Angel Jem's City Cottage

I am contemplating my future; it's a long contemplation. I like being a worker with children and teaching them things, but I don't actually want to teach; not full time, not in one school, not forever. I'm enjoying the techie play work I do for Mr Angel Jem; the messing with websites, tweaking blogs and bits n bobs that I do for him and me. I'd like to find a job that lets me do these as well as being a tutor and learning mentor. And I needed a boost in my attitude. (That blog post has been taken down for a while; I'm a happy bunny again) Today I went to a seminar on using social media to boost your business. And I really enjoyed it. Really. The variety of social and networking media available today is bewildering. Just look at this YouTube video to get a taste of how the total connectedness of life has changed; Which one of those facts blew your mind? The fact that the number of users of Facebook would be the third largest population of the world if it wer...

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld was published in 2005, the same year as Twilight, but never quite hit the fashionable heights at the time. With the subsequent success of Twilight, Hunger Games and the start of the Divergent movie series, Uglies is one of those books that surfaces in a search for dystopian YA fiction. The heroine, Tally Youngblood, lives in a world post-eco collapse where everybody has radical plastic surgery on their 16th birthday to be turned into the absolute peak of physical perfection; they get turned Pretty. Before that (and afterwards) there is a strict age-related system in place so that, from the ages of 12 to 16 the youth live together in Ugly colonies, causing trouble and doing silly things because, hey, that's what puberty-hit kids do. The book opens as Tally has gone to find her best friend (and potential boyfriend) Peris who is already a Pretty. His dismissive attitude to her makes her keen to be a Pretty as well, until she meets Shay, an ugly who w...

And there's still 58 days left. Deep joy. Crafters (like magazine editors) work Christmas from early summer until the day itself. I have my list (a virtual list on Evernote this year) and I am ploughing merrily on with crafting, creating and carefully squirrelling away the bits that will make this Christmas, well, the best Christmas ever, of course. Although I'm too realistic for that, actually, so I'll settle for a reasonable Christmas with enough to eat, no big squabbles and a little dusting of snow on the day. I've been crocheting, sewing and planning decor and I hope by December 1st (when Christmas really begins) to have a shed load of photos to share this year.  It struck me looking back over the blog that I'm usually so busy having a Christmas that I don't have time to record a Christmas. And some how a retrospective in January seems so.... silly. Perhaps I should take a day a week this year to put my Christmas memories into order, to look back and...

Half term creeps up like a recalcitrant child; not too keen to give you a break from the drudgery of daily life, slowly slowly approaching until... at last..... don't speak too loudly..... it -is-here. And like a hurricane on the heels comes the sudden stopping that is the first cold of winter. I said it before, I'm saying it again; Winter is Coming. And I am involuntarily on a sudden stop here. It started as a sore throat and has turned to sniffles. Everybody else has been packed off to church, and I am luxuriating in an hour of illness in a quiet house, with computer, TV and window to provide entertainment. A good audio book ( Thomas Cromwell on Audible ) and a good project (by Alan Dart ; a knitting project for the first time in years) and I am feeling relaxed. It's a stressed illness, I usually catch whatever at the end of a term and this year I am more stressed than ever, so perhaps this sniffle has hit me quicker than ever. I hope that the freedom I have pla...

Life is not black and white, but rather a series of greys that fade and deepen at different times. Sometimes the light shines out from the clouds and other times lies hidden, just a silver outline hinting that, if you could just sit still long enough, there will be a brighter dawn or a shining dusk that lights the sky. I'm  a great fan of monochrome photos. It's quite possible to get a really good effect even on a dark or bright day. Yesterday (as a soul-clearing, cobweb blowing experience) I went for a walk. I wanted to feel the breeze against my face and to keep having to pull my hair back, to watch the skudding clouds and to breathe. I went to our local church. It's about 500 years old, a real symbol of eternity there, then. Still a vibrant Christian community; we go about once a month to this church for parade services because our regular church don't do uniformed parades and this is the church that is linked to the primary school the children attended so th...