I WANT ONE....!!!

No lover of tiny houses could fail to be smitten by this.......



Allegedly the smallest house in the world you can read all about it HERE...

And for your further delectation there are even some moving pictures



Absolutely gawjuss.

And I soooooo want one.

If you're up for an hour or so of vicarious displacement activity you could do worse than visit the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company website which is chock full of fascinating information and videos.

Of course I would probably need a pantechnicon trailer behind to carry all my 'stuff' but regular readers of this drivel shimmering prose will remember that PP, Small Dog and I are currently engaged in a mammoth downsizing exercise, which is proceeding in fits and starts.
When completed, and we have a newly streamlined, minimalised, pared-down lifestyle, we will then be able to proceed to the next stage of our Two Year Plan.

Moving house.

Eeek!

*pause for the enormity of this statement to fully hit home and for the palpitations to ease*

Yesterday, PP got the bit between her teeth, (possibly as a result of the horse racing frenzy on Saturday) and got stuck into the big wardrobe in the front bedroom. One of the problems with living in a house bigger than you need is that there is a lot of space to keep 'stuff'. We needed overflow wardrobe space in the first year of living here, so loads of clothes got relegated to the big wardrobe in the front bedroom.

And were promptly forgotten about.

Over the intervening 6 years, and zillions of calories later, only a fraction of the clothing actually fits us any longer. I subscribe to the theory that some form of Narnia-style 'back of the wardrobe' virus has infiltrated and shrunk everything by exactly 2 sizes.

Not to mention PP is bereft and distraught because her favourite old bears, who have been living in a sort of bear maisonette in the wardrobe, have got moth and are currently awaiting incarceration in the freezer.

In other news.....

Well you'll have to wait till my next post for the other news as I absolutely must crack on and get some work done.

Don't Push It........!

Went to a lovely party yesterday afternoon, hosted by two of our best friends, on the theme of 'A Day At The Races'. Everyone dressed up and fully entered into the spirit of the thing... there was a virtual Claire Balding, a couple of stable lads, a lady 'owner' and her trainer, several toffs in top hats, several fillies in stunning hats, and even one plucky person in a horse costume (on the hottest day of the year so far!)

We were all given £100 (monopoly money) and could bet on four actual races, running at Aintree yesterday, culminating in the Grand National.

We also all entered a sweepstake on the final race, each betting £1 (real money) and picking a name from the hat at random.

In between chatting, drinking, laughing, drinking, socialising, drinking, eating, laughing etc we all watched the races live on TV. 'Winnings' were paid out after the end of each race, which meant that we could place further bets if desired.

In the second race, I won a princely £15, which I added as an accumulator to my bet for the Grand National.

To be honest, I don't really like horse racing. I don't mind racing on the flat, but steeplechasing seems a bit barbaric. The Grand National course is famous for its huge jumps and some years several horses have to be euthanized after falling and breaking legs. Jockeys are also often injured but they choose to participate so I don't have much sympathy. The horses have no choice.

Anyway.

At the start of the big race, everyone crowded into the sitting room to watch. A room full of 30 or so women is fairly noisy at the best of times but with the excitement of the big race the noise levels were stratospheric and I couldn't hear a word of the TV commentary.

It was only in the final few furlongs that I thought I heard the name of my horse, "Don't Push It" being mentioned, but assumed that he'd fallen or something equally dire. It was only after the race was finished, and everyone was asking who had won, that someone who had obviously been paying much more attention than the rest of us said 'Don't Push It'.

I 'won' £330.

In play money.

If I'd backed it for real, with genuine coin of the realm, I'd now be £330 better off.

Tsk.

Slippery slope Sandra.

Tax doesn't have to be taxing........

In addition to reams of pre-election ‘bumph’ in the post this morning, there was also a buff envelope from HM Revenue and Customs, gently informing me that I have, by law, to send them a tax return for the year 6 April 2009 to 5 April 2010.

I was, of course, already aware of this. It has been niggling away in my hindbrain for the past week. The actual filing of the tax return is a piece of metaphorical cake. I do it online and it takes approximately an hour, give or take the odd break for a cup of tea and a Kit Kat, or to bang my head repeatedly on the desk.

However, in order to be in a position to do my tax return, I need to 'do' the accounts for the whole of the past year.

Sounds simple doesn't it?

But it is at this point that I descend into a hopeless, helpless spiral of despair......

• In order to 'do' the accounts I need to sort out my paperwork
• In order to sort out my paperwork I need to get to the big plastic box containing the aforementioned paperwork.
• In order to get to big plastic box I need to shift half a ton of 'stuff' which is blocking the desk cubby hole (wherein lies the big plastic box) in the upstairs bedroom.
• In order to shift the 'stuff' I need to clear enough space in one of the other bedrooms to put the displaced 'stuff in'.
  

So far, so frustrating. And this is just stage one. In order to get to the big plastic box I have to create a level of chaos upstairs akin to pandemonium and bedlam all rolled into one.

Having located, and extricated the big plastic box, and lugging it downstairs hopefully without mishap, I then come up against the next law of diminishing return.

• In order to sort out the paperwork, I need lots of room on the dining room table to lay out the paperwork in piles. One pile for April 2009, another for May 2009 and so on, all the way to March 2010.

Am I going too fast for you?

• In order to lay the paperwork out in piles, I need to remove all the boards full of greenware body parts awaiting firing.
• In order to remove the boards, I need to load the kiln.
• In order to load the kiln I need to move the table back, pull out a large section of heat-resistant board, manoeuvre the kiln into position, locate the kiln props and shelves and prepare the kiln for loading.

Time for a cup of tea and a Kit Kat. I'm exhausted already just THINKING about it.

Having loaded the kiln and cleared the dining table of the greenware boards, it's time for the descent into the next level of hell.......

• In order to achieve 12 neat piles of paperwork, relating to each of the constituent 12 months of the year for the business, PLUS the ancillary piles related to my personal finances, I have to sort though the big plastic box.
• Despite the fact that each tax year's accounts are kept in separate files, my admittedly maverick approach to filing means that I have to search around in carrier bags, dog-eared envelopes and wads of elastic-banded receipts etc to locate the most recent tax year's paperwork.

Eventually, I will end up with, say, 20 piles of paperwork (business and personal) plus a separate, larger pile, which we will call, for the sake of simplicity, MISCELLANEOUS.

This pile is a whole level of hell in itself and though it is tempting to surreptitiously feed it into the shredder this would be A Bad Thing.

No.

Each piece of paper in the MISCELLANEOUS pile must be scrutinised and a decision must be made upon its destination pile.

• In order to allocate all the pieces of paper in the MISCELLANEOUS pile, I must first finish the ironing. (NB - while this is not, strictly speaking, essential, I find that doing something even more distasteful than the job in hand, does help put things in perspective)
• In order to finish the ironing I must start the ironing.
• In order to start the ironing I have to find the ironing board.
• The ironing board is in the front spare bedroom behind the big pile of 'stuff' moved from the the front of the desk in the back spare bedroom in order to get to the big plastic box containing the paperwork.
  

And so it goes. The spiral of despair.

Piles of paperwork awaiting attention can remain on the dining table for......ohhh, ages. Anything up to a month. Or more.

Especially if I have a lot of ironing to do.

As you can see these things are often not as simple as they first appear and I do not feel that HM Revenue & Customs quite understands this.

Plans are afoot............

It cannot have escaped the more perspicacious readers of this blog that 2010 has been officially designated Year of New Stuff Happening.

OK, so it might need a snappier title but give me a break, it's only just April.

As well as the publishing project, which is progressing nicely, we have decided to totally redesign the Tower House Dolls website in preparation for the autumn launch of both The Book and a whole new range of miniature goodies.

The website was originally designed by a very good friend (you know who you are!) and has developed organically and sometimes haphazardly over the past 10 years. If you fancy a stroll down memory lane you can revisit some of its earliest incarnations HERE.

However, a bit like its owners, it's showing it age and could do with a radical makeover. So several hours today have been allocated to brainstorming the way forward and trying to come up with workable, feasible ideas which best represent the new image we want to present.

This was also the cue for some essential displacement activity research into websites we like, in terms of overall design, colour, layout, navigation, features etc etc.....

Naturally, with zillions of sites to choose from, we could only scratch the surface, but after an hour we had a list of attributes from which to choose, and had more or less settled on a 'look' that we like, courtesy of an epiphany stunning in its simplicity and originality.

Of course the 'vision' now has to be realised so PP will have her work cut out to make the dream a reality.

I have every confidence that by the end of this summer we will have The Book published and a lovely new website in situ.

This depends on both of us buckling down and getting on with things, fine tuning our time management and banishing the displacement goblins.

Having showcased my 'Writer At Work' ethos yesterday, I thought the following might be helpful for the website side of things.......

I could be setting a trend.........

Unbelievable!

Absolutely incredible!

For the second day running I've hardly left the workroom and have been multitasking like a good 'un.

My work ethic is positively blooming, thanks in no small part to the fact that the sun is shining fit to bust and it's possible to venture outside without first piling on umpteen layers of clothing.

After a late start, Spring has most definitely sprung and is literally bursting out all over the place, which is A Good Thing.

Prodigal Son has been hard at work in the garden, repainting our little seasidey, beach hut style garden shed, which has served to show up the rather dilapidated, tatty and faded striped curtains.

Which is NOT a good thing. I may be forced to make a new pair.

However, the sun has been streaming into the workroom and I have been alternating between a marathon casting session begun last week, and preparation for some new little toy dolls and kits. All of which has been strangely satisfying.

If I can only maintain this level of concentration and dogged determination I shall power though all my outstanding tasks in no time.

*hmmm*

Speaking of dogged determination, Small Dog has been acting in a supervisory capacity on the shed-painting project. This mostly entails her lying flat out in a patch of warm sunshine, occasionally lifting her head if she anticipates any potential squirrel incursions into her 'terriertory'. On her frequent forays back into the house to see if anything interesting has miraculously materialised in her food bowl, I have expected to see her decorated with the odd splatter of blue shed paint, but thus far she is remarkably unsullied.

Ticking along nicely..........

Mindful of the 'helpful' countdown timer on my desktop, and my propensity for time wasting displacement activity on an industrial scale, I conscientiously studied my reams of 'to do' lists this morning then promptly decided against doing any of the most urgent stuff.

Instead, as it was my first day back at work today after almost a week off, I plunged straight in at the deep end with some casting, which normally has a calming effect.

However today, FOR NO GOOD REASON, I decided to revisit a set of molds from aeons ago which have only ever been cast once, and were deemed Much Too Good to relegate to my mold sale last summer.

Almost as soon as I started casting, it all came flooding back to me.

The reason WHY they'd been gathering dust in the back of the cupboard for upwards of 15 years.

The two full pages of instructions and diagrams on the myriad greenware surgical procedures should have provided a timely clue. But of course once I'd started I just had to finish.

I'm not convinced that the resulting doll 10-piece articulated child will be successful.

In addition to a hunchback's humph it will almost definitely have one leg shorter than the other and the hole for the neck flange looks much too big so its neck will disappear down the hole so that the head goes in up to the ears. I may have to resort to glueing the whole thing together which would rather render the whole 'articulation' thing null and void.

Anyways, until all the bits are soft fired, soft-cleaned and bisque fired I won't know just how much of a pig's ear I've made of it.

Undaunted, I then continued with a goodly session of tiny toy doll casting, but not before I had accidentally dropped a mold onto the centre of a board of dried greenware pieces cast last week, and which inevitably, in their fragile, unfired, chalky state, shattered into a gazillion pieces.

I was a tad annoyed.

*ahem*

This afternoon, I again disdained my 'to do' list (although straight after lunch I did feel guilty enough to at least package the most urgent orders which came in over the holiday weekend then race them to the Post Office) and instead got stuck into preparing a batch of little toy dolls to dress in a new costume style, which will involve a certain amount of trial and error during the design process.

Which meant that instead of cracking straight on with the fiddly complicated bits I had to clear a space on my workdesk to pleat some length of silk ribbons.

Yes.

Yes, I know.

I am my own worst enemy.

However, I do at least feel that I have had a busy, if not entirely fruitful and productive day. I'm going to re-assess my 'to do' lists now in preparation for tomorrow's work schedule.

Back from the wilderness...........

I am now back home, having spent a very relaxing 5 days camping over the Easter weekend.

Not only were the dire warnings of rain, more rain, storms, snow and torrential downpours wildly wide of the meteorological mark, we were even able to sit outside in relatively warm sunshine at several points.

Small Dog had a whale of a time on her birthday. She received not one, not two, but THREE squeaky toys, had a special birthday dinner, several walks, one fight and declared the day to have been her best birthday ever. She is now completely worn out and will spend the rest of today catching up on her sleeps.

The campsite was lovely and quiet, due in large part to the wardens having to cancel 94 bookings in the two days leading up to the weekend because of the bad weather. Quite how we managed to sneak in under the radar we're not quite sure, but it meant that we were spared the expected hundred or so children racing around the site, hyped up on Easter chocolate and generally making a nuisance of themselves. There were a few children but they were mostly very well behaved and outnumbered by adults and dogs.

So for the balance of today, we are engaged in catching up with emails, unpacking the campervan and trying to get back to what passes for normal. I've even managed to tinker about in the workroom briefly, doing some desultory tidying and assessing what to make a start on tomorrow when it's back to work in earnest.

The sun is shining, it will be light until gone 7pm and spring, although very late, is finally bursting out all over so I am feeling rather optimistic and looking forward to indulging in some creative endeavours this week.

In the meantime, here are a few snaps of the Birthday Dog enjoying herself......