I am not one of life’s natural green fingered, gardening types. Don’t get me wrong, I like having a nice garden, I just don’t particularly enjoy the process of getting it nice. I have a chap who is supposed to be my gardener but he is so busy at this time of year, the most he manages is keeping the lawn under control. Last year, I planted some Irises and some Arum Lilies on my river bank and the gardener strimmed them to death before I had time to mention I had planted them. Recently, I ventured out and planted some lily of the valley plants under my lime tree. Unfortunately, they went the same way as the lilies and irises….
The gardener also doesn’t plant out the pots and planters in the garden so once a year, I deck myself in old clothes and gardening gloves and spend a day planting marguerites, geraniums and lavender and getting very grubby. Have I mentioned I hate having dirty finger nails…
When I had finally finished, I had a shower and noticed that my knee was a bit itchy. This morning, I awoke and my knee was VERY itchy. Look away at this point if you are of a nervous disposition….
I have a huge blistery bite thingy on my knee which has been driving me insane with itchiness all day. I knew I wasn’t cut out for gardening…. A friend said it was probably a spider which had laid eggs under the skin and as we speak, hundreds of little spiderettes are hatching and growing….I think he knows I am a hypochondriac and was just teasing - wasn’t he?
I watched the Stella Artois tennis championships on TV this afternoon. ( to try and take my mind off the itching). Rafael Nadal was playing and he beat Jonas Bjorkman 6-2, 6-2 . He seems to have recovered after beating Roger Federer in the final of the French Open, and to have adapted to playing on grass (after the clay at Roland Garros), with no difficulty at all.
During a break in play they showed this little clip of Rafael Nadal exercising on court before the match. Watch it and weep…
This guy has muscles in places I don’t even have places!
You will have noticed that yet again, I have done no bookbinding. Well, the sun was shining, the tennis was on, I had a poorly knee….oh dear, and it can only get worse as the summer progresses…
This word is turning into a bit of a buzz word over here, isn’t it? Still, two posts in two days can’t be bad….
I was tagged by Mimi over at Mimi writes… to take part in this meme, she tagged a whole lot of people and I noticed I was included over at Kim’s. Mimi was originally tagged by Travis, who created this - just as well, as a Mimi meme is too much of a mouthful :-)
Here are the instructions for Trav’s Staying Out Of The Dungeon Trivia Meme:
He said: A meme needs ’structions.OK…here’s your ’structions:
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to:
1. Choose a category from one of these: Television, Stage & Screen, Nightly News, Publishing, Lives & Times, Music
2. Find 8 bits of trivia about your selected category
3. Be sure to let me know when…ok, if…you decide to play along so I can see what you come up with.
4. You may tag, or simply offer the meme for borrowing or stealing as you like.
So here we go. My chosen topic is Stage and Screen.
1 Tom Selleck was the original choice to play Indiana Jones. He turned the part down as he was too busy with ‘Magnum PI’ and it went to the lovely Harrison Ford.
2 Daniel Craig is the first actor to play James Bond, who is younger than the series itself.
3 Johnny Depp only had 169 words to learn in ‘Edward Scissorhands’.
4 Daniel Day Lewis and Russell Crowe were considered for the part of Aragorn in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. Even though he had never read any of the books, Viggo Mortensen took the part, after being persuaded by his son who loved them.
5 ‘The Last Samurai’ was not only Ken Watanabe’s first American Film, it was also the first time he had spoken English in a film. Tom Cruise took no ‘up front’ salary for making this film and trained for two years before film making began, learning sword fighting and taking Japanese language lessons.
6 Bette Davis was the original choice for the lead role in ‘Mary Poppins’. Danny Kaye and Fred Astaire were considered for the role of Bert, which was played by Dick van Dyke (and his atrocious Cockney accent….)
6 In the Coen Brothers film, ‘Intolerable Cruelty’, George Clooney plays a talkative character who is vain about his teeth. In his previous Coen Brothers film, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, he plays a talkative character who is vain about his hair.
7 Only days before the role of Batman was cast in ‘Batman Begins’, eight actors were asked to audition for the part. The actors were Christian Bale, Joshua Jackson, Eion Bailey, Hugh Dancy, Billy Crudup, Cillian Murphy, Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal. While Bale won the part, Christopher Nolan liked Cillian Murphy’s audition so much, he cast him as Dr. Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow.
8 Due to his part in ‘The Machinist’, Christian Bale was vastly underweight (about 120 pounds on his 6 foot+ frame) when he was under consideration for the part of Batman in ‘Batman Begins’. After being cast, he was told to become as “big as you could be” by Christopher Nolan, the director. Bale underwent a dietary and exercise regimen and ending up weighing about 220 pounds (about 40 pounds above his normal weight). It was decided that Bale had became too large (friends of his on the film’s crew dubbed him “Fatman”) and he quickly shed about 20 pounds to have leaner, more muscular frame.
So there you have it, 8 perfectly random facts (largely culled from the Internet Movie Database) and a wonderful excuse to have a look at some of my favourite movie actors. Yum!
I’m not going to tag anyone as it’s quite task compiling this list but if you’d like to have a go, please feel free!
While I’m at it catching up on tags and things, Dunn over at Simply Dunn, passed on this lovely award, which she received from Crissy, called the ‘Arte Y Pico’ award. Thank you so much, Dunn!
Arte Y Pico Award rules :
1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award through creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogger community, no matter of language.
2. Each award should have the name of the author with a link to their blog.
3. Award winners have to post the award with the name and link to the blog of the person who gave them the award.
4. Please include a link to the “Arte Y Pico” blog so that everyone will know where the award came from.
I’ve tried to find out what ‘Arte y Pico’ means but the nearest I can get from my translator widget is ‘art and tip’ (which makes no sense) I think it means like a tip of a mountain (the peak) so maybe it means ‘the peak of art’. I’d be glad for a good translation….
The weather here has been glorious, we had a wonderful weekend and I went to my first barbecue of the year on Sunday. It was a gorgeous afternoon and we played croquet which was great fun. Not quite like this game though.
I played tennis yesterday and today and have even been doing some gardening (not my forte, I must confess) but it is so wonderful to be outside in the warm sunshine. Needless to say, it is going to get cooler after today so I have been making the most of it - hence the lack of both bookbinding and blogging. I’m sure normal service will be resumed very soon.
Just a very quick post to show you this book and to tell you I’m not going to be around for a week or so. I’m off on an adventure - I’m flying to Geneva with a friend and we are then driving to Barcelona and catching a ferry over to Mallorca. We are then going to spend a few days at her apartment before flying back to the UK next week. I’m looking forward to the trip - Thelma and Louise eat your heart out! On second thoughts, that didn’t end too well, so maybe not :-)
As I will be traveling around, I won’t be taking my laptop so I’ll be having an enforced break from blogging, so apologies if I don’t visit yours for a while. I’ll catch up on my return. In the meantime, Kim over at Laketrees is having a little competition and is inviting people to vote for their favourite art work. I rather foolishly entered a book and it is up against some stiff competition - mostly (if not all paintings). If you are feeling kind and generous, and like my books I’d appreciate a vote or two so I don’t end up as a complete ‘Billy No-Mates’ over there. Thanking you kindly….
When I was a little girl aged 9, one of my best friends was a boy called Andrew. He lived just down the road from my family, his mum was my mum’s friend and his sisters played with mine. We were friends until his family emigrated to Australia when I was 14.
Years later, when I was married and living in Hemel Hempstead, I went into London for the day with my husband and some friends. We decided not to drive into the centre of London so we parked in St John’s Wood and caught the tube. We got on the first train that arrived but quickly realised we were going in the wrong direction so we jumped off that train, ran across the platform and jumped on one going the right way. As we sat chatting, a guy who was sitting next to us, said ‘Hello, Diane’ - it was Andrew with his wife, Helen. They had come back to the UK to see if they wanted to return permanently and were living in - you’ve guessed it - Hemel Hempstead! They had just made the decision to return to Australia, and it was another 20 years until we met again for the day in London while they were on a visit in 2002 and I met them again this week. Each time we meet, it’s like we had only seen each other a few days ago - except with lots of news to catch up on.
If we had not decided to go into London that day, not decided to park in St Johns Wood, not got on the wrong train, not sat in that particular carriage….we would probably have never met up again. On the way home on the train yesterday, I sent them a text to thank them for the visit and to wish them a safe journey home, just as I pressed ’send’ a text arrived from them saying the same thing. Spooky!
I love hearing stories of coincidences like these - synchronicity, happenstance - whatever you call it. All a bit ‘Sliding Doors’. Now that was a depressing film…and a happy one at the same time…. There was one particular quote from this film which made me laugh
‘Gerry, I’m a woman! We don’t say what we WANT! But we reserve the right to get pissed off if we don’t get it. That’s what makes us so fascinating! And not a little bit scary.’
You have been warned!
I also must recommend a great book by Carol Shields which I read years ago called ‘Happenstance’. It was the story of a marriage told from first the wife’s perspective and then when you had finished the first half of the book, you turned it over and started reading from the front again - the husband’s story, or of course, you could have started the other way round. I have always thought it was a clever way to show that there are two sides to every story and giving both of them equal importance.
By the way, the illustration at the top of the page is by Edward Monkton, who makes a range of hilarious greeting cards, based on the ‘Interesting Thoughts of Edward Monkton’.
I originally made this photograph album as a gift for a friend who celebrated her birthday last week, but as with the best laid plans, I didn’t finish it in time and so ended up buying her a gift instead. This album is much larger than the usual books I make (as you can see from the photograph) and was subsequently much more difficult to make as handling large pieces of gluey paper is really difficult. Well, it is for me! This was also going to be a dry run for an even larger album I am going to make for another friend who wants it to match two albums she already owns. I’ll keep you posted how I get on…
I’ve had a really action packed weekend. It was a Bank Holiday here in the UK. As is often the case, the weather was horrible - very wet and cold but I still managed to have a good time. The weekend consisted of a friend’s birthday party, meeting up with various friends and lots of eating, followed by lots of walking to counteract the effects of the eating. You may have noticed my blogging has been sporadic recently, to say the least . Unfortunately/fortunately, this may have to continue as my social life has picked up markedly mainly due to the fact I have (at the risk of sounding like Jane Austen) - a potential ‘gentleman caller’. Here is Jane’s advice on how to find Mr. Darcy…. (it comes at about 1m 15secs)
It seems the amount I am able to blog varies inversely with the state of my social life! The social drought since Christmas has led to a very productive phase on the book-making/blogging front but this pace is difficult to maintain at the moment, so I intend to aim to write something every few days rather than every day. Just so you know. If I suddenly pick up the pace on the blogging front, you will know why….and I will be back to this….
Just as everyone returns to work after the holiday, the weather has improved and today was wonderfully warm and sunny - great for tennis - apart from the fact I didn’t give my tennis skirt it’s first outing of the year (as the sight of my white legs would have probably blinded the other players) so I was actually too hot wearing joggers. As it was such a gorgeous day, I put the hood down on the car for the first time this year when I was driving home and drove along the coast road. I spotted a glimpse of blue by the side of the road so I parked and found this. Click on each image to see a full sized version.
