Ground cover on the roof

...of our garage. As far as I'm concerned, the only positive thing about autumn is the colour! I know loads of people love it but I can't help but see it as a reminder that life, death and decay are all part of the same cycle and a pretty short one at that.

Actually, this is next door's garage roof but ours is the same, and that is our wisteria busy shedding it's leaves. The photo doesn't capture the intensity of the colours but it is one of the pleasures of this time of year, seeing all the beautiful warm shades those little plants go through.

We live in a quiet close, with the entrance opposite our neighbours on the right. Our post box is just opposite the neighbours on the left and I wonder, am I the only silly woman who feels I have to dress up to collect the post? In the UK the post pops conveniently through the letterbox and onto the door mat. You can collect it in your slippers and rollers and last night's mascara and no-one will notice. Here, if I even think of nipping over in my 'bag lady' comfy clothes and no make up, it will guarantee a convoy or cars or a herd load of schoolkids on scooters will speed round the corner and catch me mid sprint! Every time. I popped over this morning looking like the Michelin man in my baggy fleece and before I even reached the gate a man's face appeared over the top waiting to hand me a telephone directory! If it's possible to 'tempt fate', how come it only work in ways you don't want?!

Robot

I have to resist the urge to moan about how rotten my October has been. Health wise it hasn't been wonderful but I mention it here only so I can look back at this in Octobers to come and hopefully feel, however cold and miserable, at least it was better than that. Just a couple of weeks ago the azalea started flowering again and we thought it was strange until I checked back on the blog and found it had done exactly the same thing last year! How quickly we forget. At least the blog is useful for keeping track of such trivia!

I drew this little guy at the weekend to try and cheer myself up. I felt sorry for him when I spotted him in the Sultan Centre supermarket in Kuwait but as I drew him I realised he has a Christmas hat on! The dreaded C word has suddenly appeared in the shops and on TV recently so I suppose it is timely!

HB, B and 2B pencil.

Tagged - 7 facts

Sally tagged me to write 7 facts about myself and then pass it on to 7 more bloggers. I've done this sort of tag twice before and as I'm extremely boring I can't think there is anything else of interest to say so these are quite trivial, sorry!

1. I have one ear different to the other - it has no curly edge! (One of my brothers has two different colour eyes, one green, one brown, so we must be a strange lot!)

2. I dislike being in confined spaces with other people - airports, supermarkets, shops, etc., and especially offices and hospitals .

3. I like to mimic accents and dialects. I think it comes from visiting relatives in West Cork every summer when I was young. The two I can't do are Scotland and Northern Ireland. New York, Liverpool and Yorkshire are my favourites! I've had four accents in total from all the places I've lived and schools I went to as I grew up.

4. I like food with a crunch or a bite - even chocolate goes in the fridge. Foods such as creme caramel, yogurt, custard or mashed bananas make me want to heave!

5. I touched a Red Knee Tarantula called Freeda (after hypnotherapy at London Zoo). She was very soft. I don't kill any spiders or insects but I make an exception for mozzies!

6. I'm not a big sports fan on the whole but right now I'm into MotoGP! My Dad and my brothers have always been into bikes and I thought I was immune but I'm a bit of a Rossi fan now. He's arguably the best but always gracious in defeat. What I like about it is that all the riders are nice guys and they all desperately want to win and all are capable of winning. Makes for really exciting races that go right to the wire! (I drew a portrait of another rider Capirossi some time ago, here.) By process of osmosis I seem to have picked up a lot about rugby in the last few weeks too - never been interested before but I'm actually looking forward to the World Cup final tomorrow!

7. I was always a cat person but in the last few years I've become very fond of dogs too. I think there is some truth in the saying that dog owners tend to look like their dogs - if I got a dog, I'd probably go for a dachshund, and as I have a long nose and short legs, the resemblance would be pretty obvious methinks! I also like black lemurs and Siamese cats - notice a trend with those noses?

I don't normally pass tags on these days but I'm going to tag the following - I'm sure they are much more interesting than me! - and if they don't want to play or pass them on , that's fine too!

Gabi
Joyce
Lindsay
Andrea
Miguel
Suzanne
Casey

Electricity boxes

I'm sure these are recently painted. I spotted them a few weeks ago in Chene Bourgeries along my usual tram route into town. It wasn't until I looked at the photo later that I realised there was a website address on the side of one of them. At last, I now know who paints these and it looks like they are all done by one man, Michel Favre!




















These two are the first ones I spotted and still my favourite - partly because they are a few feet away from the art shop and I'm usually on my way there when I'm passing them! It's just a shame they are so close together and not so easily photographed.




















This shot taken from the opposite side. I brought my camera out especially to get these and I noticed as I was sitting on the tram, two people had stopped to look and touch one of the ones I have shown here before at Place Favre. It's the first time I've seen anyone notice them but I think they are a lovely feature of Geneva. It's amazing that one man's art is displayed all over the city!

Dog sketches and Pink Floyd

I was doodling dogs last night in front of the TV from photos in a magazine. What's that got to do with Pink Floyd? Nothing of course, except that the lyrics of Nobody Home, from The Wall suddenly popped into my head. It was that line ' I've got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from' which has always amused me. I had the telly all to myself so I made myself a cuppa and flicked around for something to watch - preferably some cooking, celebrity, dieting or lifestyle crap that I'm not allowed to watch when there are boys in the room! There wasn't even an interesting trashy show to watch! And we have satellite TV, which we've been wanting for years but put off because we thought it would encourage us to watch too much! We watch even less now than we did when we only had four channels!



















Then I remembered another good line from the same song 'When I'm a good dog, they sometimes throw me a bone in'. Sometimes I wish I could tap into my subconscious mind because I think it's cleverer than me!

I did these in the sketchbook I had been keeping in my bag for outdoor sketches, the one with the blotting paper-like texture. I thought, just for once, I'll make an effort to actually fill up a sketchbook and these drawing take me exactly half way through. I'm very fickle with sketchbooks too! B pencil.

EDM 139 and TV dinner indigestion.

Last week EDM challenge 139 was to 'draw a handle' which was convenient as I was thinking of doing this anyway. This is called a hachoir for chopping herbs and a bit of an impulse buy. It's great for herbs but anything chunkier like mushrooms or peppers get jammed between the two blades! Funny, I've never seen that happen on TV! It's by Jamie Oliver and came with a dinky little cutting board, like this one at Amazon, but unlike that board, I don't have those handy storage slots. That means it sits on the kitchen draining board until I can find somewhere safe to store it where I won't reach in and take my fingers off!

I've gone off Jamie slightly in recent weeks. I'm very fickle when it comes to celebrity chefs. I first fell for the no nonsense Delia, dumped her for Annabel (great recipes for children!), ditched her for naughty Nigel (still the best) on to Nigella (my heart wasn't really in it and all that flirting with the camera is really getting on my nerves) , then Jamie with a brief fling with Bill (why does he smile after every sentence?) I think maybe Gary is next (if only he'd drop that fake posh accent!). He's a perfectionist and I can't bear sloppy! Jamie's food is great but in his latest series he seems to have taken the rustic, careless look too far. 'Course, it might also have something to do with nearly cracking a tooth on one of his bottled pasta sauces! I doubt Gary Rhodes would have let that hard piece of whateveritwas into anything with his name on it.

Something I noticed about the rise of celebrity chefs, is that every year they use some 'in' ingredients that are probably only available in tiny specialist shops in London's Soho district. In the nineties it was things like Kaffir leaves, sun dried tomatoes, Thai fish sauce and organic chocolate. Lately I keep hearing about smoked pimento powder - we don't even have self-raising flour here! Now that supermarkets in the UK stock so many specialists foods, the chefs have to think of new things to impress us with and Jamie has taken that to extremes. In his latest show, Jamie at Home (which has cleverly latched on to the journaling craze for the opening credits, showing what appears to be his own artwork and sketchbook but is actually digitally produced for the screen) he uses only his own homegrown produce. Where are we going to find those stripey beetroots and carrots, I wonder? Or those spotty tomatoes? Not only that but he uses specially built brick ovens in his very large garden - or should that be country estate? It seems to me the most important thing about any new food craze is that it has to be, at least for now, unobtainable but Jamie is going much further and tempting us with the unattainable.

Anyway, what is really great about this drawing is that I did it in between tea breaks, probably a record for me! The wood is grainy but so too is the shine on the blades which meant it didn't need many pencil strokes to get the texture right. HB and B pencil.

Face creams

Before anyone can say 'self deluded' I should point out that I do not think these anti-aging creams do anything to halt the effects of time! However I do like a nice face cream and if nothing else they do make you feel pampered! I did this drawing as something else I feel grateful for - not these specifically but I have very dry skin and I'm glad we have a nicer choice now than when I was growing up in the seventies. I remember Pond's cold cream was popular then and my mother used to use Oil of Ulay all the time, now called Oil of Olay. She also used Nivea cream in a tin with a little foil top

and Atrixo hand cream (also in a tin!) and that didn't change much over the years.

Lancome Hydra Zen used to be my favourite cream but I alternate different creams and by the time I had got around to buying some more, the packaging and fragrance had changed! I still had my old pot, empty in the back of the cupboard where I had been meaning to draw it, so while I had a couple of more empty pots, now was a good time to draw them. I find packaging interesting - I wonder why companies decide to change it so often? My old Hydra Zen (left, back row) was in a lovely glass container, the new one in a cheap looking plastic. I would have thought glass was more successfully recycled.

HB, B and 4B pencil