Have a wonderfull week 

Have a great Sunday sharon

Hi Sharon

Thanks for your great posts, they are always good.

Happy Weekend 

Did you see?

2 crazy games, I also was really thinking that the final would be Barça x Ajax.. Le'ts wait for the final match.

Take care my friend.

Have a nice day and hope all gosewell

Hello again, Sharon and Super Friends/Family 

Thanks for all the gorgeous messages you've sent me, they're all highly appreciated, and more than a little welcome.

I've been very busy making "narrative terrain" for myself and a club, so the mess in my studio area has to be seen to be believed, but the things coming out of it are spectacular.

I have taken on a Padawan/Grasshopper/Apprentice to help with the workload, seeing as she is a member of the club I'm doing the work for, actually gets my level of weird, and is unemployed, so has time to spare, and needed help with her painting and model making skills, so I told her to bring a chair to my house (Okay, so I have three worktables and only one chair. My dark little secret is out now, and my shame knows no bounds), and we went from there.

She's also a natural-born forager like myself, so our daily walks together are paying dividends while we take the air between sessions.

We found a whole skip/dumpster full of discarded cardboard seed pots, asked the shop the skip was in front of if we could take some, and then phoned her boyfriend to bring his van to where we were, and took the whole lot 

So now we have absolutely 100's of rough cardboard pots to work with (Like you get in packaging for electrical goods), a huge amount of blackboard spray paint from the discount store, and our joint imaginations working overtime and creating weird and wonderful terrain for both the club and our own needs.

I ran into a woman I haven't seen for years this weekend, and she has changed so much for the worse, as she's in a relationship with an abusive, married man (He's married to another woman), and she looks so run down and tired, that I hardly recognized her.

He's gotten her so stressed about her weight, that she is now both bulimic and anorexic, and that's left her almost skeletal, depressed and ill beyond measure, and all because he likes his women ultra-thin.

I'm trying to help her since meeting her again, giving her as much support as she needs, but until she lets go of her abusive partner, and finds herself again., there's going to be an ongoing uphill battle all the way.

I've offered to help get her away from him, but she keeps saying he'll leave his "fat" wife if she gets her weight down to what he says she needs to be, and she actually believes what she's saying, which is at the heart of her problems.

I'm not getting too far involved in this situation, for my own good, as until she turns herself around and gets out of his influence, there's not much that I can do that will help her, apart from listening to her when she needs to talk.

The cats are all out basking in the current sunshine and good weather, and the local ferals are all pretty healthy too, eating in my back garden, and now allowing me to stroke them for short periods.

I managed to treat a couple of them for ticks/fleas, which didn't go down too well, as I had to apply the medication between their shoulder blades, making them wet, and got more than a couple of bites and scratches for my troubles 

Also, as if I didn't have enough to do, I've applied for a part-time job in town, at a new discount shop that opened, just to fill some time and bring some new faces into my social life if possible.

The shop is run by a Chinese couple, who know me and what I do for the community, and by the look of things, I'm the only person who's applied for the post so far, so hope springs eternal, and I may yet get the job 

Health wise, apart from a crushing dose of hay fever, I'm doing fine, eating well, getting plenty of daily exercise, and am in very high spirits as usual, and people here are smiling again, as the sun is shining at last, yet there are always some who are complaining about the weather being "too warm."

The tourists are causing havoc in the town, blocking the pavements and wandering around so slowly that no-one can walk past them, so tempers are flaring among the natives, and the tourists are annoyed at hearing Eastern European accents in every shop they go in, expecting to be met with an Irish welcome, but getting an almost unintelligable greeting in a foreign language instead.

Ennis now has a greater population of Polish/Lithuanian/Slovakian and Romanian people than native Irish, and almost everyone working in the shops/stores/hotels/bars are from that population, so the tourists are very upset that the traditional Irish bands they listen to are mostly made up of Eastern Europeans (I saw a Korean man playing the fiddle, AND singing in Irish, in one bar), and not Irish people.

The "Trad" (Traditional Irish music) bars are full of foreigners, yet the American sports type bars are full of Irish people, listening to American pop music, wearing American designer clothes, and drinking American imported beers.

My cooking has come on in leaps and bounds, and now I'm dipping my toe into the area of cake making, thanks to finding a recipe book in a drawer, and seeing some simple recipes that I (rather overestimating my skills for a moment) decided to try.

I'm very much into eating raw vegetables right now, and ate a whole bag of Brussel sprouts in one go the other day.

Suffice to say, I had to open all the windows and doors afterwards 

No wonder the cats are all staying outside, even at night 

Well, my work table is beckoning me once more, so I'm away to make something, so will end this here, and get back to you all later.

Love and hugs all round

Paul 

Hi Sharon,

You win this game, I can't beat you

Still so excited about snow I see