Anyhow what have I been up to?
Well the garden has a few more plants in it, a lot less weeds, and hopefully less ants. There's an ants nest somewhere under my front garden so I went a little berserk with the ant powder. I know ants aren't the worst bug out there, and they do no harm to the garden, but my first trip abroad when I was a child left me with a hatred of them, seeing them crawling everywhere, even out of plug sockets will do that to a young mind.
I've also been making mudpies and playing with ModPodge.
The mud pies were for my Belfast Sinks shown in the earlier post. I got the sinks last year off Freecycle to use as plant pots, but even after I cleaned them up they still looked messy, so Dad found a recipe, 2x sand, 2x peat, 1x cement. Mix it up, cover the pots, then moss and interesting things should start growing on them quite quickly. I've only covered 1 so far, I wasn't certain whether the mixture would stick, but it seems to have so next week I'll put some plants in it and make more mudpies to cover the other 2 sinks.
The adventures in ModPodge were even messier than the mudpies. Mainly because I was sensible with the mud and wore gloves, but ModPodge is only PVA so getting covered is half the fun. Porl commented on it being like "Fun Excema". I've not finished that project, but I'm halfway through covering a box with postage stamps. I'll be getting merrily messy again next week.
The big news of the day (other than Liverpool winning the FA Cup) is... I won Craft Idol!
The final theme was "My Hero". Well my heroes are my parents, for being generally ace people, being great crafts people, passing their love of crafts onto me, and lastly for generally spoiling me rotten.
I was going to try to make a doll, but I wasn't happy with it, and I'd set myself a personal challenge of doing a different craft in each round, so I made a necklace instead.
My parents initials are "R" and "S". So the chain is made up of lots of "S"'s and the pendant is 2 "R"'s. The beads are from a necklace of my Grandma's. She left me lots of costume jewellery. She asked that we not sell it, but she knew I made jewellery so I hope she doesn't mind that I've been dismantling it.
Porl got more into this competition than I did, he's much more competitive, he's been asking every day whether I've won yet, so when I told him the results he was dancing around the kitchen. On the other hand I always feel slightly guilty about winning things and feel other people deserve it more. I was really pleased with my last entry, but I know I only scraped through on some earlier rounds, the work people have put in has been great, and the different takes on the themes and the range of crafts has been amazing.
I've also been busy having a bit of a re-organisation. 1 trip to Ikea, 2 evenings with the glue and hammer, and 9 episodes of Buffy S7 produced a lot of boxes.
It took a couple more days and my Craft Idol entry to get the remainder of the series finished. It was very good, not as funny as earlier series' and it left me with a vague feeling of confusion. I'd watched them so quickly that I didn't realize I was on the last episode. Also the little bits I've heard about the ended were wrong, I was expecting different people to die, so when my favourite character died I kept expecting him to come back. I guess I'll just have to watch them again to see if the confused feeling goes away. :)
Update on the mouse. It seems to have defeated the cats. I made sure they were inside for at least some of last night. This morning we have no "presents" on the doorstep, and the mouse is no longer under the sink. I'm not going to start worrying about where he might be instead, there are plenty of hidey holes outside, and if he found some way into the house the cats have proved they would soon sniff him out and set up a vigil to draw my attention to him.
Our garden has turned into a haven of wildlife this past week. We've had a hedgehog scurrying around the patio at 4am. Then this afternoon a squirrel came running down the steps, right up to the patio window. It stood there with his front paws against the glass peering in. Then scampered off down the side of the house before I could turn my camera on. Gonzo slept through it all.
In the 18 months I've been here I've never seen anything more interesting than a Great Tit, we get Blackbirds, Magpies by the dozen, a lot of Chaffinches, Wood Pigeons (Although these would count as "Flocks" which is what my Mum calls particlularly fat Wood Pigeons. Far too fat to be counted as just 1 bird.) Then very occasionally a Robin or Great Tit, so Hedgehogs and Squirrels are something to get excited about.
We've also had some new kittens hanging around. (Anyone not remotely interested in cat/kitten escapades stop reading here.)
The most frequent visitor is Ollie. He's a jet black kitten who is impossible to photograph, partly because he's jet black and absorbs all light, and partly because he's a kitten and doesn't keep still. Every photo I've taken is a blurred black smudge, occasionally I'll get a picture of a black blob which has glowing eyes and a red name disk. We first saw Ollie a few months ago, but these past few weeks he's been practically living in our garden.
As I write Ollie is sat by the patio doors waiting for Duke to come out to play, and Duke is sat the other side waiting for me to let him out.
He's very timid of us so he hasn't been in, not that we'd tempt him of course, he obviously has owners, he has a name tag, we just want to play with him!
He loves Duke though, I think it's because Duke usually tolerates being randomly attacked in a playful kitten manner. Gonzo on the other hand doesn't, ever, and fights back in earnest. Ollie has quickly learnt to avoid this kind of play with Gonzo.
Our other kitten friend is more restrained, literally. Our road is too busy for a kitten to be near so my neighbour is taking him out in the garden for walks on a leash, (which he keeps escaping from). He's called Frankie and if he keeps still for long enough you can tell he is the double of Gonzo. In the 6 weeks he's been at my neighbours he's trashed several of her ornaments, all her plants are now outside because he knocks them over and eats them, she's covered in cuts and bites, I'm covered in cuts and bites, and the other kitten she got as company for him has had to go to another home because he attacked it constantly and it never fought back. He's now restricted to the kitchen. Duke has tried making friends with him, but Frankie keeps attacking him, (Duke is easily 3x taller than Frankie and probably 6 or 8 times heavier) thanks to the leash Frankie has been kept off Duke, and Duke is too soft properly to attack Frankie, he just play fights. However, whenever Gonzo sees Frankie there's full scale hissing and growling, which is quite funny to watch when Frankie is locked the other side of the kitchen window, or straining at the leash :)
Next week Frankie is going to the vets to have his bits chopped off. Hopefully being neutered will calm him down enough to enable him to join cat society without starting WWIII.
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