Never On A Sunday

Yesterday Hubby and I very uncharacteristically did something with our weekend day (don't worry, we played Lego Batman, watched the F1 qualifying and were home in time for Doctor Who, we haven't completely lost our heads). Usually we're content to laze around at home all weekend, with the odd trip to the market or the library, and stick on a good DVD box set - we got through all 4 series of Being Human in about er, a week, recently. I'm sure some people can think of nothing worse than being stuck inside all weekend, but we're real homebodies, so it suits us to a T mostly.

But yesterday was a lovely warm day, so we decided to make the most of it with a walk around a local RSPB reserve, Fairburn Ings. We picked the Riverbank Trail, which was sold to us as 'a bit of a walk', two hours later we arrived back at our car, thoroughly exhausted! We didn't manage to spot any of the promised Kingfishers, but we saw lots of other lovely ducks, swans, smaller birds, butterflies and even a dragonfly that followed us around for a bit. I would hardly class myself as a twitcher, but it was a really lovely way to spend an afternoon

I'm a little bit in love with my new yellow shoes. 

(My skirt blew up just after taking this and I flashed my knickers to some ducks and possibly some men with binoculars, oops, stay classy guys)

Did you do anything nice this weekend?

P.S. What did you think of Doctor Who? I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was, but then I didn't have very high expectations going in. Eleven/Pond is by far my least favourite paring of the modern series, I know I'm in the minority, but my god am I looking forward to the end of Amy. I'm interested (and a little excited) to see how they manage to bring Oswin back - she seemed much more my cup of gin tea.

We're all going on a summer holiday

This feels a bit belated given the recent colder weather, and how autumn is clearly upon us now, but I still have a few snaps I'd like to share from the jolly little holiday by the sea that Hubby and I took well, last month now.

We got the train into Edinburgh for a lot of the days we were up; getting tatted up, buying out half of Avalanche records, sampling the wares at Brewdog (delicious, except for the 40+% ale which was ridiculous), seeing friends and catching shows - Josie Long, Dylan Moran, some awful guy who claimed 'musical racism' was acceptable (we walked out), Michael Legge & Phil Jupitus as Porky the Poet. But on the other days we just took it easy in North Berwick, having lots of romantic strolls along the beach and the coastal walks, climbing the Law and eating chips.

  (bolting, naturally)

It was a pretty good holiday really.

P.S. Did anyone make it the the festival themselves? Did you managed to snag tickets for Coalition? If so, I'm dead jealous, it sounded amazing by all accounts but was totally sold out for our entire stay, gutted!

August

Woah, it's nearly September? Time to go back to school already? The end of summer? Already?!

This month has been a total whirlwind. I feel like all I've done this month is work and sleep, and in the middle Hubby and I had a little jolly to North Berwick & Edinburgh in Scotland. I've got about a hundred photos to get through, so here's just a sneak of the things I got up to whilst away (spoiler, apparently it mostly involved looking at the floor).

Getting ready for a day of shows in Edinburgh.

Trying not to fall over whilst having a paddle in the sea.

Climbing the Law - an extinct volcano in N. Berwick - on the most gorgeous of sunny days.

That? Oh, that's just my SUPER AWESOME new tattoo peaking out. Follow me on instagram - @rosiefb - for a close up. Hubby & I both got our new ones done at Old Town Tattoos in Edinburgh and I could not recommend it enough, Nick who did both of ours was really lovely and crazy talented, I took him in a really rough sketch and he just made it perfect - it's so vibrant and colourful and everything I wanted and more.

Hope you've been having a wonderful 'summer' (what we've seen of it anyway), and are planning a fabulous weekend. We're off to Brighton tomorrow (12 hours in the car over a 48 period, kill me now eh?) for a weekend of debauchery and reminiscing about the good old times, when my friends and I weren't the old fogeys we apparently are now - one of them showed me a photo of Hubby from before I knew him today, and I didn't even recognise my own husband, how mad is that?! I can safely say that he has only gotten more handsome with age though. It's coming up for our 2 year anniversary soon, eeep!

On being a foster momma to cats

So fostering these kittens hasn't quite turned out to be the walk in the park that we first thought, and if you follow me on Twitter, you'll know there's been more than a small amount of drama and heartbreak, but more on that in a minute. First I wanted to focus on the positive, namely how freaking cute day old kittens are, and how rewarding it is to see them get fat and start to open their eyes and crawl around and turn into a mess of wriggly purrs when you tickle their bellies (Lopes, Ima looking at you).

Lopes is the big tabby girl with the baby blues, Tionne's the little spoon and Morissey is the ginger tom.

All photos from mine and Hubby's instagrams.

Momma Misha is a bit of an oddity, you're not really supposed to get ginger females for some reason, but my goodness is she a beauty, she's been super affectionate and friendly for the most part, despite clearly being through the wars at some point (she's got a majorly broken tale). But she's really struggled with being a momma. Best guesses place her at about 18 months, which is super young, and it's impossible to know what happened throughout and how healthy she's been during her pregnancy, and the kittens were probably born prematurely, but for whatever reason, the kittens weren't feeding well, and before we got to the vets to sort it out (literally overnight) Parker and Chili passed away. They were the runts of the litter, and basically never meant to be, but my god if that wasn't the most heartbreaking day of my life.

I sobbed through the entire visit to the vets, where the vet told us, in as nice a way as possible, that they just weren't very strong kittens, and realistically, none of them would survive. She gave them some antibiotics and us some kitten formula and we began to hand feed them, which was a bit of mammoth task to undertake. Being so small they could only take on a few ml each feed (and struggled to take the bottle meaning we had to resort to drops from a syringe a lot of the time), and needed feeding every few hours, so basically we've spent the last few weeks being shattered from being up half the night.

Lopes has been feeding like an absolute champion, positively guzzling from the bottle, and getting really lovely and fat, almost up to her target weight! Tionne and Morissey on the other hand were not doing so well, and based on what the vet said, we weren't exactly hopeful. So whilst it wasn't a huge shock when Morissey died on Monday and Tionne followed on Tuesday, it was still desperately sad. They're all buried in our garden now and hopefully finally at peace. We did absolutely everything we could for them, but sometimes it's just not meant to be, not matter how awful it is to experience.

Even before they died, we'd pretty much decided we needed to take the kittens back to the center, because we just weren't going to be at home enough to keep up a good feeding schedule (Hubby had been working from home to accommodate them), but their deaths were, to use an awfully inappropriate expression, the final nails in the coffin :(

So the last remaining kitten Lopes and momma Misha left, we prepared to take them back on Wednesday, but not before yet more drama could occur. When trying to give Misha her dinner on Tuesday night, one of our house cats had snuck upstairs and scratched at the bedroom door. Misha absolutely FREAKED at the sound/smell of another cat, which she perceived as a threat, and in her panic, attacked me. The centre think she did this because she thought I could protect her and her baby, so wanted to be close to me, but she was in attack mode so it didn't really work out. Whatever her reasons, my face took a good mauling and I was pretty shook up by the whole thing (understatement). Poor Hubby had to get his best First Aider hat on when confronted with me screaming, covered in blood, and looked after me like a trooper - usually he's terrible in a crisis!

I haven't taken any pictures of my face because whilst it's cleaned up a lot better, it's still a bit of a mess, although the majority of the wounds are fairly superficial. She got my scalp, ear, cheek, neck, forehead, wrist, and really badly on my chin, which is where all the blood was coming from. Hopefully none of it will scar too badly, but I was more upset that it meant I wasn't able to give blood on Wednesday because of the infection risk.

Phew, a super long post I know, but it's been a bit of a crazy 2 weeks. Emotionally & physically tiring, and emotionally & physically painful (ouch), it's been a rough old induction into the world of fostering cats and kittens. I'm not sure we'll rush back to do it again, but I wouldn't rule it out, despite our awful experiences. It might be possible for us to take Lopes back for the last few weeks of her foster-hood, once she's weaned and a bit more independent, which would be wonderful because we did grow rather attached to her (to them all really), but whilst I don't blame Misha for it, I don't think I would be comfortable taking her back after what happened.

In all of this, we've tried to still give lots of love to our two kitties, and not have them suffer for the experience. I think they've coped alright :)

New additions

I might not be posting for a while because last night we began fostering some cats! We've got the momma, Misha (BEY), and her 3 baby girl, the tabbies, and 2 boys, the gingers, who are a grand total of SIX DAYS OLD.

(and yeah, this does mean we now have 8 cats in our house, it's AWESOME)

We're still working on names for the kittens (we get to name them!), but provisionally, the girls are chilli, Lopez and tionne (as in, TLC, yeah) and Hubby just suggested Morissey and Marr for the boys <3
Promise I'll share more pictures when they get a bit bigger and y'know, their eyes are actually open and stuff. Don't know how we're going to let them go in 9 weeks time :-( I've got a feeling Misha B might be staying...

Indietracks in pictures

Hubby just handed me my photos back from Indietracks and all I can say is, wow, I love them. I know it's terribly cliched hipster of me to say so, but I really love the 'effect' of disposable cameras. There's something wonderful about the colours and the slight lack of focus, and how you never really know if the pictures are going to work. I love my digital, don't get me wrong, but you can go a bit crazy trying to get a shot just right, when you're not restricted by how many pictures you can take, and you end up not really appreciating the moment. I'm definitely going to be using more disposables on trips and holidays, because you get the added bonus of not worrying about the batteries running out or it getting filched. Anyway, the pictures...

Double polka dots // Coffee break // Train spotting // Baby goats at the campsite // Indoor engine shed stage & buffet cart bar, also, spot the punk // Sunset over the station // Real ale // Allo Darlin' // Patched up rainboots // Gordon fucking McIntyre bitches // Main stage // Steam trains // Church stage

AMAZING.

Indietracks 2012

Watching The Birthday Kiss under the blue skies.

So I might have got home from Indietracks over a week ago, but seriously, I have only just recovered. Disco dancing til dawn (including a nice bit of skanking to The Beautiful South and generally going a bit mental to any and all Belle Seb) and camping in a rather damp Derbyshire (and therefore getting about 3 hours sleep), as well as working my socks off being a super helpful steward for hours on end, left me more than a little run down, so this last week has mostly been spent face down on the sofa watching old One Tree Hill episodes - I'm a bit obsessed with how perfect all their teeth are?

I've also been waiting until I got my pictures back - I eschewed my fancy digital in favour of a very sexy waterproof disposable camera, because of the apocalypse that was forecasted, but fortunately never materialised, and apparently they take a week to process?? Who knew. All I had was a couple of instagram shots and a pop up on DiS courtesy of one of the multitude of new bezzie mates I made (it's only a small stretch to say that that list now includes Gordon McIntyre & Stevie Jackson too, BFF's yo), but I guess they'll do for now, and I'll post my proper photos later in the week.

Gordon in the Church being a bit perfect.

If I'm being totally honest, musically, no one really knocked me flat on my face and did a little dance on my body, except for Gordon McIntyre and Allo Darlin', both of whom I got to see up close and personal thanks to my amazing 'oh you can go ANYWHERE' Steward badge, who were mega ultra brill, but equally, not one of the bands I saw were in any way unenjoyable either (I had to miss Stevie because I was working, although I'm sure he'd have been boss too). I'd basically not heard of anyone going in to it, so it was all a pleasant surprise. My other musical highlights were The School, The Smittens, Bart Cummings + Pam Berry, Rose Melberg's solo set and the tiny bit of Standard Fare that I caught, just enough to have a good old boogie to Philadelphia - an absolute corker of a song. 

But if you've ever been to Indietracks, you'll know that well, it's almost not even really about the music. It's about drinking real ale as you sit on the grass in the sunshine outside the tiny tin church listening to whoever and chatting with all the new friends you made, it's about riding the steam trains and getting a little bit cosy squashed in the guard van to take a chance on some band you've never heard of before, and hearing them do a Gina G cover, it's finding a mint copy of Parrell Lines on vinyl for a fiver and snapping that baby up, it's about the after hours disco at the campsite going on until the early hours of the morning, and drinking the bar in the engine shed dry of gin (yeah, that happened). 

So whilst it might have been good if I'd known a few more of the bands, like in 2009 when Camera Obscura, Au Revoir Simone and Teenage Fanclub headlined, and I had a freaking blast watching their sets, at the end of the day, it's the experience that counts, and we still had a damn fine experience.

(source, and more awesome Indietracks photos)

I would whole heatedly recommend stewarding Indietracks to anyone, a, because we could never have afforded to go otherwise, and b, because you instantly make a whole bunch of friends and people you recognise around the site, oh, and c, because it means you get the best seat in the house for any performance you like (as long as it fits around your shift of course, but even then, there is some flexibility). It was kind of a disorganised system at times, being such a tiny little homegrown festival mostly run by volunteers, but it all worked out and it definitely didn't put us off doing it again next year.

For now I'll leave you with Allo Darlin's set closer, the crowd-silencing, frankly a little bit magical, Tallulah. 

See you there next year!

Currently

(Curly hair and new librarian specs, Barry M Raspberry nails)

Enjoying: My new job, so much. This morning I started doing mornings as well as afternoons meaning I had to get up at the crack of dawn (for reals, like 3 hours earlier than I normally get up) which was less fun, but that now means I have 3 free hours every morning which I'd have otherwise slept through, so I might be able to crack on with blogging a bit more now!

Watching: old Gilmore Girls - season 3 to be precise - I'm a Jess girl through and through, so these ones are my absolute faves. I know a lot of people seem to love Dean but yurgh! He's such a wet flannel, I can't even. Also some of the tennis & football that's been on, I like it, but I don't really care about any of the teams/players, so I'm not too bothered about the results. Murray's last match, and watching Rosol miraculously beat Nadal were both pretty exciting though.

Awkward's started back up again too, although the first episode seem to retread the ground of the first series a bit, but I'm hopeful it'll pick up - definitely worth giving a go if all your shows are on break like mine are (I still can't talk about that Grey's Anatomy series finale, so don't even go there).

Reading: A different version of The Yellow Wallpaper and other stories than the one I already have, it's got more stories and snippets from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's autobiography, so I'm kind of crazy stoked about reading it. If you've never heard of it/her, it's essentially hardcore feminist literature, written in the 19th Centuary, it's so boss.

Listening: Alligator by the National, always. Less PJ Harvey than I should be - I always love whatever I hear by her, but haven't gotten around to everything yet, so a friend lent me this DVD which I'm pretty excited to watch.

Anticipating: getting more tattoos when Hubby & I head to Edinburgh in August for the festival. I'm debating whether I'm brave enough to get a full sleeve dancing Penny Phonogram, I know it would look amazing, and I like to think I'm very Penny - give me a G&T, stick on Pull Shapes and I'm away, it's just a case of whether I can get her some legs drawn, we can afford it, I'm comfortable with the idea of getting such a MASSIVE tattoo.

I'm also looking forward to Indietracks so much, it's totally snuck up on us and it's so soon!

Eating: peanut butter stirfry & noodles. Chip butties. These beauties by the packetful...

Planning: to get started on Janel's 30 day journal challenge, er, at some point. If you've been reading for a while you'll know that it took me about 6 months to complete the last one, so don't get too excited, but I did love doing it, so maybe one morning this week I might get my craft on.

Feeling thankful for: my new job. I mean, yes, I'm completely exhausted all the time (you try running around after little ones all day and see how you cope with it :P ), but a, getting my first pay check was amazing & such a welcome boost to our household finances, even if I was super taxed - stupid basic rate - and b, it's so much fun! I was getting so bored and lonely sitting around all afternoon waiting for Hubby to come home, getting cross and upset when he had to stay late for whatever reason, but now I get to come home to him making me dinner! It's pretty great. He's pretty great really.

Oh my god, it's not even half 10. I feel like I've been up for an entire day already. Time for a cuppa and a lounge with my book now I think :) Hope y'all are having a great day so far.