I had two very strange and vivid dreams last night.

The first one was about a sheep farm, which I can understand as I live next to one. In my dream, I was in the field, looking at the lambs. I went into a barn and saw the teeniest, tinest lamb ever, about the size of a hamster. The lamb ran into a box lined with straw. I put my hand in the box and was bitten by a big green snake. I got the lamb out of the box before the snake could bite it as well. So the farmer appears and oh my, it’s Johnny Depp! (Stop laughing!) He takes me up to his house to get the doctor as by now, my right hand is turning black. By the time the doctor arrived, my feet were black between the toes. My tongue had swollen up and my mouth was all black inside, and my lips. But Mr Depp the farmer was nice because I’d saved his tiny lamb. The doctor gave me an injection which made the black go away. He said I had to stay where I was and sleep it off for a while. So wouldn’t you know it, I woke up!

That was 7am and I thought oh, I could doze for a little while longer and fell asleep again. This time I dreamt I was at the Oscars. Reason being that I was an actor and had been in a detective movie called “The Girls”. There was a group of us, who had played girl detectives. I was more crippled than I am in real life and had to use two crutches to get around, instead of one. So in the movie, they’d put me in a wheelchair. During an interval, I went out to find the loo but couldn’t find the disabled loo. (Don’t know why I was looking for that as I don’t usually use one!) I ended up outside the building and far away. I found a group of Girl Guides who were digging, for some odd reason. They took me back to the Oscars in time for our award to be announced. They showed a clip from the movie, in which I was in the wheelchair, and we were chasing a bad guy. I ran the chair into him and knocked him over so the other girls could jump on him! LOL!! It was a hoot!

There now, aren’t they funny? My dreams are often so entertaining, I really enjoy them. No idea what it all means but it was fun!

Bore da.

So, someone kicked me off her flist on LiveJournal because I didn’t comment enough on her journal. I know, it sounds inane and it is. The thing with LJ is that you can decide who you want to read your journal, or not. So my LJ is locked and only people who have been added by me to my flist can read it. I’d been having a bit of a bad time of it over the past month, what with the death of our dear old cat Snookie and having to have eyes in the back of my head to keep up with Salem. Who has a broken back leg, but you wouldn’t have thought it. And I know, Snookie was just a cat, but I was having a hard time with the grief.

So I hadn’t posted much at all, or commented on anyone’s LJ, let alone this particular person’s. To be honest, I often had a hard time coming up with something to say to her anyway. A lot of her posts were not really accessible to anyone outside the US school system. As I went to school in the UK and New Zealand, I had a difficult time trying to follow what she was saying. Much of it was jargon and very complicated at that. Or there would be lots of political posts and y’know, British here, more interested in the local council elections. (Plaid Cymru or Lib Dem?)

I’m not criticising her choice of subject matter. A person’s personal journal is, well, personal. Just that there were few posts that I felt able to actually say something about. But this whole flist thing is another reason why I am becoming more disillusioned with LJ. I may even, *gasp* decide to not renew my subscription and drop the journal all together. And another thing, I like the fact that I can’t be accused of spamming my flist’s friends’ pages with overly long posts. No one has to see my blog on their own site here, so I can write as much as I want! Garrulous, much!

I now have three wordpress blogs, as I managed to get it set up on coffee-cup.org after all, as well as stone-field.net. It turned out that the problem was an .htaccess file. In that I had one and it was blocking the wordpress thing, so that all I got was a 505 internal error page. I felt rather proud of myself for sorting that one out.

Okay, time to go feed and water the moggies.
Pryn da.

So, I thought I’d try setting wordpress up on a domain again. Why not, I thought. I’m not doing anything more interesting and anyway, there has to be a way around that spam problem. And there is, a plug in! As simple as that. If I’d known that then, I might still have pitching-pennies.

But there is a new blog at Stone Field. I’ve had that domain for a million years, doing nothing. Well, now it’s doing something. I think I’ll still keep this one though. I’m getting a tad fed up for Livejournal and it’s clones. The community aspect of it all is fun, but I’m seeing disadvantages as well. For example, I was just bumped off someone’s friends list because she thought I’d stopped posting. I’d actually posted six times this month. But yes, I suppose there was a bit of a hiatus while I mourned for our cat Snookie, who had just died. I know, I know, he was just a cat. And posting endless and unintelligable entries about her local school, and countless entries about politics were just y’know, fascinating. But I wouldn’t have said so to her and accepted that that was what she wanted to talk about.

Ah well. I am beginning to see the point of wordpress et al. So I think I’ll try posting here and at Stone Field as well.

Well, that experiment didn’t work out. I got wordpress up and running all right and it was great. But I got scads of the nastiest spam in the comments. I suppose I could have done something about it, but I lost heart. And in the end, I let the domain lapse. I’m sorry about that, I would have liked to keep pitching pennies. Ah well, maybe I’ll try again another day and learn how to stop the spam.

An update is needed as things have changed a lot around here. To being with, we moved out of Merthyr Tydfil in september 2006 and are now living in Aberystwyth. We’re in a tiny hamlet with just 12 houses, about 3 or 4 miles south of Aber. Our house is gorgeous, a little white cottage that’s over 200 year old. We’re down to four cats as we’ve lost two of them to the Rainbow Bridge. There are two hens in the family now and a goldfish. Daughter has graduated from Aber university and is now working for the RSPB in Anglesey. Husband is still contracting and is currently in Newcastle, digging as escape tunnel as he hates the company he’s working for. And me? Still the same. Large as life and twice as natural.

Nothing really changes for me. I’m the constant that everyone else circles around. Which is fine, I like being the centre of everything. Baking cakes, being P’s secretary and tech support. I’ve always been a country mouse and a bit of a home body. Not a housewife though! I’m dreadful at housework.

Thinking about it, I’d really like to go back to blogging just for myself. Not caring about the comments, if anyone’s reading this rubbish. And you know, this is no more complicated than LiveJournal, or one of it’s clones. I’m not promising to write often or at all, just that I’d like to. Which is enough when you think about it. Which is pretty much how my life is ordered. I’d like to do certain things; I don’t expect that I actually will, but I’m happy with the thought of it. If you see what I mean. I guess I chose my blog title well!

Well, I did it. I enjoyed using wordpress here and found it was easier than I thought. So, I bought a new domain and webspace and have set up wordpress there. And that was also easier than I thought, though I did have a wobbly moment when I typed in the password wrong! What am I like.  Anyway, the new blog is:

Pitching Pennies

See you there!

Did that get your attention?  Probably not. I don’t know if I like this wordpress thing, though I can see that it has some advantages over manually blogging. I’m even thinking of buying a new domain and setting up my own wordpress blog there instead. But I still prefer LiveJournal.  The community aspect of LJ wins out over the anonymity of WP. At LJ it was just a short moment before I had built up a readership. My friendslist became full of people who were genuinely friends and who did a lot to pull me through a really bad time. But here, I feel like I’m standing on top of a mountain in company with thousands of others.  And we are all shouting into the wind, but not listening to anyone. How did you do it? If anyone is reading this of course.  I know, I know, I should blog or journal or whatever for myself, but being honest here, an audience is necessary if this is not to turn into a form of word-wanking.  (Am I allowed to say that?  Should a 40-something wife and mother say that? Probably not. But no one’s looking so I think I got away with it!)

DH has spent today having three interviews.  Poor lamb, he sounded completely knackered on the phone this evening. One of them at least seemed to have gone well.  I have faith in him; I know he’s going to find a new job sooner or later. But i also know that he’ll fret until he does. The joys of being married to a contractor! It’s funny to see how far he’s come, from the book packer in an SF bookshop when I first met him; to bottle sorter at Coca Cola; KFC chicken slinger; graphic artist in a backstreet copy shop; graphic artist in newspapers to web designer for a major TV company.  Then to work for the army, the MoD, and now Vodaphone as an advert scheduler. Back then we could barely make the rent, now he’s earning so much money that fairly astounds both of us.  And it’s enough to be buying our first home (and our last!). I am so proud of him. Not only because he has progressed so far but because he’s done it all without formal training. No university education, no training courses. He’s done it all himself. And won a BAFTA Cymru into the bargain. I have the best husband in all the world by the way!

While I’m here and talking about husband and all, I thought I’d just cut-and-paste something I wrote for the monogamy fanlisting I built today. It is a sad thing, but when I tried to find poems and quotes about monogamy, most of them were laughing at the idea, or the writer was completely against it.  There were far more words on the subject of infidelity.  Many writers said that it was impossible to be happy and monogamous, that it is an unnatural condition and that humankind was not made to stay with only one mate forever.  And when the divorce rate is 1:3 or near enough, it would seem that monogamy is an outdated and unfashionable concept.  But I do not agree at all.

I have been with my husband since we met in 1983.  A completely faithful and monogamous relationship, that “they” say is impossible and artificially imposed.  It is not easy to stay in a monogamous relationship.  If one has any sense of committment at all, it takes courage and determination to stay together despite the problems and the ups and downs of living with somone else.  But the deep trust, understanding, friendship and love that comes from a monogamous relationship is well worth everything. After 25 years, my husband and I are still very much in love and very happy together.

Okay, before I go, just one thing. What wordpress really needs is some kind of search thing. I would love to search for blogs by women, particularly women in Wales, but at the moment I can’t find anything. Very annoying.

Oh my, I’m still knackered after yesterday. We all got up early so we could go to Hay-On-Wye for a book hunt! Thing is, we had to go through Brecon and wouldn’t you know it, it was the second day of the Brecon jaz festival. And guess who hates jazz? (Hint: me!) I hate being in Brecon during the festival as most folks seem to take it as nothing more than an excuse to be able to get roaring drunk in the street, walk around with plastic pints and be generally offensive. While there are children around as well. The main street is closed off to traffic as there are lots of food stalls and other stalls, as well as the places where (ugh) jazz is being played. Mind you, I did spot Cleo Laine in a car going to the Brecon theatre as we were walking along there to the canal.

Anyway, we wandered along the canal a bit and sat and chatted and generally goofed. We played the hat game, which made us giggle like loons. The hat game consists of spotting hats and giving them marks out of 10. Extra points are allocated to blatantly Depp hats or Pratchett hats. We tended to see more Depp-esque hats. Though there was one man we awarded the elusive 10 to as he was wearing a black beret affair, worn jauntily on the back of his head rather than on the top. We debated as to whether he was using hatpins, had especially bushy hair on the back of his head or, my idea, had very strong willpower to keep his hat on!

We got to Hay-on-Wye around lunchtime and headed to the cinema bookshop first. (It was a cinema originally and was converted into a giant bookshop on two floors.) I found an old copy of “Tales of Genji”, which was the reason I wanted to go in the first place! So that was me happy! I hope you’re sitting down because, I have to announce that DH actually bought two books! Yes, two! I nearly fainted! He loves books, but he has a more — I hesitate to say narrow — a decided idea of what he wants to read. But this time he bought an Alex Rider book (Anthony Horowitz, I should say, is the author. We both love his Alex Rider kid-agent books and read most of them before “Stormrbreaker” came out as a movie.) DD bought lots of animal behaviour and ecology books. 15 in all in fact. I bought four books from a new/remaindered shop which sold books for £1 each! I got “Double Indemnity”, a book of short stories of Inspector Rebus, Christina Rossetti poems, and a novel about India. I also got a book from 1891 of the poems of Dante Gabrielle Rossetti from Richard Booth’s shop and “The Empire Book for Girls” from 1910, from Rose’s children’s bookshop. Oh, and a Victorian photograph. I love Victorian photos.

A lot of the shops in Hay have dogs so we had to pet them all. I chatted to a nice old man in a motorised wheelchair who had a whippet with him. (My grandfather used to keep racing whippets.) And the sweetest little puppy took a fancy to my shoes and wanted to sit on them! Most people who go to Hay are combining camping/caravaning/walking holidays with a book hunt so there were lots of dogs around, enjoying themselves hugely and some puppies who had worn themselves out with Fun.

Then back to Brecon for a 50 minute wait for the bus back to Merthyr. And lots more drunks who were even drunker by this time. The bus was packed, but the driver couldn’t turn anyone away as it was the last bus. I got into conversation with two amiable drunken men who were standing beside me. One of them said I’m a bonny girl, which made me laugh! Yeees, only a drunk would say that. (And as my DH remembered, he was slightly inebriated when he met me! LOL!!) DD gave her seat to a pregnant woman and her husband said he’d buy Sprog a pint if he saw her in a pub! (Our lass doesn’t like alcohol much, though she did confess to having once drunk a whole pint of vodka and having felt no ill effects whatsoever. Lucky tike!)

We were famished by the time we got home but too tired to cook. So DH went to the chip shop and got some chips while Sprog and I made ham sarnies and tea. And then we all had baths and were tucked up in bed (in DD’s case, in her tent) by 10 o’clock, we were so worn out!

So, a lovely day and it was not too hot either, which was a bonus. It’s likely to be the last time we go to Hay unless DD or DH learn to drive. I’ll miss it, but we won’t be too badly of for bookshops. Apart from Ottackers and a Waterstones by the arts centre, there are five secondhand bookshops in Aberyswyth. And more in Cardigan and other places. Also DH has decided he wants to try selling some old books on line, as “Glan Dwr Books”. That will be fun! We have enough books to stock a good sized bookshop, even with the 10 boxes we gave away to the St David’s Hospice.

Well, yes, hello world! It would seem silly to have got this blog when I already have one at LiveJournal and a Vox.  But I once tried to fit a wordpress blog into one of my domains and failed miserably.  The thing is, I have no understanding of php or things like that (and hate them anyway) so was unable to work out how to fit the blog into my domain’s style.  In the end, I gave up. And anyway, it seemed as if it sucked up horrifying amounts of bandwidth.  So here I am instead, letting wordpress do all the nasty, fiddly code stuff. Nice wordpress, bless ‘em!

So, what to write about?  I daresay all first posts are rather bland and “oh my goodness, what to say”.  You don’t know me, I don’t know you. I can’t say go look at my LJ as it’s locked. If anyone is reading this, then just hang on, I’m sure it will get more interesting later on (I hope it will anyway).  A potted bio? Okay, well, I’m 45 and married with a 20-year-old daughter and 6 cats.  We currently live in Merthyr Tydfil, in south Wales but are moving to Aberystwyth in a month.  Our daughter is a student there and we just fell in love with the town.  We’re not actually Welsh; we came here from the north east of England in 1993 (though my husband is a  Brummie).  We’re Welsh by adoption.

Well, that will do for now. Bore da!