Whilst talking with Tim yesterday, I've finalised some thoughts about where I want to be travelling, career-wise. I enjoy writing a *lot*, and I think I'm pretty good at the right sort of writing. I also want to do more music on a smaller, local community scale.

I woke up this morning with the sudden realisation that there was *possibly* an opportunity to combine both aspects into the project we currently have in hand - the next CD.

I've realised that there is *never* enough room to explain the stories behind the songs in a CD booklet, no matter how big it is. The CD we're currently working on has a LOT of stories and explanations tied up with it, not to mention the pictures and illustrations.

So, I'm idly wondering if anyone out there might be interested in buying "the book of the CD" with the stories explained, expanded, retold in prose and illustrated with both artwork and photographs? It seems to me that there are a couple of different ways to approach the problem of publishing as well, depending on how interested people were in the product - sites like Lulu.com do absolutely *beautiful* vanity published hardback and softback books in both full colour and black and white. The catch is... they're expensive. There wouldn't be much profit in this, but it would look *gorgeous* and be worth doing, I think. The other option would be the way that a standard songbook is published - good quality photocopying (or litho) and spiral/comb bound. This would be cheaper, but not such a nice product.

So, I've dipped my toe into the pool of polls, to ask for your thoughts...

Poll #1185605 Would you buy a "Behind the Music" book?
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Would you buy a "Behind the Music Book"?

What format would you prefer?

How much would you be prepared to pay?

How big would you like to see it?

Just updated the In-Debt Net referencing a Daily Mail article about food waste.

Augh! I am very distressed now. How can someone throw away £35 of food a WEEK??? Just buy *less*!!!!

Spent yesterday evening in the company of bardling, who accompanied us to the Luttrell Psalter Film preview. The film is about 20 minutes or so long, and utterly, utterly gorgeous. It features Rika and I spinning and carding and our rendering of "Miri It Is" is used throughout the winter scene. We recorded two versions - one live whilst we were actually spinning, and then again in a sound studio. Of course, no-one thought to bring the rushes of the scene to the audio recording, so we were a bit worried that our audio version wouldn't be in the same tempo as the spinning version. Turns out that we did it identically both times, in both timing and pitch. Which is fairly astonishing when you bear in mind that there were *weeks* between the two recordings! I thoroughly enjoyed the film, and am looking forwards to owning a copy.

When we got home, it was time to attempt to batter CuBase and the Edirol into touch. I hadn't been able to finish installing the Edirol drivers on my own as I was sans a power supply and appropriate firewire cable. But Tim found these and by the end of the night, we had two guitar tracks down on the laptop. Yay!

I've also found out what was causing a problem with my copy of MasterWriter, and have fixed it so that I can record again. This is also a quick and dirty way of getting MP3s of single track live material, so if I owe you a song for any reason, feel free to ask me now as I stand a vague hope of getting it to you!

I know that many people out there view gardening as something akin to, or worse than, root canal work. I am not one of those people, and this comment is not aimed at them.

Being outside with your hands in the earth can be some of the best therapy I can think of. I have spent quite a while the last couple of days up on my allotment, planting potatoes, carrots, radishes, peas, mangetout, french beans and broad beans, perpetual spinach, onion sets, courgettes and squash.

My allotment looks like an allotment now, which is a good feeling. I still have some sweetcorn, a couple of different sorts of beans, brussel sprouts and some Jerusalem Artichokes to go in, but I'm almost at the point of just weeding and watering for a bit, which I'm looking forwards to immensely.

The wind and rain on my back, the pheasant's call and the cheeky blackbird who follows my spade around whilst risking life and limb in search of the fattest worms for his babies all conspire to keep me sane. Whilst I'm working, I can hear my neighbour's chickens wombling around for bugs and roots and when I look up, I can see the community orchard in beautiful blossom. Life has so many facets, and there are so many of them to be grateful for...

I've felt all bouncy and energetic the last few days. Today I feel slow, exhausted and apathetic.

The big difference would appear to be the weather - the tiredness has come over me ever since the greyness and rain started.

Who knew - I'm solar-powered!

Click here for a tale of woe, despair, very small amounts of money and cordless phones.

You'd think that by now I'd have learned my lesson. But no. I wish I could break my emotional dependance on cheap cr*p...

I am typing up a list of homemade and home-produced goodies available for sale in the cottage (thanks for the suggestion, Soren!) and realised that I have a metric ton of rhubarb available. I can't eat it fast enough, so I thought that selling it would be a good idea. I went to the Tesco online site to see how much Tesco sell it for so that I can undercut it (we hates Tesco, we does my precious!).

Tesco don't sell fresh rhubarb.

How can that be??? It's slap-bang in season and very, very scrummy. Rhubarb crumble is the ideal way to cheer yourself up after a soggy spring day. How can they not sell it? They sell rhubarb *flavoured* things such as yoghurt, but not the actual stuff itself. The closest they come is a ready-meal dessert affair called "Finest rhubarb and ginger crumble", which I can almost guarantee is much worse than the quickest, cobbled together crumble you could slap together in 10 minutes in your own kitchen.

Mark it up as one more reason to avoid supermarkets with a vengeance.

Rebel! Show your individuality! Eat some rhubarb today! Say "Rhubarb" several times and wonder at how silly a word it is! Pah.

In the absence of any hard information, I will be selling it at a pound for a pound. But may reduce that as it seems a bit expensive...

Yeah. Right. Well, Mr Prime Minister, I'm sorry to say that most of your subjects have noticed that whilst you claim inflation is really low, all the stuff that we actually have to, like, y'know *pay for* has gone up. By quite a lot.

So I'm trying a new technique to keep track of what is cheap and where.

I don't know if it will help, but right now, with rising prices, I need all the help I can get!

Well, if you've ever wondered how we actually earn our money between all the different businesses I keep mentioning in passing, this post will fill in some detail.

What we do, why we do it and how we came to do it.

There's more in the "The Build" Flickr set, if you're interested in knowing where we are now. The picture here shows the stairs down to the basement level with the study and music room doors to the right and the kitchen door straight ahead. Now that there are some actual *floors* on top of the room spaces it is getting easier to envision being in it :-)

This has been a very exciting step, as we now have some floors on the first stage of the building. The space to the left of the picture will be a hallway, a loo and a stillroom/pantry. The space to the right will be a garage which we plan on promptly filling with rubbish, in the time honoured tradition of garages. This picture shows nicely how it's all going to be split level. Down a few stairs to the kitchen, up a few stairs to the living room etc.

I had a comment on the In-Debt Net ages ago saying that the (anonymous) poster didn't believe that I didn't want to be rich, and that all women married for money (if it were true, there would be a LOT of single men out there, I suspect!).

I finally got around to a coherent posting on what I DO want, and what this debt-repayment journey is all about for me.

If you read The In-Debt Net, please do consider posting your dream in the comments - I firmly believe that articulating our dreams makes them a little easier to reach...

My new wig. Not a very flattering shot, though.It looks better from further up, but I'm not very good at this mirror photo thing.

Just so as you don't faint in shock when you see me next, this is what I look like with red hair now.

So, if you haven't seen me recently, you might not realise that my hair colour has changed. I now have quite excitingly red hair.

This poses a problem for doing the last FFM gig we have lined up, as at virtually no point in her career was Stevie Nicks a redhead (there is an argument for it based on the cover of her "TimeSpace" compilation album, but it could just be colour touch-up). However, I really needed to be a redhead for sanity's sake for a while.

What's to be done? Particularly if I want to earn a bit of dosh doing backing track work (and a large number of the backing tracks I own are of La Nicks...), I really need to be a blonde.

So, I've done what I always swore I'd never do, and have bought... a wig.

I've railed in the past about tribute bands and their excessive use of bad wigs, but this situation just called for it. I've bought a rather good wig, actually, which there didn't used to be many of on Ebay. However, the market seems to have expanded recently, and there are some really good wigs available.

So, here I am, sitting in a Stevie wig.

It looks surprisingly good!

I haz a twopay!

The current housing crises in the US and England have made me think a lot about decisions that I've made, and about how other people view us and our decisions. I really dislike the peculiarly British tendency to put others down whilst crowing about how superior our own decisions might be. As Pocket_Naomi once said, very wisely:

There are no right or wrong decisions, only the decisions that we make and live with.

Whilst reading my newest copy of "SmallHolder" I find an advert for these people:

http://www.loltractors.co.uk

Are Tim and I the only people who imagine lots of pictures of tractors with captions like, "I can haz ploughing attachmentz!" or "I is in yr Woodland, loggin!" ?

Hee!

I've had the final word on running your diesel car on heating oil. The answer is...

http://indebtnet.com/blog/?p=122

Of course I'd never do something like that. Oh no. That would be *wrong* :-) (To quote Faith in Buffy's body...)