It's weird, I've just been feeling quite uninspired a lot of the time. That, combined with being quite short of time has meant that a lot of them were a bit rubbish!
Oh well, here's a few of the better and/or more interesting ones...
I really enjoy cooking, and I enjoy it most of all when it's for friends.
We travelled up to the RA in London to see the summer exhibition. It was hectic and beautiful and inspiring as always, but Grayson Perry's "The vanity of small differences" series really blew me away. I'd go as far as to say that they were the best 'art' that I've ever seen in real life. I'd seen pictures of them, but they absolutely have to be seen in the flesh to be fully appreciated.
They took up the entirety of the last room of the exhibition, and I spent longer in that room than in any of the others, despite there only being six pieces to look at. But the detail and craftsmanship was second to none, and the story running through the pieces was so incredibly executed that I had to walk round again and again, taking it all in. I did this very poor reproduction of one small section of one of the tapestries, which me and Jess were both cooing over. "It's just a tree! But LOOK at it!"
You can see it as part of the tapestry here.
I was absolutely wracked with guilt about this afterwards! I've relayed the story to several people and have been assured that the kids would have got much WORSE language if they'd been in my shoes, but still. I'm not a swearer. I felt like a monster. A big horrible pink fat monster. (I have put on weight, and am sunburnt.)
Our landlord has done nothing but emergency/essential maintenance on this house in about 8 years (and most of the house looks like it's gone a lot longer than that). So when some workmen pitched up to finally paint our rapidly crumbling windows, we were pretty amazed. Even more amazed when they didn't just paint the windows, but the entire front of the house, including shiny blue front door!
We used to direct people to our house by saying 'it's the worst looking house on the street', but no longer!
It's that time of year. Brochure season at work means ridiculously hectic days - this year especially hindered by my computer deciding that now would be a good time to start glitching and error messaging all over the place...
Oh, and a LOT of rainbow wheel. ARGH.
A new friend came over to our house last night, and after going up to the bathroom, he came back down to fetch his camera because: "Your bathroom is so amazing, I need to take a picture". He came back with an amazing panorama view.
A weird number of people have this reaction to our bathroom, which is interesting, because the first time I came to the house I was genuinely a bit disgusted by it. The ancient toilet with the horrible rust stained bowl, the mustard yellow sink and bath, the dark wood panelling and low ceiling… But I've come to see it does have it's good points. For starters, it's MASSIVE. Like, you could have a little party in there. For seconds, a series of housemates have all added their own decorative touches, which means, as my friend with the camera put it "I wanted to stay up there for ages looking at everything".
However, as this blog entry touches upon, it's never REALLY clean. Like, there's only so much you can do to tackle about 50 years of ingrained bathroom grime, no matter how determined you are. (And I am pretty determined.)
So I've started going back to Quaker church every so often. Most of their worship is in silence, but anyone is welcome to stand up and speak about anything that they'd like to share. One man stood up and talked a bit about various conflicts around the world, and he said this. It really touched me, so I decided to write it down. I decided to leave in my pencil sketch lines, even though I know they look rubbish, it just shows me how I develop things. I am annoyed with myself for spelling visitors wrong. I spelt it right in the pencil, and then spent ages staring at it. For some reason it just looked wrong, so I changed it in the ink, and it looked even worse, and then I felt like an idiot.
Everything at work eventually just turned into a blur of frantic amendments. (My senior designer did humour me by letting me include some drop shadows though. Drop shadows are my guilty pleasure.) If I get around to it, I'll post some pictures of the finished brochures. They look GREAT and it's been a while since I've shown you any 'work work'.
Alex knew everyone at work was sad and stressed, so he bought us rocket lollies. What a hero/best boyfriend ever. <3 p="">
In a brief respite from stressful work days, me and Alex spent the evening with Elly and Kitty (and Jonny and Kris) while they were dog-sitting. We went down to the beach for a paddle by Fatboy Slim's house, then boardgames back at theirs. I am definitely dog broody.
So some days, I just don't know what to draw. Nothing that happened seemed significant enough. So this day I decided to draw several small (and fairly rubbish) drawings of some very minor events in my day. The little writing in case it's too small to read…
1. Colleague Dave spent ages on the phone arguing with a Russian airline over a £10 booking fee. "It's the principle of the thing!"
2. I've had the same sandwiches every day this week and they've been great, until today when they were really disappointing.
3. I had a rant about people leaving litter around the office assuming it was Wayne, but actually it was Marina and she apologised and I felt bad.
4. Anna bought a child into the office. It wasn't hers, but it was also called Anna.
5. Decided to walk home because I had lots to carry. There were loads of flying ants.
6. David made noodles for dinner, he found them really disappointing and swore to only have cereal again from now on.
Gave blood. Fun times!
I did this at about midnight so it's pretty poor, but anyway, this is a visual review of why I don't think the Mongolian Barbecue is a very good restaurant. (I did have an absolutely lovely night though, good company made everything good!)
More at the end of September, I hope.
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