Rocking Your World Friday weeks 30 & 31

Oooops I did it again - somehow I have managed to miss a week. Not sure how, I've just been a tad busy both at work and at home and blogging kind of slipped my mind for a while there....

So in the interests of catching up, rather than the day by day account I usually do in these posts, here's a combined list of everything that's been rocking my world over this last fortnight

• First up - money

Not that I've got any - that would be nice :)  But nope - the fortnight started off with a visit to my bank and a long, detailed chat with them about how I can consolidate my debts so they are easier to repay, and how I can cut down in some areas of my outgoings to save expenditure. It could have been depressing but actually it was pretty empowering, I've now got a MUCH better handle on what I'm spending and if I can stick to my new regime I should be totally debt free in a couple of years which will be amazing having had money worries hanging over me for years now.

And then a couple of days ago, out of the blue, I got called in by the boss (always scary as I automatically think I have done something wrong and am going to get a telling off :) ) and given a small but helpful payrise - yay!  Things are looking up :)

• Firefly!!!

For years I've been making excuses not to watch this little bit of television genius - I knew it had been cancelled after just one season and I knew the chances are I would absolutely fall head over heels in love with it.  A Joss Whedon produced space western - what's not to like??

So I figured I would spare myself the pain of loving something then immediately losing it, by not watching it at all.

But my willpower finally crumbled last week, and I'm so glad it did!  I'm now 9 episodes into the 14, and I don't want it ever to end.

• Health

Last year the docs put me on blood pressure tablets which I wasn't too chuffed about as they made me really sleepy - my life pretty much became "work, dinner, sleep" for a while with no energy for anything else.

So about 4 months ago I stopped picking up my repeat prescriptions and took myself of the tablets - which I know is really naughty!  

I finally went back to the docs last week ready for a telling off and a new prescription, but when she took my blood pressure she declared that I am now below the worrisome level and no longer need the meds - hooray!  I have to go back and get checked regularly for the next few months, but here's hoping it stays out of the danger zone.

• Index Card A Day

The ICAD project came to an end on July 31st and I am over the moon that I made it to the end of the 61 days without missing a single card.  And I even like some of them! (some of my favourites above).  Daily creativity is hard work - but I managed it, and enjoyed it too.  For two months anyway (must admit I haven't done a thing since and am enjoying the rest :)  )

• The Olympics

Now I must disclose up front that we have barely watched any of the actual SPORT (the Winter games are more my thing, so our olympics comes in 2 years time) -  but we have enjoyed the general Olympics buzz so far.

We watched the whole of the bonkers but brilliant opening ceremony last week (loved the Industrial Revolution bit especially), we have cheered whenever we heard word of another Team GB medal, and when we were in Lee Valley Park earlier this week we walked past the Canoe Slalom event and heard all the whoops and cheers which was exciting.

And it's just great to see the whole country united in their excitement over our local games.  Fab.

• Geocaching

Now that the weather is finally picking up a bit (well, mostly, it's been peeing it down again today), we are geocaching a bit more regularly again.  We have been out for nice long caching walks over both the past two weekends - lapping up the sunshine and the scenery and generally having a wonderful time.  And with me watching the pennies especially carefully at the moment it's the perfect hobby as, apart from a bit of petrol getting to the start point of our walk, it's free!

The kids were particularly pleased this weekend to find their 300th geocache - next milestone will be for myself and Jay as we are just 6 short of our 500th

• Seeing my dad

I don't get to see my dad anywhere near as often as I'd like, so it's a real treat when I do get down to London for a visit.  Connor and I popped down the motorway to see him a few days ago.  and annoyingly I've just realised I didn't take a single photo - so here's one of him on an elephant in Sri Lanka about 40 years ago instead :)









and last but not least

• Fun days out

On the way to my dad's, we always pass signs for the "Royal Gunpowder Mills" at Waltham Abbey, but we've never been.  So as it was a nice sunny day, and we had a few hours spare, we thought we would go and see what it was like.

And it was fantastic!  Such an interesting place, and so much to see and do.  Despite it being the summer holidays we almost had the run of the place, maybe everyone else was at the Olympics?   

We saw a cool film about the history of gunpowder, joined in with the interactive science experiments, shot airsoft rifles, went for a ride on a military truck, made a cola fountain, saw deer in the grounds, tried archery, and played with the guns and the dress up clothes in the armoury

Definitely a recommended day out for anyone with boys (or gun crazy girls :) )

So that's a fortnight's worth of positives from me, it's not been a bad couple of weeks! :)

I'll be linking this up at Rocking Central (otherwise known as Virginia's blog), why don't you join us?  

Index Card A Day - it's all over!

the Tatty Wall - all done!

Phew!  I made it!  2 months and 61 cards later :)

This ICAD project has been tremendous fun, for the whole family, but I must admit I'm REALLY looking forward to doing nothing even remotely creative tomorrow evening :)  Every day is a big ask for me!

So here are the last few ..... thanks to everyone who has encouraged me along the way with comments here and on Flickr .....

Day 50 - 20th July - EDM prompt #3 draw a purse or a bag

Day 51 - 21st July - prompt: dice

Day 52 - 22nd July - the truth is out there!

Day 53 - 23rd July 

Day 54 - 24th July

Day 55 - 25th July

Day 56 - 26th July - for song lyrics Thursday - People Are Strange by the Doors

Day 57 - 27th July - a bit of a cop out of a card tonight as I was glued to the opening ceremony  instead of my art table :)

Day 58 - 28th July - EDM prompt #4 - draw a cup or a mug

Day 59 - 29th July - playing with salt/watercolour backgrounds, and Serj :) 

Day 60 - 30th July - a collaged tribute to one of the best TV shows ever cancelled

Day 61 - 31st July - the end of an era :)

Seems like ages since I last did a Circle Journal entry....

... and it certainly makes a nice change from Index Cards :)

This is my entry in Liz's Rock CJ - her theme was "your ultimate feel-good rock song" or the song that makes you feel like a total bad ass

Now, I'm not convinced I ever get particularly bad ass, but I can do the feel-good bit :)

There is one song on earth that is guaranteed to make me sing along and smile, and that's Tribute by Tenacious D.  Connor has it on his phone ready to play to me if I'm ever in a sad or bad mood, works like a charm every single time :)

And it's the "we are but men, ROCK!!!" bit that really works the magic

So that's what I went with:

Liz's book is a kiddies board book, which was fun to work in, but that did mean that all our entries had to be pretty flat, no embellishments, and in addition she asked for us to draw/paint our own entries as much as possible

So instead of collaging in Mr Grohl as the Devil, I drew him and coloured him in with watercolours.

It was tough!! and I don't think the result looks much like him :)  But I'm still pleased I gave it a go.  I hope Liz likes it.

This almost concludes my participation in this CJ - but I have one entry to re-do, as Clare's colours journal (the one I did this for)  has sadly gone walkies.... I think I'll pick a different colour this time around rather than just reproduce what I did before .  After that, I'm all done and dusted.

Rocking Your World Friday week 29

For once, this is going to be a fairly short and sweet post as, well, not a lot has really happened this week

It's not been a bad week by any means, perfectly pleasant, just a bumbling along doing not much out of the ordinary week....so I've not so much had my world rocked, more like gently swayed :)

Although it did start off with a little bit of excitement as one of my favourite authors (the one I mentioned in my last RYWF post) came to Swindon to do a book signing - and I was at the front of the queue :)

I made a right prat of myself, as I got all fan girl stupid and ran my mouth off, shades of every other time I have met any of my 'idols', I never know how to rein it in :)

So yes, here is Jasper Fforde being very understanding of the crazy woman and signing my book - it says "for Sarah from Swindon, who would love to be the next Thursday Next" - squeeee!

And I got a postcard too (to add to my other Nextian universe postcards - yes I have a few, shoot me - and no, I won't be postcrossing them any time soon :) )

The rest of the weekend was pretty chilled, the weather was pants so we mainly stayed indoors, watched TV, played with the cat, did arty stuffs.  That was nice.  We usually dash about a lot at the weekends which is great fun but it's so nice to have some relaxing down time once in a while.

We did finally leave the house on Sunday afternoon, to head to the local bowling alley with some of our Tesco Clubcard vouchers.  As ever, they saved us a fortune - two short games for the 4 of us would have cost £36 if we were paying cash - ouch!  So thanks yet again Mr Tesco!

True to form I was fairly rubbish at bowling, didn't get a single strike, and the only half decent shots I did get had bounced off the guardrail so didn't really count as they should have been in the gutter :) but it was still a lot of fun.

Jay huffed and puffed when I made the whole family pose for this pic:
He doesn't appreciate that I used to scrapbook, and an ex-scrapbooker can't resist that kind of photo opportunity! :)

And then fast forward to Wednesday, a day for celebrating as it was Connor's 10th birthday!  Poor kid still had to go to school as unlike some parts of the UK, Swindon hasn't broken up yet, but he did have a fun party in the evening.

Along with four of his incredibly hyper and noisy pals we first went to the pictures to see The Amazing Spider-Man (yup, I've seen it before, but they hadn't - at least I got my ticket free via Orange Wednesday :) ) - and then on to Pizza Hut where the kids were so noisy and cheeky that I am amazed we didn't get kicked out :)  Especially when they somehow managed to break the ice cream machine and spray it everywhere.  And I mean EVERYWHERE!  I swear some of it went in the salad :)  (the nice waiter did assure me, as I apologised profusely, that it has been known to do that before and he didn't think that the kids fighting over who got to use the ice cream tap first was to blame!)

It was pretty late by the time the cake came out for happy birthday singing and candle blowing - which is why the kids all look exhausted in this photo - I promise they were really having fun despite appearances! honest :)

And that's about it for this week.  The rest of the week has been the normal work, home, ICAD, sleep routine.

So my last grateful this week is for the occasional quiet week that means my RYWF post is manageable in size and I can actually get it done on a Friday morning for once! :)

I'm off to link this up at Rockette Central, and give Virginia a shock when she sees my name so far up the list :)

Index Card A Day week 7

the "Tatty Wall", week 7

Well, we're on the home stretch now!

The tatty wall is almost full to bursting, and there's only one week (well, 11 days really as I'm going through to the end of July) left to go.

This week is the first one I've struggled a little with, not with finding the time to make something, it's more that I feel like I'm running out of ideas, or getting too repetitive... and also that it's not leaving me any time to do anything else!

It's almost starting to feel like a chore and that's never good. Although I'm glad it took 7 weeks for me to get to that stage and not 2 :)

When this is all over, I'm hoping to keep up the daily creative time, but to vary what I do - so a journal page one day, an ATC the next, mail art the next, maybe a bit of fabric work the next etc.  No more index cards for a while :)

So anyway, here we go - and despite what I've just said, this first one wasn't a struggle at all, I thoroughly enjoyed drawing/painting my Friday 13th dude in honour of the date :)

Day 43 - Friday 13th July - Jason Vorhees

Day 44 - Saturday 14th - prompt: owl (and wholesale stealing Sue Roddis's idea with the sheets of letraset letter rub ons in the background)

Day 45 - Sunday 15th - no prompt or real reason for this one, I just loved this image I found in an old magazine 

Day 46 - Monday 16th - EDM prompt #2 , draw a lamp - couldn't get the proportions right at all on the lampshade bit, which annoyed me!

Day 47 - Tuesday 17th - prompt: graffiti - a super quickie using a "SARAH" design I found on't web, as I was busy tonight getting ready for Connor's birthday tomorrow

Day 48 - Wednesday 18th - made with my brand new stencil (the red spots) which came in the post this morning as a present from the lovely Shirley

Day 49 - Thursday 19th - "Look On" by John Frusciante for song lyrics Thursday

See you at the end of the month, for the final wrap up!

Are you sitting down....?

....because I'm about to post something that is neither ICAD nor RYWF related....shock!

So here is an update on how my Collabor-ART Pair Journal is coming along

This is the shared art journal that I am working on along with Shirley (Done At Last)

I love my book already :) :)  and we are barely getting started!

This is my second round working in my own journal

First of all, I tweaked my original first page as it looked a bit plain, by adding some little label stickers that I had "splatted" on with distress stains:

Next another minor tweak, this time adding a bit of black outlining and an orange harlequin pattern to Shirley's "eye for colour" page:

Then I added straw blown seaweed and a school of fish to one of Shirley's gorgeous backgrounds:

Next, this photo of two geishas paddling is from the 1920s and has been sat in my collage pile for a while waiting for the perfect time to use it, I love it:

And last up, the beginnings of a page for Shirley to run with:

Next I get a second turn in Shirley's own book, can't wait to see what she has done to it this time around....