It's been nearly a month since I last blogged, which is a rather long time for me, and writing did not form much of the reason why I've been quiet.
I've just been very very busy. And still am. But I thought I'd write a summary of what's happening in my universe. Just so you know I'm still alive. But where to start...
In the past few weeks I've started to use Twitter (@adaddinsane) I spent several weeks just researching it, reading everything I could about it - before I even created my account. I thought this would be wise, no point blundering in and making more of a fool of myself than I already do.
So that went off fairly smoothly, I don't tweet much and as suggested by the things I've read I certainly don't mention what I'm eating or bodily functions.
It's an interesting medium and the important thing to realise is: you will miss stuff. It doesn't matter. My main purpose in getting an account was to see how useful it would be as a promotional tool. I concluded it would be very useful indeed.
Then I got a Google+ account (you can only get one by being invited currently, it's still in beta, only has a few million users). And then I got a G+ plug-in (SGPlus) which allows me to read and post to both Facebook and Twitter just from G+. So I do.
G+ is different again from either Facebook or Twitter. It's more solid and its controls for privacy are far more intuitive than either FB or Twitter. Soon SGPlus will allow me to access my LinkedIn account as well. G+ also integrates with all your other Google products, like GMail, PicasaWeb and so on.
But again, I'm looking at these things from the viewpoint of promotional tools when we start to promote our steampunk Voidships project. Which is all very exciting.
On a personal note the Daughter has been to Bolivia and returned alive. You can see some of the pictures on her
Bolivia page on Facebook. She worked in two places, the first did not involve animals directly but they were building holding pens - hard manual labour, in high temperatures, in the jungle.
The second stage did involve animals, and she worked with an ocelot called Ob (oh-bee, ocelot b). The ocelot has to be walked every day, but will never be released back into the wild as she was rescued from being someone's (extremely inappropriate and dangerous) pet. A bit bigger than a domestic cat, behaves like a domestic cat until she decides to take a piece out of your arm.
It may have been said elsewhere, the Daughter would like to be a professional actor - and has done quite a bit of stage (and some TV) in the past. Well she has finally got an agent, a proper one (hurrah!). Plus, though 20, she looks 14 so can work without the legal restrictions imposed on under 16s.
We went to the Edinburgh Festival and saw many many performances, some good, some less so, and some completely off the wall.
Having an affinity for Japanese culture (our whole family) we had to see "
Samurai Grandma" if you read the reviews on the referenced page you'll see there was audience participation. There were less than 10 people in the audience when we saw it. Guess who ended up on stage ... twice. Luckily I revel in playing the fool in public. Gave the family a good laugh.
All I can say is: Watch out for that devilish Kitchen Penguin!
The Boy is a musician, he plays the tenor horn in a brass band, saxophone (most recently in Bugsy Malone, where he was also on stage) and so we visited an educational show called "Blues!" covering the highlights of the history of blues music in one hour. We were blown away. So blown away that we went to see it again.
We also went to see comedy rock band
Axis of Awesome who were excellent live - reminded me of Morecambe and Wise: so well rehearsed it looked improvised. It's the Boy's birthday and tomorrow we buy him an electric guitar. He'd like a drumkit too ... maybe next year, after we sound-proof the cellar.
The Teacher has been working with early years for the past few years, but she's moving to Year 2 which has meant a lot of work. But she's so sorted she sat down to do some work, and then realised she's already done it.
Today is the last day of my current contract, I start the next one on Tuesday, in Bristol for a week and then back home for the rest. I could get used to this working from home lark.
And that's about it. Now I have to do more paying work.
What's on the turntable? "Drifting" by Clannad from "Atlantic Realm"