New Things in March

A bit late, but April is already proving to be a busy month - as was March, looking at my list of new things.

☼  Found a nice new (to me) drinking establishment in Leeds, the White Swan
☼  Bottle-fed newborn lambs (!!!!!)
☼  Baked banocolate muffins
☼  Went to a jazz night at a pub in Huddersfield
☼  Carried a live frog in my hands (random)
☼  Went to a nightclub all by myself
☼  Visited Winchester
☼  Visited Bristol (think I could love this city...)
☼  Ate chocolate Philadelphia + baked with it
☼  Watched two new films: Girl, Interrupted and Whip It
☼  Read four new books: Far From the Madding Crowd, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Dibs in Search of Self, and Dear John
☼  Got my car towed by a recover truck (a nerve-wracking and ultimately expensive experience... Not looking to repeat this)
☼  Took my first pictures with my Polaroid camera (they were rubbish so no scans I'm afraid)
☼  Visited East Riddlesden Hall
☼  Watched a horseball demonstration

 gratuitous lamb shot

New Things

Following on from January's list of new stuff, I kept it up for February and I was surprised to see the list is not shorter than January's (the opposite, in fact) - considering I've been back at work since the start of the month and consequently had less free time for doing fun stuffs. Some of them are, admittedly, a little more 'minor' (boring, unimportant, tedious... Whatever you wanna call it) than all the new things I did in January, but new is new and they're all experiences, right?

☼ Wandered round Harvey Nichols (felt like I didn't *quite* belong here..)
☼ Tried mee goreng (meh)
☼ Bought a pair of proper walking boots
☼ Visited Sandal Castle
☼ Went to Red Hot Buffet (omg - amazeballs)
☼ Ate sushi (not for me)
☼ Built a snowman
☼ Went sledging (I have done this before but not since I was tiny, so for the purpose of this list it's the first time I've been sledging *as an adult*!)
☼ Signed up to a dating website (!)
☼ Went on a date with someone from said website
☼ Shared rum with some randoms, awesome people I happened to share a train carriage with
☼ Tried a Kir Royale (yum)
☼ Tried a chai tea latte (a grower)
☼ Went on a night out in a town I'd never been to before
☼ Drove my friend's Land Rover Defender. This was with the intention of learning to tow a trailer in it, and I'm dead excited - I felt totally boss driving such a large, unforgiving vehicle! I hope to report back on this more in future, as I'm really keen to learn to tow.
☼ Read four new books: The Diary of a Madman, A Hungarian Quartet, One Hundred Years of Solitude and A Tale of Two Cities
☼ Watched four new films: Prozac Nation, Elizabethtown, Stealing Beauty and Midnight in Paris (would especially recommend the latter two - so wonderful)

making the days count

Over the last few years, I've mused and pondered a lot on the things I do with my time, how I look back over the days/weeks/months/years. I used to look back on past days or weeks and feel like I hadn't done anything particularly exciting, new or interesting. And that was pretty depressing. So I would do even less.

I have come to the conclusion that, for me at least, there needs to be something different in my days to set them apart and not feel like the days are rolling into weeks, into months, into years. THAT'S just depressing. My calendar journal helps me with this, as it makes me think about even minorly interesting things that sets my day apart from the other 364.

Another tool that I began in order to help me make me feel like I'm doing and experiencing things, is a list. Yay! More lists! I can never have enough lists in my life.

Anyway. Since the start of this year, I have been making a note of every single new thing that I have done, seen, watched, read, whatever - no matter how minor, if I hadn't done it before, it goes on the list. And I'm quite surprised to note I have managed to fill a whole page in my notebook (which isn't that tiny actually) of new things for this month. I'm pretty pleased with this, and it cheers me up to see a whole list of things I've managed to try in the space of only one month, that I hadn't done before.

According to my list, during the month of January I:

☼ went to an antiques fair 

☼ dyed my hair red 

☼ got a tattoo on my arm

☼ started learning to knit

☼ watched a film whilst in the bath (this is the best! I just sit my laptop a safe distance away from the bath, and relax - it seriously is the future of bathtimes)

☼ ate smoked mackerel (told you I was even including the minor things)

☼ played L.A. Noire (this is an awesome game, I highly recommend it and I wouldn't consider myself a gamer)
☼ had my portrait taken

☼ visited Richmond Park

☼ started learning to use vector software

☼ wrote a guest post for another blogger

☼ went to a brass band concert (this was better than I expected!)

☼ watched two new films: Shutter Island and Jawbreaker

☼ read four new books: The Unconsoled, An Area of Darkness, Great Expectations and Vanity Fair

For once, looking back at the usually-dreaded month of January is quite inspiring. However, I am running out of time and things to try, so February's list might be considerably shorter than this. Especially as I will be back at work full-time from next week, so sadly I will have to spend most of my day writing apologetic letters to customers.

playing around...

In another attempt to educate myself, today I have been playing around with vector graphics software. I have never used any program like this before, my skills included Paint and that was about it. I've kind of shied away from anything else previously, mostly because any graphics software always looks so complicated and I've not had any major need or desire to learn to use it.

I am using Inkscape; it's an open source program that, from what I've read, holds its own against professional software such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. Best of all, it's free!

I can never learn a skill arbitrarily - there has to be an end result in sight for me. So I tried to find a tutorial to draw something, that wasn't too difficult for my total-noob credentials. I followed this tutorial for a Japanese kokeshi doll, as shown below. It's quite long (took me a few hours, though that did include some major dawdling such as painting my nails), but really easy to understand and I think I've grasped a few of the basics now.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out a way to upload the images to the blog in their original .svg state, so this has been converted to a .png with the disappointing but unsurprising result of it looking all pixelly. :(

Despite my having 'cheated' by following a tutorial, I'm chuffed that I've been able to make this little doll without too much difficulty. For anybody that's thinking of having a go with software like this, bite the bullet - it's a lot less scary than it looks!