Wordless Wednesday: Collage

Project 365+1: April

Is it just me or is this year just whizzing by? How can we be into May already?

Anyway, once again, made a little collage of all thirty of April's photos.

Project 365+1: April

As you can see, a certain black labrador is kind of dominating things this month. I'll have to get some photos of my girlie!rats in this coming month!

Project 365+1: March

Just a little post because I forgot to do it earlier.

March 2012

That's all of the photos that I took this month. I love seeing them all laid out like this.

Project 365+1 Days 58 - 64

Here's another week's worth of photos. It hasn't been a particularly eventful week and I had a funny feeling that when I came to sort out all of my photos, there wouldn't be a huge amount to work with (I've been doing the classic thing where I take random photos of things like my step counter or odd bits of food because I didn't think there would be anything else to use). But I've been pleasantly surprised with what I've done this week.

Day 58: Rats On TV

I was surprised to find this picture of Carol exploring the TV on my camera. I'd completely forgotten that I'd taken it. All week I've been trying to get some good photos of the girls, but the problem with Carol is that she rarely sits still long enough to focus. I have lots of blurry photos, or photos with a bit of nose or bum or tail, or of the top of the cage where moments before a rat had been.

Normally at home the girls live in a little alcove, just between the living room and bedroom, so when we let them out on top of the cage there's not really anything interesting to investigate. While we've been here they've been sandwiched between a dresser and a TV which is proving to be a great source of interest (once we convinced them to stop trying to eat them through the bars of the cage!), if we let them, they'd probably quite happily go exploring on the TV, but I was mean and stopped Carol before she could go too far.

One thing I do love about this picture is that you can see that Carol's clearly part flying squirrel (which perhaps explains why she is so confident hanging upside-down from the top of the cage). She's a bit of a slippery rat because you can be holding her when she suddenly decides to change direction; she's got so much extra skin that it seems like you're just left holding fur while Carol's trying to squirm off somewhere more interesting!

Day 59: Night Watch

This week has also been a good week for reading. I was getting low on reading material, so gave Mr. Click strict instructions on what to bring back from my bookshelf. At some point I'll have to take a photo of how my books are organised, it's kind of obsessive. I've got various sets sorted out and I'm working my way through them all gradually (in order, of course) but after reading a book from one set, I read another book from another set.

The Discworld books are right at the top of the bookcase, followed by the Stranger Than Fiction set I've been working through, then crime books (I'm reading the Kathy Reichs ones at the moment), then there's my Tolkien books (though I finished the last of those last week, so that will be rearranged soon). When I get to the bottom of the bookcase, I go back up to the top and start over with the next Discworld novel.

Day 60: What To Do On A Leap Day

As I posted earlier in the week we went to see War Horse on the 29th. I knew that I wanted to take a photo of something with the date on it (if we'd been at home I would've used the Winnie the Pooh calendar that we keep on the windowsill and usually remember to turn every day, sometimes we both do it and we end up a day or two ahead of ourselves!) but I didn't have much luck finding anything. At bedtime I whipped out my diary and grabbed a quick photo of the date. I wonder what we'll be up to next time February 29th rolls around...

Day 61: Getting Mathematical

When I reluctantly finished reading Night Watch (I'll write up a review for that later on, I'm almost caught up level with the books I've been reading and the books I've been reviewing), I started on Fermat's Last Theorum. I'll say more about it in the review when I write it, so for now, just enjoy this picture of this book posing atop my book journal. ;-) I have to admit, a large reason for taking this photo (and the one of Night Watch) was so I wouldn't have to go looking for a picture of the cover which is the same as my copy when I come to actually write up the review.

Day 62: Continental Breakfast

At the weekend, we sometimes spoil ourselves with something fancy for breakfast (my personal favourite being pain au chocolat). Mr. Click proudly presented me with a bag of croissants after work on Friday. They sat in the corner of the room tormenting me all night, and they barely lasted five minutes on Saturday morning! They tasted lovely though. As I said above, I was kind of scraping around for things to take photos of. It turns out, it's really hard to take a photo of croissants in a bag like this and make them look appetising. Looking at them now is kind of making me hungry, so moving on...

Day 63: All Worn Out

I'm planning a separate blog post about my girls because I've taken about half a million photos of them this week (and some of them have turned out quite well and so deserve to be shared). As we were planning on going home later this afternoon, we wanted to get them cleaned out but didn't want to use rat litter (because it costs a fortune and we didn't want to be putting it in, only to throw it out the next day). So we used shredded paper instead.

Now I've used shredded paper as something for ratties to play in before, and as bedding, but these girls had never experienced it before. And they went MAD for it. The picture above shows what part of the cage looked like about five hours after we put them back in. They'd carried vast quantities of paper up to the shelf and litter tray, then decided not to sleep in the comfy, clean hammock that we'd put in for them because the hard plastic litter tray was much more comfortable to sleep in. I suppose with all that paper (and Carol) to lie on, it wasn't too bad.

Day 64: Ivy

And today I was trying to take a photo of the further destruction that has been wreaked on the cage. I'll post the actual photos another time, but suffice to say I was woken at 7:30 this morning by Holly jumping down off the shelf, grabbing a mouthful of paper, jumping back up, depositing it on the shelf (and lather, rinse, repeat).

When I oped the cage to get the photo of the heap of paper on the shelf, Carol went crazy, so I sat back and took photos of her through the bars. Bell and Holly were curled up alseep ignoring me but Ivy was a little bit curious. I don't normally get any decent photos of Ivy. She's petrified of the sound of my DSLR and I don't really like using the flash around the rats, so normally photos of her end up with her looking terrified. But she didn't seem too bothered by me sitting outside the cage, snapping photos of Carol, so I focused on her for a couple of shots. I was really pleased that this came out so well, seeing as I was taking photos through the bars.

That's how Ivy normally looks. She has a cheeky little look on her face which is just pure Ivy. She likes sitting in the tunnels and can sometimes be a bit reluctant to come out of the cage (but while we've been here she's been desperate to come out almost every time we open the door). She's also a proper shoulder rat, it's the first thing she heads for when she comes out. And now I have a nice photo of each of my girls.

And now that we're into March, I've also made a collage of all of the photos I took in February. I'm quite pleased with the fact that I've managed to go so many days without missing any. According to the Project 365 site, I'm 17% of the way through my project. I think that the last time when I tried doing this I failed sometime in March, so here's hoping that once I've broken the 20% barrier I'll be able to keep going until the end of the year!

February 2012 in pictures

Project 365+1 Days 36 - 42

Earlier today I tried to get all of this week's photos uploaded to Flickr, but for some reason it wouldn't let me log in so I'll have to have a mass uploading session later in the week.

I quite like using my Project 365+1 photos to summarise my week, so I decided to make a collage of all of the January pictures. Hopefully I can do something similar for each month so I've got all of the pictures in twelve little groups.

My month in pictures

And onto the photos from this week...

Sunday I found myself craving chocolate. So when Mr. Click went out on an errand, I hinted that some chocolate might be a welcome treat. 'Hint' is maybe a little bit too subtle, I probably said something more along the lines of "I've been craving chocolate all week and I really, REALLY, think you should buy some before you think of coming home" but you know, whatever.

Either way, my hinting clearly worked:

Day 36: Double Chocolate

I should probably add here that they weren't both for me, and I do still have a significant lump of mine left because I'm not that much of a piggy.

Monday evening was largely spent ploughing on with the OU work I needed to be doing for my assignment. After noticing the colour-coding system going on with my course books I decided that I should also select my reading material to suit as well, okay, maybe it was just the next book on my obsessive-compulsively organised bookshelf. Whatever the reason, I started on The Perfect Storm, a book I'd been planning to read for several years.

Day 37: Odd One Out

So I snapped a picture of my rather impressive stack of books. I have to say that the green one in the middle (beneath the DVD case) is actually pretty good for a set course text. I've spent this week reading it in my lunch breaks at work and underlining copious amounts of it in pencil to reference in my assignment. Much better than the set text assigned for the first half of this course.

Another of my Day Zero Projects has been to buy some wool with the intention of actually making something with it (rather than spending an obscene amount on a 'good deal' and then stuffing it in a box because there's not enough of it to make anything worth making). In order to complete this task I thought I had better clear out some of the wool that I've had sitting in the spare bedroom in a big old double duvet box.

This thing was massive, about 2ft by 1ft and I was convinced that it was only about half-full with wool, surely the rest of the space in there was taken up by random junk, I could never have accumulated that much wool. Turns out, I had.

Day 38: A Big Tangle

And this is just a fraction of it! My new plan is to get knitting and use some of it up. I'm also ripping out a bunch of random things that I've started and lost the patterns for. Anything which looks too useless may get bundled up and eBayed or something. My weekend plans for a future weekend are going to include weighing and measuring just how much I've got before sorting it all into boxes and bags for easier storage. Fun!

As I said, a large portion of this week has been spent studying in one form or another. It's not always been easy, especially when your pets decide to help:

Day 39: Hitting The Books

This is Bell, deeply engrossed in my set book which I had been making notes on shortly before she decided to help. Holly and Ivy both enjoy 'helping' me keep track of my pens, while Carol likes to nibble the edges of the pages to show how far I've gotten through the book. (Who needs bookmarks when you've got rats?) On a related note, the girls are getting much better at being photographed, Ivy is a bit nervous of the flash (and they all get a bit jumpy at the sound of my DSLR) but this makes me happy because they're all so cute, I'm hoping I can get some nice photos of them all soon.

It was one of those weeks where at times I was reaching for something to photograph for 365+1. Mainly because most of my time this week has been spent working on my OU stuff. We get home in the evening, I pull out the books, we get the girls out and watch Spooks. Not really very many options for photos.

Day 40: Book and Brooch

But I'm still trying to find something that actually relates to the day in one way or another. For example, Day 40 is a photo of the book that Mr. Click got and was about to start reading that night (which he did virtually as soon as I finished using it for my photo). Perched on top of it is a little brooch that a friend gave me earlier that day. I used to collect all sorts of butterfly jewellery (most of which I still have but no longer wear), I'm thinking this one will look nice on my denim jacket which I normally wear through the summer months.

Day 41: A Blank Page

I finally made a start on actually writing my assignment out, beyond the ever-so-helpful notes. In preparation for it, I put off the actually writing of the first draft for as long as I could, I spent the whole evening stalling - rereading bits of the course books, making extra notes, taking an hour long super hot bath and then taking photos of all my stuff ready to go. Once I actually started it, it was relatively painless and by the time I gave it up for the night I was only 600 words away from the end.

I'm still yet to type it out, edit it and come up with a fitting conclusion, as well as changing my placeholder references such as "[Someone] says blah blah blah [ref p.31]" which makes sense in my notes but isn't particularly academic in its general formation. I'm ever-so-slightly paranoid that one day I'm going to forget to correct these bits and will submit the wrong version of the assignment.

And yesterday was just lovely. Up and out the house for a Red Cross meeting, we picked up pizza for lunch as a little treat and then headed home for a film and to fill up. Then a bit of OU work (the final 600 words of the aforementioned assignment). By the evening we'd watched another film and spent an age with the girls running around the sofa with us. We were craving a bit of hot chocolate but hadn't bothered picking any milk up while were were out earlier in the day, so Mr. Click improvised with a wartime equivalent made with the powdered milk we use for breadmaking. It wasn't bad at all.

Day 42: Wartime Hot Chocolate

This week is set to be fun. There's a day off work and a shopping trip tomorrow, I'm quite looking forward to that, even if I have had to go for a hospital appointment as well. I'm on one of my favourite shifts at work and I'm getting my assignment finished for submission on Thursday (so expect some more OU snaps during the coming Project 365+1 bunch). I also have coursework to do for the course I'm doing at work, thankfully there's not a lot left to be done so I'll get that done once I've finished my OU stuff.

And my father-in-law is off for his knee replacement surgery at the weekend as well. So it's going to be a busy week all round.