Right from the start, our kitten Ninja has been fascinated by Martin the lamb. At 8 weeks old, on only her second visit to ‘the outside’, she tried stalking him.
After six more weeks of experience, Ninja is now an old hand at lamb wrangling (although she still hasn’t decided quite what to do with him)!
Last time I did the Photo A Day project (in 2010) I made four pages for each month. The first page for each month was a pocket page, on which I pasted ephemera collected over the month. The pocket held most of the photos. The next two pages were the two sides of an American Crafts divided photo protector (the kind that hold six 4×6 landscape photos on each side). The final page was a scrapbook layout using one or more photos from the month that had a common thread or allowed me to tell a particular story. I enjoyed this format.
Roll on 2011 when I’d decided not to take a Photo A Day – but I grabbed a Project Life album on special (go here to find out more about Project Life).
This is what I’m using for my 2012 project – and I’m pleased to say that it’s working out OK so far. I’ve finished January and am still snapping a photo every day (often more than one). I’m managing to fit the bits and pieces I collect (receipts, cards, flyers) into the pages as well as writing enough to help me remember the whys and wherefores for each photo. It’s fun – and very affirming to have four weeks done. I’m off to complete week 5!
We had a stall at the Martinborough Fair yesterday. It’s great fun meeting lots of new people, as well as old friends. Ed was one of my helpers (along with his girlfriend – they did an awesome job) and it was such fun to run into Debbie, one of the women who worked at the daycare centre Ed attended for nearly four years as a pre-schooler. The last time we saw Deb was at Ed’s 5th birthday party. We are now planning Ed’s 21st.
Deb is the same height as she was 16 years ago.
Ed isn’t!
I had such fun – and was challenged creatively – in 2010 when I did a Photo A Day for the entire year. I have to confess that there were some days when I missed taking a photo, but not too many. (I made up any gaps by taking an extra photo the next day – making sure it was some constant feature of life that stayed the same over several days).
This year I’m doing it all again. My approach is to try to capture everyday life, and photos range from an ordinary breakfast:
to special dessert and coffee (hazelnut mousse, from La Cloche, on the Old Hutt Road):
The household animals feature strongly too – here’s Martin the sheep:
Martin’s full name is Martin Baasley, after Martin Bosley the chef. Each year we host a lamb for the Hyde family, for when their town section’s grass has all been eaten up there’s still plenty at our place. For the last three years we’ve renamed the lambs on arrival here, choosing to name them after chefs. We’ve had Gordon Lambsey and Lam(b)ie Oliver as well as Martin Baasley so far. The challenge is coming for next year as we’ve run out of the easy ones – if you have any good ideas for chef/lamb names, please let me know. They all have to be males as the female lambs don’t get given away as they’re too valuable as breeding stock (else we could have Annabelle Lambein, of course!).
Even though the year is not yet one month old there have been lots of photos of Ninja the kitten. As she’s getting older and bolder she comes ‘walkies’ with me and seems to enjoy seeing new territory with the safety of her person nearby. Here she is a couple of weeks ago in the cattle race:
There are also pictures that reflect our developing business. We have had many visitors to the grove over the Christmas/New Year holidays (and we hope for more as the summer continues). As yet we don’t have a separate sales room, so visitors come into our big living space to taste our products:
We are also selling at some of the open-air markets over the summer. I am so grateful to our son’s girlfriend for her help at these – she is a terrific sales person and keeps me going with her enthusiasm and energy. The Eat, Drink and Be Crafty market was on Saturday, and we had loads of family groups enjoying the sunny weather, great (locally produced) craft, listening to the country band, and all in support of the Life Flight Helicopter Trust. As it was such a beautiful day and a lovely setting, I’ll leave you with a nice big image for this one:
What a wonderful weekend we’ve just had. Five of my scrapbooking friends came over to visit and spend some time creating together.
We had a yummy lunch (they provided all the ingredients, I had only to provide the plates and cutlery)!
We worked in the loft of our garage (where we lived while our house was renovated), which – by dint of relocating tables from elsewhere – became a crafting heaven for six.
I’d posed a couple of Challenges – here are three of the pages produced in response to Challenge #1 (use a pocket on a layout). Aren’t we clever! Unfortunately I am not clever enough to have remembered to take a photo of the results of Challenge #2, but there were lots of other pages and projects completed over the weekend.
In the afternoon a couple of the girls who had not visited before joined a tour and tasting I ran for visiting tourists. I was so pleased when they told me how much they had enjoyed the experience, and that they’d learned a lot – so affirming to have this feedback.
We went out for dinner on Saturday night to Goodness of Food Cafe in the neighbouring town of Carterton. All the dishes are gluten-free – honestly, you’d never know – totally delicious!
It was sad to say goodbye on Sunday – I hope we can do it all again soon!
This pretty young thing is our new kitten, Ninja. She is already living up to her name and practising all the moves she’ll need to be a fully-fledged warrior one day when she is big:
* the wiggle and pounce (her tail was moving so fast it looked almost transparent to the camera lens!);
* wrestling (just someone’s hand for now – poor Scruff (our other cat) will probably become practice material very soon!);
Sitting on the enemy (and watching out for whatever is pulling their string);
and utilising available resources to conceal her presence (also known as “kitten in the bag”).
She is a great deal of fun, and not a lot of work is getting done around here because playing with the kitten is so enjoyable.
I had a marvellous weekend trip to Auckland (a one hour plus car ride to the airport, then an hour’s flight away). My friend was turning 50, and I’ve known her since she was two and I was three.
She’s a lucky girl – has three brothers and a sister. For me (an ‘only’ until my sister arrived when I was six) her family became the siblings I didn’t have. They were all there at her birthday barbecue, and the banter between the three boys took me right back to my childhood – it seemed exactly the same!
Their father instituted a family tradition of lining up the kids in birth order and taking a photo for the annual holiday cards. Here’s the 1965 version:
I was instructed by the birthday girl that I had to re-enact this ritual, and get everyone lined up for a similar photo. The creaks and groans as everyone protested at getting down to the floor were nearly as funny as the resulting pictures. I’ll leave it to you to judge – I don’t think I’m as good a photographer as their Dad was, but I’m pleased to have at least got them all in one line, and looking in the general direction of (if not actually at) the camera!
Haven’t they aged well!
I’ve been enjoying a Big Picture Classes (www.bigpictureclasses.com) workshop taught by Darci Dowdle over the last couple of weeks. The first part of the class saw participants gathering photos in envelopes numbered 1-14, and various embellishments in containers similarly numbered. The second part of the class started a few days ago. Each day or two we receive a new set of instructions, to combine the photos in one envelope with the embellishments in a differently numbered container. There’s a sketch, written guidelines and a sample layout from Darci to help. It’s been such fun!
Here’s my first layout, where we were asked to scrapbook the ‘girls’ in our families, and where I focused my journaling on the characteristics we share:
And my second, where we were challenged to select a photo of something we loved (so I picked this lovely portrait of our cat Scruff, of course:
The third layout was a two-pager in 8.5 x 11 size (not one I usually do). The focus was a seasonal event – so not surprisingly, I chose some photos of our olive harvest – but an old one (2005). What was interesting was realising how different things are now that our trees are so much older and have a much bigger crop.
And today, the challenge involved photographs of a place we loved. I chose pictures from 2004 that had remained unscrapped all this time. They were taken at Ohope Beach, on the holiday we had shortly after Mum’s death. The beauty of the place certainly helped us to relax and recover our equilibrium. I remember feeling so glad to be alive.
So that’s the story so far – there are 14 layouts in the class, and I’m already keenly anticipating the instructions for #5!
Imagine the narrative voice of Jane Austen writing a murder-mystery novel, and you have Murder at Mansfield Park. This is Lynn Shepherd’s first novel, and it’s a very accomplished debut. She has captured Austen’s vocabulary and style very well, and created a credible mystery as to ‘whodunit’. She had to do this by changing the characters in the original Mansfield Park, but I think this was a good decision, as it creates an entirely new story. I imagine Jane Austen herself would have enjoyed this novel – I certainly did.
One spin-off from reading it that would almost certainly have pleased Jane Austen, is that it’s inspired me to read her novel Mansfield Park again.
the implement wot did it
This tool is known as the Ninja Saw at our place. That’s because it’s lethally sharp, and extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.
this is the thumb wot got slashed
Do I need to say that thumb is attached to one of the ‘wrong hands’ mentioned above? Not mine, I hasten to add. This is a photo of the anaesthetised, cleaned-up thumb, at the local hospital’s Emergency Department. We had to go there because:
a single suture is all they would give us
After a tetanus shot, local anaesthetic, irrigation with saline, a single suture (and four steri-strips), we left Emergency feeling only slightly silly. We were very grateful that we’d arrived when the department was quiet (the whole visit took less than 30 minutes), and for the competent, cheerful staff who attended us.
Now let’s hope that this is the only hospital visit anyone connected with this family will have to make this year!