More recycling

I wanted to share some good news today, we got our new recycling bags from the council today, I think it's great that there's so much more recycling going on now....it's maybe taken like over 20 years but at least it's finally happening.

Here's a photo of the new bag for card and plastic, they're so cute ^^

I really hope that other people use them, I do hear people making fun about people who do recycle but I think people are starting to turn around, I don't get the annoying glares when I say to people to recycle, at work now they even have boxes for paper and such, it's so inspiring. ^^ It gives me reason to hope.

Respect for nature?

A caterpillar I found in December fell out of some flowers that my sister had been given, it was too cold to put it outside so I looked after it, watched it make a cocoon and then today found that the little 'Angle Shades' moth had um hatched? ^^ I think things like this are so special it's like magic. I just wish more people could appreciate things like this...and not try to kill them at first sight.
So yes it's important to look after nature....not do something so stupid as what I captured here, seriously, what moron does this? there's a free place they can take this kind of thing just in town.

Expressing though the arts

I'm a fan of music by Nine Inch Nails, was listening to their song 'The Hand That Feeds' today and felt that the lyrics have a powerful message on well the way the world is, I really want to talk about how I feel on a lot of issues on the world but I find it hard to put it all in to words, so I guess I feel by sharing things like this I can get my point across.
I think in a lot of ways that's what a lot of people in music or in the arts are trying to do, get their point across best they can.

NINE INCH NAILS
The Hand That Feeds

You're keeping in step
In the line
Got your chin held high and you feel just fine
Because you do
What you're told
But inside your heart it is black and it's hollow and it's cold

Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?

What if this whole crusade's
A charade
And behind it all there's a price to be paid
For the blood
On which we dine
Justified in the name of the holy and the divine

Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?

So naive
I keep holding on to what I want to believe
I can see
But I keep holding on and on and on and on

I'm an artist myself and now and then I do try to express how I feel about things through my art.


I drew this picture (please click on it to view the whole thing plus the short passage I added to it) when the war started in Iraq and I guess it expresses in a way my feelings at the time upon the whole thing and how I couldn't understand why things like this were happening.

This picture I created a few years later when I guess I realised a few more things about how we're puppeted by the media and of course by the real power behind the other puppets that are our 'leaders'.

To a poet....

I heard this today on the radio and really liked it, thought I'd add it here.

TO A POET A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE

by: James Elroy Flecker

I WHO am dead a thousand years,

And wrote this sweet archaic song,

Send you my words for messengers

The way I shall not pass along.





I care not if you bridge the seas,

Or ride secure the cruel sky,

Or build consummate palaces

Of metal or of masonry.





But have you wine and music still,

And statues and a bright-eyed love,

And foolish thoughts of good and ill,

And prayers to them who sit above?





How shall we conquer? Like a wind

That falls at eve our fancies blow,

And old Mæonides the blind

Said it three thousand years ago.





O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,

Student of our sweet English tongue,

Read out my words at night, alone:

I was a poet, I was young.





Since I can never see your face,

And never shake you by the hand,

I send my soul through time and space

To greet you. You will understand.

Fined for recycling?

I've been interesting in Recycling since I was little, when we would have family parties I would leave a box out for people to put their bottles and cans in, I would glare at people when they would go to put them in the bin, I must have been pretty annoying. ^^;
I'm now so proud of the area I live in, we get lots of recycling boxes to put out and we have a nearby recycling collection point.
Sadly I don't think people are being rewarded for this, I don't ask for anything in return but it's a bit scary and I believe off putting to new recyclers when you hear about people getting finned for silly recycling incidents.
I heard just the other day about a 12 year old girl that was fined £50 when she placed some card next to a card recycling box rather than in it, the box was full at the time, where is the problem if it's next to the box? It's not her fault, she was told she should have taken it back home but then think if she lived in the country and had to make a trip the next day or the next it's not really doing anything for the environment using the car over and over.
There was another story of a guy that put something in a recycling bin that wasn't meant to, like a plastic bottle in a paper bin or something, anyway they found a letter in with them that had his address on and fined him.
I really don't think that it's good to fine people, these people are doing a good thing, what sort of example does that set to people? that little girl is going to be scared now of ever putting anything out.
We're getting new bins and a fortnightly pick up rather than a weekly, and there will be fines to anyone that leaves rubbish outside of the bins. We recycle a lot so that doesn't worry me at all, what does worry me though is we have a neighbour that would get enjoyment out of thinking she was getting us in trouble and I can already imagine the day we get a fine because she's placed a bag of rubbish beside our bin. What would we then be able to do about that?

I'm really proud of our little recycling set up ^^

It's all about sport

Imagine a big sports event is coming up, everyone is talking about it, every where you look you see it, they use it heavily in advertisements to sell anything and everything, they...I could be talking about the Super Bowl actually o.o I live in the UK and even I can tell you the names of the teams....anyway yes imagine that almost everything around you is influenced by this sports event. Now what if you had absolutely no interest in this sport?
Well that's what it's like with Asexuals and sex.
"Asexual: A person who does not experience sexual attraction"....just so you know.
This concept can be completely alien for people who are sexual, some wont accept the idea at all.
I consider myself to be Asexual, when I was growing up my friends around me would be talking about guys they had been with and getting all excited about their first kiss and well other things, I would find myself feeling apart and far from understanding why everyone else had such a fascination with the subject of sex. In sex education classes when they were giving out condoms my friends would ask why I didn't get any, I got a lot of pressure on the fact and one day even snapped back 'I'm gay!', I'm not and my friends took it as a joke but still I couldn't understand why I wasn't the same as my friends. Sometimes I would wonder if there was something wrong with me, I eventually put it down to the fact that I was just taking my time and I was concentrating in school anyway.
It wasn't until later when I was online and was able to meet people who I could talk to about such things, one friend first used the term 'Asexual' to me and when I found out more about it I realised that this was me! You have no idea the sort of relief I found in the knowledge that I wasn't alone.
I get mixed reactions to people I tell, most say 'You'll feel different when you meet the right person' or 'Maybe you should get your hormones checked out' I hate the idea of people thinking I just need to have something 'fixed' about me to change, I don't want that, I'm really happy with who I am and don't feel the need to be fixed at all!
I am still able to form close relationships with friends, male and female, I do find I'm attracted to both but purely in an (for lack of a better word) intellectual way.
There's a great web site that needs to be promoted more for people like myself who felt very lost AVEN a big thanks to the admins and the members, they do great work.

The computer game did it!

I hate hearing about how some computer game has killed someone or got someone hurt....wait what? a computer game did that?
What I mean is when computer games are blamed for influencing children in to doing bad things.

There are plenty of examples of parents reporting in papers how their kids had watched a movie or played a computer game and then gone out and replicated something they'd seen. However I have to ask what are these kids doing with these games DVD's anyway? I read a report just last week about this they were talking about a Jackass dvd, which shown in the photo clearly had an 18 sticker on the front, so how had the child gotten hold of this movie? it didn't say anything about that. Had the parent bought it for them? I'm pretty sure an 11 year old couldn't buy it themselves in the shop, did they get someone else to buy it for them?
If the latter is the case and after watching it they went out and copied something they saw in the movie then clearly there is something wrong in the way this child has been brought up.
People have to stop blaming things for the way children are today, I don't blame the games or the movies, I blame the way children are being brought up, they haven't been taught what is right and wrong correctly, what worries me is that these children are the adults of tomorrow who still wont know the difference between right and wrong. If we keep blaming everything but the way we ourselves are teaching our children then the problem is never going to be sorted.

Living with nature

Early on in my childhood I was taken by my parents in to our local nature reserves, historical land marks etc, I live in a part of the UK that's very rich in history and nature, with places such and Hadrian's wall, the lake district and Kielder forest on my door step. So I was taught very early to respect these beauty spots but to be honest I find it hard to believe that anyone couldn't...however you can go in to these amazing places and still find litter and rubbish that people who supposedly come to enjoy these places leave behind.
Is it so hard for people to just put their rubbish in their pocket and place it in a bin? we have enough of them so there really is no excuse. It's disgusting you visit somewhere beautiful and green and there's always an empty packet of crisps in your view.
I believe so much that it's important to protect what beauty we have in this world and to appreciate it, there are ways we can build that works with nature rather than against it. I know that there are many people who share my views and do what they can to try to help with cleaning up but there should be so much more to prevent people from littering and fly tipping to begin with.

I visited an area around Doncaster yesterday, it's a very beautiful and green area, I saw woods, canals and small lakes. However I also saw mounds and mounds of rubbish left by fly tippers, there wasn't a road side wood that wasn't full of the stuff! I thought my own area was bad but it's nothing compared to what I saw in Doncaster.

(some web examples of fly tipping)

The other aspect that disturbed me was the yellow clouds from all the power stations, it was a frosty still air kind of day and so the smog was hanging in the air. Being there gave me the same feeling as being in a smoke filled bar, where you know it's damaging your health but you're willing to put up with it for the short time you're there. (Gods I'm looking forward to the smoking ban coming to England)
We really have to start looking in to alternative ways of creating electricity, I'm all for windmills and solar energy, I can't understand when people say they don't want windmills being a blot on the landscape, Windmills are great! I'd rather have those than a nasty big power station! We should do more to promote cleaner energy sources.

Poem: Waiting for Star Light

Yeah I write poems, it's weird they tend to just pop up now and then and I don't know where from. I'll post some here when I feel like it.

Waiting for Star Light

Sigh away the day my friend
Till sunset and light are past
Lost are we until the end
Until each star is cast

Sit with me awhile friend
Let us talk throughout the night
What wishes will we ask and send
For stars to bless with light?

Learning to make my way through school

My education, early on in school I discovered that I could stand out through my art, that's where I was special, however schools are not set up to service the needs of such children so I suffered through spelling tests and learning times tables...learning that if I wrote them down on tiny pieces of paper I could cheat, terrible I know but I just couldn't understand the importance of being able to chime off like a robot my times tables. Spelling I learned later through chatting online, although it's something I have had to learn to over come and get over, finding that despite what topics my essays and stories were about the only thing teachers had to say about them was 'incorrect spellings'

Arts, yes I was lucky in some respects, as some teachers I had could see that I had skill and would encourage me to create things, I could always be found raiding the craft bins for materials.
The problems came later in secondary school when everything is a lot more structured, I would excel in any and all craft projects but lose out in the more academic sides. I am however a person who can adapt and I did learn over time how to get around these problems. I guess in a way sometimes in life you have to learn to be an actor, learning the script and very little more, just enough to pass.
Thinking about it all now, I did well at school, I got good grades, however I realise that we are taught to repeat a script not to understand it.
The last two years were all about 'past papers' where we weren't really taught anything new, we were made to repeat past tests and taught to fill in the blanks.
Like crosswords you read a question and fill in the blanks, at school you are taught what to fill the blanks with but not what the question means.

2 Down: You take part in ______ in order to learn to pretend to know something.

When I was at school all we had were the old Acorn computers, very very early on I have had an interest in computers, introduced to them by my parents, the old Spectrum, finding it amazing to be able to interact with images on a screen. Using computers at school I loved but never felt like we did that enough, it wasn't until I was in secondary School and managed to get on to the new Windows computer in the art room that I learned that it was possible to use these to create artwork. I would go in every break and use Paint (and solitaire of course) amazed at the new machines only beginning to grasp their potential, here was a new tool I could use to overcome my problems at school such as spelling and grammar, I was in fact the first person in my class maybe even my school to submit course work typed up on a computer, (the following week the teacher moved us all in to the new computer room to do newspapers) which gained me a whole new level of respect from my English teacher and I think was the only reason I ended up passing that class, I was being noticed for other reasons than bad spelling.
I guess I was attracted to computers for a few reasons, I was already feeling different to other people in my class, while they were all going on and on about boyfriends and the latest episodes of Neighbours, both of which I found I had no interest in, I was discovering the possibilities of computers and the information it could provide.
And discovering just how different I was to other people in my class.

The Introduction

I want to talk about who I am, I'm not sure how to start, I guess with the beginning and see what comes out.
I am the child that has lived from the start believing in magic, partly because I was brought up on Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and the Care bears. I am the girl that would come home covered in mud with snails, caterpillars and baby birds in her pocket (and still do). I have always known about respect, not just among people but to everything, animals, plants, even the rocks and the river.
I am a child that lives with a foot in two worlds, be it; Magic and Logic, Arts and science, the present and the past, on the earth and online.
I know the difference between what is right and wrong but struggle with understanding why others do not.
I see beauty and magic in the smallest of things and question the things that others accept or find trivial.
I believe there are no consciences and that everything happens for a reason, my life is prove of that, I have always felt that certain elements in life have directed me.
I always choose the path less warn...or cut straight across country.
I consider myself to be wiccan and have been so before I knew what the word was.
I am also asexual and also knew that before I found out what that was.
I believe there is more to this world than what the media tells us.
Think of this as an introduction as I plan to explain these more over time and I'm looking forward to doing so whether people read this or not.