The Morning After the Day Before 2011

Bloggie friends!

The Final Bad Poem of 2011 by Old Kitty

Ahem.

My head is the size of Jupiter

My belly the size of a monster

I ate cake with indulgence

Drank mulled wine without abeyance

So now I suffer with flatulence! Heheh!

******************

Hope your celebrations were as fun as Charlie’s!

Here he is enjoying his pressies! Oh yes, feel the excitement! LOL!

SEE Y’ALL IN THE NEW YEAR!!! (Well maybe the morning after!).

Jingle Bells All the Way!

A Poem to Make You Weep (cos it's jolly awful!)

by Old Kitty

Here is my Christmas tree

In its pot, all happy!

Decked in lights and not much else

Now all it needs are some presents!

Charlie says: I sleep in awkward pose and wait for Santa.

Bloggie friends! Charlie and I wish you all a most beautiful Holiday Season!

Tricky Kitty Reaches for the Stars!

I wish I could escape into Charlie’s head as he sniffs Tricky Kitty!

Charlie says: Crazy cat lady is not making sense.

Oh but I am!

On the 14th Dec, lovely Janice Horton’s book “Reach for the Stars” is launched and to celebrate she’s holding a “where would you wish to escape to” PARTY! Celebrations start here!

And Tricky Kitty?

A fiendish trick played on me by gorgeous Janet Sumner Johnson! She held a trick or treat party and Charlie won the trick! Yay! Thank you lovely Janet! There was an extra pack of yummy jelly beans too but I ate them. Ahem.

Dashing through the snow!

Cucumbers are Cool.

Bloggie friends!

Not much happening in Old Kitty’s world so here is Charlie and his attempt at showing some Christmas spirit!

Charlie says: I wear Santa hat for nobody.

And here is my attempt at more Bad Poetry!
*************************
Avoid like the plague by Old Kitty

Such a stick in the mud
Was Brian, the boy next door
And worse was his good for nothing brother!

But they were thick as thieves
And did exactly what was said on the tin
And were over the moon when I legged it.

Just as well I didn't peg it.

:-)
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The above is my entry to the gorgeous Madeleine’s Cool as a Cucumber Blogfest – a feast of more clichés you could shake a stick at!

Deck the halls with boughs of holly – tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-laaaaa!

Chicks, Coffee, Charlie!

bootilicious babe
brave, beautiful and brainy
glass ceilings beware!

This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.

Thanks lovely Patsy for the info about the above!

Charlie says: Mine's a cattuccino with extra sprinkle of nip please.



Wonderful bloggie friends!

I can't wait for December, can you? It means, Christmas, holidays, pressies and fun work parties (LOL!) and more presents!! How exciting! I'm excited, I hope you all are too. And if you celebrate something else not Christmas then I hope you all have a fabulous celebration too! And please may I join? Yay!

See y'all in December!

p.s lovely Madeleine is having a Cool as a Cucumber Turn a Cliche into Something wonderful blogfest! Now I normally run away from blogfests but this sounds like "something up my street"! LOL! Details here:



Jingle bells all the way!

Old Kitty - 0, Techonology - 1

Bloggie friends!

I am thankful for SOME new technology.

Seriously, for one who doesn’t own a mobile phone and never will, one who pooh-poohs e-readers and all things e-format, one who will never drive a car or learn to and one who continues to but fails to learn to swim or ride a bike or rub her tummy and tap her head at the same time, admitting to this is a Big Thing.

You see over the weekend, my pc crashed catastrophically. The only way I could revive it was to reset the whole thing to “factory settings” circa 2005/2006. LOL!

Yes I lost all my writing and documents. Note to self: always back stuff up! Grrr!

But I didn’t lose any pictures of Charlie, my angel kitties and those of my sister and her kids’ visit to England from Australia in 2009. I only managed to keep these precious pictorial memories because of these:



Yes bloggie friends, if it hadn’t been for digital cameras and their little diskettes and if it wasn’t for Boots the Chemist able to transfer photos to CDs, I’d have lost my beloved pictures too.

Charlie says: Over the weekend, I read the papers and fluff up my furrs.



p.s. I didn’t lose all my stories – luckily I sent a load out to critiquers and to myself via email so am able to retrieve these.
p.p.s. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Smile please!

Bloggie friends!

I returned home from a most trying day at work only to find these pushed through my letter box:


They are pics of Charlie taken by two different neighbours!

I knocked on their doors to thank them and was regaled by tales of how Charlie keeps them entertained by his shenanigans when he is out and about.

Well I was most touched!

Charlie says: I search for neighbourly extra treats.


Here's to ending each of your days with a smile!

And here's a purrfect way to start: a free ebook by the talented Ellen (Normanda) Whyte of a Katz Tales:

http://www.lepak.com/Katz%20Tales%20Christmas%20Givaway.pdf

A tale of a lost cat, the humans who care for him and his adventures before he is found again! Awww it's just lovely!!

And another: why not join lovely Janice Horton's launch party for her book "Reaching for the Stars" about a celebrity chef with a lurid private life who then goes missing and the reporters who set out to find him.. it's a romance! LOL! Out on the 14 December? Details here.

See y'all soon!

A Very Naughty Post - be warned! and a serious p.s. about Jack the cat

Rick of Life 101’s recent blog post about typos and their hilarious - and in his case more serious consequences - got me thinking of the working title of a recent short story I wrote.

The title was “The Last Shift”. I sent my first draft to a trusted critique partner who then immediately replied asking me if I was serious about the title of my story.

Bloggie friends! Of course I sent him “The Last Shift” not realising I had written the word “shift” WITHOUT the F.

Charlie says: I lie here, un-amused.


Pic of Charlie taken last Saturday, 5 November (Guy Fawkes’ Day), when fireworks were exploding everywhere and he was trying to be super cool about the noise!

Happy Autumn everyone!

**********************************************
p.s. I don't know if any of you were following the news story about Jack the Cat who was lost by AA Airlines cargo people (baggage handlers dropped his cage and he fled) in JFK airport? He was found after two months, starved and wounded. He's now gone to the Bridge. Just read the news here. I'm so sorry Jack for what was done to you. Run free now.

Darkspell, Fangs, Rumpy pumpy and Bad Poetry!

A Bad Halloween Poem by Old Kitty

It’s time to stir the witch’s brew
And bake a cake with a spider or two.
It’s time to dress up as a ghoul or a monster
And turn the cat into a bright orange lobster!

It’s time to go out and trawl the streets
Trick or treating for some gooey sweets!
It’s time to turn off the lights and stay unseen
It’s time to scream out “Happy Halloween!”

Charlie says: I search for treats only.

Bloggie friends!

Do you like magic? Here is lovely Elizabeth Mueller’s book Darkspell launched today!


Winter Sky believes she is everything ordinary . . .until she is kissed by Alex Stormhold. As seer of Stormhold Coven, Alex is sworn to be Winter’s protector against the darkness that hunts her. Violently thrust into a magical realm she always thought impossible, she stumbles upon a disturbing secret of her own. Will love prove thicker than magic?

Available here.

Or vampires? Gorgeous Theresa Milstein's story Allured is in Fangtales "an anthology of vampire tales for teens".

Available here

And if you like a bit of rumpy pumpy Texan style - good ol meat eating "lettuce is the devil disciple" Travis Erwin's book Feedstore Chronicles will be launching on 1st November! Details here.








Phew! Off I go to make way for November at last! But just to say: I love my vegetables and am a proud vegetarian! LOL! Take care y'all!

A salute and a tiny boost for a big ego!

Bloggie friends!

To whoever decided to get a perfectly good apple, shove a stick in the middle of said apple and THEN dip the lot in thick milk chocolate instead of toffee – I SALUTE YOU!

:-)

Now bloggie friends! This came just in time to give me a little writerly ego boost!

If you scroll down the list of accepted submissions, you can just about catch “A Haiku by Jennifer Domingo”! Yay!

I’m particularly happy about this because The New Sun Rising publication has been fraught with difficulties but I think the publication itself has been salvaged. The hope is that it will be out as a commemorative anthology in time for the anniversary of Japan’s devastating tsunami. So double yay!

Charlie says: I smell for introoders.


Is it nearly November already!!??!

Highlighting dense fluff

Bloggie friends! These are some of my highlights in the past week:

I baked Herman! He was very yummy if a little dense! LOL!



I entered this writerly competition. Unfortunately I saw it the day before the deadline and rushed off an entry with the minimal edits and re-writes. I doubt I’ll get anywhere! Let that be a lesson to you all budding writers – never rush your stories!

I tried my hand at “fluffy American pancakes” with varying degrees of fluffiness success!


I swooned at the Aussie vs All Blacks rugby game (the match was pretty awesome too LOL!)

Charlie says: All week I search for autumn.


Yes, bloggie friends! It’s only 68 days to Christmas!

Herman - my new best friend

Bloggie friends!!

Meet Herman.



Herman is a friendship cake mix. And yes, a friend gave me this mixture. Hoorah! It’s great to know I have friends. LOL!

Apparently I’m to look after the mixture for ten days. I’ll need to stir, talk (ahem), mix and add stuff to it.

On the tenth day I divide the mixture into five. I keep one part and then give the rest to four others.

Of course I hope I find four other friends to whom I can offload Hermans 1, 2, 3 & 4 to! Oh dear!

I then add lots more ingredients to my own Herman mixture and bake.

Come back in a few days to see how my own fiendish Herman fares!

Charlie says: I sit on the router and scramble the network.



See y'all soon!

Through the net curtain darkly

As I continue to edit my short story for this competition, Charlie sits on next door’s posh shed admiring his potential feathered snack.

Disclaimer: Picture shot surreptitiously through my net curtains! LOL!


Charlie says: I admire how tall the fir tree is.

(I think there's a lesson about perspective here! Thank you, Charlie!)

Happy October!

Today is a Yellow Day for Livestrong!

Bloggie friends!

Today, Charlie and I are pledging to go yellow for Livestrong Day!



Set up by the Lance Armstrong Foundation, Livestrong seeks to “fight to improve the lives of people affected by cancer” through raising funds, organising support groups, etc.



Comments are off for today in the hope that you visit the above links, share your own personal experiences (if you wish) of this disease or just make a pledge to wear yellow and/or donate and/or just find out what Livestrong is all about!

Have a lovely Sunday!

83 freckly words

Bloggie friends!

Finally posted my submission
All week it took me to write.
83 words for this here competition!
Now it’s time for a chocolate bite!

:-)

I have another story I’d want to write for this week, so my blogposts will be scarce again (stop cheering at the front!) but I will visit y’all as always!

Apart from this Wednesday. I am totally off-line this Wednesday!

Charlie says: I continue to snooze and show my freckly toepads.

Pic taken yesterday (Sunday).

Enjoy!

Fright night

Bloggie friends!

The nights are drawing in, there’s a little bit of autumnal weather in the air, I continue to pretend it's summer and this headline just frightened me:

Snow forecast for Britain in October (source)

LOL!

And here is Simon’s Cat doing something we with furry friends could so easily relate to.




Charlie says: I snooze now.


Have a fab weekend everyone!

Thaaar she blows!

Bloggie friends!

I may be sporadic with my blog postings this week (stop cheering at the back! LOL!) cos I’ve decided to try and crack this writing comp (thanks to the ever so fragrant Patsy and fab womagwriter) and need time and space to do this.

That’s the plan anyway!

In the meantime, today is MEOW LIKE A PIRATE DAY! And here is Charlie being all pirate-y!


Thank you to the ever so creative Jan of Jan’s Funny Farm for the fabulous graphic of Charlie!!



May y’all have an oooh- arrrrr and if you prefer, an oooo-er missus kind of week! Yay!

Of course I’ll be visiting y’all as much as I can!

Trains, bakes and giants

Bloggie friends!

What does one do when unable to travel to work and forced to take a precious day’s leave because all trains to London have been cancelled due to “overhead wire problems?”

Bake cookies!


Thank you lovely Martine of Silencing the Bell for Beths’ Famous Oaty Cookies recipe.

The cookies were so easy to do and so so so so so yummy!

Thank you National Express East Anglia train company (not).

Charlie says: Now I sit on your glasses and look even more gigantic.


Have a fabulous weekend everyone!

Mistaken identity

Bloggie friends!

The fruit below is a quince! Not an apple!

All this time I thought these funny small trees growing wild in the estate where I live were just dwarf apple trees producing this really weird looking apple.

Except that they weren't apples, they're quinces. LOL! And the great thing is that Sue -the nice lady who looks after the estate - says I could pick them to my heart's content and make jam out of them! Yay! Cos you mustn't eat them raw as apparently the flesh is bitter.

Charlie says: I look like a giant kitty in this pic.



Have a fantastic Thursday!

Party of the Willow

Bloggie friends!

Today, I've gatecrashed adorable Talli Roland's celebratory launch of her second book "Watching Willow Watts"!

The theme of her party is to come as your alter ego. So without further ado:

"If I could be anyone, I'd like to be..."

RIZZO! Only as played by the wonderful Stockard Channing in Grease (1978).

Why? Cos she's a Pink Lady! She wears black pencil skirts! She's a bad girl with a fragile passionate heart! And Stockard Channing steals the show from gorgeous Olivia Newton John's Sandy after she sings this song.



About Watching Willow Watts: available here and here.

For Willow Watts, life has settled into a predictably dull routine. But everything changes when a YouTube video of Willow's epically embarrassing Marilyn Monroe impersonation gets millions of hits. Instantly, Willow's town is overrun with fans flocking to see the 'new Marilyn'.
When a former flame returns seeking the old Willow, Willow must decide: can she risk her stardom and her village's newfound fortune on love, or is being Marilyn her ticket to happiness?

Charlie says: I watch and I learn


Happy Wednesday! Go Talli!

THANK YOU!!!

Bloggie friends!

I just wanted to sneak in a huge THANK YOU for your kind words and time reading my little silly story yesterday! Awwww you are all shiny sparkly stars!

Charlie says: I sleep now on your writerly pad.



Happy Tuesday!

My story on a postcard

Bloggie friends!

Are you able to fit a whole story on the back of a postcard? The answer is YES, YOU CAN!

Here’s mine! LOL!

And the lovely Ellie Garratt’s and gorgeous Margo Benson's too.

But typical me I’m reading my story and thinking – yikes – it ain’t finished, needs more work – why on earth did I send this story, tis melodramatic rubbish...!

Ahem.

Charlie says: You get postcard, I have toys and treats.


Thank you wonderful Suzanne of Four Crazy Cats for this very special surprise for Charlie! As you can see he couldn’t wait for me to open the box properly - he went completely doollally!

Happy Monday everyone!

Lockers in the Amazon

Bloggie friends! Yay it’s Friday!

And did you hear about how Amazon are planning to install “lockers” in shopping centres/areas – the idea being that you order from Amazon then pick up your orders yourself in these lockers? I found the news article here.

Good idea? Bad idea? Apparently it’s already a reality in the US! Really?

It’s just we have zero tolerance where I work for using the work address to have personal stuff delivered and I’m never in when my Amazon packages arrive – but luckily I’m able to collect my packages from the post office later – so it’s not a problem really.

Anyway! Today is MO CATS DAY!!! More cats on the internet equal a very happy Old Kitty!

Thanks Ann of Zoolatry for the graphic!

Charlie says: Fresher catnip than these equals a very happy Charlie.

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

One day I shall write a story about this...

Bloggie friends!

I may have gotten the art of feigning nonchalance as yet another woman puts on her make up during my train commute to work but I'm yet to do the same when a man decides to change his shirt and shoes and comb his hair while the train chugs along into London.

Charlie says: I run inside from the rain.


The weekend beckons bloggie friends! Yay!

53 Shiny New Words

Bloggie friends!

I am horrified to report to you all that I wrote a total of 53 words of my shiny new short story after taking Tuesday off to do be all writerly creative.

That’s from starting at 9 am sharp and finishing… just before midnight! LOL!

Yes, I got most stuck delivering that oh so important knock-out first sentence!

Oh but I did rustle up a mean courgette cake and baked a pizza from scratch! Yay!

Charlie says: I discover the bath tub. I do not like it.


Happy Midweek!!

Sheepish things

Bloggie friends! Look what I discovered yesterday:

1) This is Wool Week! It’s a week to encourage lots of woolly ideas like knitting and hugging sheep! Of course there is a serious side to all this wooling about - apparently sheep population is declining and the wool industry is going through a very woolly phase at the moment from the rise of the use of synthetic fibres. Crikey!

2) The ever so fragrant and beautiful Doris Day’s new album in 25 years was released yesterday! Yes, The Doris Day! She with the voice like “syrup dribbling over corn” – someone else on the telly (I can’t remember who) said that, hence the quotation marks.

My Christmas wish list has begun!

3) It truly is only 110 days to Christmas.

Charlie says: I want new blankie.



Thank you all so much for your kind words about my stinky poo poem yesterday!! You are all shiny beautiful stars!

A Tale of a Tail

Bloggie friends!

I started writing this stinky poo of a poem on my commute to work yesterday and thought I’d hold its world preview here - you lucky things!!

Consider yourselves warned! LOL!

***************************

Charlie’s Tail by Old Kitty

This is a tale of Charlie’s tail
A feline limb, a magnetic broom
Of fur and fluff
It drags with it
All of Nature’s best
And unwitting beasts
Clumps of mud and stray twigs
Lost leaves – dried and shrivelled
Even ants with their military might
Do not stand a chance
As Charlie’s tail sweeps all under him – a quiet hurricane.

********************************

Charlie says: I turn off pc for your own good.

:-)

Of Cobs and Best Tokens

Bloggie friends!

Before I show you my yummy Cob bread, does anyone need extra bonus tokens from Best magazine for their short story competition?

The tokens were published each week in their mag plus extra ones.

So if you’d like an extra two please do email me! You need to have four to enter the competition.

I have my story all written for it – I’ll never win but YOU MIGHT!!

This is a great opportunity to crack that oh so elusive and ever so shrinking commercial women’s magazine fiction market. Thanks lovely womagwriter and Patsy for the heads up!

So, without much further ado, here is my Cob! Ta-da! I halved the amount of the ingredients from this recipe!


In the meantime, Charlie gets high on pruned bits of old potted catnip!


Have a fantabulous weekend everyone!

My Staycation temptation, part 1

So far, I baked this chocolate chip banana loaf but do not understand why all the chocolate chips sank to the bottom? LOL!


In the meantime, Charlie helps me tidy the bed.


Tomorrow I shall wow you all with my next baking project.

Bloggie friends, I hope to introduce you to … The COB! (It’s a big round bread thing!)

p.s. Has anyone been tempted by Bad Blogger’s very tempting “Try the updated Blogger interface” link that it insists on putting up on my dashboard?!?! Bad blogger! I just know that if I do click on this link it'll all end in (my) tears! So I won't, na-ah!

Holidays are such fun! Love you all!