Picnic in the Park

This week has been annoyingly hot. I've hated it. People think I'm crazy; I think they're crazy.
The way it seems to me, the human body does all it can to remain at a healthy 37 degrees. It creates more heat than it intends to retain because outside is usually pretty cold. When the outdoor temperature is too high, the body can't lose all of its excess heat. Much like a fever, this can lead to symptoms such as loss of appetite, headaches, insomnia and fatigue. It becomes almost impossible to function as a normal person.
To make things worse, everybody around me seems to be really happy about this uncomfortable weather, in spite of the fact that they're all complaining about 'heat exhaustion'.

Well, yesterday I decided: I'm not gonna let the weather beat me. I took some paracetamol, drank a load of fruit juice and put on half a bottle of sun cream and a tiny dress that just about covers the essentials.

We decided to go for a picnic.

These are my favourite cheese and onion sandwiches.

Get all these things in a bowl and mix them all up. Spread cream cheese on the bread then fill with the stuff you just mixed up. Good eats!

And I ran around the house looking for other things to take (ok, I didn't actually run - too hot for that).

And I found a blanket. It's not a real picnic blanket complete with ground sheet - it's a bedtime blanket. I figured it would be OK since it's not rained in days and bed blankets are softer than floor blankets.

James brought some food too. NOMS!!!

The choc-ice experiment

Q - How long will it take for a choc-ice to melt in a cool bag?

A - Well it's about as soft as can be accepted after about an hour and a half. Wouldn't leave it any longer than that really.

Then we ate our food and had chats and stuff. And James gave me a present!

I like presents! And teapots. And tiny things!!! What a good boyfriend I have :)

And I went to the Ice Cream van.

Then we sat in the sun reading for about an hour. It was around this time that I started to understand why people like hot weather. It's not so bad when you don't actually have to do anything.

Anywho, I'm tired now, probably because I've not had a decent night's sleep in about a week. Off to bed. Night night.

I Melted a Record

This is Lucius. I've had him since he was a tiny little pet plant, but now he's starting to look like a proper cactus.

Lucius needs a new pot. He's not outgrown this one (obviously) but it is made of paper and it seems that the pin holes that I made for draining when I water him get clogged up too easily.
I've wanted to play with melting vinyl records for a while, so thought this would be a pretty good excuse.

I have read that it is possible to do this with a hairdryer. Possible, but time-consuming. Well, I did this with a hairdryer and it took about 20 minutes (although I suppose it is a small record).

I chose to use a hairdryer because I thought I might have more control over the way it moulds. Most of the bowls I've seen online look quite shallow, and I want to make more of a pot than a bowl, meaning I need the edges of it to be quite steep. 

At first I wasn't sure I did have much more control over it, really. With a hairdryer, you can only heat one part at a time; when you move to another area, the first part starts to cool down, and it lifts back up in the process. I imagine this wouldn't happen if the whole thing were equally pliable.

I soon learned that once one area was supple enough, I only needed to hold that part in place for about 10 seconds while it cooled a little for it hold its shape. Then I would turn the hairdryer back on and move to another spot.

So I kept going round and round, stopping every minute or so to hold it in position for a few seconds, until I had a shape I was happy with. It did get quite hot; at some points it was hurting my fingers too much but I found a drinks can on the floor (yes, I'm an untidy person) and used that to hold the record down. When I'd finished, I took it off its cup, and it looked like this:

And here is Lucius in his new home.