Summer Distractions

Oh blog how I have missed thee... The honest truth is I want to write but I feel like I can't. I am busy, it is true, but I am also struggling and the two together tend to have a detrimental effect on my writing as a whole. If I'm going to let my writing slide then blogging is the format that drops off of the radar first.

This summer has been full of distractions, good and bad. The good has helped with the bad, and that is the stuff that I want to share right now. Behold, if you will, a look into my good summer distractions:

Urban Exploration
I've mentioned before that this is one my husband's favourite hobbies. He usually goes exploring with one of our friends as I'm a bit of a Hermione Granger about these things, but I decided to join them on a few adventures this summer. We went in search of three abandoned train tunnels on lines that were closed after the Beeching Axe in the 1960s, an old mill, and a nuclear bunker that wasn't quite accessible. It was fun, and on one of the days we went out the sky was darkening menacingly as a storm brewed, a highly effective atmosphere for sneaking around outside an abandoned building, and we got to see some pretty impressive fork lightning on the way home.

Fancy Dress
On average I probably attend one fancy dress party a year, but we've been to three this summer alone. The first was an 80s Night to raise money for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, the second a 'Music' themed party for a friend's 30th birthday, and the third a 90s Party (inspired by the 80s one, having decided that the 90s is just about credibly vintage) for another friend's birthday. Each night was great. The 80s party involved hilarious karaoke, the Music night threw up some brilliant costumes, and the 90s night had great costumes as well as a fab playlist, if I may say so myself as I put it together. There was a lot of nostalgia at that party aided by the consumption of Iced Gems and Party Rings!

 A Graduation
At the beginning of July we went to London for my husband's MSc graduation at the Royal Festival Hall. It meant an extremely early morning and extortionately priced train tickets. It was great to celebrate my husband's success. I am very proud of him.

Tomfoolery
Sometimes when I'm tired and when I'm low I get random bursts of energy where I enjoy messing around. For the most part this has involved my husband and I successfully creating amusing status updates on Facebook for a couple of our friends over and over again. It's provided quite a lot of giggling and much amusement. But leaping around abandoned tunnels, playing pranks on the youth and other youth leaders, and running around the park pretending to be goblins have all proven to be very silly yet welcome distractions.

And now autumn is not too far away, which means all of my family's birthdays to look forward to, a special christening, the changing colours of nature, and hopefully plenty of adventures. But first, I am happy to enjoy just a bit more summer!

There will be some more posts on Rome coming soon too!

Photos my own.

So that was November 2011!

I am on a little bit of a high because last night I succeeded in submitting 50,000+ words of a novel to NaNoWriMo, just in time to win! I am very happy to reach the landmark, and whilst I lived up to my old university habits of doing the majority of the work at the last minute, I am really pleased to discover that I am capable of writing a novel. It's given me the confidence I need to get to work on my other projects, once I've figured out which to do first!

So NaNoWriMo was a continuous theme throughout an incredibly busy month. It's been great for me to be so occupied because it's helped me fight SAD a lot better. Now it's December and the big run-up to Christmas begins - more to keep me occupied!

But before I celebrate the arrival of December fully, I decided to have a look back at some of my favourite events from this very busy November.

A Day of Bangs, Booms and Celebrations - I have already described Bonfire Night in one of my earlier posts. What I didn't mention then was that before all of the festivities began we took both of my brothers out for lunch to celebrate the youngest turning 21, and the other achieving a distinction in his MSc as well as getting a new job as a GIS technician! I am one very proud big sister. Then we had an evening full of fireworks, friends, and food, a brilliant day.

What-ho old chap!

A Wedding - One of my closest friends from university got married on the second weekend of the month. The wedding was beautiful. The couple had chosen a vintage theme so all the guests were dressed in very glamourous 20s-50s attire. The hotel for the reception was grand, and art-deco in style, which fitted the occasion perfectly. In the evening we all played with sparklers outside before hitting the dance floor and whirling each other around like crazy until the early hours. Quite a few of my old friends were there, and as the ceremony was held at my old university church, the day brought back lots of memories.

Calves on one of the farms

A Trip Down Memory Lane - Speaking of memories, on a gorgeous sunny day my husband and I walked from our home across the South Downs Way to one of my old homes. It was about 11 miles of walking through farmland, along old routes that I had hiked through at night as a scout, and then finally down the long country lane that I used to cycle along as a teenager, before hitting suburbia once more. I showed my husband my old house, where I spent most of my childhood, and then we wandered to the tiny shopping centre where we discovered the old greasy spoon cafe was still running strong - so we stopped for much needed, and very cheap, mugs of tea and a chocolate nut sundae. We felt very healthy and relaxed. A great way to spend a Saturday.

That's me with Nemo on my head!

A Fancy Dress Party - Yet more memories were shared on this occasion. My old Classical Society friends from university always host fantastic fancy dress parties. We Classicists are all a little bit mad and have good imaginations, so you can always guarantee some pretty awesome costumes. This party was themed N for November, and we all had to come as something beginning with N. I came as November 5th - the idea was appreciated, but was perhaps a little too abstract! Anyway, we also had Napoleon, a Night Elf, a Neanderthal, a Nerd, Nigella Lawson, and Noel Edmonds amongst other things! My favourite was Nemo - one of my friends made a papier mache Nemo that he wore on his head! It was a brilliant night of catching up on all times and sharing funny stories, as well as taking many photos of Nemo wearing silly hats etc.

In other November news, my husband grew a rather dashing moustache for Movember, to help raise awareness of prostate cancer. The Fairtrade Christmas Campaign at church was launched successfully. And of course, there was NaNoWriMo! I thoroughly enjoyed creating my characters and knitting their adventure together. I'd had a few vague ideas about this story before I began writing, but as I wrote different characters kept wandering into my head, bizarre turns of event would just happen, and the whole thing became a lot more dramatic than originally intended. It has been great fun!

So goodbye November, for the first time in years you were a great month! Hello December!

Fancy Dress - The Challenges and the Hilarity

On Friday night we went to our friend's birthday party - themed sci-fi & fantasy fancy dress. Now I love fancy dress parties. I used to do lots of acting so I always enjoy dressing up as a different "character" but I also love the chance to be creative with costumes. The one problem with this is that I conjure up fantastic images in my head of what I will look like in my awesome costume, and the reality is never quite right. Friday night's attempt was one such. Nevertheless I think it turned out reasonably well considering...

I decided to go as a Blood Elf Mage from World of Warcraft. Some of our friends wanted me to go as Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, but a) my hair is too short nowadays and I didn't want to buy a wig or extensions, b) I would have to obtain a long (no doubt gorgeous) white gown (not my wedding dress!) and then avoid getting tomato sauce on it - BBQ, virtually impossible, c) I would need to look ethereal and stunning at the same time - I am not Cate Blanchett... and d) I didn't feel I could be creative enough with the costume. So, I opted for Blood Elf.

I started by searching Google Images for ideas. This mostly churned out photos of hardcore WoW players at BlizzCon with replica costumes - costumes they had slaved over for days or that they had had custom-made at great expense. I have no sewing skills whatsoever and couldn't afford to have custom-made Judgement armour - why would I want to anyway? What would I do with it afterwards? So I decided to go for the RP Mage look. I knew only three others, including my husband and the birthday boy, who were attending the party that have played WoW and therefore I had little to fear about not looking genuine.

                                                                                    

The first step to my costume was to find a dress. I went shopping in Brighton with my husband and the birthday boy a couple of weeks ago. Brighton was a nightmare. People everywhere. Thankfully, however, we had a very productive shopping trip. First we tried Snooper's Paradise, which is an amazing flea-market style shop in the North Laine. My husband and our friend both found long leather jackets for £25 each! That was their Steam Punk Hero or Villain costumes started! My husband also found a pair of brass binoculars to hang round his neck. I looked admiringly at several beautiful vintage dresses, especially Medieval style, that would have done the trick but were tear-inducingly expensive and so out of the question. Then we moved onto Revamp, a fancy dress shop. And outside was a sale rail of ex-hire outfits. I found a long black dress with black veils attached to each strap to form sort of sleeves/cloak. Perfect, and a definite bargain at £10! My husband then found a waistcoat for only £3 over the road. We then went to rest our aching feet and quench our thirst with fruit smoothies in the Guarana Bar (an old favourite haunt from our sixth-form days), before heading back towards the town centre where the car was parked. There I battled my way through gangs of horribly fashionable teenage girls and young women in New Look to find a suitable belt, which thankfully I did, for less than a fiver. So far so good.

Then we got out of there and went home. Next, I had to obtain ears. The elf ears that you can buy in fancy dress shops are the LOTR ones. Thanks to Google I discovered that Blizzard sell official Blood Elf and Night Elf ears. Blood elves have fairly large and long ears as you can see in the screenshots of my hunter above and mage below. I was lucky enough to find some being sold on Amazon in the UK rather than having to purchase some from the States which would have cost me an arm and a leg. I like making an effort with fancy dress costumes, but I don't like spending a fortune to do so. The ears arrived and they looked cool, except for the thin black band that held them together and keeps them on your ears. If you want to wear the ears right the band has to sit across your forehead. If you cut the band off then I'm pretty sure the ears won't stay on. I have small(ish) ears, so found they elf ears slipped off very easily. I think they would work better on men's ears. The ears also came with some rather dubious looking make-up - the instructions said, 'Do not use the purple make-up near the eyes.' Er, ok then...

So, final purchases were cheap make-up from Boots - eyeshadow, eyeliner, and bright red lipstick - and a purple silk hairscarf that I was able to cover the black band with - it also looks very like a Mageweave silk band that low-level tailors can make in WoW - I am nothing if not authentic, haha!

Thankfully I already had enough of the other items I required. A staff from when I played the Chorus Leader in Aristophanes' Thesmophorizusae at university (a large wooden stick that a friend of mine had found in the university woods!), a purple pashmina cum sash for the belt to sit on so that it didn't catch on the dress, black sparkly pumps, and mascara. My brother leant me a dagger in its sheath that I could hang off the belt. So, if you are a WoW nerd I managed to do the impossible - have a stave and an enchanted dagger all at once, OMG LOL ^^ right? Is there any way I can express sarcasm on this blog?

So the next challenge was putting it altogether. The costume itself worked like a charm but the trouble came with putting on the ears. I am ashamed to say I had something of a childish hissy-fit over this and went into a temporary self-hating tantrum, declaring that I wasn't going to bother because I just looked stupid! I know, silly huh?

Anyway, I got over it and managed to make it work, yey! The party was a good laugh with some pretty awesome costumes. I'm biased but I must say that my husband looked very dashing as a Steam Punk Hero, complete with his replica flint-lock pistol and cogs around his neck (shh, don't tell anyone that they are from Gears of War...)

Other costumes included Dr Who, 3 fairies, Aslan, Men in Black, Neo from The Matrix, a Jedi (with an incredibly cool lightsabre), a star and some indistinguishable Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings characters. But the best costume of all, which could only be worn for photos as it was immensely impractical, was that of a friend of ours who we had given some boxes to...he came as a robot. He'd put boxes together and used various bits of tubing and lots of silver spray paint to make a fantastic costume. He could hardly see, barely walk, and certainly couldn't eat or drink, but he made a brilliant entrance and definitely got the most cheers of the evening. That was the height of creativity.

I've been to many fancy dress costumes and I've dressed as many things including a fairy (many times), a pirate, Puss in Boots, Rainbow Brite, a bunny, a princess, the list goes on. Each time I relish the opportunity to be creative and come up with something different to what other people might try, even if there are other fairies at a party I make sure I am my own special brand of fairy! My Blood Elf costume is not worthy of special recognition by WoW fans, but it was fun to try and I enjoyed making it my own.

Now, to persuade another friend to host a fancy dress party in the near future... What theme shall we suggest? Ah yes, I forgot to mention that it was our fault our friend opted for fancy dress, we're just persuasive like that xD

Screenshots & photo my own.