So, what's been happening since April?

Time for a bit of a catch up.  Again.  I know, I know.  I've got very bad at doing the blog.  As mentioned, I think I just get bored of the sound of my own voice, and the inanities that pour out.  I'm just an ordinary person, no better or worse than anyone else (most of the time) who's doing her best to get through this life in one piece and with all her brain cells intact so to think that anyone might be interested in the mundane activities of my day makes me feel sorry for how sad that person's life must be.

I was never any good at keeping a diary, or, rather, I'd do it for a few months and then get bored and stop.  This blog is pretty similar.  Though much like my old, sporadic diaries (which I've kept), when I read them now, several years later, the memories come hurtling back in techicolour, because I went to the bother of writing them down at the time.  So maybe there's merit.  I have to admit that I am most impressed with people who can keep up with frequent blogging, year after year, and still make it a very interesting read.  I'm thinking of people like Katyboo here, who has been diligently blogging for...actually, I don't know because I can't find how to go back to her very first post on her blog, but her profile seems to date from 2008, so we'll say that, shall we?  2008.  That's like millennia in blogging world.  And that's just beyond me.

Plus I find I tend to ramble around the point rather than coming straight to it.

Like now.

So, getting back on track - how's things at Jones Towers?

Things are pretty good, actually.  I'm more or less over the weird stomach thing that's felled me for the best part of a year.  In fact, it's exactly a year since I took the antibiotics that, I believe, started all this in the first place, which means it's almost exactly a year since we went to Copenhagen.  Blimey.

I'm now battling with my weight and trying to keep off the pounds I lost when I was ill, and I'm doing this by vaguely trying to watch what I eat but, more practically, going for a 30 minute walk every day (or damn near every day), and this week I reintroduced swimming which I shall definitely do once a week and preferably more.  I've got to that age now - 52, if you MUST know - where exercise is getting to be more than a good idea, it's vital if you want to be able to still be walking around when you reach 82.  And I don't mind the walking - I listen to podcasts and just do it, 1.5 miles every day.

So that's good, but not as impressive as what The Lovely Husband's been up to.  He's done his first full marathon!  Ran the Brighton Marathon back on 12 April.  It was a lovely day, beautiful blue sky although there was a stiff cold wind coming off the sea.  I wasn't feeling particularly chipper (gastritis was playing up) so after the start in Preston Park, I wandered down to the finish line on the seafront, found a deckchair and just sat there for the next 3+ hours watching it all on the big screen until he came home in the brilliant time of 3hrs 53m 59sec.  Some photos:

16,000+ runner gathering in Preston Park at the start

Walking from the park down to the seafront, in the middle of the road!:

Walking past a water station after the runners have gone through:

Brighton Pav:

The view of the big screen I had from my deckchair at the finish line:

Himself's finish time and the medal:

Pretty darn impressive, huh?  Makes my paltry 1.5 miles look a bit pathetic!

So, he's been running and I've been painting.  And the art group that I'm a member of - Surrey Contemporaries - has got three group exhibitions coming up before the end of the year which is pretty exciting, especially the one at the end of November as it's going to be at The Lightbox, which is a nationally renowned gallery/museum in nearby Woking where we'll be exhibiting for two weeks.  The other two are in two galleries in Guildford, one in August and the other in December.  In fact much of the last week I've spent doing the framing for the one in August which always takes a lot longer than you'd think, especially as I haven't quite decided exactly which pictures to put in that one so am doing everything I've currently got!

Plus I've also discovered the joys of lino printing, and also dabbling in oil paints as well as producing more paper collages, so I've been a busy bee.  Looking at my old posts it seems I've not shown you any photos of my art for over a year now so, be warned, there'll be plenty of pics!:

(I don't mean to sound mercenary but many of these are for sale (although the linoprints aren't there yet) and can be found at my Artfinder profile - www.artfinder.com/kaz-jones, however, Artfinder's commission is added to those prices so if anyone's interested, if you contact me direct, they'll be 30% cheaper).

I've also set up my own artist website - www.kazjonesart.co.uk - which acts mainly as a gallery rather than a selling portal; it's a repository of images of all my work, including sold pieces, that I can show potential galleries (should I ever be brave enough to contact any!)

And I think that's it for now.  We've not been away on holiday anywhere this year and, quite possibly, won't, which is a shame but we went abroad twice last year so I can't really complain!

As I said, things have been pretty good at least in the second half of this year - let's hope it continues...

The dinosaurs that walk among us....

Hello peeps!

Been a long time, innit.  Ah well, you know how it goes.

Anyway, a lovely thing's just happened that I feel I should share.

Do you remember, back in the mists of time, I did one of my annual ninja posts about the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and mentioned that my favourite courtyard sculpture was back in 2007 when the Chapman Brothers showed their big iron dinosaurs?  Yes you do, it was this post.

These were two of the dinosaurs in the courtyard -

When we visited the exhibition in June this year (sorry, no post, although I did mean to tell you that FINALLY the RA is allowing photography so I may well do a properly legal post next year!), I was discussing these dinosaurs with The Lovely Husband and was wondering where they'd got to.  I mean, these things were big, REALLY big - I have enough trouble finding space to store my comparatively pathetically small paintings, where the hell would you put several tons of rusting metal?  And it was a shame that they couldn't be seen anymore because I LURVED THEM.

Anyway, out of the blue, this afternoon I got a lovely, lovely email from a lady, who said the following:

"Dear Mrs Jones,

I went to Golders Hill Park for the first time yesterday and was enchanted by three large iron dinosaurs.  On the journey home I became convinced that I had seen them before in a different setting.  So I went about searching for more information on the internet.  Yours was the first site i looked up and it gave me all the information I needed for a more in depth search.

I had seen them at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007, my first visit.

Thank you."

Isn't that fab?  And, what's more, she sent me photos!! Don't they look happy to be among the trees?

But watch out - they're bitey!

How great is that?  Not only that the fantastic dinosaurs are out there, freely wandering among us, rather than hidden away in some Russian oligarch's garden shed, but that someone went to the trouble of letting me know!  Thank you so much, HF, you've made my day!

I'm not quite dead yet!

I really need to catch up on my posting and fill you in on stuff that happened last year.  The main stuff that happened was that we went on holiday twice (I know!  How lucky am I?!) and then I fell ill (which is still sort of ongoing).  In a nutshell, the illness hasn't been resolved and might well have been a cascade of things falling apart starting with a bout of surprise!mastitis in August that saw me heading off to A&E as it could have been septicaemia or cellulitis or an abcess, and it was 8pm so I had no choice.  They loaded me up with an antibiotic - Clindomyacin - and it cleared up within 3 days.  I understand now that Clindomyacin is a brutal drug, and I had to take one every six hours for 10 days straight.  That meant setting my alarm for 5am every morning, so I could take them at 5 and 11.  It made me feel a bit sick while I was taking them, and then my innards didn't feel that brilliant throughout September, but everything was okay after that.  Or so I thought.

On 21 November (so about 3 months after taking the antibiotics), I came home from art class with an absolutely wicked pain in my side, just under my left ribcage, and feeling as tired as if I'd been up all night.  I went to bed that afternoon and slept for 3 hours.

To cut a very, very long story short - I visited the doctor's and was initially diagnosed with Gastritis.  Had a blood test to check for anemia and a poo test for Helicobacter Pylori.  They both came back negative, which meant I didn't have a stomach ulcer.  I was put on Omeprazole and then Ranitidine for suppression of stomach acid in order to control my acid reflux.  Which they did but gave me really awful bowel disruption which resulted in me having to add Buscopan and Immodium into the mix.  I put myself on the BRAT diet for a couple of weeks (Banana, Rice, Apple sauce, Toast - all acid neutral foods that are easy to digest) and cut out all caffeine (no coffee, tea or chocolate) and alcohol, and then really started watching my fat intake and portion size.  I managed to lose a stone in weight (which is a good thing).

I came off the Omeprazole and Ranitidine because I couldn't face having to spend every single damn morning within running distance of the bathroom and I wasn't sure it was doing any good when the side effects were outweighing the supposed benefits.

Very, very slowly the stomach pains (which moved about, from side to side and around my belly button, and up and down my back) got less disabling which was good, because I spent the whole of November and half of December basically just sitting on the sofa, watching crappy telly, clutching a hot water bottle to my left hand side.  I didn't leave the house because I just felt too shitty.  It was awful.

Things started looking up by about February but then I had a flare-up so went back to the doctor's and asked for an endoscopy referral so we could see what was going on.  I had more blood taken to check for inflammatory markers and also Coeliac disease.  We also arranged to have a trans-vaginal ultrasound done to check there wasn't anything nasty happening with my ovaries that could be causing problems.

I had the endoscopy done on 16 March and they found no sign of Gastritis at all.  A biopsy of my stomach lining was taken to test for H Pylori (which I knew I didn't have) and that also came back negative.  What they DID find though was that I had a 5cm (which is medium-sized, apparently) hiatus hernia which, frankly, I think I've had for at least 20 years and most probably much longer than that.  So that was no help really.

The blood tests were negative (or, at least, the doctor hasn't called me back in to discuss them so I'm pretty safe to assume they found nothing), and the trans-vaginal ultrasound showed perfectly normal ovaries for an ancient crone of my age.  So I'm flummoxed really.

The discomfort is still there, even now, 5 months after it started but it changes throughout the day.  Some days it's barely there at all, others are more uncomfortable.  Fortunately it doesn't seem to bother me at night which is a blessing.  I've found that exercise helps a great deal so am walking for between 30-45 minutes every day (which is also good for keeping the weight off).  I've started doing mindfulness meditation that has definitely helped with the stress and managing the pain.  I'm drinking almost 3 pints of water a day, as well as herbal tea.  I'm taking various supplements which I think help, and Paracetamol when the discomfort gets tedious.  I'm staying away from Ibuprofen because that may have caused all this when I was taking it for its anti-inflammatory properties back when I had Mastitis, but I can't help thinking now that if it was the Ibuprofen, the fact that I've not touched any for 5 months would mean the problems would go away, and they haven't yet. 

I keep looking for the positive side of things which, trust me, is pretty hard to do when a medical condition turns out to be chronic and the doctors can't seem to find anything wrong.  At least I'm better than I was back in November and can now pretty much eat normally.  At least my bowels have finally settled back to normal (although the Buscopan still comes in handy every now and then).  At least I never once vomited (or even vomited blood, or pooed blood, which would have been terrifying).  I can now go out and socialise again, within reason (I had to miss several events in December that we'd had booked because I just didn't feel up to leaving the house), and I can probably start thinking about going on holiday somewhere (we had to cancel a week's holiday in Marrakech in December).

The fact that all these tests are negative are both a good and bad thing - good because if it was something as awful as cancer, then something would have been found by now, and I probably wouldn't be improving like I am, albeit glacially slowly - but bad because I still don't know what's going on.  At the moment all I can do is just trust that improvements will continue, possibly with occasional flare-ups or setbacks.  I can say I have been to some very dark places in the middle of the night, that have all ended up with a wooden box in a hole in the ground - it's been extremely stressful.

But I'm still here, I still wake up every morning if not with a song in my heart then with gratitude that I am still buggering on and with hope that I can do so for at least another 30 years or so.

And that's where I am at the moment.  I'm still painting and need to catch you up with that, and I will do a couple of posts about the holidays we had last year, before I fell ill, as they were brilliant.

Swifts arrive!

Long term readers of this frankly sporadic blog will know that I keep an eye out throughout the latter half of every April for the return of the Swifts, and they finally arrived this morning.  I saw two, very high up.  It made my heart soar!

I love these birds with a passion, their sheer exuberance as they chase each other across the sky, squealing with delight is something I look forward to every year without fail.

Although I didn't do a blog post about it (sorry), The Lovely Husband and I went to Florence for a week last summer and the whole place completely blew me away (I burst into tears the first time I saw the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral it was so overwhelming) but the thing I was absolutely not expecting and made my jaw hit the floor was the sheer number of Swifts tearing around the sky.  Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them - in the distance over the rooftops there was so many it was almost like watching a swirling tornado forming!  There were literally too many to count, and up until then, I thought the 50 or so we get here where I live was a lot!

I took video from our hotel window - they're tricky buggers to film but hopefully you get an idea of what it sounded like (check out the atmospheric Sunday morning bell-tolling) as well as seeing the gorgeous terracotta roofs and the blue, blue sky (sorry the quality's not that great!) -

End of an era. Probably.

So - I think the time has come.  It's time to put Venerable Bead to bed.

For those who don't know, I've been making jewellery for the last 12 years under the name of 'Venerable Bead' (yes, there's a website and everything...) and for the first five or so years things were going pretty well.  I was never really going to make enough money to make an actual living from it but it was encouraging to pull in a few grand every year.  People seemed to like my stuff and were willing to pay me a reasonable amount.  I enjoyed designing things, and resourcing interesting stones.  I learned how to fuse glass to make my own dichroic glass bits and pieces - it was fun.

Then the economy collapsed, and people reined in their spending.  My sales started nose-diving.  As my mother said (she also sells handicrafts and also suffered) 'we're not selling sausages', and you can't deny that she's right.  Sausages, we were definitely not selling.

What she meant was that jewellery (mine) and decoupaged items (hers) are not essential household items like food, mortgage payments, utilities, etc. and given the choice of being able to feed your kids or hang some trinket from your ear'oles, the sausages are going to win.

Things have slowly gone from bad to worse.  Last year I experienced my first ever craft fair where I sold nothing.  Not a single sausage (see what I did there?)  My mother tried to gee me along, saying motivating things like 'don't worry, the economy will pick up, it'll come back...'

But it hasn't.  And the reptilian Cameron pronouncing last week that we're heading for a second market crash hasn't exactly helped.  Thanks, Dave.

For example, the last three craft fairs I did I sold a grand total of £10, £16 and last Saturday saw me go home with the princely sum of £12 in my pocket.  Bearing in mind the pitch cost £16 and there was petrol costs involved, it means I'm actually paying to attend the fair.  Plus I haven't sold anything at all from the website in over a year, where I used to sell a few bits and pieces a month.

This is not good business practice.  Admittedly I don't do any advertising/marketing at all, but then I never did and always managed to sell stuff.

I was chatting to Janet, the organiser of the craft fair I attended on Saturday (which I've been doing regularly for about 7 years now) and she said that many craftspeople are giving up, and it's the first time she can remember that she doesn't have a waiting list of people waiting to get a table at her fair.

My heart has most definitely gone out of it.  If people don't buy your stuff then there's absolutely no incentive to continue adding to your stock, so you stop looking for new stones/beads/whatever and you stop designing.  No point making more if you're not selling any - it's just that much more to cart around. Plus I'm far more excited about painting and making art these days and, to be honest, selling more of that than my jewellery anyway.

So The Lovely Husband and I have come to a decision that this will be the last year for Venerable Bead.  We're committed to doing 6 more craft fairs in Alresford, Hants, which will take us up to December 2015, and then that's it.

God knows what I'm going to do with all my semi-precious beads and pearls - I'm thinking I'll probably eBay them in bulk next year.  And, of course, I have my lovely little kiln that I fuse glass in, but I think I'll hold onto that - I'd like to try and incorporate dichroic glass cabochons into my paintings somehow, and I'm quite keen to have a go at using powdered glass to make seascapes or other art pieces.

It's sad, but times change and events conspire to make you alter your plans, and the time has come to bid Venerable Bead a fond adieu....