Creepers. When RL and blogging collide.

Thatssss a very nice fashion show you have there...
**BOOM!!!**

I have just realised that I didn't put any of my 2013 blog pics up on Flickr (like this one), and that I have somehow attracted a small following, including people I don't know, which is both gratifying and slightly scary. I am going to rectify the situation and repost some of last year's pics on Flickr. Now is also the time for me to re-evaluate what I'm doing with Flickr and this blog.

If you hadn't already realised, I'm totally clueless on the whole Flickr/Blogspot scene, not a fashionista or 'professional blogger', and have zero time or energy - what with caring for a small boy with Aspergers and ADHD while personally suffering from Fibromyalgia - to look outside my goldfish bubble-bowl of Shiny! Buy! Photo! Blog! Rinse & Repeat. 

I honestly think it's some kind of displacement addiction, or possibly therapy, because for the last 6 years (ever since my son was born) we've been moving from house to house and the bulk of our belongings have been held in storage, so buying pretty things on SL has substituted the ability to wear jewellery, look around at pictures or ornaments, read books, or watch DVDs IRL. That is changing now, because we bought our own house (our very own, very first mortgage!) back in October, and now my fantastic dad has fixed up our loft (attic) so we can store stuff in it, and he has brought everything over, and the house currently looks something like a junkyard until we can get it all up into said loft on an electric hoist. Then the theory is that we'll unpack a couple of boxes a day, or week, until it's all sorted. My fantastic mum has just bought us a dishwasher - and I think whoever invented those things, indeed all large kitchen appliances, should receive the Nobel prize - so now I'll actually have some time and energy to spare for unpacking which previously would have been spent on washing up. I can only do so many things a day before crippling exhaustion sets in.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, I'm sorry I don't reciprocate very much by tracking your blogs/Flickr, though I do take a look when I can, and that I don't socialise. It's not because I don't care, or think your posts aren't worth the effort; quite the opposite! I just literally can't manage to do both. I had this problem with LiveJournal too, prior to finding SL, and abandoned the thing in the end because I couldn't see the point of writing if I couldn't maintain a circle of friends by reading their posts. I suspect the same is true of this blog, so my main goal is just to record the piles of stuff I inject into my hoard before they are swallowed up and lost to all but LL server memory (and to make pretty pictures). But writing about them is also a lot of work and Flickr is a lot easier in that regard, because there isn't really room to write, you just post pics! So I -might- move over to Flickr entirely. I'm not sure yet. I want to keep it for the best pics, rather than showcasing everything, and put links to fuller blogposts with all the credits, for those who are interested, or just so I know what I've got.

And in the meantime, I'm going to post some of my 2013 pictures up on Flickr because I rather suspect people are going there for the immediate visuals and that nobody ever reads all the verbal whitewash I put in this blog anyhow };=8) Go on, prove me wrong with a raft of comments!

~ : ~

A Morning in the [Real] Life of a Mother Dragon

Get up, put laundry load on to wash. Empty potty twice (yay!) Take child to nursery. 


Go shopping for new stickers and reward charts for toilet training. Buy much-needed new pair of sandals (old ones having hole in and being around 3x age of child). Nip home for quick breakfast and to harvest crops in Farmville. 


Collect child from nursery, who has earned third sticker of day (yay!) Take child to nearby park as it is sunny. Push child on swings. A lot. Child wets self while climbing rope net (whoops!) so take child home, fortunately having a spare change in bag from some previous occasion. 


Rinse through wet clothes & hang laundry. Come in to find child, for reasons known only to himself and the lords of Chaos, has unscrewed the salt cellar and poured salt EVERYWHERE. All over the table, himself, his high chair, the floor. Child is now sucking on empty salt cellar and saying "I like salt!" Send child outside while clean up. Reflect that in mediaeval times, this much salt would have ransomed a minor noble.


Make tomato soup with bread rolls for lunch. Child spills soup on shorts. Wash shorts with Vanish to prevent staining. 


Make coffee and (finally!) come to sit at computer. Child demands Zombies so put Plants vs Zombies on Daddy's computer. This will ensure pleasant, interruption free break until nap time at 2pm. Will have to fight hard not to nap with child as already exhausted, but napping is not conducive to early night's rest. Suspect will lose this battle. Coffee doesn't help. Feel like zombie myself. Blurgh, brains....

I Will Never Keep Fish

Those who know me well probably have some idea already of the ongoing Fish in Winter saga - today I finally had enough >.< I have tried to do all I could for them, going down every day to clear inch-thick solid ice from the tops of the ponds, but it has been horrendously cold since mid-November and no sun reaches that end of the garden. Consequently, the water filtration tanks are frozen solid and the pumps can't be switched on, so the water is filthy, with hydrogen sulphide bubbling up and being trapped in a suffocating layer under the ice - which is of course where the fish come to try and gulp more oxygen from the water surface.

You can barely see into the murky depths of what should be clear water - but I spent an hour down there fishing out everything I could find into a bucket. They weren't hard to catch; they are sluggish with cold, and (sensibly) trying to keep near the surface instead of hiding down in the toxic depths. After removing the obviously near-dead ones (the odd twitch, but basically all kipper side up and starting - literally - to freeze) I have a bucket of tiny golden orfe which are sharing the back porch with Andrew (my husband) when he goes for a smoke.

The full death tally so far is 20 - 10 each from the big and small [that's fish size] ponds - I don't believe there's anything left alive in the big pond, and it being harder to de-ice, and me having been ill with flu the past few days, I decided not to bother with it and concentrate on saving the tiddlers. Not that they are young fish, by any means. They are at least three years old, having been here since before I arrived, but conditions clearly have not assisted their growth. I don't know their chances of survival in a bucket, but they can't be much lower than in that freezing, toxic hell hole of a pond, and I just couldn't bear to do nothing. There will be more ice tonight, and I doubt I will have time to clear it tomorrow morning as we have a very full house-viewing itinerary, followed by dinner at Andrew's parents.

Thank you, Dad, for this traumatising experience. You might have learned from your experiences last year, when you managed to freeze half the fish INSIDE the ice (something I've managed to avoid, even though it's been colder, for longer) and then trap half the remainder in the roots of the overgrown watermint when they made a rush for the oxygenated water outlet - a saner or more considerate person would have concluded at this point that a man who spends every other month in another country is not suited to keeping pets, and sold them to someone who was. Instead, you soldiered on, trusting to blind luck and the well-meaning but inadequate care of your daughter, who has enough to do with minding a 2 year old besides not knowing the first thing about your jerry-rigged pond filtration/oxygenation device; bar the manifestly obvious fact that it is UTTERLY USELESS in sub-zero conditions.

I had better not get the blame for any of this. But soon we will be moving out and then it will be out of my hands. Except that I will never quite assuage the feelings of complicit guilt in the deaths of these poor animals. If the Buddhists are right about reincarnation, I think I know what I'm coming back as - but I am optimistic that there can be few perils for the domestic fish quite so awful as those suffered in the [absent] care of my father.

What makes it even more pathetic is that I missed watching the CBeebies Christmas Panto with Jamie while I was doing all this. Oh yes, I did. Not. Happy.