Monday 2nd March - Today dawned bright and sunny

Actually, I'm talking about me, not the weather.

The weather was cold and grey. But I felt bright and chirpy having rested on Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday. (Saturday morning is one of my more intense teaching times - eight pupils more or less back to back in 4 hours, with any breaks usually taken up in chatting with parents.)

By the time I had finished the morning's lessons, the sun was up and outside was as sunny as my mood. I spent the rest of the morning being extravagant in town - banking a cheque, buying a magazine and some coloured brush pens, having coffee in Waterstones and decorating the envelopes of letters ready to be posted

 and buying stamps and reduced-in-the-clearance-outlet-pillowcases and cat treats and bird seed in Wilcos...  a goodly haul by the time we got back.

This is what I spent some time doing yesterday - I wanted to include them in the previous post but it was taking too long for the photographs to arrive on the computer, if you see what I mean.

Anenome - happy ever crafter tutorial

Johanna Basford Inky Art Course Day 4

Bobblast video on youtube - he says
 'Use a Big Brush - Biiiiig Brush, start by making a carrot';
so that's what I did ,but I only had a small brush pen with me! 

Right. That's all from me... one more lesson to teach, and then an evening of rest and recuperation and crochet...

Wednesday 28th November - Advent begins to begin

Once my birthday has happened, I really start thinking about Advent, and then Christmas.

Each year I try and make time for a bit more Christian spirituality in Advent to balance the practical preparations for Christmas. This year I have bought a book (or rather downloaded it) called Art in Advent which takes a picture as a starting point for a daily meditation. I have refrained from reading too much in advance; just enough to see that the first picture is this;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_of_Days

 by William Blake, called 'The Ancient of Days'. Interestingly, wikipedia notes that the image was used for the cover of Stephen hawking's book 'And God Created the Integers'




I follow the blog written by a Benedictine called Dame Catherine Wybourne. Today she gives 5 suggestions to follow in Advent;

Summarised, they are

1. Read the daily lessons set for the Mass (or Eucharist)
2. Try and find a few minutes every day for prayer
3. Try and find some silence each day
4. Keep it simple, and keep it kind 
5. Try not to worry about all the commercialism, or meeting the demands of everyone. A smile or some kind words can be a precious gift to share. 

I reckon I can 'try', starting on Sunday 2nd December, the first Sunday in Advent - and I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't succeed.

Less 'spiritually', I will enjoy opening the little doors in my wooden Advent calendar (a birthday present from several years ago), lighting the tealights and the advent candles I have bought, and hanging the decorations of the cloth calendar I made.

The Tree will be going up this weekend, or more likely next weekend. Good and Early!

Meanwhile, right now, I am celebrating finishing a course of antibiotics by having a glass of ginger wine and some palmiers.

I have already listened to some of today's music from the 'Year of Wonder' book;
Chopin Nocturne in D flat major. I didn't like the first version I listened to, but this Barenboim one suits me better. I have been learning this one in B flat minor, but I've a long way to go. Here's Barenboim again...

Friday 3rd November - Out in the town

I had a gap between teaching 30 children to play the recorder in the morning (noisy), and teaching 15 children to play the guitar in the afternoon (should have been 30, but half the children were away on a trip, so less noisy than expected).

So I went into the town to do some errands. First off was paying in a load of cheques. This did not go so well. I fed them into the machine, which made mechanical noises of an unproductive nature for a while and then spat half of them out. "Please reinsert your cheques". I did so, and it regurgitated three of these. Without further interaction, the machine returned to the opening screen ready for the next customer.

Hey! What about my card? Where are my cheques?

I managed to get a cashier to come over, who went and fetched keys, and then a colleague to lock the front door of the bank. It seems that this is a necessary precaution whenever they open up the cheque-and-money-eating machine, in order to prevent anyone rushing in and grabbing all the money from the machine's innards...

Eventually she was able to give me my card. Then she retrieved the cheques and handed them over, each with little oily tooth-marks along one edge. "Would you like to try again?" Not likely, thought I, and posted them into a sort of letterbox to be dealt with later by a real human.

We (because He was by my side) had lunch, and then filled in time before the guitar lesson mooching around.

In Waterstones I saw this;

 which might wean me off too much Freecell

and these,

but one can have too many desk calendars perhaps?

I thought both these cartoons by MATT on the cover of his book were entertaining. The second one, under the sticker, shows The Three Bears sorrowfully agreeing "This Brexit is too hard, and this Brexit is too soft," but short of peeling off the sticker it wasn't possible to discover if there is a Brexit that is just right.

I'm not a fan of cartoon books, as they remind me of visiting the dentist as a child. He used to have a great stack of GILES cartoon books on the table in the waiting room. I always remember Grandma.

Hey! She's got a statue! In Ipswich!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/suffolk/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_9024000/9024384.stm

There's even a Giles website! With cartoons! Those little twins are off again - they were always worth watching in the pictures.

 http://www.gilescartoons.co.uk/cartoon.asp?cartoon=336

Finally, I stopped to take a picture of this piano which has appeared outside the top floor exit of Wilkinsons. I want to use it in a post for www.themusicjungle.co.uk, my music teaching blog.

As we walked away a determined young girl (why wasn't she in school?) made a beeline for it, and started picking out the tune of a pop song.  Isn't that exactly why the piano is there?

Daily List - Sunday 16th April

It tells me somewhere on the internet that you should make a list of ten things every morning when you wake up. Apparently this will make you more cleverer. We shall see.

Today is Easter Day. It is 7am, and we have just come back from a dawn service at the top of the hill. I've consumed a bowl of porridge with maple syrup and just about stopped shivering. It was COLD up there!



Sunrise

1. Birdsong (today we heard owls)
2. Surprising the cats
3.Dark turns into light
4.Shadows become shapes become things
5.Breakfast (and first coffee of the day)
6.Monochrome world becomes multi-coloured
7.The day warms up - both in temperature and in the colour of the light
8.Sunlight reaching the blossom on the apple tree (assuming itbis going to be a sunny day
9.New day, new start
10.Opportunities....