Spamalot

I'm not sure what is more troubling about this SPAM I received today.

 

Is it the fact that a website called seniorpeoplemeet.com was clearly set up by someone with a less than basic understanding of grammatical structures of the English language, or the fact that I seem to be in their target audience to have received this email?

 

Just what did I click to slot into their Over 50, single, non-English speaking demographic...?

Catawampus

Hmm, from the time that's passed you'd be forgiven for thinking I don't have much to say these days. I really don't.

 

Umm. Tube strike in London today. Silly people stand forlornly at the shut gates hoping everything will magically start running. More silly people get angry and rude at staff and each other. It's like Christmas. You knew it was coming, they told you it was happening.

 

What else? My new favourite word is Catawampus. It means out of alignment, or diagonal. For example:

"We walked catawampus across the field"

or

"The tubes are all catawampus today".

 

I started my next Open University module in Grammar this month and discovered a blog that might just pull me through it:

http://linguistlaura.blogspot.co.uk/

She's called Laura. She's a linguist. She blogs about it. My favourite post is where she takes sweary tweets and analyses them for grammatical accuracy.  Verdict: not very.

 

And I finally found a use for some blackboard paint I bought a year ago on one of my well-intended creative benders.

 

I loved the paper place mats we had at the wedding:

 

 

 

So whilst I could never achieve the levels of intricacy and detail with my catawampus handiwork, I did manage to jazz up some plain slate place mats I had lying around.  I painted two coats of blackboard paint directly onto the clean and dry placemats and coasters. Then when that had dried I stencilled, pencilled and painted the design with a tester pot of matt bathroom paint.

 

 

 

 

 

Sure it looks like a ten year old did it. But it looks like they had fun in the process.

Mantel wellbeing

You can tell how thrilled I am at my new fire mantel by the amount of clutter it has accumulated within 2 minutes of being up.

 

 

 

I've wanted one for a while to give our Victorian brick fire a bit of feature and personality, and there's no denying it's one more surface to put stuff on.

 

We bought this one off an eBay seller (Fire Surrounds) who does standard sizes as well as a made to measure service. For just £52 - including postage - it arrived in 3 days made with beautiful detail and craftsmanship. It's completely solid, all we needed to do was paint it (1x spray can of white satin from Wickes) and mount it with a pair of floating shelf brackets.

 

The mirror is a thing of beauty from Gallery Reflections, via Achica of course (currently can be found on sale at Brand Interiors).

 

 It's all looking rather festive in our little abode. We never usually bother decorating the house but this year we decided we wanted to get into the Christmas Spirit (and I'm not just referring to the gin). Even though last year was our first in the house, this is our first Christmas not spent surrounded by boxes, paint brushes and DIY tools. Actually, yes we are. Scratch that last comment.