Monday Here Again

It has been a week exactly since I managed to get on here. After my hectic weekend last week, the following few days were not too bad. Sioban got a few hours trial waitressing with a local resturant and subsequently got a shift for Thursday, Friday and a double on Saturday, plus she had a Chemistry lecture at Monash on Sunday, so not only was she rather busy, so was I running to pick her up and drop off. Went to a family bar-b-cue on Sunday at my sister Maree's. Lovely lunch and lovely to see most of the family again, but once every three months is enough. LOL>

Monday Blues or is that Bangs

After my stressing weekend, I went to bed with a bit of a headache, which turned into a rip roaring hurricane by 2.30 am. I struggled out of bed to get some pain relief and also took some blood pressure pills, in case that was what was causing the pounding. When I awoke some 4 hrs later, it felt a lot better, but was still a dull thud in the background. The good news of the successful computer defrag, did a lot to brighen me up, but the slight nagging of guilt in regards to not driving teenagers to school bus and train knowing they would be drenched in the downpouring of rain, renewed the stress and the headache with a vengance. So off I go to do my three hours at Romantic Cottage (I may have called in a sickie on another Monday,) but with Graham been away, I felt obliged to go. I only work there once a forthnight, so when do they choose to have a builder demolish the wooden boards on the wall of my office, (they been SP Tubes) Today of Course. Bang, Bang, Bang, Clung, Clung, crash, goes the builder, Bang, Bang, Bang, Roar, Roar, Roar, goes my head. Then to add to all this noise it starts to hailstone, not just little hailstones, but ones as big as birds eggs, all pounding on the tin roof which is a whole 6 inches above my head. I am not sure which is the loudest, the hailstones or my head thumping, however there is a short respite from the builders noise, as he pauses to watch the hailstones beating in the shed door and which by now are starting to dent the soft inner lining of the walls of the office where the wooden planks have been removed. I was so glad when my three hours were up and I left to go to my next job, that of teaching three classes (duration 9 hours). It is now nearly the end of the last class, and I am sure I have missed 3/4 of the questions asked by students tonight as the pounding in my head and ears gets progressively louder. Roll on 9.30pm, only another hour to go. But wait, then I have to drive home, thats nearly another hour. Where oh Where is my knight in the white limo, with the cool cloths for my head and the massage for my aching neck.

Weekend Gone By

I spent most of the weekend trying to clean up my ancient computer. It has been going so slow of late and I could not get it to cleanup files or defrag, due to lack of disk room. I borrowed an external hard drive from Adrien (my middle son) to copy all the files under my documents to it, with the intention of then deleting them from my hard drive C; giving me more room to play with. However as they say, the best plans of men and mice!! First of all, my computer refuses to stay running for more than an hour or so, sometimes and this was one of those times. I started it copying the Mydocs folder, pretty straightforward one would think, but my computer has had the hard drive replaced a couple of times, so it has my docs folders under my docs folders under my docs folders, all in all about 27 gbs worth, so when it locked up, I have to spend about a hour trying to figure out just what stage it had got to, before starting it up again, as I did not want to repeat what it had already done. So I get it going again and this time it seems to be doing well, till just about the time I was ready to call it a night and go to bed, hopefully leaving the computer going all night and it would be mostly done when I arose late on Sat morning, no such luck, it decided to lock up again, somewhere in the middle of Sioban's Tigger folder which contains hours and hours of music, buried in a mountain of folders and sub folders, so some hours later after much printing of folder contains and comparision between drive C: and the destination drive F: I have pretty much worked out where it had got to and with some fiddling around got it on the copying pathway again. Anyway this set the tone for pretty much all day Saturday until late evening, when I was starting to feel rather hopeful (after it had been running continuously for about 4 hours) that it would get the job finished before conking out again, disaster strikes .....
the lights are no longer flashing on the external drive, It would have to happen just as Adrien had appeared in the Lounge room. Of course "it is all your fault" "you have left it running all night" "you have burnt it out" was the reaction. After a quick check of plugs etc, it appears that I had not "burnt it out or anything so drastic, someone (probably Fudge) had dislodge the main power plug. It the meantime 'middle son' had gone stomping off to his bedroom with underbreath mutters, about how I have destroyed his precious hard drive. Anyway after considerably more time and checking (after I reconsidered throwing the whole kit and caboodle out the window) I started it off again. Somewhere in the early evening on Sunday(without any more rubbish) it finally finished. I was missing about 300 files somewhere in the exchange but by this time I had had enough and I had checked it so many times, I did not know whether I was looking at C or D drives, I decided that to hell with it, What was missing now, could go to God in that cyberspace hole where socks, hair ties and cutlery disappear to, for all I cared. I deleted file by file, with a feeling somewhat like sweet revenge, from the C: drive. All in all I reclaimed 17gbs all that work for less than half the drive capacity, "Well better than nothing". Then I decided to really push the button, and try to defragment the drive, something I have been unable to do for many a month. Low and behold it ran all night, without failing and I awoke this morning to a completed defrag. It did not really give me much more space, but it did give me a great feeling of joy. Who would know that one could get so much pleasure or sense of achievement from getting a basic tool on a computer to work. God how my life has changed since I was young.

However there was one spark of light in the whole weekend, I got a flickr email from someone who had spied my communion photo on my flickr site and who came from my hometown of Naas. It was great hearing from someone "from home" so to speak. He is a great deal younger than me, but still knew some of the people I did, so it was really good to touch base. Maybe he might be able to put me in touch with an old school friend or the like as he still has family living there.

New Month - New resolution

AS October starts and brings with it the longer, warmer days I decided that I must start updating this blog on a more frequent basis. I started one about two years ago and never used it and then I was forced to start another one recently so that I could leave a comment on Suzan B's blog (one of my favourite artists) thriftycollageartist.blogspot.com. Somehow or other they seem to have been combined (the old and the new blogs) that is and the little bit of blogging I had done previously has disappeared.

Anyway all this rambling is simply the prelude to me saying that I am going to try and make an effort in the next few months and get a blog going. I really love all these nifty blogs that I visit, but as yet not sure how they are made, but I am willing to learn as I go along. Someday my blog might be one that people want to visit. I have previously started a page on myspace and frontpage, but I have lost interest in both of them. I think mainly because I am not sure how to pretty them up, but also because they seem to be so boring. Anyway we will see how I go.

My aim is to have a little tattle most days about what Art I have seen, enjoyed or done , but not necessarily confined to that. I hope to talk about other things of interest also.

Here is something I have just finished for a swap on a flickr group called Scrappindipity. The theme for this swap was Trash and Treasure. The aim was to make a group of ATCS using something saved from the bin (trash) and something you have got and been hesitant to use, saving it for that rainy day (treasure).
I used the foil tops from tubs of butter, ran them through a little embossing thingy, bought about 8 years ago during my scrapbooking days and never used. Then I used Alcohol Ink Markers to put some colour on the raised areas. I wrapped the foil around old playing cards, then I stuck the little dried flowers which are sealed between laminate, on to the foil. Using a icy pole stick I made a freehand frame around the flowers by smoothing out the textures on the foil. Because they are done freehand, the frames are not symetrical but I think this adds to the charm of the ATCs.