Mrs Sparkly's Ten Commandments Award

It's so nice when the people you know acknowledge your blog! I sometimes feel I'm writing to myself (which is fine. I'm comfortable with self-communication.) Thank you Evin, from Sláinte Cork for nominating me for Mrs Sparky's Ten Commandments Award. What’s involved? I need to answer some questions about myself, and here we go…

*Describe yourself in 7 words:

Friendly, interested, loving, sincere, enthusiastic, eccentric, weird.

*What keeps you up at night?

Planning adventures and projects. Sometimes I'll start writing little songs in my head or stories, sometimes I get really involved. It's a problem that I get really excited about things when I'm trying to sleep, because I just want to get up and sing. Someone sleeps next to the music room in my house, so I've had to be really strict about no late-night song-writing. (Which, now that I think about it, could account for my lower song output!)

*Whom would you like to be?

The best version of Amy. It's my ambition to keep trying to be a better person, with better skills. I have a loooong way to go, but I'm trying!

*What am I wearing right now?

This:

But with a black and gold waist-cinching belt, and black tights. Spectacles. A head of curly brown hair, and a smile.

*What scares you?

• Greed, ignorance. 
• Being misinterpreted.
• Animal cruelty. 
• The quest for happiness - not fully knowing if I'm happy now or if it's something that's coming later. 
• The concept that I'm wasting my life, that I'm spreading myself too thin and I should be focusing just on singing.
• Artistic confinement.

*What are the best and worst things about blogging?

Best: It's nice to have a place to just get it all down. It doesn't matter if no one reads it, it's a thought that I had and it's good to be able to revisit ideas and events with another frame of mind.

Worst: Not being able to do it while I'm running. I write the best mental blogs when I'm running!

*If I could change one thing about myself, what would it be?

I'd like to be more able to relax, and to suffer less joint and muscle pain.

*Slankets, yes or no?

No. They seem like such a good idea in theory... but no.

*Tell us something about the person who nominated you.

Evin has beautiful eyes and a blogging addiction. She has lovely, long, straight hair and looks completely different when it's up or down. In her apartment, Evin has a Little Liam, a fishy chair, and a staple gun, which she uses to staple things, and to ward off clowns with suspicious-smelling fridge foods.

My next step in this award is to nominate 10 others.

These are my favourites, and my friends! I really hope that you'll all give it a go! :)

The TARDIS in my Mind: http://thetardisinmymind.blogspot.ie/

The red red robin goes blog blog blogging along: http://redbreastedbird.blogspot.ie/

Goodnight Boutique: http://goodnightboutique.com/

The Smallest Smallholding: http://www.smallestsmallholding.com/

This Yorkshire Life: http://thisyorkshirelife.blogspot.ie/

The Savage Searching: http://savagesearching.wordpress.com/

LizzDelicious: http://www.lizzdelicious.com/

A Ripping Yarn!

Every night before I go to bed, I'm writing down everything I've done in bullet-points. I want to look back and not wonder what I did for the whole of June.

The thing is, I've been a bit under the weather for about a week now, so most of what's up there is:

• Poirot.
• Crocheted a snowflake.
• Made brownies.

It's not quite as productive as I'd hoped! I also have a code. If I had a singing lesson: (Y) If I did singing practice: (X) and if I went for a 30 minute run ( ✔). I'm also trying to do a plank every day and build up my time. I have practically no core strength! I hit 60 seconds this week and was SO HAPPY!

Considering I can't do a lot of running around at the moment, I've been doing a lot of knitting and learning to crochet!  Here are a few of the things I've been making!

Add caption

I love this headband! I made it in a really nice earthy green aran yarn (which was on sale!!)

Such is my amazing talent at crochet that I can follow the same pattern and come up with two completely different snowflakes. That's talent, right? Oh... you mean that's NOT mean to happen?!

Again, I followed the same crochet pattern and came up with different sizes of jumpers. The teaspoon is for scale. Aren't they sweet? They're a present for a local bar/restaurant in Cork. :)

This was to show the difference between using usual acrylic yarn and using proper cotton thread. The yarn looks nicer with this pattern, I think. 

I've been making this quilt for about four years. I'm nowhere near done! Maybe this will be the year that it finally gets done? It seems that a patchwork quilt is a massive undertaking. I wish I'd known this four years earlier... It's pretty, though. And I've learned to follow patterns and to make new stitches through making this. Following a varying pattern is way more fun that plain garter stitch.

Hopefully I'll recover in the next few days, and I can post all about my adventured with avocado chocolate mousse... :D x

The Meaning of Life

At the end of this week, I am FINALLY going to sit down and watch The Great Dictator. I love Charlie Chaplin. This speech will never stop being relevant, it's incredible.




"You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful! To make this life a wonderful adventure!"




Just listen. Then live.

International Yarn Bombing Day

 This morning my knitting group engaged in a spot of 'Yarn Bombing' in Electric. We subtly knitted bits and stuck them to things. I am responsible for the hideous tea cosy you see pictured. Liz from Reckless Knitting made the cake-stand cosy! 
The staff at Electric must have liked them, though, as they gave my my latte for free! And later they tweeted that if my knitting group knits them a jumper, we'll get a free lunch each! There are plans in motion...

How to Organise Your Fridge in 3 Easy Steps

 Dear friends,

In the interest of inspiring others (and in shaming myself into action) I am letting you see the awful state of my fridge.
Look at it. It's awful. There's so much food crammed in there and none of it is organised.

In my defense, it's been a crazy few weeks and I'm not the only person who lives here. Most of that food is not mine.

Recently on Pinterest I saw a picture of someone's freezer, which had plastic baskets keeping it tidy. I had to try this! In a pound shop I found exactly the right sort of baskets for just €1.50 each!

Is this not a most beautiful sight?

STEP 1:

Empty the fridge and throw out ANYTHING that needs to go, or that won't get used. Any dairy products that are past their use-by date need to go. Condiment bottles that are nearly empty - let them go. 

STEP 2:

Clean, scour, scrub! Take out the shelves, clean and dry them, wash the sides down and make sure it's all ready for the food.

STEP 3:

Fill the baskets. Use one for cheeses, one for vegetables, one for jars, etc. Make sure that the bottom of all jars, bottles and cartons are clean before you put them back in the fridge

Vegetable basket.

The cheese basket.

This has worked out so well! And it's lovely to know exactly what's in there. I'm hoping that the baskets will keep things a little neater, and show more clearly how much of each thing we have. :)

The finished product! 

I'd love to know if you try this! Let me know how it works out! :)

Lucky, Lucky, Lucky.

When I first heard Duke Special's cover of Radiohead's incredible 'Lucky' I wanted to learn it and sing it. Even before it was over, I knew that I couldn't give this song what it needs. As a performer, I'm not restrained enough to not let all my thoughts come straight though and ruin it. As a human being, I don't have enough wisdom to do this song justice. (This is not a love post for the Duke. That will come on a different day.)

What's so striking about this song is that we know what it's about - not from the lyrics, but from the marriage of the music and lyrics.

I think that most people have been in the place this song is about. We're walking through life smiling and talking and doing things. To others it might seem that everything is going our way, but inside we're feeling dark. It's going through the motions, doing your very best not to alert anyone to how you're feeling, because if you're honest with yourself, you don't know what this feeling is, how to fix it or how long it will last.

"Pull me out of the aircrash,
Pull me out of the lake
'Cause I'm your superhero
And we are standing on the edge..."

There's a very tangible sense of restraint through this song. The narrator never says anything directly, or at least he never says anything that we can make full sense of. He's dancing around the issue. Nothing is certain with him: he's ok, he's not sure if he's ok.

"I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll this time,
I feel my luck could change..."

In the original Radiohead version, the track is introduced by a sort of high-pitched scratchy noise which remains throughout most of the song. It reminds me of a device sometimes used to make listeners feel uncomfortable. If you ever watch a horror movie, there may be a subtle high-pitched sound - as you're focused on other things, you're not aware that you're getting more and more anxious because of this persistent noise. I think it's all linked in to the psychological aspect of this song. It's getting right in there, and explaining something that most people can't put into words.

In the Duke Special, the accompaniment is so beautiful. It's very measured and again, very restrained. It supports what's happening with the voice, but has its own story to tell. To me there's a sense that it wants to just go absolutely insane with running chords and scales. There's a slight hint of this coming through around 3 minutes in, where the piano wants to take off, but it restrains it. (In the Radiohead version, there's a very tortured guitar with a lot to say. It almost sound like it's crying.)

All in all, it's pretty sad. I want the guy in the song to just scream and shout and run until he can get this feeling out of him. I want the music to rage and the voice to cry what it's really feeling.

Crochet, flowers and summer time!

St. Brigid Anemones

Huge weights have been lifted off my chest. Tonight I feel lighter and less restricted than I have in months. As of today I'm down to teaching one day per week until the end of June, though I'm still studying and going to lessons for various music exams and auditions coming up.

The decision to fill this summer with as few travel plans as possible came quite naturally after an intensely busy travel year last year. Since Christmas I've sorely felt the need of a nice quiet sit down on my own. There will, of course be adventures with friends in the UK, but for my health and sanity, I need a few weeks of calm, baking and crafting.

My fabulous Cork KnitUp group has begun again after a slow start to the year and I am enjoying it so much! About two weeks ago, the lovely Hilary taught me to crochet and it's really pulled me though these tough final weeks of work.
On Saturday we had our biggest turn out yet with around eight crafters coming! I'm really looking forward to the group every Saturday and it's motivating me to finish projects!

For my birthday I was given a Cath Kidston crochet cusion kit by my friend Orla so that's what I've mostly been working on for the last fortnight. I can't wait for it to be finished and on my bed. :)

Tonight after walking my dog, the neglected packets of seeds that I bought weeks ago called to me. I planted at least 48 sunflower seeds, lettuce, love-in-a-mist, cornflowers and nasturtiums as the sun went down (and the midges came out.) I'm loving the garden right now. The dozens of bulbs I planted in the spring are finally coming into bloom and it's so satisfying!! My herbs are doing really well too and all of the fruit bushes are heavy with unripe berries! 

Singing-wise, things seem to be going well. I had a lesson today,though I was quite worried about it beforehand because I didn't feel I'd done enough practice. I hate the feeling that I could have put more work in. This week was CRAZY with teaching and exams, though, so I really didn't have more time. This week I intend to put in consistent work every day. I'll need to do an hour every day of actual singing.

I find that when I'm out running, most of what I think about is singing. Posture, breathing, mouth shape, facial muscles, placement of breath, meanings of songs and ideas for compositions and concerts are all on my mind for the 50 minutes that I spend out of the house. I think that must be the reason why I'm improving despite not having enough time for long practices.

Having this week's lesson over with is contributing to my feeling of lightness. :) I am so content right now. It's late, but I don't have to be up for any particular reason in the morning, other than to run. :) Leisure!

How are your summers coming together, blog friends? Will they be chilled out, or jam-packed? (Mm...jam..)

Morgen by Richard Strauss

Every so often a song will come along that completely stuns me. Having looked through some very old singing volumes that belonged to my mother, it was suggested that I should study 'Morgen' by Richard Strauss.

This piece feels like it is holding and manipulating you. When I listen to it, I feel as though something is being held just out of my reach, something that I desperately love and want. Occasionally Strauss lets me imagine having it, only to whisk it away again out of my grasp. There is a forlorn sort of optimism to this song. The singer responds to the gentle dream like melody of the violin by opening with a strong and definite statement: 'And tomorrow the sun will shine again.' She goes on with a sense of optimism, but there's always a longing and a pleading behind the words, hidden in the music.

And tomorrow the sun will shine again
And on the way which I shall follow
She will again unite us lucky ones
As all around us the earth breathes in the sun
Slowly, silently, we will climb down
To the wide beach and the blue waves

When she begins, she interrupts the violin and he stops for a moment to listen to her before playing again. Occasionally he supports her, or echoes her, but sometimes he is playing a different melody. Maybe it's the sad one that she doesn't want to hear. It seems to me that when she reaches the end of this idealistic speech, she gets suddenly swept up in her reverie. The violin notices that she isn't with him anymore and follows her into her dream world. She is so displaced from the reality that she was in. The broken chords have turned to sustained ones, she is almost drifting on clouds of music.

In silence, we will look in each other's eyes
And the mute stillness of happiness will sink upon us

In this section, she lifts the music up step by step, as though willing the sun to rise faster as she watches it. She can clearly see the moment that she will be happy in front of her. She almost trails off, discordant again as she was at the very beginning - although this time it is a peaceful, resolved sort of definite that she inhabits now. Without any resistance, she waits for the dawn while the violin plays.

Seriously?

An example of a time I wanted to be taken seriously

I am quite confident that I don't take myself too seriously. As I go about my life I literally police myself about it. Recently though, I've worried that I try too hard not to take myself seriously. Perhaps I should start, because if I don't, who will. It's possibly a symptom of what we in Ireland consider a very Irish mentality. We don't like to make it seem like we're anything out of the ordinary. We would like to make it seem that what we do or what we have achieved is just a trifle, that it was nothing. And if anyone acts like they worked hard for what they have, we consider them to be snobs and tend to be suspicious of them.

"Ireland is a nation of begrudgers," is a phrase that is tossed around quite freely here. And it's true. And I often worry that if I were to just explode my sense of containment, to say the really arty, stupid things that come into my head, people would think that I'm assuming another personality and doing it for attention. The reason I've been thinking about it more recently is because I want to be an artist. There is, obviously, a type of artist that is very coy and cunning about everything that they say. I would at least enjoy a period of unpoliced freedom to say and create whatever I like.

I'm always drawn to song-writers who don't follow the rules. Marina and the Diamonds, Regina Spektor, Elbow, Florence and the Machine, Lily Allen. In art class at school, I used to detest when I was making something I was excited about and my teacher would tell me how to fix it and what I shouldn't do. It's that age-old argument of "What is art?" At that point I just wanted the freedom to explore my abilities and what worked and what didn't.

That's what I want now. I'm writing all these slightly absurd lyrics. (One song is actually inspired by the Absurdest play "The Sandbox" by Albee.) And songs about the change that has happened, the way I understand my brain, the people I know and how I feel about what's occurring (<---pop reference!) Even though the speed at which I'm turning out complete songs isn't what I'd hoped, I'm still getting into the lyrics which I always found the hardest part.

In the end, if I start Tweeting or blogging completely teenage things and just seeming a bit pretentious, please don't hate me. I probably won't even get past my self-preservation reflex anyway, but I thought I'd just jot it down... in case.

Bumpy Road

I am extremely unwell. All my energy today went into doing work-work. (As opposed to work.) At the moment I am going to concentrate on battling this chest, throat and sinus infection. But hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to write again. Listening to myself rasping on the last two recordings is driving me around the twist!


Naturally I'm really inspired at this time of not being able to write. ;)

I am enjoying this spoon's face.

<3

Martha

You know how it is when you're young: your mother is friends with someone and so you are expected to socialize with their children. You do it because you have to, not because you want to.

That's what happened with Martha and me. We were very young, maybe 3 and 4 years old, forced together by our mothers' friendship. I didn't like her. She was too quiet and she used to copy everything I did. Also, she was from the country and knew how to grow vegetables and look after chickens and things I had no clue about.  

At the age of 12 or thereabouts something suddenly clicked into place and Martha and I became good friends, going from strength to strength in our friendship over the years. Over the years I watched as she turned from a quiet little country girl to a confident, cool, talented adult and maybe as a result of that I feel more like she is my sister than just my friend. 

She is the person that I queued up for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with for 16 hours and read it with, surviving on a diet or chocolate, tea and kettle chips.

Sadly we recently realised that we haven't seen each other in nearly a year. Because of going to college on opposite ends of the country , we haven't hugged since my 21st birthday last January.

Martha will turn 21 on the 9th December 2008 and I will be there, in Belfast to celebrate with her. The best part is that we both know that no matter what happens, no matter how far apart we are or how long we go without seeing each other, we will always be friends. We can always pick up where we left off.

Can't wait to see you, Martha. <3

Turn to the Music: 

In memory of the summer spent watching DIGIMON!!! This fun fun fun track "All Star" by Smash Mouth

Turn Up The Musing

'On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

A partridge in a pear tree."

Well it's not quite the first day of Christmas, it is however the third day that I have woken up to a blanket of ice covering my car and freezing fog hanging eerily in the air. Imagine my delight when, on Friday morning, after waking up to find that my alarm had not gone off and I was late for work, I opened the door to a virtually opaque world. I had to feel my way to the car armed with jugs of water to melt the windscreen. 

Now don't get me wrong, I hate hazardous driving conditions as much as the next person. But there is something so reassuring about winter being, well, winterish. Especially living in Cork, the Wet and Warm Capital of Ireland, it's nice to see some evidence of the change in seasons. Although I'm not crazy about waking up in the dark, working through the daylight hours and driving home to see a 4pm sunset.

Some people will blame global warming for this unusually bitter weather but I must say that it brings me back to my child hood. Many happy mornings were spent crunching across the frozen grass on my way to school bundled up in hats and scarves and anoraks. Good times. Personally I'm looking forward to the opportunity to don my favourite hats and scarves again. Nothing says "WINTER!" like disappearing under a sea of mittens and socks.

So come on people! Stop complaining! Stoke up that fire, pull out your comfiest blanket and snuggle down. If we're lucky we might just get a white Christmas!

Turn to the Music:

To keep my smile warm I'm listening to "Good Morning Baltimore" from the musical Hairspray.  Listen to it first thing in the morning to keep you happy for the rest of the day.