I’ve been informed that my rate of posting here is JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

I’d have to agree.

I don’t know what it says about my life that I’ve not had any huge ideas or revelations to report, discuss and digest, but I’ve been fairly busy just DOING stuff, which, as it turns out, has taken kind of a lot of time.

What started out as sort of a side business has blossomed into something wholly unexpected. How did it come to pass that people actually started really liking stuff that I’ve made? I’ve been spending every evening engaged in a frantic creative frenzy that usually end in some progress, but usually a lot of swearing. With two holiday craft fairs to prepare for, there is a very real chance that my head will explode.

And then of course, there’s the Prawn.

The Prawn, mighty lobster that she’s become, is the undisputed master of our lives. She Speaks! (“What Mummy doin? What Mummy doin? What doin, Mummy?” “I’M ON THE JOHN, DARLING. A MOMENT PLEASE.”) She Shouts! She Empties The Bookcase Every 7 Minutes! While my love for her knows no bounds, there are days when I have to acknowledge that my kid can kind of be an asshole. On days like this, when the assholery is at it’s height, she is lucky that she’s aesthetically appealing. Time that is not spent crafting is spent Prawn Wrangling.

Oh yeah. And there’s that guy that lives with me too. I don’t see him quite as much as I’d like.

With these three factors in mind, as well as the upcoming nuptials of Trumpet and BoyRacer in which we are heavily involved and a visit from my parental units, I am going to take a temporary hiatus from Blogapotamus until after the first of my two crafts extravaganzas at the beginning of November. This way, I can assuage my guilt complex at not posting and simultaneous feel righteous if I DO manage to roll up the bottom of the tube to squeeze out some literary toothpaste.

I’m still about, however, on Facebook, email, etc. so feel free to wave or throw goats in my direction every so often. ☺

Toodleloo for the present. See you in November.

That sumbitch Fall is knockin on the door.

Autumn is a deeply nostalgic season for me. I talk about it every year, but it doesn’t make it any less true. A lot of people look at spring as a time of new beginnings, but for me, it’s always been fall; at least while I was still in education. A time to meet new friends and reconnect with old ones.

College reinforced this feeling still further. I was lucky enough to attend a small, liberal arts college in a tiny Indiana town where I had, bar none, the best time of my entire life. Fall was a time of returning, campfires, frosty evenings sitting down by the millrace with a group of the best people I’ve ever known, drinking green apple cider in a field with the stars winking overhead and watching the Maple trees (Goshen, Indiana is known as “The Maple City”, so, as you can imagine, there were quite a lot of them around) turn glorious shades of yellow and salmon, lining the picturesque streets with a riot of fiery color.

So, when the weather turns colder, I’m always hit by a bittersweet wave of longing for the beautiful place where I spent 5 happy Autumns.

My childhood is also a fertile ground for fall memories. Having grown up in the woods, the bane of my father’s life was to rake our approximately 1 acre property clear of leaves. This, was, of course, an utterly thankless job as not all of the buggers would fall at the same time, so I was pretty much assured of soft leaf piles to leap in from late September to late October. Of course, I was not the only one who liked leaf piles- slugs also found them well nigh irresistible. Of course, as a child, I had a much higher tolerance for wildlife than I do now (My top three most hated list- earwigs, silverfish and slugs, followed closely behind by wasps.) and didn’t mind picking the slimy little devils off of my clothing.

We had an old cider press that has since found a home with one of my older cousins who’s fixed it up. My grandfather (who passed away before I was born) used to make an evil concoction with it called Apple Jack (probably akin to English Scrumpy) that could most likely power a compact car for a short time before destroying the engine, but my parents stuck to the more sedate and non-alcoholic cider produced from apples that came from an orchard at the base of the Catoctin Mountains. Trips to the orchard were always much anticipated as they gave out free apples and cider, crisp and refreshing from their own presses.

A tradition that I’ve carried on despite the constant ribbing of my English relations is Halloween pumpkin carving. Halloween has only really become a thing over in the UK in the last 5 years, but I’ve steadfastly bought and carved my jack-o-lantern every year since arriving. This year, I hope to get The Prawn involved in the process in so far as she can mess around with the pumpkin entrails before I pick out all of the seeds to roast. (Which is by far the best part of the pumpkin lobotomy process.)

I’ve been working on fall bits in my workshop (aka- my dining room table) as well. I haven’t consciously set out to create Autumn friendly pieces, but perhaps the change in the weather has affected me on a subconscious level, because I find myself drawn to the same browns, yellows and reds that are outside my door.

Anyone else for a bit of autumn nostalgia?

So, since the world DIDN’T end, I suppose I ought to pull my finger out and write something.

After the Rock Star’s stag antics of last weekend, (I got an awful lot of interest after posting my facebook status, “Blogapotamus is chuffed that her husband got into a shouting match with two strippers over the weekend.”) I am off for hen tomfoolery this weekend with Trumpet and Co. We’re heading down to Brighton for a day of windsurfing (in the Atlantic, in September, yes) and an evening of eating and drinking and hopefully a bare minimum of inflatable men.

After a bit of reading up on the internets, within those in the bachelor/bachelorette party industry, there seems to be an overwhelming consensus that people would rather deal with a stag do than a hen do any day of the week. Bar owners, restaraunteurs, limo drivers and others that deal with large groups of men and women out celebrating last nights of freedom before matrimony are definitely of the opinion that women are far more badly behaved when out in large groups. The driver of the pimptastic limo that the Rock Star hired to take BoyRacer and the other stags on their Ocean’s 11 style evening in London told the lads that large groups of women scared the Christ out of him*. (As did one woman in particular- Trumpet, who was standing by, unnoticed, while he made the obligatory “So who’s the unlucky man?” jokes.)

One wonders why this should be, especially since it is the sterotypical getting-drunk-starting-fights-tying-the-groom-to-a-flagpole mentality of stag nights that often makes the news. Could it be that men, as lone hunter/gathers are less likely to cause trouble in groups than women, who rely on a close support network of other women? When we get the chance to cut loose, why do we do so in such bad grace?

Trumpet’s day, I speculate, will NOT be such an occasion. A little bit of humility in the form of a wet suit and getting hit on the head by a runaway sailboard will most likely take care of any bravado that may be lurking.

So, apparently, we should all make sure we’re wearing clean underwear on Wednesday, as the world is scheduled to end. Although, what good clean underwear in going to do in that unlikely eventuality, I’m not entirely sure. After all, assuming the world WERE to end, there’d be no one around to care if you were wearing your “Rock Out With Your Cock Out” pants or not.

On Wednesday, the good people of CERN will be firing up the Large Hadron Collider for the first time at full capacity. the 27 km long super collider is intended to replicate conditions the caused the Big Bang, thus hopefully providing us with valuable informations regarding the origins of the Universe. (in case we ever want to start a new one, I suppose.)

It seems that this alarms some folks as there is a teeny weeny possibility that the LHC could create our very own pet black hole, which is probably A Bad Thing. (Although for everyone in the US who’s been sitting through 2 years of campaign ads, you might be ready to kick back and welcome a little oblivion.) There is also a possibility of “strangelets” which, although I have read about them on their Wikipedia page, I still do not understand, but think that The Strangelets would be a pretty bitching band name. At any rate, Dark Matter is also not something that you want Just Floating Around.

Physicists seem to be pretty unanimous in their declaration that people who believe this are Utter Boobs (a scientific term, no doubt) and that the LHC could no more be said to produce dangerous black holes than someone farting in a bathtub could cause a tsunami. (The Rock Star helpfully gave me this analogy.)

A girl in my high school predicted the End of the World once. On the day of the End, she came to school dressed in Sunday best and looked smugly around at the rest of us schmucks, doomed forever to wander the earth, in search of Grace. I wasn’t in her class as the moment of the supposed End came and went, but I can only imagine her utter surprise at being left unceremoniously alive in the middle of her jeering classmates.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m opting for jeans and dirty pants on Wednesday.

If you will pardon me, I am about to talk about barf. The moment that I have been dreading as a parent with weak constitution finally occurred at approximately 3 am this morning.

My mother told me that she too was notoriously squeamish when it came to all matters scatological until motherhood, as it does universally, beat just about all of the queasiness out of her.

Except when it came to sick.

She particularly remembers an incident that took place when I was about 8 and came down with a violent stomach flu. After emptying the contents of my stomach on the floor by my bed, she sent me to take a shower and steeled herself to clean up the mess. Only when she arrived at the scene of the carnage, she discovered that the Crime Scene had already been tampered with by our painfully brainless lab/cocker mix, Lady. This alone nearly sent her sprinting for the porcelain herself.

So, when I heard the unmistakable sound of Cardinal Chunder early this morning, I braced myself for the worst.

And the worst was what I got. After awakening The Rock Star with the words, “Honey, the Prawn has totally hosed all over her bed and I need you to hold her”, I had to get to work stripping the sheets, which was a painful test of my newly hardened parental stomach. The Prawn, meanwhile, was happily charging around the living room in her pants, (having been stripped by The Rock Star) smelling like a bad night out in the city centre and quizzically repeating, “Window?” as if to ask her father why the hell the world outside was all dark and broken.

My reluctance to push the laundry through before bed came back to bite me in the ass, as, at 3.30, I was forced to fold everything in the dryer, (that luckily contained a clean shirt for Lady Barfalot) take everything out of the washer and put it INTO the dryer and chuck blankets, bottom sheets and the indomitable Sir Humphrey the Second (Lord Humphrey now, I reckon) into the washing machine.

I am pleased to say that I survived with no ill effects other than waking up for work this morning feeling like I had a hangover.

I rued not having at least chugged down a whiskey or something before returning to bed at quarter to 5 to feel like it was well deserved.

I can’t even begin to tell you how fed up with meteorology.

I noticed the advertising community spending rather a lot of time these last few months trying to depict the British summer as “quirky” or “eccentric“. These are, of course, weasel words for “appallingly shite.” “HA HA HA! ISN’T IT A HOOT WHEN IT’S 15c ON THE DAY OF YOUR BIG FAMILY BARBECUE? HOW DELIGHTFULLY ENGLISH! HA HA HA!” No one likes festivals that gets washed out. No one likes two weeks solid of grey skies and drizzle. No one likes huddling on a pebble beach eating sandwiches in 40 mile an hour winds. Why is Ibiza so crowded? Why is the Costa Del Sol a heaving mass of pale and flabby English holiday makers suffering from both sun and alcohol poisoning? BECAUSE OUR SUMMER BLOWS.

I Skype with my parents 2 or 3 times a week and the sight of them lounging around in their shorts, lamenting the 90 degree heat out of doors is enough to make me want to walk into traffic. I miss definable seasons. I miss knowing what to wear on a given day and not having to drag half of my wardrobe with me in case of atmospheric eventualities.

*collapses into a weeping heap on top of my raincoat*