False spring

More mud. Song thrush. Printers that work.

I walk to the post box, along the edge of the dead-crow-field, though most of the crows have been replaced by empty carrier bags now. The dead crows that is, the living ones are undeterred. I do not think the carrier bags flap about because of any remorse on the part of the crow murdering farmer, more the realisation he was not so much scaring crows as laying out a buffet for red kites.

I can traverse this path despite the weather because a new drainage ditch has been dug along the hedgerow; a healthy stream of water flows through it already. I do not think that the farmer has done this out of remorse for driving tractors along my access to the postbox. I think the council has made him fix it after his exerted campaign to stop people walking there made the public footpath unusable. I cannot help but hope the ditch caused him a good deal of expense and trouble.

The couple of days of glorious spring are behind us. I am in a bad mood. My experiments have not been going well. I had a feeling if things weren’t going right, they should at least have the decency to get a little better, not worse. And now it’s cold. And I’m wet.

The next day, I sit in my studio listening to the song thrush. I have not been out, and I do not want to go out, which is unusual, in fact, I can’t remember the last time it happened. I think of myself as a sort of complicated dog; I need long walks, lots of exercise, chew toys and I take inexplicable dislikes to random people which do not seem to be based on anything they’ve done, but are largely found to be of sound judgement in the long run. Today though, I am happy be home. Maybe it’s because it was so warm and sunny, and now the wind howls lonely through the treetops. It’s a form of whiplash. A dizziness from standing up too fast. Some climatic version of the bends. I need to lie down.

The song thrush makes a series of electonic sounds followed by three harsh shrieks. He likes threes, does the song thrush, who I have dubbed Captain Screamapillar. Three refrains stolen from another bird, three noises like a starwars droid, three screams. I tell him sternly that beeping sounds stolen from electronic devices and shrieking do not count as a song. No one but Aphex Twin would call that a song. I tell the existential anguish thrush he’s supposed to be a song thrush. ‘Dick’ says Captain Screamapillar.

Dick-dick-dick.

Workings

I have got tantalisingly close to finishing this one… the final layer is practically invisible, but, it feel, quite important. It also involves wetting the paper, so I really need to be patient and let it dry properly.

Obviously I am tempted to carve a song thrust with a barely perceptible ‘dick’ in the background. Somebody probably needs to stop me.

Shrimp update

The shrimp had babies and I was delighted. I have three batches of babies from different mothers; the extra tiny little just hatched ones, which are barely perceptible but travel at the speed of light, the week old ones which resemble very tiny see-through shrimp and the two week olds, which are starting to get their colour. It’s wonderfully exciting, except the first female is now holding eggs again and I am starting to panic; just many shrimp can you fit into a 20 litre tank? I could see the worry building up in my husband’s eyes when I told him the good news; I could practically see the fear that I would be filling the house with increasing large shrimp tanks as the population grows and grows.

It’s his fault anyway. The shrimp tank was not successful until Christmas when my husband gifted me this metal sculpture of a lobster, which I put over the tank as a guardian. I saw the sculpture in a shop in Cornwall, and was momentarily excited until I found it was connected to a lobster pot. Obviously I am against eating lobsters, but also, my father was a lobster fisherman, and designed a new type of pot, so I also disagreed with this pot on the grounds it was far too small, and not the right shape, so refused to buy the whole thing. My husband bought it when I was wasn’t looking and separated the two because he’s a lot more sensible than I am. It is ridiculously easy to separate the lobster from the pot. I’m glad he did. I like my lobster.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the baby boom is entirely due to the power of the shrimp guardian.Anyway, I found this delightful thread illustrating why hobbies are important and we shouldn’t make fun of people for harmlessly enjoying themselves, even if you personally don’t understand it. If the stupid stuff is the sauce the lets you enjoy life, it’s not stupid. That’s why I bought my husband a coaching (or hunting) horn I found in a charity shop. I have no interest in trumpets, but he always looks at them longingly when we’re visiting stately homes, and if it makes him happy, it makes me happy.

Findings.

This year (as is traditional) I started a new journal. It’s not for public consumption and I am enjoying the freedom of not having to worry about how it looks. I bought a little thermal printer to make stickers and I have been enjoying that a stupid amount.

I already had a label maker. I like that too. Some people are mean about the type of person that likes a label maker, but there is a lot of fun in making labels.

I also like that the label maker has this decorative functionless black circle on it. It makes it look like a radio or something much more mysterious. Anyway, the label maker was not enough. I needed bigger stickers.

You’re probably wondering why I need a thermal printer when I have a perfectly good printer upstairs that will print much more durable colour prints, but the fact is I turn the little printer on, it communicates with my phone instantly, there’s a lot of clip art on the app, I click go and a sticker pops out, it’s tremendous fun.

The upstairs printer, I have to turn on five minutes early so it can do it’s complicated early morning rituals, before it will fail to connect to my ipad three times before connecting, but insisting the A4 piece of paper I have put in is not A4 and it cannot possible print on it. It is new printer, as the last one died- a natural death surprisingly, given how often I threatened to throw it out of the window. I am once again wondering why humans, with access to such intelligence and technology, have chosen to curse me with this blasphemy of a printer. Surely the point of the smart printer is it makes life easier? How is it possible that something could be worse than my previous printer, a machine I was convinced ran on human tears? This one has a screen with which to argue with me endlessly. I cannot express my excitement at a printer that just.. prints things out. It is not a feeling I have even enjoyed before. It’s called Phomemo, if you are thinking you might enjoy such delights. You know thermal prints from such things as receipts, they do tend to fade, but that’s probably for the best given the nature of my dross journal.