Feel good

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I just spent the last half hour looking through some old artwork and discovered a piece of animation I did at university (the second time round).  I love animation and wish I was better at it but unfortunately, the process is too painstakingly slow for my taste and I have little patience in that department.  I like art that is instantaneous and so even though I have dabbled in oil painting, watercolour, textiles, lino-print, screenprinting etc. they never grabbed my attention for long enough.  As much as I’d like to see my characters animated, I’m afraid I’m likely to stick with the cartoons.

So for laughs, I thought I’d share this dire attempt at an animation – I really am a tad embarrassed but hey, I’ll get over it.  Trust me, it isn’t a master piece and in places it is unfinished, so I have used stills/sketches to show how the story progresses.  Essentially it was a short advert to promote Feel Good Drinks. The character, Brian, hates life and grumbles at everything including the sun, until one day he stumbles across a bottle of feel good and his life is turned around!

Movember

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Everyone is talking about Movember.  It is the one and only time of year I wish I had facial hair – imagine the things you could do with it!  In case you don’t know what Movember is: During November each year,  thousands of men men across the UK and around the world grow moustaches with the aim to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and testicular cancer.

In the image below, I was testing my new brush pen…

Londinium

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A rather frenetic three days in London have come to an end.  I have skirted around the city on various work visits or on the occasional get-together with friends, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to soak in the atmosphere and visit the top tourist attractions.  My mother, keen to reinforce the maternal / filial bonds, saw this as an opportunity for us to spend some quality time together. So, with a little bit of planning an a lot of luck we left the quiet solitude of our respective houses in the ‘north of England’ and in the Jura Mountains (France) to tussle and jostle with some of the millions of tourists that visit London annually.

Every hour of our three day tour was packed with interest, culture, art, music, heritage, gastronomic delights and shopping.  So much so that I need a few days holiday to recover.  We visited the Houses of Parliament (a real highlight); the London Eye where mum was reunited with her fear of heights; Harrods, where for the first time I felt my bank account was completely inadequate; we took in two shows, Jumpy and Singing in the Rain (ponchos are requirement); we were perplexed by contemporary performance art at the Haywood Gallery; intrigued by the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, ‘Bronze‘; enlightened by the Royal Ballet’s performance of Swan Lake; moved by the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition; felt patriotic watching the changing of the Horse Guards and were calmed by our saunter through St James’ Park.

If you felt tired reading that, imagine how we felt at the end of our stay?!  Enjoyable and draining in equal measures, there has been talk of making this an annual event…

On my return home, I doodled on the train:

 

Performing monkeys and job interviews

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I’ve done it!  I have found myself a new job and gleefully handed in my resignation! I leaped through rings of fire at my job interview, presenting the biggest, boldest, most articulate and inspiring side of myself – I was a true performing monkey for 2 whole hours!

So now, after three long years of working from home, I will bathe myself in colleagues and office gossip.  I will go to the office parties and invite people for drinks after work. I will speak to an IT person if my computer is broken and talk to people about my workload before making a coffee for the person sitting opposite me.  I will commute with a solemn look on my face and groan when I miss the bus.  I will clock watch on a Monday then kick my heels up with that Friday feeling at the end of the week.  I will clear my bedroom of mountains of paperwork and liberate my shelf space to join the millions of you out there who call yourself an OFFICE WORKER!

Oh to have an office

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I know I have been somewhat tiresome with my recent rants about work, but it is one of my biggest irritations, no, hates at the moment.  I’ve reached my absolute fill, the homeworking quota has been exceeded, my own company is becoming tedious and I have to escape.  I daydream about the good old days (with rose tinted glasses of course) when I worked in an office. Oh how I miss the daily commute, the people watching, the office gossip, the office politics, the impromptu drinks after work and the regular, face to face contact with other human beings.  As the years tick by, I feel I’m slowly losing the ability to communicate, I’m becoming introverted and find it difficult to make idle chit chat with people who ask ‘how has your week been?’.  For the most part, my working weeks are quiet, monotonous, uneventful, uninteresting, uninspiring…you get the drift. 

As my other half comes home each evening, eager to plonk on the sofa and relax in the peace and quiet,  I’m looking to escape the confines of the apartment which seems to be getting smaller by the day.    That’s the problem you see, if you don’t go to work, then you don’t come home from work – it all just blurs into one.  There’s no shaking off the day when you walk out of the office building. I just turn from my work computer to my home computer – I’m in the same chair, at the same desk, in the same box room. I eat dinner, I go to bed, I get up, eat breakfast and sit at my desk ready to do it all over again.  *Sigh*  I think the ideal balance would be to work in an office three days a week and have two very focused days at home.  That way I could have the best of both worlds because no matter how much I whinge, there are definitely some upsides to working at home.

Anyway, before you start playing your mini violins, here is today’s cartoon on the subject:

Image

Mind melt

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Recently I have had a series of what can only be described as premature senior  moments.   These range from the usual, I’ve-walked-into-the-kitchen-to-get-something-but-now-I-haven’t-a-clue-what-that-something-is or putting-boiled-water-on-my-cereal-instead-of-milk moments, to more the irritating organisational failures.  Last week:

  • I double booked a couple of meetings.
  • I bought a non-refundable/non-moveable train ticket to Brussels only to discover afterwards that I’m scheduled to deliver a training course in England on the date I’m away.
  • I drove 50 miles up the motorway when my petrol light came on.  After another few miles, I pulled into the petrol station and reached for my purse only to find I hadn’t brought it with me. Unsure whether I’d make it home on the red light, I had to humbly scrounge some money from one of the delegates at my training course.  I’m thankful for small mercies – at least I hadn’t filled the tank BEFORE I realised I had no money. That could have made for an interesting cartoon!

So, either I’m showing early signs of Alzheimer’s (God forbid) or my brain just has far too much information to process.   I hope it’s the latter and suspect this is what happens…