I tell you something, if I really want to win an auction on eBay, no one will ever be able to outbid me π
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I tell you something, if I really want to win an auction on eBay, no one will ever be able to outbid me π
Continue reading It started with a painful childhood memory. You see, the first ever Sindy I got, as a present at the tender age of three, was the Superstar Sindy. Sindyyy, Superstar Sindy, you're everything I want to be! Superstar Sindy, dance with me! You're everything I want to be! Superstar SINDY! And she had this cool silver microphone. And for some reason, my mum let me take the doll with me to school, complete with all accessories. In hindsight, she may well have tried to convince me to leave them at home, but that's not important.
What's important is that I did take them. And one day, the nursery teacher β we shall call her Mrs A β didn't like that I was playing with the microphone while she was talking to the class about something or other, and she said to give the microphone to her and she'd look after it. I didn't want to, because I knew, even at the age of three, that grown-ups rarely keep their word. But she pressured me and in the end she took it from me and put it in a box and I never saw it again.
So you see, I was right to never trust a grown-up at their word.
In any case, it had a lasting effect on me. I still feel the pang of loss. Even when my little sister, three years later started nursery, I asked her to keep an eye out for it, being so upset I deluded myself into thinking it must still be there. More years later, when other girls I knew started nursery, I plaintively made the same request of them.
Continue readingAs I mentioned in my body butter post, I was planning to make a home-made moisturising cream. Because the body butter is nice, but it's purely fat-based, and I wanted something with water in it as well.
So I ordered my glycerine and emulsifying wax, and had a root through the various recipes I'd accumulated over the last 10 years (yes, that really is how long it's taken me to get to this) and settled on this one I'd found recently:
http://www.herbal-howto-guide.com/creams-and-lotions.htmlarchived
Distilled water is not so ubiquitous here in the UK for some reason, and certainly not so cheap. So instead of the cold infusion recommended in the recipe, I just made regular old bush tea (rooibos) the old fashioned way (with boiling water) and left it to steep for a few hours (that part was unplanned. I just couldn't get a free hob on the cooker for ages). Also, the recipe above doesn't use glycerine, but I wanted to include it for its humectant properties.
As you can see, the bush tea gave it a really lovely golden hue.
So here is what I used (I wasn't too exact with the solid ingredients):
Continue readingThis dry winter air is really damaging my skin. Lately my hands have been so dried that the skin splits at the slightest thing. My hands are currently a mess of scars, scabs and cuts. I've had a bag of cocoa butter sitting neglected in a drawer for ages, so I thought it's about time I used it. Looking at recipes online, they all used beeswax, which is definitely NOT vegan (however much some may like to kid themselves). So I went without. There was a vegan recipe online somewhere, but I couldn't find it, so I winged it. Here's my recipe, which is way quicker than the ones I found:
Continue readingI do miss eating Indian-style omelettes. Eggs are the only thing I really miss from my pre-plastic-vegan days. Egg and chips, pancakes, scrambled egg toasties, all full of yum. Also years of malfunctioning kidneys from all that animal protein π But that's another story.
Well lately I've been thinking of the omelettes my mother makes. Continue reading
My sister used to have a really cool chemistry set when we were younger. She was so lucky. Chemistry sets in those days weren't like the airy-fairy elfin-safety crap we have now. Her set had meths (methylated spirit, what were you thinking), iron "fillings", a mini bunsen burner, copper sulphate and all sorts of awesome. Also, she had UNIVERSAL PAPER.
She was so lucky to be able to test out the pHs of all kinds of things.
Well, some 20+ years later, I finally get to live the dream!
Continue readingThe folks at WAPF are always good for a laugh. If you're interested in vegan nutrition, you're bound to have come across this claim at some point:
"The most serious problem with soy may be its use in infant formulas. βThe amount of phytoestrogens that are in a day's worth of soy infant formula equals 5 birth control pills," says Mike Fitzpatrick, a New Zealand toxicologist. Fitzpatrick and other scientists believe that infant exposure to high amounts of phytoestrogens is associated with early puberty in girls and retarded physical maturation in boys.
-westonaprice.org/health-topics/soy-and-the-brain/
What I find incredibly amusing about claims like this is that the people who love to throw out this "fact" are the same ones pushing milk.
Now let's just get one thing straight. Soya comes from a plant. Plants are not female mammals.
I'm gonna say that again.
Plants are NOT female mammals.Therefore, they do not produce oestrogen. They don't. They just don't.
Now let's think of an animal that does produce oestrogen. Hmm, let me think. Oh yeah! Cows! Cows produce oestrogen!
Now here is an extract from a very interesting article I came across the other day (emphases are my own):
Continue readingIt's been a pretty bad few weeks. It started with...
I was really looking forward to eating the cress, but one by one, the plants all ended up like that. White patches, followed by tiny black dots. I had no idea what it was and therefore, no idea how to treat it. It was an absolute mess.
Now you may (or not) remember, but the parsley I kept on the spare room windowsill, since my own was getting a bit cluttered. Well, my mum didn't like that and I had to bring it into my room.
Continue readingAhh, the everlasting Morning Glories.
So I think I never got round to mentioning these weird buds I saw on MG #2 a few weeks back:
They didn't look anything like those leaf buds I was so sick of seeing:
So I mentioned in the last MG post that I'd Continue reading
They've done an Australis on us. I thought it was just my browser being all buggy as usual (Palemoon doesn't seem to like me much, but I'd rather soldier on with it than go back to the crummy FF29 or whatever crappy version they use now with its crappy interface).
Anyway, WordPress now officially SUCKS too. Yeah I know I whinge every time they bring in an update. I remember how much I disliked the changes they made way back in 2004 (or sometime thereabouts. You old timers will know what I mean). But as much I disliked the change initially, at least the ruddy thing WORKED.
Now if I notice a typo and want to be able to quickly change it by clicking the edit button on the actual post I'm sent to this load of crap:
And that's all it does. I'm not willing to wait another 10 minutes to see if anything happens. I said I wanted to edit my post, not look at some dancing dots until I fall asleep!
But it turns out it's not my browser throwing a tantrum. It's just WordPress doing their Mozilla impression.
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/beep-beep-boop-screen-is-a-joke-is-this-a-glitch?replies=945
Quote from WP staff member rootjosh (last page)
Continue readingWait! For seriously! No! How the heck did I not know about this?!! Apparently my nephew has been watching this on Kix! for some time now and I had no idea! Although I vaguely remember hearing his singing the theme and asking where he learnt it. Hmm. Only a couple of days ago he just caught the end credits and that reminded me to go looking.
See, I knew they were planning a series 2 for real this time, because was it Chalopin or Ryshpan who said the second series work was underway on the DVD interviews, but I am so seriously late to the party. I just haven't been keeping up. Rabid Fangirl is losing her touch π
So as soon as I heard that the second series was out (I'm soooooo late to the party!) I had to go search on youtube. I must have read an old post that said it was only in French at the moment, so I didn't hunt down an English version. Luckily my French is good enough to understand most of what they are saying, even if there is a big lag between hearing the words and understanding the words.
So far, it's actually all right. I was scared they'd do an Adult Icarus and ruin everything (see NAEZ), but they've kept the style faithful to the original, and even kept the theme tune. I like that the voice casting (for the French version; a review says the English voice cast is pretty awful) is also faithful to the original. Zia seems less helpless in the new series and I'm not so keen on the way Esteban's facial expressions are animated; it seems to change his character somewhat*. But overall, I'm not disappointed.
So I've just ordered my DVD set and I'll do a full review when I've watched it!
* I remember who he reminds me of the way they've animated him. Ben 10 Series 1. Seriously!
Randomly yesterday, the thought just came into my head of the tragic death of Henry Surtees. I don't know why this suddenly popped into my head, but it has left me feeling so so sad. Even when I'd first read of it, years ago, it made me hurt inside, too. I didn't know him -- I think I'd only vaguely heard of John Surtees's son -- and the last time I watched a F2 race, I believe it was called F3000. And there are so many people dying every day, in much worse ways than this, so why does this one upset me so much and yet others leave me completely unmoved? And it's sad, because he was young, and his parents had to witness the death of their teenage son. And if that tyre had just been a centimetre or two off, or if Henry had just been driving a bit slower or faster, it would have missed him and he'd still be alive. And it's so sad seeing that smiling face and knowing it will never smile again. I don't know why this one particular death upsets me. It just makes me feel so sad, I have such a cloud of gloom hanging over me all the time, and how must it be for his family? Even after these years? And his biography on his homepage still speaks of him as being alive and it's sweet in a way, but heartbreaking, too.
As an aside: this is one of those situations where someone will say, Continue reading
More photos!
So this is the end of my lamb lettuce. It's not so obvious in the photo, but most of the leaves suddenly ended up covered in powdery mildew, and smelt all sickly sweet. Definitely not edible, so I chucked them into the border. I'll start a new crop next month.
And here are some photos of the busy bees. They always go straight for the borage.

Here are some stuff that I'm growing. I don't really get much space in the garden, so a good deal of these are in pots.
Here is my lamb's lettuce, which is doing quite nicely now. Got off to a bit of a tricky start. It tastes really nice.
I planted some borage in the garden, and also some indoors for the budgies, but they didn't like. I tried a leaf and it tastes kinda cucumbery, but it was too furry and I didn't like, either.
This is one of the garden ones. The bees absolutely love it. I planted one in my sister's strawberry tub, and it is making it grow more than the other strawberry plant.
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