Octnober

We went on holiday mid October. And because I am ridiculous, that is a source of immense stress to me. So the first half of this month was mostly dominated by intense anxiety, and after a brief interlude of holiday, the second half of the month was mostly dominated by intense relief to not be anxious any more. Silly brain.

In anticipation of autumn, I treated myself to some great new tights from H&M. Unfortunately H&M have a fundamental misunderstanding of how women’s clothing sizing works, and the fact that when women go up a size, they don’t just get taller whilst maintaining exactly the same stick thin legs. I’m only about a size 12 in trousers, and yet their ‘large’ tights make me feel like a vast bloated whale trying to squeeze itself into sausage casing.

BONUS guinea pig action!

So Alex has got an amazing Sherlock Holmes themed board game/RPG game… basically the idea is that Sherlock has decided to recruit some assistants to solve some of the easier crimes he has to investigate, and he’s training us up. There are 10 ‘games’ (books of text) in the box… At the start of the game, someone reads out the ‘scenario’ (using appropriate terrible character voices), and then based on that, you have to decide which locations you’re going to ‘visit’ on the map. Each location has its own text which you take in turns to read, and based on that you try and solve the crime, and you have to try and solve it by visiting fewest locations. And each ‘scenario’ has an actual fake newspaper for that day, which might contain hints and clues about the case. It’s pretty amazing and for some reason always highly amusing, particularly because they’re delightfully difficult and we usually end up visiting around 30 different locations when Sherlock (who’s your benchmark that you’re scored against) solves it after visiting about 3. Anyway, this is our crime solving team from that night, and we all fell into hysterics imagining the scene in which Justin struggles to pronounce the word ‘correlation’ wasting valuable minutes of crime-solving time.

Ahhh #GBBO.

We went on holiday to Frankfurt (and later Cologne) in Germany. There was SO MUCH VEGAN CHOICE, including an entire supermarket of vegan food which was basically a dream come true. I want to move there.

Most of my holiday doodles weren’t very good. Neither’s this one but I feel like I need to include at least a couple of holiday ones, even if it is just one of Alex lying around reading. We did a lot of that. It was LOVELY.

Cologne cathedral is massive and amazing.

Holidays are fun, but so is coming home. I’m such a loser…

I made vegan nachos and they were SO GOOD. Ask me about my vegan nachos. I will make them for you and you will (hopefully) be impressed.

Calm and well rested for the first time in what feels like months, but still not capable of doing a decent self portrait. One day! One day!

Dog sitting the adorable Henson for our friends Lucy and Angie. A golden retriever/poodle cross puppy and every bit as cute as that sounds.

I know it’s bad to feel this way, but can it hurry up and get cold already so I can get my awesome-layering-action on?

How hard can it be to fix a leaking washing machine pipe? Two months of washing machine sitting in the middle of the kitchen says VERY HARD, but we might finally have cracked it…

I am probably a nightmare to live with. A have a lot of pent up rage about very minor household improprieties, although weirdly since drawing this illustration it’s sort of got it out of my system and I’m no longer cross all the time. Therapy through illustration!

I hate halloween. I did however, do a halloween themed diary, confronting the scary things that happened to me. Unseasonably warm? Global warming. TERRIFYING. Mystery lunchtime roti, could it contain lentils? Will I eat it anyway thus subjecting myself to a day full of agonising stomach cramps because I’m incapable of showing restraint? All the cash machines are broken! Is this the beginning of the financial apocalypse? (It wasn’t) Let’s run the broken washing machine… will the hose fly off and flood the kitchen?! More than enough fear for one day.

Onwards to November. I am unseasonably optimistic.