Superman

So, watching Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (new favourite, utterly hooked) last night with my chap:

Lois: You read my work?
Superman: All the time.

Me: Awwww!
Him: [quiet voice] I read your blog...

Mint :)

camera

This post is making me feel like the hugest underachiever. To my shame, I haven't picked up my digital camera with anything resembling intent for bloomin' months. 

My attraction to hulaseventy's gorgeous blog is somewhat bittersweet. In fact, the blogging world in general is at once beautiful and nigglingly irksome. Scrolling through endless pages of talented, creative people committed to whichever art form they have dedicated themselves to - photography, writing, film - is bound to provoke some twinge of unease.

Somehow they all find time to be gloriously creative!  Good grief. I need to sally forth into this next term with a much more determined focus - a focus on taking pictures in particular. 

Time to dust off the Nikon and look at the world with new eyes. 

foxed

So I haven't written a post in, oh, a decade. I shall give you an excuse explanation. Well, you see, it's been Christmas, and as you know from previous posts I've been more than a tad excitable of late, and I have allowed preparations for the festive season to pretty much commandeer my life for the past few weeks.

Also, I've started a new notebook (journal, of sorts) after finishing my latest one a few weeks ago. It is, needless to say, a thing of utter and complete beauty and I'm pretty attached. It always takes a little while to get used to a new notebook and to get over initial excitement about binding, paper quality, and to decide whether a .5 or .7 nib would be best, etc. (yes, I know...). 

However! the preliminary zeal has somewhat subsided so I've now begun to think of my poor neglected blog once again.

Well, that was until I discovered this. Or, rather, my excellent mum bought me a year's subscription to it as a Christmas present. It is difficult - nay, impossible - to convey the sheer beauty and perfection of 'the real reader's quarterly'. Suffice it to say, it came tied in a green ribbon and asked me to put aside 'the challenge of the e-book and other similar worries' in the note from the editors. Need I go on?

I spent much of this afternoon curled up in front of the fire, gliding my way through my first issue (no. 28) and dreaming of working for such a gorgeous company. If you're remotely interested in reading, I beseech you - try it.

So, in short, all these things have led to the neglect of ol' goshkate.blogspot. So, in the next few days and weeks I shall address this injustice (as well as the hideously lingering guilt of the inexcusable abandonment of the goshkate presence on YouTube), and cast aside my new glittering literary appendages in favour of the old dependable blog.

Huzzah for that!

al fresco pet pedicures

Good grief, 3 posts in the last two days - the lass must be serious. Yes indeed, dear readers, I am sallying forth as I mean to go on. After my shockingly disparate blog presence I consider it a matter of duty and pride to up the ante on the ol' literary input. It always takes a little while to get back into blog-mode after being away, but I genuinely love it and want to get back in the habit.

Ok, so today started with my usual awakening - not from the infamous Mickey Mouse - but from my pet cat, Daisy. Every morning she considers it her duty to sandpaper-lick my face/fingers/elbow with her oh-so-cute-but-not-at-4:30-in-the-morning tongue, and maows pathetically (not a misspelling - that is exactly the disgruntled noise that she makes. Every morning...). I then heave myself out of bed, and semi-consciously stumble downstairs to let her out.

A few hours later I got up feeling slightly more human (slightly) and went to the kitchen for my restorative Weetabix. Today I was helping my Mum with the kids at church; one of our planned activities (and I'm now not sure how we came up with this idea) was to make chocolate bugs with the children - in a gesture towards cooking but without having to brave the hazardous e. coli-zone that is the kitchen at my church. My church, I should explain, is held in a local community centre, so we don't actually own the building. It's a nice set-up, but it does mean that we have to share the building with all the youth offender/ASBO kids/behavioural disorder groups that meet there during the week. All great stuff, but inevitably the kitchen has now begun to resemble what I imagine the scene a few minutes after the events at Chernobyl. You get a general feel for the building when you take a moment to more closely examine the posters and notices that adorn its walls - among them the bomb discovery protocol, a how-to-avoid-loan-sharks warning, and a text-this-number-if-you-know-someone-carrying-a-knife police appeal. Mhm, you get the idea.

So, basically, these chocolate bugs that we were preparing were made out of milk chocolate and white chocolate with a few good dollops of golden syrup to make them stick into a kind of chocolate dough. The picture in the Usborne children's recipe book looked pretty and simple enough, but turns out that what is essentially solid glucose turns children not into angelic darlings joyfully forming wings for their confectionary bugs using the helpful cocktail sticks provided for the purpose, but into minions of the apocalypse bent on wreaking havoc and destruction amidst much shrieking and chaos.

The afternoon was decidedly more relaxing, involving little more that sitting out in the sun in the garden and making my way through almost the entirety of hayleyghoover's blog. That's right kids, the girl is a legend. This blissful occupation was interrupted (it just took me about three attempts to spell interuppted interruppted interrupted. Shocking.) momentarily for a brief interlude where I had to help my Mum cut the cats' claws. Straightforward as this may sound, let me tell you - hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? No fury like a cat cajoled, more like.

Needless to say they didn't take kindly to being accosted in their casual promenade around the garden, and were even less impressed when they saw we were wielding a pair of nail clippers. Ye-es. Not impressed. I was the designated cat-restrainer for the proceedings, and I was cooing and chirping in all manner of soothing and encouraging ways, but to little avail. When we'd finished they flounced off disgustedly, appalled that we could ever subject them to such indignity.

Anyway, bedtime now - need to be up early to make my sarnies for work tomorrow. Off to take Mickey's battery out.

back on track

Well thank goodness for that.

Laptop issue sorted at last after final showdown in the repair shop. So yesterday I went and bought another one, as mine was apparently dead as a doornail.

So now that I have a fully-functioning beauty of a laptop I can crack on with some uni work that really pretty desperately needs doing (8000 words in 3 weeks? No problem... *cough*).

Leunig on Sunday and Monday's Faces shall start again with fresh vigour and excitement, and a film of Easter at Othona (see last year's) soon to follow. Huzzah for that!

so basically...

I have been absolutely useless for the past couple of weeks. I have only blogged 4 times so far this month (not including this one) with, I have to admit, not even very much interesting in those.

I could jump on the whole "my life is really busy at the moment, guys" wagon, but the truth is it isn't. Or at least it hasn't been until this week, as it is our CU's Events Week, which certainly takes some organising. It's basically a whole week full of events and lunch talks, and it's the culmination of the CU's year and we try to reach as many people as possible on campus.

It's a bloomin' mint week as there is a lo-ot going on and it means you pretty much don't have an hour to spare - but we love it :)

Aside from that I am hopelessly behind on my reading for my course, with no excuse at all - something which I plan to rectify in the next couple of days when there is the occasional lull in events. Determination is, admittedly, low but it will be done. Oh yes.

an unexpectedly mint day

Today I ventured out into Newcastle with one of my housemates to try and find a computer repair place in the vain hope that I might be able to get my laptop fixed. 

We eventually found a place in a quiet shopping centre, which was run by a couple of Geordie blokes, and proceeded to spend much of the day in their tiny shop with them and their dog with kidney-failure called Smudge.

Turns out there is something wrong with my motherboard/graphics card and it's really common with my particular laptop. Ach. Should cost about £170 to get it repaired, but after that it should be ok. Then normal service shall resume and I can crack on with blogging/vlogging with renewed vigour once more.

In the meantime I have bought a copy of Les Misérables and will settle down with it for the night very contentedly with a hot water bottle on my feet.

infuriatingly

my laptop has given up the ghost. Which, while on a worldwide scale it may not appear to be so important, it's a pretty big bloomin pain in the bum. Agh.

Was just getting into the swing of vlogging - I will be back with a vengeance once laptop is sorted/I've had to fork out an outrageous amount of money for a new one.

Hate hate hate loathesome technology!

Mind you, will probably work out for the best - I've got a couple of exams in the next week or so, so kamikaze laptop probably did me a favour by not leaving YouTube and Facebook looming temptingly before my eyes...

And it's giving me chance to snap away with the ol' camera. I'll post my first batch of pictures on here when I get chance :)

this is it

No more procrastinating - the blog is as perfected as you have the energy to make it before collapsing into bed, but now you need something to write. You can't just leave it empty, what kind of that impression would that make on the blogging community? 'Ah, another half-hearted glory blogger, she'll never last.' No, indeed!

So, with a sigh of trepidation and unwilling obligation you settle back down to think of something deeply profound, witty, and - if nothing else - remotely interesting to say.

Nothing. Blank.

Frantically you rack your brains, scrabbling into the deep recesses of your mind, grasping at some intangible and marvellous gem of philosophical or comic potential prose with which to stamp your mark firmly upon your little corner of cyberspace.

Zilch.

Inspiration snorts at you and says, 'Oh, come on. You can do better than this. Next thing you know, you'll cop out and write a some spiel about how you can't think of anything to say.'

So that's what you do.

Then resolve to find something deeply entertaining to write tomorrow.