h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't done this before, so bear with me if I don't get the hang of it for a while.

I was going to call it GnoJoPoMo but the rules say I have to have NaJoPoMo in the title, perhaps so that people can search for them.

I will post the link to here from the NaJoPoMo page as soon as I've finished. There, that's the fiddly stuff out of the way, now I can start writing this journal.

I still haven't decided whether to start a new conversation each day (which will flood everybody's conversation lists) or to bung it all in here (which could make this conversation rather convoluted if people comment). I may start a new conversation everytime there's a new major topic.



Today is the 1st of November. In Ireland traditionally, it was the first day of Winter and also of the New Year. The Irish drove home the point by calling September "Middle of Autumn" and October "End of Autumn". So when yesterday was the 31st of End of Autumn, there's no doubt that today is the 1st day of Winter. For English speakers, it's not so clear cut and most people consider 1 December to be the first day of Winter. I'm somewhere in between. In the official Gnomon Calendar, Winter starts on the 15th of November.

In the Catholic Church, today is also the first of the two days of the dead - it is All Saints Day. In former times this was called All Hallows Day, hence last night was All Hallows Eve which became corrupted to Halloween.

Normally at this time of year, I'm rushing around doing last minute practice for the concerts that happen at the end of November and the start of December. This year, both my choirs decided to do an end of October concert - both of them went well, although the audience at the big choir's concert on Wednesday was poor. So I've a few days off singing now before we start rehearsing for the next engagement. We've about 5 rehearsals until the concert in each choir, and since I haven't yet seen any of the music we'll be doing, I don't have to think about it.

Other things happening at the moment include redecorating - Mrs G has always hated the ceilings in our house - they were done with a sort of lumpy paint which covers the ceiling with tiny spikes. She found out recently that it is possible to plaster over this, so we started the project of getting every ceiling re-plastered. This will take a while because it has to be done in conjunction with repainting the room.

So we started by moving daughter Iz out of her room into the spare room. Our builder did a complete redecoration, removing the undersea life mural which I painted so many years ago, replastering the ceiling and painting. Iz chose photo wallpaper of a forest scene for the biggest wall. All the rest are painted plain green. I spent about 8 hours last weekend assembling an Ikea wardrobe for the room and we moved her back in. Then we moved all our stuff out of our room into the same spare room, and our room is being decorated at the moment. It may be finished today.

On the writing front, I trawled through my old unedited entries and found about 170 that I had started and abandoned. I've been going through these - some are just a few lines of an idea, others are nearly finished, so I'm working on them to get them published. Ones I'm particular interested in at the moment are Irish High Crosses and Slide Rules. I'm sure I'll talk about writing as the month progresses.

Unfortunately, amid all this redecorating, singing, researching and writing, I have to work for a living, so there will be days when I don't do a lot - but even then, I see things on the way to work and on the way home. I'll be able to tell you about the ducks, and the tram, and the stars.

So I'm looking forward to a month of writing.

I always heard them called popcorn ceilings; I think they have a sort of gun for blasting little bits of wet plaster at the ceiling. Then I lie in bed, look at the popcorn ceiling and obsessively looking for faces and animals. Hate them. The ceilings, I mean.

I never saw any faces or animals on my ceiling. It was just a load of shallow spikes.

Did see the occasional spider, mind you.

A typical Gnomon journal. Wears you out to read them. I would love to re-decorate the entire house - now the children have all flown the nest and we have had the new windows put in everywhere it really is becoming quite urgent. But when I get home from work in the evenings, I'm so exhausted, I only have time to cook the dinner, look at my e-mails and h2g2 conversations and then I drop in to bed.

Mind you, decorating a room (let alone a house) is a very complicated affair in Germany. The systems are different, and tastes are very different.

Now that's a point - how did you arrive at your decor decisions? You say, Mrs G doesn't like the ceilings. Did you agree? Or did you think that they ought to be renewed anyway, or did you leave it entirely up to her? Did your daughter have complete freedom to choose colour and wallpaper in her room? How will you decide which colours to do the rest of the house?

That is something that often holds up proceedings in our house - neither wants to impose their ideas on the other, but both have very certain ideas and it's a long process to actually come to a conclusion.

Is that paint, Gnomon, or stippled Artex on your ceiling?

I don't do decorating except in emergencies. But then I don't do housework either, although I will dust and hoover every year. Usually in springtime as this gives the spiders ample time to recreate the cob webs that are looking so atmospheric at this time of year.

"wear you out to read it" - you've no idea. Last weekend, which was a long weekend, we were rehearsing on Saturday afternoon with a concert in the evening (Fauré's Requiem in a new chamber arrangement). We intended to spend Sunday and Monday recovering. But then we got a text from the builder to say that Iz's room was finished so we could move her back in and move us out of our room (including eveything in our huge built-in wardrobe) so that he could start on our room on Tuesday. This involved going to Ikea, buying Iz's wardrobe and quite literally spending 8 hours constructing it. It was very tricky, particularly the bit where I had to insert small metal clips into a slot between some wood and a glass pane, which some helpful Ikea employee had filled with impenetrable glue. Must write to them about that, and my injured finger.

I'm easygoing about colour schemes, so Mrs G gets to pick those, with my nod of approval.

When it comes to construction, though, she comes up with all sorts of crazy schemes, and I have to divide them into ones that just can't be done for solid engineering reasons, the ones that won't work because she has no ideas of the dimensions, and the ones that are still crazy but will work. Then there's a long delay while I get used to the idea before I'll agree. This can take years.

The children have always been free to choose the colours of their rooms. The undersea bedroom was Iz's idea. It had been a jungle bedroom before that, with a forest canopy made from camouflage netting hanging from the ceiling, various jungle creatures around the room and a view out to a Savannah scene on the main wall, painted by my sister-in-law. But the netting attracted too much dust and Iz was asthmatic (she seems to have got over it now). So the underwater room was much cleaner and clearer.

Now she's an adult she wants something plainer, hence the forest.

Stippled Artex - yes, that's what it is.

reddit

And the name for those handy-down bits is/are 'snots'.



Really!

Must get my NaJoPoMo started!

MMF

I'm allowed post more than one journal entry per day, so here's my second one.

One very old Halloween tradition is the lighting of bonfires. These were also traditionally lit on St John's Eve (some time around Midsummer - 26th June, I think).
We always organised a Halloween bonfire in our back garden when I was a child, and all our friends would come round to watch. But some of these bonfires are huge - the piles of wood can be ten feet high before they're set on fire.

Thankfully, there were no fatalities last night, although the Fire Brigade reported nearly 500 call-outs. In some cases, they were attacked by crowds who didn't want their fires put out.

I believe that the bonfire tradition was moved in England to 5 November, but I'm not sure whether people still light fires at Halloween as well in England or Scotland.

I believe those 'stippled' ceilings were popular maybe late 60's and in the 70s.... My Father is doing the same, and haveing them re-skimmed, to just have a flat ceiling... He's done downstairs already, which was made easier, as downstairs is now only really two rooms (kitchen and dining room have been knocked into one), leaving just the living room, which he's now also de-stippled, and redecorated well, there is the hallway too, but I think that was painted and de-stippled the same time as the kitchen was filled with the sound of walls being smashed down with a large hammer....

Definatly feeling like the first day of winter here, today, heating had switched itself on, at some point over night (themmostat), so I guess it got cool... and I've just had to twiddle the thermostat again, to get a bit more heat into the house

Decorating is over-rated... This place was mainly* decorated just after I moved in... desperatly due for another lick of paint, now, err, thirteen years later Maybe I'll jsut paint the front-room 'hint of tobacco' next time, so the gradule staining of the actual* colour on the wall and ceiling isn't so obvious...

Talking of de-stippling, my front room ceiling : DIY job, done by the previous owner... very* badly... patchy stipples, and really spiky ones horrible... that ceiling, and the one in the utility room and the kitchen, all need re-skimming (though luckily the kitchen and utility room don't have sipples on the ceiling)

The worst thing about that style of Artex is how difficult it is to overpaint. You end up flicking little spots of paint all over the place, and it ruins the brushes too. The combed designs are far easier.

http://www.sheffield-plastering.co.uk/ArtexTexturePatternSelector.pdf

Just one more reason why it has* to go

The new forest room sounds lovely. When my son was younger he had a sea themed room- we used stencils for starfish and shells, and I crudely painted a dolphin leaping through surf on one wall. I'm surprised it didn't give him nightmares!

the forest room sounds great.

The Germans have a fondness for textured wallpaper which I loathe. If I had time and money I'd redecorate from top to bottom, but I don't so I'll put up with it.

Never, ever put up wallpaper (that's my advice).

I never have, but I did, spend days, and days and days of my life, when I moved into this house, taking off layer after layer after layer of wallpeper.

The kitchen wallpaper was the worse... some dredful sort of embossed stuff (meant to look like brick-effect? (70s and tacky!).

Steam wall papper removing thing, and a scraper..

OK. a day to remove the wallpaper; to find out, it'd removed the top* part of it, leaving just the backing behind...
Remove the backing.
To discover an earlier wallpaper!

by the time the wall papper was removed, it'd also removed about seven layers of paint from the wall, leaving a totally bare plaster wall... which made painting them more effort and time

Actually, the wallpaper in the spare room, was nearly as annoying, multiple layers of wallpeper, adn when it was finally* all removed, I swept it all up off the floor; only to discover, the effect of steam/water, plus old wallpeper, and it had all stuck down to the wooden floor!; then one had to re-remove the wallpeper, from where it was now stuck firmly down to the floorboards

Hmmm... its given me something of a deep seated fear of wallpaper

I remember when Mrs G's father was very ill and was coming out of hospital, we said he could stay with us. I was doing up the study as a bedroom and was trying to take all the old woodchip wallpaper off. I remember hiring a steamer and staying up until 1am removing wallpaper in a room that was like a sauna. I felt absolutely rotten.

Two days later I discovered I had pneumonia and was out of work for six weeks.

We had those ceilings when I was growing up. Well, I think my parents still have them. Very seventies, but having grown up when everybody had them, it was quite a shock when I realised that not everybody did.

My ceilings are artex fans. Lovely

Deb