested in doing some sculpture again. I did an OCA Sculpture course long ago and discovered then that I was most drawn to assembling things rather than carving, wet clay or moulding. I made enough at the time to also realise that sculptures are not as easy to store as pictures are - even when you are just at the maquette level - so working in a medium where you can take photos and then reuse the parts also suits me well!

I'm going to "doodle" in wire (plus other bits) for a while because its lots of fun.

Any idea what this one might be (or become)?