Angelicscalliwags Rag #06

Hello! How are you all doing? I hope you’ve had a great week. Ours has been fairly quiet. We’re now in the dreaded February, which my youngest daughter informs me should be my favourite month given that she was born in it…but she turns thirteen this year and I find this very sad. She’s growing into an amazing young woman, who knows her own mind and freely states it to whoever will listen! In fact, much like she was as a baby…as a toddler…as a child…Hmmm, the teen years will be an interesting time, that’s for sure! I just can’t really believe my youngest is now out of childhood. How fast it goes. As always, I am SO grateful for the hours, days, weeks, months and years homeschool has given us. I wouldn’t change the last 22 years for the world 🧡

My Mother, the Swan Whisperer

Mum still hasn’t fully recovered from her fall and I am trying to help out where I can. Unbeknown to me, mum wanders down to the pond each day and feeds the swans. She calls them and they come straight to her, and clearly recognise who she is. Anyway, my stubborn mum attempted to walk down there just a few days after hurting her leg. Once she got back, she admitted she maybe shouldn’t have gone because her leg was hurting more. So last week I took her in the car each afternoon so she could continue feeding them without the long walk. I took some photos – these are especially for you Donna!

Reading this Week

The Problem of Pain

The first book I read was The Problem of Pain by C S Lewis. He really is one of the most intelligent writers I’ve ever read. I enjoy all his non-fiction stuff. He presents a problem, in this case pain, and then seeks to understand it through his faith. In doing so, he allows us a glimpse into his incredible mind and the clarity of his thoughts. Here, he grapples with the widely accepted opinion that God is a benignly good God. This is an eyes-wide-open moment as he lays out the truth as he sees it, philosophises all its angles and makes his conclusions. 

There are moments of brilliance where you grasp inklings of an intellect which waaaay surpasses my own. I am constantly blown away by his ability to explain the complex in a very simple easy to understand way. And I am always left yearning for a similar intellect so that I too could see the world, my faith and life through his lens.

Know Your Rights And Claim Them

The second book I read this week was a book aimed for young people and is linked to my master’s. My next assignment is on listening to and the participation of children and young people. One of the sections of my module is an interview with a professor at the Open University who worked alongside Amnesty International to create a report informing a book meant to appeal to young people all over the world and enable them to understand their rights according to the UNCRC. After a bit of searching, I found the book! It’s called Know Your Rights And Claim Them: A Guide for Youth by Angelina Jolie and Amnesty International. I’ve really enjoyed reading this book and will definitely be rereading it a few times for my assignment. In fact, as of today I’m half way through my second run through it!

Master’s Study

Well, the poor grade of yester-week has absolutely kicked me up the backside and made me knuckle down. It helps that I am very interested in learning about the topic of the assignment, which is listening to and enabling participation for children and young people. I’ve gone back to creating mind maps for each resource I use as well as adding each one to an annotated biography. I did both these things in my first year and they seemed to work well for me. They are a kind of elongated method of taking notes (although the annotated biography is more truncated) however, when it comes to writing my assignment, the mind maps and annotated biography make it so simple to take my own notes and simply transfer them into the assignment.

I am still concerned about the fact that this master’s is written especially for social workers and is geared very much towards professionals and policies in the workplace. Half of each of my assignments for the rest of the year include reflections on my professional work…of which I have a grand total of zero.

Health and Fitness

I’ve not done too much this month, exercise-wise, mainly because of the rash (itchy and sore in equal measures). The last week I’ve been walking Harvey again and building up the time I’m out with him. My goal is to build back up to the hour I used to walk each morning. I’ve also begun swimming again. I have been swimming a few times this month, but I want to get back to a decent number of days each week. Swimming is definitely my thing! I love it so much and find it incredibly relaxing. Although Gary and I go at around 4 to 5pm, it’s kind of dark then and the swimming pool uses dimmed lights. Also there are usually only one or two other people in the pool at that time.

Insomnia Diaries

I’ve started my insomnia diaries in earnest now. It was hard to do before because the itching wasn’t conducive to sleep. Anyway, I’m meant to stay up until 1am and get up at 6am – basically I have to limit the time I’m in bed to five hours. I’m finding this really hard. I’m used to going to bed at 11 and even if I don’t sleep I’m resting. Staying up until 1 is quite hard. I work at my office for about ten hours each day, as well as homeschooling, so by midnight I’m exhausted 🥱 . I stay up as long as I can manage before I get fidgety legs, but I’ve not made it to 1am yet 😬

Forcing Myself Out of Bed

Also, any time I am lying in bed for more than 20 minutes unable to sleep, I have to get up, leave the bedroom and wait until I’m sleepy before going back to bed again. This was hard, but is getting easier and it definitely helps. Getting up means I don’t lie awake thinking and therefore stay awake. I get up, listen to an audio book, in the dark, rocking on the rocking chair, until I feel sleepy again, and then head back to bed. And you know what? I go to sleep!

The other thing I’ve been told to do is light therapy each morning for 30 minutes and to head outside to exercise in the light each morning (which I do by walking Harv). I think I am noticing that the light therapy makes me feel far more awake…almost more so than coffee, which is weird!

I’m keeping a sleep diary and am averaging between 2-3 hours of sleep a night, which sounds terrible but I actually think they are really good quality hours because I feel less tired than normal, like something has changed.

My Very Own Botanical Nursery

You know I’m completely rubbish at keeping anything green and living alive? Well, it may surprise you to learn that I have kept five indoor plants alive since the summer. I mean, it helps that my greatest nemesis, the slug, doesn’t tend to be found indoors (I say doesn’t tend because Gary and I did wake to a surprise over the summer when we woke up one Saturday to a huge slug making its way across the ceiling in our bedroom). 

It also helps that my mother lives next door.

As soon as a plant under my care looks a bit worse for wear (from over or under watering, over to under feeding…you get the picture) I take it over to mum, who waters and feeds it the proper number of times, clips off off the dead stuff and somehow performs what is basically botanical heart surgery on my half dead plant. Within days, it perks up, grateful to have someone who knows what they are doing caring for it.

You can almost hear its groan when mum passes it back into my hot little hands to kill…and the process begins all over again.

So saying I have kept them alive for the past few months is maybe an exaggeration 😬

Small Art Business

This has been a difficult week for me for many reasons. I’m not sure what’s going on with my YouTube channel but my videos show views and my analytics show views and then the next day, they’ve all gone. There is no-one to contact from YouTube to discuss it, just a short blurb in their help session which says they remove views that I’ve paid for or repeat views when someone runs my playlist over and over again throughout the day. Neither of those two things happen as far as I’m aware. It’s so frustrating to see the views go up and then disappear into thin air. Sigh.

And Then…

Then I filmed a few videos to amalgamate into this month’s studio vlog and my iphone refused to airdrop them into my Mac. I tried everything, from downloading them and uploading them to my Mac, syncing them, syncing with my iCloud, turning on and off and on, updating… I really LOVE my Apple products and for the most part they work perfectly, but this week I have just wanted to throw them in the bin! I’ve run out of things to do to try to get the video from my phone to my Mac 😢

Update: I did finally manage to airdrop the 90 minute video onto my Mac to upload for editing. Imagine my surprise when I opened it and found it was now over five hours long! Somehow it airdropped it in slow motion. I have to admit, this week’s video is not one of my best because I had to speed it up by 20 just to get it playing at a decent rate. I’ve uploaded it to YouTube but I’m not sure I should have bothered! But having spent SO much time on it, I felt it would be a waste if I didn’t upload it.

Etsy Update

On a somewhat brighter note, I have managed to get all my cards up on Etsy. I’ve only included one photo with each listing, but I can add some at a later date. I kept putting it off because you’re meant to have ten photos and one video. Time was a thing, and I think I just felt I needed to do it and get them up in my shop otherwise I’d get further and further behind listing my newer products. I still have all my stickers to list… I am loving how my page looks and I can see there is a real cohesion between all my paintings! Maybe I do have a style of my own!

Postage Decisions

The other thing I think I have made a final decision on is postage. I’ve tried a few things and the one I feel most comfortable with is free postage for the UK and free postage abroad for orders over $35 (around £26). Postage is really tricky to figure out and adds up really quickly. I think by offering free postage in this way is the simplest way, and customers don’t have a nasty surprise at the end. 

I’m pleased I’m giving myself a coupe of years to figure all of this out because decisions are not as clear cut as they seem. Free postage means ensuring the item price is set at a level where I will get some sort of profit after Etsy take their cut in addition to the 20 pence each time I sell an item (this is the cost to then re-list). Postage and packaging for one card is £1.50, and is about three times that if it’s outside the UK (actually, I’ve only sent to the USA so really that applies to America only – I have no clue about anywhere else!).

I need to open a shop on here on my website but I just can’t get my head around how to do it!

amongst all the stress, I had some fun, making some turtle book marks. I made 40, in three different designs and I’ve already sold three! 

Anyway, here is my not so great video:

How’s your week been? And how do you cope with February when all you want to do is hibernate…?