Really Free

Posted by Val in Arty Old Bird, Blogging, Wittering and tagged with , , ,
yeahbut isn't like sherbet by Val Erde

yeahbut isn’t like sherbet

This post was going to be about how to have a completely free blog with lots of space and nice design and no upgrades. Instead, it’s going to be a bit of self-indulgence, because that’s what I need.

After my previous post on the No Ads upgrade, a few people asked me some questions about domains, upgrades in general, and so on. WordPress.com stuff. And I started writing a post that got longer, and longer.

After writing quite a bit of it, I wasn’t happy with what I had, so added some, removed some, and generally got into the editing. I hate editing, always have hated it. Years ago my mind was clear, I had an incredibly good memory (close to photographic), I had pretty good concentration and could focus. These days I have very little of any of those. My concentration and memory are shit.  So when I write a post – unless it sort of runs straight out of me and gives me the automatic reaction when I read it back of “now that’s good!” or “wow, that’s funny!” I am not happy with it. And generally, when I’m not happy with something the damn vibe of it trails around after me spoiling everything else for days. That’s what’s happened.

I’ve struggled with that damn post for four or five days now, and that’s enough. I’ve given up. And I’ve gotta tell you – I hate giving up. But I’ve got to. And d’you know what? When I step back from this blog I ask myself: whose life am I living?

Now that, to me, sounds unnecessarily selfish. But that’s how I was brought up: not to put myself first.

I was a tiny child in the 1950s. Yeah – if you’re much younger than me, I know that makes me sound antique and quite honestly I feel like I am, quite often. But the thing is – I don’t NEED to feel like that.

Here are some things I could be doing if I weren’t sitting here worrying about how to write a damn blog post and have it make sense to someone other than me. Heck no, not even have it make sense to someone other than me but have it make sense to me, too.  I could be in the garden feeding the birds which earlier today stood by my feet taking tiny bits of suet I was breaking up for them (hubby said that they like soldiers and I didn’t believe him, but he was right), we’ve four baby blackbirds one of whom is devastated that we’ve run out of grapes so suet soldiers have to do. I could be drawing with a real pencil and paper instead of being glued to the computer using Photoshop to make puzzles for my account on Jigsawplanet.com where I am Seahorse. (Yep, that’s a link to me as ‘Seahorse’, there. And my puzzles. Which you can do, if you want.) I could be listening to that music that I was going to listen to this morning and didn’t. I could be making a miniature that I was going to make for myself (and what it is going to be is a secret or it wouldn’t be just for me, so there). I could be sorting books or labelling minidiscs or washing toads or hemming artichokes…  or bloody hell, anything really. I don’t know, but I could be doing something different.

Somehow, in the past few years, I’ve got stuck in the ‘helping people’ mindset. That would be fine if I would allow myself to become one of the people that I help, but I kind of put myself at the back, out of view and then by the time I need my own help, my energy for that has gone.

So, for now I’m going to leave you with very little in the way of a post on upgrades. Instead, I’m just gonna say “here are some running dots”…. and help myself for a change.

More below this announcement from our sponsor rather nice video.

PS. The gist of my post was this: none of the upgrades are compulsory and there’s no such thing as a Premium user, just someone who paid for stuff they might not have needed. You don’t have to have a domain. (Well, you don’t. I did.) All it does is remove the ‘wordpress’ bit of your blog address and you have to pay for it forever, even after you die (unless you’re a zombie in which case you probably wouldn’t care, or you might go and eat Matt Mullenweg‘s brain, which is what I’d do if I were a zombie.) You don’t have to have the space or videopress upgrades, instead you can host your pics, music and videos on media sharing sites such as Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and others and use the URLs from there. (‘URLs’ sounds a lot like a nasty infection of the undercarriage, but isn’t really.) You don’t have to have the custom design – look what I did with this blog without it (without the custom design, I mean. I am frequently ‘without it’ in other areas: currently I am without a long cool drink. It’s damn hot here, 81 degrees in the shade. If you can call my room ‘the shade’.) You don’t have to have the No Ads upgrade. Well, you do have to have it if you’re me, but you’re not me, are you? You don’t have to have a premium theme. The one I use here on Arty Old Bird was free and was one of the goddawful worst of the bunch and look how I changed it. Don’t believe me? Here’s the original. Its original self is horrid but I wouldn’t part with it for the world ‘cos it actually has (or had, as it’s no longer available but I still get to keep it) all the thingeys I needed for customization. And…

… oh heck, I just wrote the damn post!

Don’t play this unless you were a punk or mad. Or both. Or still are.

Do you blog on WordPress.com? Did you know….

Posted by Val in Art, Blogging and tagged with , ,
nets-by-Val-Erde

Nets, by Val Erde

… that if you don’t have a no-ads upgrade many of your readers will almost certainly be seeing ads on your blog every time they read a post there?

Don’t believe me? Log out of your account (and if necessary, clear your cache so that your browser doesn’t present you with a previous view of your blog),  and then look between the bottom of each of your last few posts and where the comments begin. See it? Also, if you refresh the page, each ad usually changes to a new one, too.

Many are in the form of videos or animations and some might run completely counter to the content of the posts they are below.

If you’ve only just started a blog you might not have any ads yet – sometimes they wait til you’ve got a certain number of followers before they put ads there, but eventually they do.

Do you think this is unfair?   I don’t. It’s a pain, certainly – but it’s not unfair as they have to have some way of paying for the site for the people who can’t or aren’t willing to pay for the upgrade. And, let’s face it, there really isn’t any such thing as a ‘free blog’.

While I don’t think it’s unfair that they put ads on blogs, what I do think is unfair is that they don’t make this practice clearer. For instance, they could put it nearer the top of their Terms of Service*, rather than way down the page (currently as term #10). What – you didn’t know it was there at all? You didn’t read the T.O.S.? Well, then you can’t fault the site.  Always read a site’s T.O.S. – and make sure you re-read it from time to time in case of changes.

There is also information about ads here on one of their support pages.  Didn’t know that was there?  Most sites (all reputable ones, anyway) have links to their support or help pages, as well as to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy clearly visible. If you can’t find them on the sign up page of a site – go looking for them (often they’re at the bottom of the site’s home page) before creating your blog or joining a site. It really is worth your while.

If you want to get rid of the ads, yes, you have to pay for an upgrade, but it really isn’t expensive at $30 (currently £19.61 GBP) per year, per blog, unless you have more than one or two blogs. I pay for it for this blog and for my art site and I do it for my readers as well as for myself.

I hate that so few people who blog here even know about it, simply because they don’t log out of their accounts** and take a look at what a logged out user or someone who doesn’t even use the site, would see.

Then again, there are some bloggers who aren’t bothered by it. Well, fine, but I’m not one of them. I hate ads with a vengeance. I hate going to a blog, reading and enjoying a post which makes me want to comment and just as I’m about to comment I see an ad for a bank account or a political party or a swimwear sale or something else that’s completely out of context to what I’ve just read. I hate that most of them are animated or in bright colours that scream out at me “I’m not meant to be here!”

How about you? Have you ads in your blog you didn’t know about? How do you feel about them being there? How do you feel about ads in other people’s blogs?

*That’s a link to WordPress.com’s Terms of Service, not to a description of what ‘Terms of Service’ means!

**It’s actually not a very good practice to remain permanently logged-in to any site, however convenient it is. If you want more security, get in the habit of logging out, at least at the end of the day if not more often. 

It’s all Derek’s fault.

Posted by Val in Photo, Wittering and tagged with , , , ,

So I Said And Then She Said, by Val Erde

I have a guilty secret. It’s about those late nights I have that many people comment on… you know, those nights when I don’t get to bed for hours and hours? Yes – the nights when really I’m still up at 3am, sometimes even 4am. Yep, those ones. The ones in which you think I’m on Facebook, or Twitter, or here on my blog. Well… I’m not entirely on those sites… no… I’m with Derek.

Derek? You ask. Is he your husband?

No. Nope, he’s not my husband.

Val! You’re having an affair!!! You exclaim (in italics and with a lot of exclamation marks, just like that).

Mmmm… well, I can’t tell a lie… I am, sort of…

… and he’s very attractive. I mean, he gets my attention.

He must do, you say, without any quotation marks or even inverted commas.  After all, you continue (clothed in italics and with just a bare comma to cover your thingy), there your husband is…

how do you know?

… in bed without you…

Ah yes! But actually if it hadn’t been for my husband, I wouldn’t have known Derek’s name.

It gets worse! You say.  You’ve been with this man without even having known his name. Shame on you!

And then you say…

Hang on a minute. How did your husband know his name, if you didn’t?

Ah. Well, let me set the scene:

It is very late at night early in the morning, and still dark, when I get to bed. I creep into the  bedroom so as not to wake my husband, undress and get into bed beside him (after dropping my clothes on the floor because I’m a messy thing. Yes, that’s right – the lessons taught me in childhood about clearing up after myself didn’t make a ha’pence of difference.)

I lie there quietly. Well, as quietly as I can. Which isn’t very quiet at all, as I’m a fidgety sort of person and that fidgetyness (is that even a word? Oh well, it is now) tends to be noisy.

After a bit (which is roughly the same length of time as a moment, give or take a nanosecond), a slightly muffled voice says “wov time zit?” You’ll understand that I’m not quoting verbatim, after all a word or two spoken in sleep or even half-sleep is rarely clear. Well, not in our house anyway.

“Wov time zit?” is not normally a question I’m happy to answer, particularly in the circumstances. But knowing that the question has come from a person who is not particularly alert and might not remember a thing the next day later in the day gives me courage to say “er… late.”

There is a silence. That’s good. Silence in this situation is good. I hold my breath for a few nanoseconds (give or take a moment) to help it along. And then a voice says “Derek.”

I think for a moment that he must have been dreaming about cranes. So I say:

“Derrick?”

To which he replies in the affirmative. And then repeats it.

How do you spell that? I ask (hoping against hope that he can’t spell in his sleep.)

“D.e.r.e.k.”

I’m a little confused, and giggle. (I often giggle when I’m confused. It’s a high pitched giggle and, when provoked, can easily turn into a kookaburra.)

“It’s Derek’s fault.” He says.

What is? I ask.

Your late nights.

I think about this. Derek. He’s calling my late nights Derek?

Yes, he is.

Suddenly there’s a kookaburra in the bed.

.

Posts that never made it…

Posted by Val in Art, Wittering and tagged with , ,

… but are here for you now. Do you have draft posts that just don’t make it into your blog because they just didn’t make the grade, or you weren’t in the mood to post them, or for any number of other reasons?  I’ve loads of them. But they’re lonely sitting in the draft folder (I have to assume it’s a folder rather than some horrible oubliette that is lurking at the bottom of my dashboard) so I’m going to yank out a few and present them to you here, and you can tell me if they should have been put in posts of their own, or if I should actually take them and chuck ‘em back in that oubliette and forget ‘em forever.

Or you can answer their questions. (My posts are good at asking questions, even when I’m not).

Or you can just read them.

Or you can avoid them and get on with whatever exciting thing you were doing before. Like vacuuming the ceiling or defurring the curtains or whatever.

Exhibit A is a post called:

BANANA ESCAPES JELLY

and it goes something like this (well, it goes exactly like this):

An abstract artwork with orange jelly and a banana that's trying to get out.

You can take the banana out of the jelly but you can’t take the jelly out of the banana. Er…

Here in the UK, ‘jelly’ is the wobbly shivery semi-solid, semi-transparent stuff that kids eat (ate?) at parties. I’ve never had banana jelly, but I can taste it from this image. And that’s bound to be orange jelly. I have never liked orange jelly. Raspberry, yes. Strawberry, yes. Orange, no.

There are some flavours I like and some I don’t. Orange with apple or orange with banana… nope! Orange with chocolate has never appealed to me either.

What flavour combinations just don’t do it for you?
What flavour combinations do?

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Next, may I present:

WHAT’S THE STRANGEST SKY YOU’VE SEEN?

Abstract art mostly in shades of green

Curious that I’ve named something with green in it ‘Sun Streak’? My mother was an artist, too. Although her forte was sculpture, she also painted and loved to paint oils with palette knife. And one of her favourite subjects was skies – thundery, heavy skies. She’d point out the green in the sky, which fascinated me, and I’d keep my eye on the strange colours that an otherwise ‘ordinary’ sky (if such a thing exists) would produce. So here are some streaks of colours that you might, one day, see above you.

Or not.

What’s the strangest sky you’ve seen? Where were you at the time? What time of year was it?

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This next one didn’t even get an image for itself, let alone get finished (and because it didn’t get finished, it also didn’t get to ask a question.) It did, however, get a title. I don’t know quite how the title relates to the post, but here it is:

WELL DONE SO FAR ARMCHAIR TABLE

Doesn’t kumquat sound like a small marsupial rather than a fruit? I wonder what it would look like. Would it look like a drop bear? (That’s a link to a slightly tasteless set of jokes that only Brits and Aussies will ‘get’ without being annoyed. If you’re not a Brit or an Aussie – or possibly a New Zealander – and you’re annoyed, don’t take it out on me, find the person who wrote the original and take it out on them. If you’re a Brit or an Aussie – or possibly a New Zealander – and are annoyed – just get a grip… but not on me.)

Y’know the ad from way back that goes ‘hands that do dishes can be soft as your face‘?(If you’re a Brit of a certain age, you’ll now be singing the rest of that line without even wanting to. Oh dear, these earworms, they get everywhere. This one is green and has wings) well, did you ever stop to really think about that? I mean, all assuming you have a soft face in the first place, why would you want your hands to be soft? And in fact, why would you want a soft face? Let’s see, what parts of our anatomy should be soft… er… not much really. Possibly the liver. (Nice with onions, I’m told, though a bit difficult for it to do its job if it’s been introduced to onions.

Onions, please meet liver.
Liver: Hello onions, how are you old chap?
Onions: Pickled.

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Birds of a feather

Posted by Val in Photo, Youtube and tagged with

Weety the suet monster, by Val Erde

Do you remember Weety the Chaffinch from lower down this post? Well, his personality is getting stronger and stronger as the days pass. Now, as well as huiting for his suet, he comes directly to the dining room door, stands just by or upon the mat and huits. Loudly. Deafeningly. Until the door is opened. One suet pellet thrown his way and he’s off with it – or occasionally now, he’ll daintily break it up on the spot, eat a bit and then take the rest away. You see, like most of the other birds in the garden now, he’s feeding a brood.

There are two male and two female chaffinches. Without noting their behaviour they are difficult to tell apart, female from female, male from male. However, Skinny Chaff is timid and Weety isn’t. Throw food for Skinny Chaff and he’ll jump aside. Weety’s partner, Chip, is bold. She’ll sit on the potted Acer and yell, Chip! Chip! Chip! til she’s fed. She’ll also approach the door. Sometimes she huits but generally she knows we know she’s not him. (She probably also knows how much wood a woodchuck would chuck, but I’ve never asked her.)  However, regarding the males – as well as his boldness, it’s a little easier to see at a glance which is which because until Skinny Chaff follows suit (or should that be follows suet?) Weety’s back is turning green and Skinny Chaff’s isn’t. Chaffinches change a little in colour over the seasons.

Chaffinches are rather secretive about their courtship and mating. However, Weety and Chip let me see them a while back and it looked like Weety had been drinking, as he listed to the left and right before hopping on. In day-to-day life, they don’t usually hop sideways. It looked so funny. Here are a couple in a video I found on YouTube:

.

The other day, I watched Skinny Bob (the european Robin) feed his partner. Robins do that. The boy feeds the girl just before she is with egg and while they’re feeding their offspring, for quite a while. There’s a sweet little ‘eeep’ and then he pops a morsel into her open beak. It’s the way they bond. And believe me, at any other time than in the spring, Robins don’t like each other.

Beaky, the european blackbird, has learnt a new song. He now wolf whistles at us. He did it at me yesterday and at my husband today. I think he probably learnt it from a starling. You can never trust starlings to behave themselves.

Male blackbirds are very diligent and devoted dads most of the time. They take far more responsibility for their infants’ feeding than do the hen birds. The two hens we have in our garden (yard) are still fighting each other, but not as much. At least one, maybe both, have or are about to have eggs.

There are three baby dunnocks. We were terrified that recent torrential rain might have done away with one of them, but it appeared and rejoined its siblings again later. They’re plucky little birds.  A lot of people mistake Dunnocks for sparrows and I’m sure that at first glance they must seem like them (they’re even nicknamed ‘hedge sparrows’), but their behaviour is very different and a good look will tell you that they are different in appearance, too. They have jerky little movements and always seem to be twitching. They run quickly a little distance at a time. They also have slate grey heads and little speckles, though their back feathers resembles sparrows. The babies most resemble baby (european) robins – one of the three we currently have here has a very different expression to its siblings but it’s definitely a dunnock.

Little girl feeding a (European) robin.

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Blue Tits – eggs to fledge.  I’m fascinated with the way the babies upend themselves to deliver their very clean faecal sacs (sorry – is it still too much info if it’s birds?) to their mum to take away out of the nest! Food in, food out… there’s a different definition of FIFO! And oh gosh, the amount of food they are fed.

One of the things I’ve learnt about birds, but solely from my own observation, is that they use their open beaks defensively. They will open them if they fear a predator or aggressive rival is about and sometimes do it (for instance, when sunbathing) as a preventative measure. Where’s this in any book? I’ve not read it about it anywhere! I’ve also observed that they listen more than they look. That tilt of the head? They’re concentrating on what they can hear, often from the trees, sky and anything else above them as much as in the ground below.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that as birds use song to – amongst other things – make their presence known, “here I am” and “this is my place” that they probably regard sound from other creatures, including ourselves, as a bold or possibly aggressive statement of presence. So I have been trying to quieten down in their presence as sometimes my voice worries them if I’m too loud or if I make regular, repetitive sounds. They and I share our space outdoors. I don’t want them going away thinking “it belongs to the no-wing”. Also, I avoid using high-pitched rising and falling whistles as they sound too much like birds of prey and those sounds definitely do worry them.

Often, I think that ‘twitchers‘ miss a hell of a lot by admiring and recording how many rare birds they see and not allowing themselves to get to know one bird at a time as an individual, instead.  The majority of bird watchers are, in my opinion, ‘guilty’ of not getting to really know birds as individuals. In that sense, I’m no bird watcher. I’m a bird-friend. I stick together with my birdies. And I’m as much ‘their human’ as they are ‘my birds’!

Are you aware of the birds in your area? Can you tell them apart? I’d love to know about any ‘characters’ amongst them that you have got to know, and what you’ve learnt by your own observation and interaction with them (if any).

Eureka!

Posted by Val in Photo, Real Life and tagged with
sheep and lambs by Val Erde

sheep and lambs near where I live: this is a bit of my reality

On July 11th, it will be a year since I started this blog. I looked at my diary the other day and realised the pace at which I’ve been blogging. And then I looked at myself and realised that I can’t go on the way I have been, something has to change and that something is me.

In particular, I have to adjust to the fact that I am no longer in my twenties, thirties, forties or fifties. Not that I have been for a few years anyway, but til now I have kept looking back or looking forward and refusing to look at myself now.

I did a small exercise some months back that – temporarily – startled me out of my stupor. In it, I imagined that I had swapped bodies with my teenage self.  I loved her spontaneity – something I have been missing for a long time. The sort of spontaneity that comes from doing what comes immediately to mind and not preparing and editing and focussing only on one thing til it’s done, or overdone, like I do now. The spontaneity that comes from putting oneself first, instead of everyone else. From her point of view, though? She hated what she saw and experienced in my now-body. She hadn’t started experiencing the migraines I get from flicker and bright light, so she danced in strobes and ate ice cream at the same time. She didn’t have any responsibilities yet: no house, no bills. In her time, her knees didn’t hurt going up the stairs, her feet didn’t swell from sitting, and she still had all her teeth.

The reason I’ve become so focussed on just one thing at a time and to the exclusion of all else, relates to the years when I was addicted to Valium – which, amongst other things caused amnesia and problems with concentration – and now to my age, which has slowed me down and made my memory worse.  It takes me ages – often hours – to do the simplest things. The ‘wittering’ posts here in my blog are the easiest for me as they are really just word and idea association, I don’t have to put much work into them. But editing posts, choosing images for them (often taking the time to specifically do images for them), answering comments, and all the other stuff that goes with running a blog, is getting more and more difficult for me. But I don’t want to stop!

If you’re a blogger who’s been doing this for quite a while, you’ll know that you start to think in blog posts. “Oh this’ll make a good post” you think, as the cat pees in the salad, the car won’t start, a kite gets caught in your neighour’s chimney, your kids have a confrontation with their teacher, you’re given a bunch of flowers by a stranger, your partner says I love you, it is raining, snowing, windy or hot. Everything is material for a post. If you’re an extrovert, your work, your family, your neighbours, the news from near and far find themselves in your blog, if you’re an introvert, it’s your mind that gets embedded as content.

On the days that I don’t blog I often feel that there is something dire missing. And I’m not wrong. My own life is missing from my life. My life – my mind, my humour, the introvert expressed – is in the blog, and I’m astonished that that has ever felt normal to me.

My teenage self had music on all the time, she could write and read while rocking out. My now-self can’t. I can’t concentrate anymore on more than one thing. It has to be music OR writing. Not both. (I can, thankfully still paint and draw with music on, in fact I get inspiration from that.) The result is that with all the time I spend blogging, I’m spending none of it listening to music. And I miss it badly.

When you can only do one thing at a time because of slowness, lack of attention, you start to prioritise – you have to prioritise.

So my blog is going to have to take a back seat rather than a front one. I don’t yet know if I can do this but I’ve got to try.

Instead of blogging one week on, one week off, or trying to do it to any sort of a schedule, or blog because I feel it’s expected of me by you (or me!)… I’m going to try to do what sensible people do…

…I’m going to blog when I want to.

Cuckoo! (Yes, I am. Very.) And not just cuckoos.

Posted by Val in Art, Ask me a question and tagged with ,

Cuckoo-Dog-by-Val-Erde

Right, I’m going to chicken out a bit here. You know I said I’d pick six of the questions from the ones asked in my Question Time post and answer three this week and three in a fortnight?  Well, I’m going to answer the rest of them here in this post (as best I can). A couple are… well, sort of, complete. The rest aren’t. And the rest I gave myself a big D minus on!

Well, here they are.

Andrew from All downhill from here, asked:

“Why are cuckoos parasitic?”

That’s a very good question and I thought that the best way to find an answer was to ask a cuckoo. However, somewhere along the way I realised that we’d all got our wires crossed somewhat… here’s what happened:

.
Me: Hey guys. I need to talk to a cuckoo. Anyone seen one round here, recently?

Chaffinch: A cuckoo? What’s that?

Me: It’s a parasite. It’s a bird that steals other birds nests, takes them over and…

Chaffinch: Oh you mean a sparrow!

Me: No, not a sparrow.

Chaffinch: A starling, then?

Me: No, not a starling. Its babies are big. Bigger than the nest owner.

Chaffinch: How does that work, then?

Bluetit: Not bigger than my nest? Please say not bigger than my nest.

Blackbird: Not bigger than your nest.

Bluetit: Thank heavens for that.

Blackbird: I lied.

Bluetit: I don’t understand how something can steal a nest and be bigger than it.

Blackbird: It’s not bigger than the nest, stupid. It’s bigger than you.

Chaffinch: Everything’s bigger than a bluetit.

Wren: No they’re not.

Blackbird: Well, you…

Wren: And even I am not the smallest bird there is. There’s a thing called a humming bird.

Bluetit: What does it hum?

Wren: Eh?

Bluetit: What does it hum?

Chaffinch: More to the point, why does it hum? Has it forgotten how to sing?

Wren: How should I know? There aren’t any hummingbirds here.

Bluetit: Then how do you know they exist? I think you’re making this up. Nobody’s smaller than you, you’re just peeved that you’re the smallest bird there is.  With a stupid tail.

Wren: I haven’t got a stupid tail. At least I haven’t got blue feet…

Me: Oh shut up, everyone!  Look, has anyone seen a cuckoo?

Blackbird: I might have.

Me: I’ll give you one suet pellet for the information.

Blackbird: Two.

Me: Okay, okay, two. Now spill the beans.

Chaffinch: Beans?

Wren: Don’t look at me.

Me: Forget the beans. Where’s the cuckoo?

Blackbird: In the dog.

Me: Pardon?

Blackbird: In the dog.

Me: The dog ate the cuckoo?

Bluetit: Oh my heavens! If the dog ate the cuckoo, he might eat me!

Blackbird: He won’t eat you. And the dog didn’t eat the cuckoo.

Bluetit: But you just said…

Blackbird: The cuckoo’s in the dog. Not just one cuckoo, either. A lot of cuckoos.

Me: How do you know this?

Blackbird: I’ve seen it scratching itself.  Got any more suet?

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Yvonne of Pets, People and Life asked:

“How do you think your formative years affected your sense of humor in the way it is expressed through your blog?”

Well, I thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it some more and d’you know… I drew a blank. Thing is, my sense of humour just sort of arrived by itself a few years ago, I wasn’t really aware of it til I started blogging here and began sharing stuff with people – and til they laughed and enjoyed it.

So I was going to write a dialogue like my other dialogues for this, and it just wouldn’t happen. As a consolation here’s a mini:

Is there a humour bone?

There’s a humerus. But I don’t know how funny it is.

I don’t have a funny bone in my body

That’s because you’re a jellyfish.

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Ramana, of Ramana’s Musings asked:

“What makes you want to blog?”

And heck, Rummy, that’s another tough one, because there are so many different reasons. So I thought I’d ask my blog to tell you and she wasn’t much help. But here’s what I got:

Me: Why do you blog?
Blog: Why do I what?
Me: Blog.
Blog: Yes, that’s me.
Me: But why do you?
Blog: Why do I me?
Me: Yes. Why do you, you?
Blog: Because I am.

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Camilla of Songdog Dreaming asked:

‘Why do you think time flies? (“Time flies when you’re having fun,” we say here. “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana”–I think that was Groucho Marx.)’

Well, when I was a kid, my older sister would say: “Time flies. You can’t, they fly too fast” so that’s what I associate with that but I’d heard the one you quoted, too. And many years ago I had a blog called ‘Time Flies’ (with the tagline “you can’t, they fly too fast.”) in which – believe it or not – I posted the same sort of nonsense that I post here. That’s when it began.

So I was a bit stuck with this… til I overheard these two flies talking:

Fly 26 Billionth Jnr (aka Fly 26): I like bananas. Do you know the banana dance?

Fly 255 Zillionth Jnr’s cousin, twice removed (aka Fly 255): Not sure. How does it go?

Fly 26: Stamp Stomp Stamp. Squelch.

Fly 255: Does it taste good?

Fly 26: After I’ve licked my feet, yes.

Fly 255: You spend a lot of time washing.

Fly 26: I’m a very clean fly.

Fly 255: Me too. Though the shower’s a bit fierce.

Fly 26: I’d noticed that. Do you get that strange noise and vibration when you’re under it?

Fly 255: Yes. I also hear voices.

Fly 26: What do they say?

Fly 255: “Damn, the flush just soaked my feet.”

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Two other people asked me questions I just couldn’t answer in dialogue. I literally couldn’t think of anything.

Lorri, of The Eff Stop and The King of Isabelle Avenue, said:

“If you could migrate like a bird – where would you spend winters and summers?”

My answer to that wouldn’t fill a dialogue, Lorri, because honestly I love where I live so much that even in the worst weather I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. But it’s a lovely question and for a little while I daydreamed of flying through sunsets!

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Renee of Cravesadventure said:

“What do you think birds think about being bird brains and all?”

I can’t answer this one as I don’t think that birds have ‘bird brains’. Well, apart from them being birds with brains. I think they’re really much more intelligent than people make them out to be. And who would answer it anyway? Dunnocky Dunnock is bound to think he’s got a bigger brain than the Wren, and Collared Dove would think he’s got a bigger brain than the blackbird… it would all end very badly with a fight for suet pellets and a lot of squawking.

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If you missed the previous ones, they’re here:

2B or not 2B which answers Sarah’s question about my favourite art media.

Flying Free which answers Renée’s question about what happened to her diaries.

Chat for Cat which answers Charles’s question about what his cat is saying.

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I’ve a post coming up tomorrow or the next day that is important to me, then I’ll take my break. More info will be in the post (I hope! If I can ever finish editing it!)

I hope you’ve enjoyed the answers to questions. Comments on any of it are very welcome! :)