Kel's Space

My freedom: quirks

Shimelle challenged us today to blog about our quirks - those things we love and find inspiring that other people just don't seem to get.

It occurred to me that the thing that most people in my 'real' life don't get is the very thing that brings most of us together in my internet neighbourhoods.

Making stuff.

Most of the people I meet on a day to day basis just don't think that making stuff is fun, cool or even normal. I find it very hard to explain that I spent the weekend with a bunch of people playing with art stuff. Most people I know just wouldn't get why I've spent the last two days working my fingers off working on another one of these. But you do, right?

Yep, that's us, we're quirky!

Birthday joy

1. We had these for tea after my belated birthday lunch on Monday. We picked them up at Candy Cakes in Covent Garden (Catherine and I had admired them when she was over - I'd save you one, but I don't think it would mail well, ha!). Perfect with...

2. ...a nice cup of coffee from my birthday present, the all singing, all grinding, timer setting,  advice giving, shoulder offering, custom brewing shiny shiny machine.

3. If music be the food of love, then why am I playing with a plastic guitar? Because my kind friend shared the gift of Rock Band for my birthday. And for you keen-eyed scrapbookers out there, yes, those are Basic Grey rub-ons I used to customise it!

4. Pretty pretty present from Nicola. Inside there is some gooooooooood music, some PINK blutack, and there was a bottle too, but they wouldn't let her bring it into the Jack Johnson concert in Hyde Park (that was more birthday joy, with Ben Harper, G Love and Special Sauce, and Jimmy Buffett too!).

5. Look, look, look what came in the mail too. Mary Stanley made him and very kindly offered him to me in a swap. Hopefully I'll be able to offer you a teensy peek before I head to the post office next week with her surprise.

6. I've had this a little longer, and it so deserved a bigger announcement when it arrived, but it was right in the middle of post-China lonesomeness and the beginning of my reaction to the hayfever medication. I'm so sorry, Latharia, because I love it so much! I don't know if you can see in the pic, but it says "Kel's Space". It hangs in my artsy-craftsy room and is so pretty that I haven't fixed anything onto it yet, but I will find some gorgeous inspiringness to fix onto it.

Happy Belated Birthday (to me!)

I am filled with gratitude and I have so much to show you. A wonderful prize from Latharia received (can it really be true?) back in May. A kind offer made by Mary Stanley and since received. It was my birthday two weeks ago and I felt surrounded by love... birthday treats from a dear man and a dear friend. Birthday music in the open air. All rounded off today with the lunch we postponed to an easier week and the trip to buy the beans! Links and answers and pics tomorrow...

PS on the topic of the Big Read, I got my hands on Anna Karenina today and am planning to spend the summer immersed in it, in Russia and in love.

Lost in Translation

I just love this movie. In my opinion it has the best ending of all time. I always cry. It is such a beautiful little film and everything is so pulled in and quiet. Anyone agree with me? Or hate it? Let me know...

My Freedom: pace of life

As part of the My Freedom project over on Shimelle.com, we were given the blogging prompt today:

How do you prefer the pace of life? Do you wish things would speed up or slow down?

The kneejerk reaction is to say "slow down!" In truth though, I don't know how true that is. My lovely was born in Orkney and raised there and in Shetland. As much as we love to visit, we have discussed it and neither of us would want to move back somewhere that quiet.

If I have too many days in a row with no structure, I tend to float around and waste the day, not even luxuriating in the freedom. I get far more done if I have a lot to do. Then when I'm too busy I long for periods of uninterrupted time.

I guess the answer, as so often, is balance. Which is no surprise. Farmers, religious leaders, educators all tell us that we need time to grow and time to rest, time to play and time to work, time to give and time to receive, time to create and time to think. As I start the second year of working part-time and a new course, I hope that I will find more balance - some routines and commitments to hang the week on, some blocks of focused time for creating and some down time.

My Freedom: Time

I'm doing another class with Shimelle. It's called My Freedom and while we don't know exactly how it's going to go yet, it's meant to be personal, spontaneous and reflective.

Today we were taking pictures on the theme of time. I realised that I have three little quirks related to time.

This is a photo of my little drawer of watches. Don't ask me why I have so many old watches. I don't even have stories for them all or anything. I keep my watch pretty basic, I've been given a Seiko twice in my life, the rest of the time it's a basic Timex or Swatch.

The second little story is all about how I don't now wear a watch. I used to wear one all the time. Last Easter my watch battery gave up at the beginning of a week. I freaked out! I had no time to replace the battery and surely I couldn't function without a watch!!! Yeah, well, 15 months later I still haven't put my watch back on and I'm fine. I do my job, I meet my friends and if I'm late, it's NOT because I don't know what time it is.

The quirkiest detail is that those kinetic watches don't work for me. Generally they work by storing the energy produced as you move, especially your hands. Well, I don't know whether it is the way I talk with my hands, or how busy my hands can be at times, but with me they get all over-energised and go racing ahead. This happens with good-quality, well maintained watches.

Peace and Love

Happy Birthday, Ringo!
Peace and love, man!

Click here for his wish.

He's added a new video, so you have to choose the one that says 'Peace and Love Update'....

YOUR Reading List

I meant to add this on to my other post... Public Top 100 lists are all very well, and seem to make ideal TV viewing for my husband, but there is often that indignant feeling about your dear favourites that were missed off. So, please share - what are your must reads that do not appear on the Big Read list?

I would have to insist on (I'll add as I think of more):

• Wild Swans - Jung Chang

Books you can't live without

I found this on Zenia's blog and was tempted to pick up my keyboard again. It's a list from the Guardian paper over here in the UK, and seems to be a slightly edited version of that provided by the Big Read at the BBC. The original claim is hard to track down, and most people blogging about it have read loads. I think that there is something in it though - there are households that don't read and this is a big factor in children's success at school. There's a trailer on at the moment for a documentary on this week where a prisoner describes the first time he ever picked up a book, and he was already in prison by that time. Something to think about, eh? But in the mean time, some fun, and maybe a challenge...

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.

5) Gray out those you are unfamiliar with.

6) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - William Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (updated - read August 2008)

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (updated - read August 2008)

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

You'll notice I haven't ruled anything out, it goes against my philosophy of life to rule anything out too soon. Looks like I'd better get on with reading my Russians! I've got a few of these on Bookmooch already.

Whoa! It's been HOW long?

I had no idea that it had been this long. I've had a weird mystery illness that has eaten up most of my free hours with grogginess and unrestful sleep. It went on for a couple of weeks and was driving me crazy as everything I wanted to do became impossibly heavy going. Turns out it was a reaction to hayfever medication, and I am happily back on my faithful homeopathic ones. Curled up on the sofa under an afghan watching Pal Joey because I have a cold, but feeling so much better.