Author: artbychristinemallabandbrown

I'm an artist based at the Spode factory site in Stoke on Trent. I paint, draw and create digital art. Contact me at mallabandbrown@aol.com

Hedgehog seen!

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Last night my hubby went out in the garden to put some bird food out and almost tripped over a hedgehog! He said it seemed to be asleep at the base of the cherry tree. He went out again and took a bowl of cat food. This morning the bowl had been tipped over and the food was gone.

When we see hedgehogs I think of spring. It’s still pretty cold and we may get some snow, but they are coming out of hibernation.

DON’T FEED…. milk and bread, hedgehogs are lactose intolerant. They also don’t get enough calories from so called ‘hedgehog’ food. Apparently it’s just meal worms and pet food manufacturers are just trying to make money. You can feed them cat food. Ours seem to like fresh wet or dry cat food. Also nake gaps in wooden fences at their bases to allow hedgehogs through into your garden. .

Almost burnt

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We had finished tea and my hubby took the plates in to the kitchen to be washed up. He shouted through to the living room ‘are you cooking something else?’… ‘No’, ‘well you’ve left one of the gas rings on?’ I didn’t realise I had and I walked into the kitchen just as he lifted the Wok lid up off one of the gas stoves burners at the back. He’d only just turned the burner off and as he lifted the Wok lid by its plastic handle he let out an involuntary ‘ow!’ Turns out when I poured some pasta into the big pan of mixed veg and salmon I was cooking on the front hob, I must have dropped the wok lid over the back hob without switching it off. Because the gas was on low, and the lid and handle are heat resistant nothing caught fire, it just got very hot. If the pan lid had any food clinging to it, it would have caught fire, and because I can’t smell things properly we could have had a real problem. Thank goodness hubby spotted my mistake!

Dawn chorus 5am

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Imagined view of our garden with bird singing. Too dark to really see.

It’s just after 5am now. I got up because my toes hurt (gout?) on the other foot to the one I had broken my toenail on. Long boring story…

Anyway it’d still dark so I’m sitting here by the light of a standard lamp and trying to sleep with my foot uncovered so there’s no pressure on it.

But through the window I can hear the lilting song of what I think is either a Robin or a Blackbird. I haven’t heard them in the morning during the winter, so I guess spring might just be on the way. It’s lovely to hear them, possibly marking out their territory in the tangled trees and bushes we call our garden. Mind you they have to be aware of the local cats. Mine are all inside snuggled up, but I hope they are singing high up in the branches. X

Playing with silhouettes

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A previous digital drawing of a fence against a colourful background. My Sketch app on my phone has silhouettes of trees and plants that I rarely use. I also added extra texture and overlays in Photodirector. These are a couple of the art apps I have on my phone that I use frequently and don’t want to remove if I have to get the Jetpack app. Am I irritated? Yes. Must stop going on about it. Creativity isn’t important after all is it (sulks)…. Sorry!

Reach out to WordPress?

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I keep trying to submit a question about Jetpack to WordPress but the support submission form won’t open. I filled in a question on another page but at the bottom it said this comment box is not for questions and to use the support form. So I tried and it still won’t open. I feel like I’m going round in circles and that people like me are too unimportant to WordPress.

This is what I wrote:

I don’t have enough memory on my android phone to add another app. I’ve asked what to do and someone suggested deleting other apps but I use them daily. Or I get messages that deleting them will affect the performance of my phone. I cannot afford a new phone (I can’t afford to pay for fuel, how can I pay for a phone?) This is stressing me out and I only have five days to try and work out what to do. I feel this is for the convenience of WordPress and Jetpack and not their customers. I’ve been told to ‘reach out’ but don’t have a solution. I will have to spend my pension money on a new memory card if I want to keep using WordPress on my old android phone, I feel so frustrated about this.

Time

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Time washes through the landscape, light transforms the colours, shatters water, creates cold and hot spots. Thinking about atmosphere, time ticks across my mind. Change and stillness held face to face in a slow embrace. Taste and smell senses change. No more daisy chains, just dry grasses, emerging from gravel. Birds flit across the planet, like a time lapse film. Here and gone, gone and back again. Generations. How to define time? A single vertical plane of paper, sliding over bumps and humps, a thin slot that holds open but does not exist in more than two dimensions. Behind and in front no longer exists or has never existed. Time flies forward at a walking pace….

Fushias

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Six months ago these were still flowering. The bushes are outside Portmeirion pottery and always cheer me up when I see them. Now we have reached meteorological spring they should start to transform again from dry looking sticks to flowering stars.

Fushias are beautiful hanging flowers. They can be simple like these or delicate like ballerinas with swirling pink or red skirts or double flowers like flamenco dancers. You can get all sorts of varieties of them. I think they are called F1 hybrids?