wrestling vikings.

Also today the hampster died.

The stupid dog is in the frame for lamb killing after picking up a two day old corpse & strutting it proudly in front of the nastyiest neighbours of doom. StreSSSSSS.
and then a grass fire 25 miles away.

time managment? realistic goal setting ? forward planning ? got my nose so far into Wendy drawing at the moment , but still behind my schedule. 9 hours yesterday without pausing to get dressed or anything & still behind schedule, damn day to day functioning, chores, resposibilities & putting out fires ! theyre getting in the way of my ArT dammit. Discovered a new source of handsome men tho , hurrah ! my daughters kerangg posters & magazines, theres a nice proportion of cheekbones in the ROCK world.
had a nice little stove fire yesterday, smoke getting into house thru knackered chimney etc, i did some balancing on top of roof, getting smoked & soaked action, suffering today tho, coff coff.

and made 100 badges for a viking event this weekend, which is held at the heritage Centre who are trying to rip me off over my shop, i could always ask the 20 or so Vikings who are coming to do some hacking & maiming for me, slash, burn , Kill....

All these tasters are all very well , but i dinnae want to spoil the story. So in the meantime please laugh at Wild West Wendy's gran in reference photo.But don't laugh too much, shes kind of grumpy.

Its spring ! The daffs are out; my dogs are ridden with ticks; the labrador keep running away to chase the mangey chav jack russel doon the road; Bob the gender confused parroqueet is trying to do courtship dances with me, the cat, or that nice shadow on the wall; and all sleep and paid work is lost as the Bristol Comics Exhibition deadlines loom.

having funky dreams tho, warzones where a helicopter drawn by Jock flew to the rescue, and being cuddled by a 20 foot robbie coultraine as a film extra in surreal medaevil costume drama... thats what happens when you draw sloppering fat kids.

Chapter 2 of wild west wendy is done, only 3 to go in minus time. no i'm not panicing noooo.
I'm praying , like Wendy, that great Grud himself will bestow me with a living wage, 6 extra hours a day, and a shot gun that i too may dole out justice to the unclean, the unrighteous, the unholy , and the gruddam un-interesting.


actually scrap unclean, i can live with that one.
damn computers, i can't post this post. my scanner won't scan, photoshop won't photoshop...bah

what is muirburning ?

well see how in those photos in the previous post, theres not a lot of vegetation on them there hills ? well this glorious man made boggy desert is maintained in part by the highly pointless practice of muirburning, whereby estate managers & crofters set fire to the hills in the spring, to burn away any palry grass or heather which had previously attempted to grow there.

It might be to encourage new grass shoots for the grouse, but no-one hunts grouse here, possibly its to encourage new grasses for the plague of over populated un-culled red deer that no-one wants.

But this important thing is its tradition, illegal, life threatening, costs the tax payer squillions , destroys forestry, property, sterilises the soil , kills nesting rare birdies, adds to greenhouse gasses, killed a firefighter from this village in 70's, but hey, its tradition. 

 sure is pretty on a day like today. Shame i was stuck indoors cleaning carpets for 10 hours. oh joy.







Thats my hoose behind white specs to left of second pic.
If the weather stays dry, idiots will be muirburning all weekend, so I'll be knackered.

meanwhile there was lots of nice art at the house we were cleaning over in Kyle of lochalsh, 25 miles away. I spotted a watercolour view of our village, then recognised the name... yeah me, it was one I painted in 1982, 24 years ago !!! very bizarre.! s'gotten me inspired tho.

Alas My friends i have strayed from the path of true blogging. yeah verily i was seduced by the wanton lure of myspace, link its basically a ginormous mutual advert for people mainly musicians, who all pretend to have loads of friends , its a great way of listening to unsigned bands, if you can find them in the squillions. or its a great way to get depressed because they're not real friends & you havent got as many friends as they have & your friends aren't so cool & famous & are uglyer.
everyone on my space is very smiley & pretty, thats also depressing in its simpering vainity, wheres the bloody humour ! anyway, Thargs my friend now, he's green & everso sexy, but he claims to be 29, when we all know he's of indeterminal age. like me.

all of which detracts from the shuddering horror of approaching deadlines, the size of the application form for the art worker job & the fact that i should have heard by now about the animation filum, is that late post or a knock back ?

Easter Sunday.

, we went to roll our painted eggies at Balnacra, the site of our old House. The girls wanted to go back there. strange after nearly 6 years.

Its always hard after all the bad stuff thats happened since then. Everything has really over grown, but sadly the sheep are getting in otherwise it would be a nice mini wood, tho the actual house is all gone theres all these childrens artifacts in the garden.




But it was great to play again in our woods, even tho they too have been trashed by the hurricanes of the last two years.

and then we were tiny unrecognisable specs in the backround of the time team, which was nice.

Goddamn it this towns quiet, too quiet, anyone would think the townsfolks have all gone to bed early in the anticipation of un-holy pagan Easter eggs tomorrow. Well no goddamn easter bunnys coming here lessn i says so.

sheesh. random round up.

computer probs can't get crisp version of Wendy pages sorted.
gone into grump with results so far. muuuust do better !

a day of hotel work serves as nice reminder of why i need to focus on making pennies from art.

spotted an 'art worker' job in paper with my name on, working with kids who are carers. sounds great. shall apply.

got myself a solicitor on board to deal with the problem with my shop. 
Hurrah, My car has actually passed an MOT, i thought i needed to buy a new one this month. thank the gods of spiralling debts for that favor.







* its all a shame really cos history, archeology & the whole link to the past thing is still one of my obbsessions, but stuff them, i'll keep my crannogs & hut circles to myself.

after.

At Last ! Wendy is a flowing, Ive been tearing my hair out trying to get a minutes peace to get on, but shes on (tight) schedule again, so don't panic boys our favorite moral crusader is here to bring the love of jesus into the black heart of the wild west, and theres nothing can stop her... or is there ?

bah our local magazine lied about the time team programme, maybe next week ?

however this is compensated by this strip;
http://www.2000adonline.com/?zone=input&page=thrillviewer&choice=stagparty

i shall enjoy putting to the sword all those involved. Eeeeveryone knows that Trout is already married, and Queen Fatty-bou would never stoop to such a anachronistic patriacal ritual , bah ! and thrice bah ! why i can't even spell it.

nice one boys. but yur still deid !

home again. It'll take a month to de-condition myself after such an intense week. I miss my boys ( and girl ), 
theres so much will come out of this, hopefully i'll get time to work on it all, i'll be looking into further modules & qualifications which is sommat none of us have ever done. squillions of training i'll need to do here locally. Its really cool for me to feel like part of the 'real' fire & rescue service, we're always felt that retaineds ( part time ) were very seperate from the big clever proffessional whole timers. I've never trained with whole timers before, & have been at some incidents in the past where they've certainly treated us like the village idiots. But actually considering these guys have been to many thousand incidents to our couple of hundred, and that theyve had years more training, have tonnes more equipment & resources, get paid six times as much, considering these things, we highlanders did pretty damn well actually. we ROCK !

hey hey ! sooty bou grabbing a second to log in !
been to more fires & crashes n stuff this week than i'll get in a year or three at home. Its been great fun, hopefully ive got over that whole irrational fear of rubber mask darth vader stumbling around in pitch black places on fire thing that we do. I've lost count of how many heroic deeds we did & lives we saved...killed the off one here & there. and we actually got one incident today where the instructor said we'd done good !! alleluilia !


i only got one shot of being the incident commander ( boss ) , but lo ! it was a goodie, a crashed plane in the woods, a pilot wandering around, an anxious landowner, another pilot still stuck in ejector seat on ground looking like a dead green dummy, all sorts of possible hazchem & munitions posibilities, i had two fire engines at disposal, great fun , but full on !

Ive got some great photos to post when i get home, gotta dash, loads to do before rendezvous with 4 watches for possible incident in local pubs.

love sooty vik x

DAY 2 fire course

This course is great ! I'm still pretty nervous about the practical excersises, which are about to start in half an hour, but the whole team on the course are great. Theres the occasional patronising comment towards me & the lad from Skye, but its well intentioned & i know that teh 6 i'm working with in my engine are going to help me out . In a way its going to be much easier than at home, cos we have all the fancy equipment here, .

We've been kitted out with Breathing Apperatus & cutting gear, so we're predicting a small house fire & car crash for the One pump afternoon excersise. By thursday we're talking high rise collapse & ships on fire.




laters x

FIRE COLLEGE !

sadly i'm not clever enough to hi-jack college computers with my camera & shop you photos , but this place is NUTS.

first the journey, yes 14 hours to get from sunny village of the damned to...whereever we are in England, moreton on marsh. we were about to take off in our ikkle eastern airways plane from Inverness, when Lo... one propeller started making a nasty clonking noise & wouldnt turn. many many hours later they flew us to manchester instead of birmingham in another plane, then eventually buses us to birmingham, where our car then took us to Moreton.

Apparently its an old RAF base, & at 11 last night i thought i'd walked into boot camp from hell. Its huge, the uniformed bloke who greeted us was terrifying & the gaggles of drunk uniformed police cadets didnt inspire me with much either.

This morning the 23 students on this officers course gathered, their gold stripes & general bling uniforms glistening almost enough to drown out my moth eaten dog haired non-rank no-stripes status. " yes i'm watch commander at so-&-so , we get 12 000 calls a year "... er "i'm vicky no-rank, i get around 30 ". I then spend an hour or two being completely freeked by listening to an 'intro' in a trillion things i'd never heard of, it was an anacronym anoraks heaven.
However when we joined into smaller groups, our "watch " for the next week, alles became a bit clarer. in my crew we have a completely intimidating bunch of experts, you may have seen them on the news at major famous disasters. However so far so good, no-ones rolling their eyes or laughing at me, and i seem to be holding my own.

The practical facility here is the best in europe, the fire-ground is huge, it has a fake commercial building, house, substation, ship, jet, five other sizeplanes, motorways a level crossing & train crash, tankers left right & centre , theres a spectactuar collapsed multi story building, and apparently tomorrow we get to use real water & real foam , in real smoke n fire. Ive never seen anything like it , its like DISASTER town. wierdly enough they actually had a real plane crash once into the field with pretend crashed planes. spooky !

right my friends, i must away to the pool. tough i know. farethewell.

apparently the TIME TEAM programme that we were hanging about at is on the sunday 9th april at 17.55pm. we were only there last day, possible in shot on final round up speech by Tony. I think Ishie had blond or bluey hair at the time. The Broch they found was brilliant, nice bits o pottery etc which is cool cos theres very very little local clay deposits.

neuro linguisticly programmed.
Aieee! ive been brainwashed.
spent this week on a really interesting & useful Business start up course, when what i really need is a business closing course. Learnt loads of useful stuff that people like my accountant have utterly failed to explain to me all these years. So i'm ready to kick some major ASS regarding my property & the attempted enforced buy out... however i'm too busy to kick ass this week, i'll kick it on my terms , when i say so.

beyond the consious words and learning on this course, very interesting stuff going on. The Course tutor is trained & training in hypnosis & neuro linguistic programming, basically Derren brown stuff, he told us a fair few things, including the fact that no-one can actually be hypnotised to do things they don't want to, its a method of removing inhibitions & psychological barriers but impossible to use cohersion.
But i was watching him closely how he played the group dynamics, man it was subtle stuff ! directing key concepts to individuals with gestures & eye contact etc. The final day he created the positive association trick by utilising the disruptive & anarchic humour of two young boys & Auntie Bou, we ended up all applauding & cheering individuals oprah style, but whilst this larking humour was going on the tutor/instructor whispered things in a couple of ears... mine was "you will sucseed second time around " simple when you know how, but clever, & effective.

i'm off to rob a bank when i see the colour green.