I also got that haircut I needed on Monday and I bought a couple of rectangle washing up bowls…one for actual washing up, and one to bathe my feet in so as not to get an ingrown toenail. It’s amazing how effective that warm soapy water is. I seem to be out of danger for the time being. That whole thing where I thought it was growing sideways musta bin an optical illusion or something.

Anyway, back with Pure Radio, and Paul recorded a last few links with me and my two main co-hosts to finish off the February show…which promises to be our best yet.

Paul has been made aware of my ideas for us to talk about bullying on the show. The mentally and physically disabled are often prime targets for those lowlife pond scum who get a kick out of others’ misery and don’t have a brain cell to share between them.

In the meantime I’ve just been recording some clips from “Open All Hours” for our comedy classic segment…Geh-Geh-Granville, fe-fe-fetch yer cloth! Heh.

I’ve just about gotten used to how that till in Banardos works now. I’ve even served a customer while my tutor was away using the loo. So the next thing for me is to update my CV with “Cash handling, Till work and Merchandising” under the Banardos section and I also gotta add my time at Pure radio to it…then everything will be nicely up to date.

I’m up in the middle of the night once more. This time it’s because my fear responses have kicked in and released adrenaline and that, overriding all my sleep chemicals.
Why fear? Well because I’ve had blood appear on my toilet tissue again after excreting some faeces…and again thoughts of the possibility of having bowel cancer are racing through my head…
It’s strange though…it’s been two or three months since the last time, and during that time my poos have been completely normal. If I’m supposed to have bowel cancer, aren’t I supposed to have blood every time I poo?
The way it seems to have started coming and going every few months or so is akin to a woman’s menstrual cycle.
It’s weird…I dunno what to make of it…I mean this poo was one of my trickier ones that took a bit of effort to shift…I’ve been having those quite a lot of late, I’ve noticed…

It’s not just my bowels that’ve given me cause for concern of late…my upper chest has too…sometimes it feels kinda tight, right across the top of where my two pecs meet in the middle…and sometimes my right pec feels like it has some kinda lump in the top of it…but when I try to feel for this lump with my hands, I can’t find anything other than my fat-filled moobs. Maybe it’s too deep down to grab…I dunno.

Other than that, I’ve just been noticing some general minor issues…for starters, my hand-eye co-ordination seems to be deteriorating…I mean it’s been pretty bad before coz of my Dyspraxia, but now…well when I try to use a box of matches, I open it enough to get one out, and as I try to get one out, suddenly I knock the whole drawer of them out of the little box. I’ve never done that before…but now I seem to be doing it pretty much every time I try to use a match.
I’ve also been hitting completely the wrong keys on my keyboard. I mean, I’ve been known to make the odd typo now and again before, but now…it’s as if I’m typing one word, and complete gobbledygook is what appears on the screen.
I’ve also noticed an occasional slight tightness in my lower stomach…not to mention tiny twinges of pain in my kidney area.

And when I was trying to sleep, I felt really cold all over even though I had a thick duvet over the top of me which shoulda made me feel really warm…and I don’t think the cold winter weather or my fear hormones had anything to do with it, that’s for sure.

There’s no use ignoring it anymore…there’s something funny going on with my body…I don’t know if it’s all just stress/anxiety related coz I’m such a worrier about something being seriously wrong with me AND ALL THESE SYMPTOMS ARE NOT HELPING or if there actually is something seriously wrong with me.

Either way, I’m gonna just have to get some medical help. So, come Monday, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. The medical center ain’t open on a weekend as far as I know.

On the plus side, I’ve managed to severely reduce the amount of times I abuse my throat with my neck muscles. In fact I think I’m more or less over that little habit as I type this.

Weight check…
…Oh hang on I best do it with my trainers on like I have with all the others so far…
15 stone 5, 97.6 kg, 215.1 lb.
You know, my weight loss might not count for much after all. One of the symptoms for cancer is “any unexplained weight loss that feels significant to you”…now I know I’m trying to lose weight by watching what I eat an’ all…but I’m not sure I should be losing as much as I am…
…says he who just realised he’s not really losing that much week by week…
…it just felt like it had gone down a lot when I saw it on the scales…but now that I look back at my weight last week…it’s only an ounce, less than half a kilo and almost a full pound.
Hey I wonder if my weight loss might have something to do with my symptoms? My body having trouble adjusting to the ever-depleting reserves of fat…hmmm…

Might be worth going to my GP anyway for some dietary advice. Tell him I’m trying to lose weight and think my body’s having an adverse reaction. Yeah…then we’ll see what he says.

I haven’t seen this week’s new MLP instalment yet…my Youtube searches so far have yielded no results…lemme try again now…
*do do-do do-doooo…*
…still nothing. Bummer. Maybe later on in Sunday.

I’ve gotten a lot further in KH1. I managed to do a whole lot of the game in just one day last Friday. I was waiting for my dad to finish using the bathroom so I can have a shower and generally tidy myself up so I started playing and just got caught up in it for the rest of the day. I’ve defeated Malificent and now all the heartless are extra strong. I’m gonna need to level up Sora and co a bit before I can go any further.

No new editing done on the Scotland trip footage. Oh dear.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, yes…on the first Saturday of February, my parents and I went to the first jumble sale of the year. It was only the Short Street one at Hazel Gravel Pit (our name for Hazel Grove)…there’s rarely much there…though this time there was this toy train set going for three quid…I think it was a Playmobil set…it looked about the right size and it certainly had a Playmobil feel about it…I was very much tempted…and decided to come back for it see if I wanted it…but by the time I decided I did want it, some old couple had swooped in and nicked it. I was a few seconds too late. Rats…oh, well…we’d have no room for it anywhere in our house anyway.
We originally planned to have a mooch about Hazel Gravel Pit charity shops but after we went to Windsor’s World Of Shoes so my dad could get some new slippers, my parents changed their mind and decided not to bother coz there were only two or three there and there’s rarely much in them. Ah, well…maybe next time.

We then went to what we call Denton tip* so my dad could dump a no-longer-functioning TV for a friend of his…and we saw a kestrel at the roundabout~ just before the turning off for the tip! Not seen one in that area for years…not since I was a cub. I remember usually seeing one hovering above the bigger roundabout just down’t hill from that first one.

*It’s actually Bredbury Parkway Household Recycling Center. We call it “Denton tip” coz, in our mind, it’s actually closer to Denton than it is to Bredbury…in fact I believe it’s right on the border between the two…and it used to be a small “chuck any old thing in any old how” kinda tip before all the hype about recycling came about.

~The roundabout I’m talking about is the smaller roundabout of the two talked about in this page I’m linking.

Well I think that’s just about everything I have to talk about this week, so until next week…

Ciao for now,

Cordially, The Blue Fox Thom.

Seventh graders learned about “Op Art”.  They came up with six different op art style designs and then placed each design on one side of a cube made from tagboard. The cubes were colored with black marker.

Teaching project based classes (as opposed to standing and speaking while, say, pointing at maps or graphs) is a bit like a presenting a short piece of performance art. I research the topic, write the lesson, or “script”, gather the props, plan the staging, then the audience arrives: TaDa! Jazz hands! And, as is often the case in this type of art, your audience is part of the performance. But sometimes they’re sullen. After the conclusion of a class last week, one of my teen attendees commented, “Pfft. Was that all?”. My lesson plan, along with my ego, collapsed like a house of cards.

14 is the cruelest age.

Well, I’m sure even Blue Man group has hecklers.

The class I am about to describe is today’s Optical Illusions class, no hecklers, everyone had a great time. Just looking at the world through colored lenses gives one a bright perspective, even after a night of gremlin sheets.

Anaglyphic Art: 1) an object embossed or carved in low relief, like a cameo; 2) a stereoscopic image made of two superimposed images printed in different colors which produce a 3D effect when viewed through correspondingly colored filters.

Materials: card stock or cheap railroad board, red, blue, green gels, tape, scissors

Take several pieces of card stock (available at any office supply store) 11 x 14 is a good size, cut in half or thirds (5.5 x 14, or 3.5 x 14) and hand out to participants, 1 pc of card strip per.

Supply scissors.

Cut colored gels: red, blue, green (available at Blicks) into 2″ x 3″ pieces (approx, large enough to cover eye sockets), hand set of 3 (one of each color)  to each participant.

Cut cardboard into gel holding devices. These can be simple: one cardboard rectangle for each gel color, tape gel to short end of rectangle and hold in front of eyes, or engineer grade: custom wrap around 3D goggles.

Red gel goes in front of left eye. Green or blue gels go in front of right eye.

Now observe:

Here is the site of a NY artist who makes 3D his home: Josh Katt’s Stereography site has a selection of anaglyphic stills, videos, a blog, links, and more. Check’im out.

Creating our own anaglyphic art by hand using red and green markers was tricky. Some were more successful than others. We traced a simple shape, then put a piece of paper over the shape, but offset by .5 inch to left, traced the image in red, then moved paper in other direction 1″ (offset main image .5 inch to right) traced image in green to have a picture that was a red/green anaglyph.

It would work better to draw a picture and then offset it in the two colors using Photoshop, but that’s a “duh” observation.

The rules of the game are as follows:

1. Lines that are drawn right on top of each other are seen on the picture plane.
2. Lines that shift the blue to the left are seen behind the picture plane.
3. Lines that shift blue to the right are seen in front of the picture plane.
4. The greater the shift, the farther from the picture plane the lines are perceived.
5. You never want to shift your lines farther apart than the distance between both eyes.
6. Shifts are always horizontal (side to side) and NEVER vertical (up and down).

Even if you don’t get the hand-made anaglyph right, you’ll look fabulous in the glasses.

If you like my posts, thank you! and feel free to stop by to “like” me on Facebook, too Cheers~

https://www.facebook.com/SarahStoneArt

http://www.Sarah-Stone-Art.com

I took this photo to show the curious optical illusion whereby it appears to have a big puddle half way up the side of the hill, but the puddle didn’t really come out very clearly on the picture. Oh well, it’s a nice shot anyway, and I know you lot like pictures of roads.

does this puddle look like it’s half way up the hill to you? No? Just me then…

For those who like illusions, here’s the puddle circled. I don’t think my career lies in taking clever paradoxical pictures, do you?