General update

Remember the spiral stringer bead from the last post? Well, here it is as part of its set. That vibrant acid yellow-green is new CiM 'Oobleck' and I will be writing more about it shortly, along with my thoughts on a few of the other new Creation is Messy colours.

I'm still getting back into the beadmaking after a couple of months away from it. I don't think I posted about it here, but I gave up my archaeology degree. Here's what I posted on my Facebook page about this:

"You know how you shouldn’t do something if it makes you unhappy? If you’re not happy in a relationship, or your job, or just in your general life situation, we’re advised to change it if we can, right? Because life’s too short and all that. Well, I’ve made a change and… I am no longer a student.

I started my archaeology degree because I wanted to learn more about the subject and I wanted to get myself a qualification that would allow me to get a good and interesting job if I wanted to at some point in the future. The course started off OK. I was loving it and I was doing well as far as grades go. However, in about November I began to hate it. I hated the workload, the pressure, the having to write in a totally unnatural, wanky academic fashion (if I’d done uni when I was supposed to, I’d probably have found academic writing as a 40 year old a lot easier), and I began to hate the subject. I began to hate it to the point where watching history and archaeology programmes made me feel sick. In fact, I couldn’t watch them because I felt like some kind of fraud. How could I watch Alice Roberts enthusing over some old coins or a fossilised Viking turd, when inside me I had this gnawing “I don’t want to be doing this degree” feeling?

I have a shelf full of utterly fascinating archaeology and history books that I haven’t had time to read properly because I was only using them to scan through and pick out relevant references and quotes. That’s a waste of books.

I said to myself I’d give the first few months of my second year a go and see how I felt. Well, I did that and I felt bad. There’s no fun in reading stuff that makes absolutely no sense to you, no matter how much you translate it and use the BBC Bitesize website to help you try and understand it. And when you have to regurgitate all that stuff your eyes have read but your brain didn’t understand, in the form of 8000 words written in the absolutely correct way, well… basically I was buggered. Yes, I could have struggled on. Yes, I could have just done the best I could for the next two years, but you know what? When I can’t sleep for worry, when I keep getting styes (my number one “You are run down, Laura” signal), when I want to vom every time someone asks me how the degree is going, when I feel that weight of dread in my stomach whenever I look at any of the books or papers, and when I simply feel so unhappy every day, it is not worth it.

I thought vocalising my “I want to quit” thoughts to my husband would make me feel like a failure. But I don’t. I know I’ve made the correct decision because of the feeling of utter relief and lightness I’ve experienced since quitting. I had a go at being a uni student. I thoroughly enjoyed some of it. My love for archaeology and history remains, but now I will learn about it in my own way, in my own time, and without having to cite every single ruddy thing I ever want to communicate. (Tits to you, Harvard referencing!)

TL;DR – I quit my archaeology degree because it was making me unhappy."

So there you go. Back to the beads I go. I have missed them and I even tidied up the shed last week!

My workbench, before and after the tidy-up

My shed is still the same undecorated and unfancy wooden box it's always been, but it's a lot more uncluttered than it was. Here are some of the beads I've made post-tidy:

'Fiery' Potpourri

'Sage' Luminobeads

'Purquoise' Spotties

In other news, I'm still running. I don't know what I'd have done without my running during the whole degree worry stuff. It kept me sane. I ran my first 10K race last month and in September I'm doing a half marathon. You can read all about my running over on my running blog if you like, and I've set up an Instagram account for all my red-sweaty-faced running pictures.

This week's shed listening has been The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling. I listened to the third book in the Cormoran Strike series, Career of Evil, after watching the BBC adaptations of the first two stories, so then I went back to listen to the actual books.

Gratuitous photo of Tom Burke as Cormoran Strike

The books are far more detailed than the television programmes and you learn way more about the characters. I'll be getting The Silkworm when my next Audible credit comes through. The Strike audiobooks are narrated by Robert Glenister and he does a marvellous job of it.

Right! Off to the shed for me. Its black and white today, I think, possibly with a splash of that Oobleck thrown into the mix.

Messy Workbench

I think I need to tidy up.

'Fruity'

These 'Fruity' beads and more will be for sale over on my website tonight at 9.00pm (UK time) tonight.

Cor blimey it's hot in my shed today! The last few days have been nice - not too sunny and a little overcast which makes for good beadmaking conditions. This enabled me to work from about 9am to 4pm but not today. I gave in about half an hour ago when the hotness and mugginess became pretty much unbearable. So now here I am talking to you while sitting on our brand new sofa. We ordered it a few days after we moved in and a week or so later we were informed that there was a delay but it finally arrived today! I can't say I'm sorry to say goodbye to Chris's old sofa - the thing was beyond dead and it was more comfortable to sit on the floor.

Going back to the subject of the shed, I had a couple of visitors today. Not human visitors but small, squeaky types. I was sat making beads when I heard a rustling noise and then a squeak. I turned around to see Martha and Jemima at the shed door.

Jemima was nosing around the bag of guinea pig hay that I use to prop the door open and Martha came into the shed, looked at me and uttered a few 'Mweeps!' as if to say "Oh! It's YOU in here! Fancy you being in our garden!"

As you can see from the photos I am literally working in a bare, no frills garden shed. Outside the door are a Laurel bush and two massive evergreen-type trees (I don't know exactly what they are yet but I will find out) that are around about the forty year old mark. When Dad was visiting the other day we measured the circumference of one of the trunks and with some mathematical jiggery pokery Dad calculated the tree age using some complex formula that he found online. The trees mean we have a whole host of birds in the garden which is wonderful. We have a couple of very tame collared doves, some sparrows, blackbirds, pigeons, thrushes and also a massive amount of starlings. I know that some people think of starlings as pesky birds but I like them. There was about thirty of them in the garden the other day eating some food that I'd put out for them.

Tomorrow Chris and I are going to tackle the front 'garden'. This is a gravelled area that is full of weeds. It looks a right old state so we're going to just pull the weeds up which should improve it no end and then we'll work out what we're going to eventually do with the area. So it'll be yet another trip to Homebase tomorrow morning to get some gardening gloves and some kind of magical anti-weed product. I'll let you know how Project De-Weed goes .....