My brother came down today and we got to messing around in the garage. This is the end result...

Here's a really odd star shaped light we got for Christmas.



It's plugged into this four-way under the stairs:



Note the bright orange lawn-mower cable. The other end of that cable is here, in the garage:



That weird silver thing is called an inverter and basically converts 12v DC into 240v AC. As you can see here, it's all hooked up and into the whole car battery that's permanently being recharged by a solar panel:



As you can see it's already working hard charging up digital camera batteries and mobile phones. Now it's also doing this:



That's being totally lit by the car battery in the garage that is recharged from the solar panel on the porch roof!!!

I know that there are in-built huge in-efficiencies throughout the system. In an ideal world I'd pipe in 12v and use a million and one different in-car adapters for the phone and the laptop and I'd modify the light too. But in a practical sense, having a normal mains 4 way that runs off the system is much more useful...

Graham

OMG one whole month went past!

There's a month just gone by. But on the plus side, the garden is well under control. And I am still writing, albeit quite slowly. And I've done the entire middle bit of the year planner for 2011. Except for the quarter days, but they can be done in the next couple of days. Either way it's a long way ahead of the game and the earliest I've every done it. And I got the glass paints out with the children and did some night-light holders too.

So, all in all it's not so bad. I think given all the demands on my time, I'm doing alright in terms of my creativity. I really want to get on and do some metal casting which will mean making statues first of all.

Grahan

Different way to be creative!

Hi

I haven't made much progress on my many projects, but since the weather's improved in the last couple of weeks I have spent more time out in the garden. I think with three children to look after and three different jobs I've got to give myself a bit of a break and try to have a rest as well as getting on with writing and making things.

Graham

Past the block

I've been thinking over the past few days and I think I've worked what I'm not happy about in my main book that I'm writing. So I've amended a bit and now it feels much more natural and "right" so I'm making progress again. Hopefully I'll finish the Dark Age section and that'll be about 40% of the way through.

I've also made a breakthrough on writing stuff for eldest DS to read - I've come up with a good mechanism to introduce traditional British folk stories.

Graham

Creative Writing

Yesterday I was walking up to the Post Office and I saw a CD lying in the grass. A recordable CD with "AC/DC Back in Black" written on it. I took it home and today on the way to school we had a bit of Hells Bells. Except when they came to the final few seconds I expected it to chew up and stop.

You see, what must have been 25 years ago my older brother went to University, taking his record collection with him. I bought a box set of 12 C90 cassette tapes - for the price of ten, with their own case. The case was black and shiny plastic with a clear window where you could see what was inside. Each of the twelve tapes I then used to record two albums by one artist. There was an AC/DC tape, and an Iron Maiden one, and Motorhead, and I really can't remember. Saxon, almost certainly and definitely Hendrix and Deep Purple. One artist had two tapes - maybe Iron Maiden? It had a beauty and a symmetry because each tape just had the name of the artist on the sleeve and on the tape the right labels were stuck on nice and straight. With the album names and track listings all copied out. And they all fitted into the box, arranged in alphabetical order. I can see it now as clearly as I could twenty five years ago.

Anyway, this was the middle of the eighties so we had a music centre, where you had to press record, play and pause, put the needle on the record and then take off pause. Once you'd wound the tape past the lead-in bit, with a biro. So when we did the AC/DC tape, Back in Black side, something went wrong with Hells Bells. About ten seconds from the end, the tape goes squiggly and Iain says something. It's just a syllable and only a second. But I listened to that tape so many times, especially once I'd learnt to drive that I still expect that drop-out to be there.

Even though I've lost the tapes, and can't actually remember the last time I listened to a tape instead of a CD, music still has the power to go straight to your subconscious and yank out some memories.

Now I'm drawing

I've started on the illustrations for my 2011 Lunar Year Planner. I always thought I couldn't draw too well but I'm quite chuffed with how it's been going so far. I'm away from my scanner so it'll have to wait until I can show what I've been up to!

Still here!

Just a quick post to say I'm still here! I work evenings for a printers that mostly does diaries. At first I thought it might slow me down a bit because I do sixteen hours a week with Quark so I'd be less likely to want to do any work when I was at home. But recently I've become fired up with the ideas for my writing.

Don't want to say too much til I've got something down on paper. But it does feel good that my creativity is still there. I wonder if it's seasonal as we're just past Imbolc and it does feel like spring is coming, even though the weather man says that next week will be wintry.

Graham