I Took Pictures

I went out into the garden, and I was finally able to take pics. I wasn't sure how well that they'd come out, as there was a lot of glare on the screen, but I hope that they count, and I've published earlier than usual as I want to post before I forget. 

I've been putting off the garden for ages, but I pushed myself out of the door with the new gardening gloves.

They are neither thorn proof nor nettle proof, despite the product description online. I am deeply unimpressed. 

The garden is a jungle. The first thing I tackled was the brambles overhanging the wall onto the public path at the side of our house.

I can only stand for around five minutes at a time, so it took a few moments, but I got it clearer.

I don't know if you can see the cluster of ripe blackberries, but I left them and I intend to send out bear to pick them later. 

The brambles are all over the place and vicious with it, but to really get to them, I'll need to hack back the rose.

It's absolutely gorgeous, covered with roses and perhaps the best showing I've seen for years. It's one that father planted and it's done very well. I don't think that I can cut it down in full bloom, so I'll just have to prune around it. Perhaps I can bring myself to cut it thoroughly back next spring. 

Gladys is also doing well. It's growing more vigorously than it has for years, although there aren't so many blossoms. 

There's all sorts growing in the garden. I wouldn't be surprised if I found a lost tribe or King Solomon's Mines. I found this little plant, and wondered if it was a teasel, a plant whose seed heads were used in the production of woollen cloth. I'm in West Yorkshire and it was a weaving centre even before the Industrial Revolution.

I had a look online, and as far as I can tell, it's not the plant that the weavers used. At first glance it looked like I could have globe flatsedge growing in my garden, but that seemed unlikely as it's native to the Eastern United States, from Mississippi up to Wisconsin, but not really known in Europe. I'm not exactly sure what it is, and I think that I may have already pulled it up, so who knows?

I spent around an hour outside. I need to be a little careful, as around ten years ago I had an easily treated, not very threatening, very small skin cancer, so I am aiming to go out early in the morning, late in the evening and while it's cloudy, which it is here today. I could only do stuff in short bursts, but I managed something.

The four bin bags aren't overstuffed, but they're full enough to be loaded up in the car and taken to the tip. Apart from clearing the path, I made a very small dent. 

If you look at the picture of the roses above, you can see that there is now a very small difference. If all goes to plan (and when does it ever do that here?) I'll do a little more tomorrow. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

I'm Old Enough to Know Better

I'm getting blog post notifications in weird ways. Some seem to be giving me the notices of new posts then older, then some blogs seem to be missing, and then sometimes I get a whole list of the posts for the last three months all in one chunk. My comments may be patchy.

I don't know if it was an evening when I'd had a drink, or I was just a little more confused than normal, but I bought this. 

I do not need 500 potato recipes. I'm fine making mash and wedges, and I usually prefer pasta. But here we are. It's what happens when I have unsupervised access to Temu. It came from a firm in this country, Smeikal Books, who are selling through Temu as well as Amazon and eBay, and I saved 31p buying it from Temu instead of the company direct, at a grand total of £5.68 including postage. 

As an aside, I just made a mistake where I absolutely should know better. I checked out the website of Smeikal Books and it looks like a source of inexpensive books, which I do not need! 

So now I have a book with 500 potato recipes, a preference for pasta, and an unfortunate urge to try out the recipes. I mean, 500 potato recipes? There's got to be something special in there. I opened the book at random.

The first recipe I saw was Beef and Sweet Potato Stew - that sounded good, and I looked further. I don't think that I'll be making it, though, as it's not just beef and sweet potato. The ingredients list is:

1 large pumpkin around 5kg or 11lb

4 tablespoons of olive oil

1kg of braising steak, cubed

1 large onion, finely chopped

3 fresh red chillies, chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 large tomato, roughly chopped

2 fresh bay leaves (and I have no idea where I'm going to get those as I don't grow them)

1 pint of beef stock

one half bottle of red wine

500g of potatoes, peeled and cubed

500g of sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed

1 corn cob cut widthways into 6 pieces (and I'm not sure about how that would work)

3 peaches, peeled, stoned, and cut into wedges

salt and ground black pepper.

It's supposed to serve 8, and that's not a bad stretch of the meat, but two unlucky souls won't get a slice of the corn on the cob. 

And what the hecking heck are peaches doing in the recipe? 

You are supposed to serve it in the baked shell of the pumpkin. I think that I'll pass. I'm not ready for any recipe that involves an eleven pound pumpkin. I looked further, and there's a recipe which mashes cooked potato with apples cooked with a couple of cloves, which is served with fried blood sausage and onion rings which sounds more plausible, though I may use 'normal' sausages or perhaps chorizo. 

I am absolutely old enough to know better than to get too attached to a book like this, and it's absolutely the wrong time of year for main crop potatoes. I'll share when I cook something from it. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

Playing with Pictures

I still haven't done anything worth taking a pic of, so I spent a little time playing on Canva. I have no artistic skills whatsoever, and I couldn't draw anything, not even if someone held a gun at my head, so playing around with the programme is quite satisfying. And, as far as I know, none of the stuff I've used has been AI generated. 

First of all, I dug out a book.

And I'm fairly sure that it's older than AI. I've been dipping into it for over twenty years, and the copyright date is 1997, so someone had to do some oldfashioned research to pull it together, not to mention that there is a massive index. The book is 740 pages long!

I was looking for something with a little glamour, something that was striking. I ended up being reminded by the book, but looking the full thing up online, and found this.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote some poems that were so wonderful dense with imagery that it's hard to tease out any meaning. I have no idea if this is supposed to mean anything but I love the idea of the star citadels, filled with fire people, looking down on us. 

And while I was leafing through the quotes, I also found this quote from Horace, the Roman writer.

I love the sentiment, but I had a lot of trouble finding a good way of displaying it. I guess that today I had a lesson in working with graphics - and it was fun! I swear sometimes that I'm half magpie, and looking through all the pretty backgrounds and pictures made me so happy.

Writing stuff - Today's instalment of The Guest is here. 

Reading is Good

Jabblog was right in her comment, it's odd having bear home. It's wonderful and comforting and reassuring to have him home, but it's odd. I've got used to one way of doing things, with him many miles away, and now I'm getting back in the habit of him being home, but not quite the same as it was before. After all, he's lived away from home as an adult for nearly a year. And he's done brilliantly. 

Now he's home, it's not exactly the same as when he went away. I like to think that DH and I always treated him with respect as an individual and allowed him to make choices. He's certainly just as respectful and considerate as he's always been. It's just that he's definitely an adult. Today was something of a reminder.

Bear has been clearing out his books. He's getting into reading for pleasure. He's been reading things like Around the World in Eighty Days and the originals of Dracula and Frankenstein. I introduced him to Postscript Books, which perhaps I shouldn't have done if I was a truly responsible parent. They do a lot of remaindered books at great prices, including some amazing academic books, and they were running a three for two offer on cheap classics at the end of last term, so bear loaded up on copies of Dickens and such like - he's so much better read than I am! 

He realised that he was out of shelf space and the two full bookcases and one half bookcase were already jammed before he added anything, so he's had something of a clear out and got rid of a lot of books that he got when he was younger. I took a pic of one for a memory keepsake.

It's just a young kid's book, about a cat that mooched dinners from six different families, which was so much fun, and we read it to him so many times when he was little. It's obviously not something that he wants to keep, but it made me smile. Anyway, he overfilled three big bags for life and I'll be taking them to the Salvation Army. There are some books from when he was very young, and a few more that are nearer young teen, and quite a collection of study guides for his GCSEs.

He hadn't cleared out his shelves since Covid and so it's no wonder that they were overflowing. I've always bought lots of books for him. When he was little I bought books by the armful. The now defunct Book People would have sales where I could order sets of ten easy learn-to-read books that were maybe a dozen pages long and cost very little and I indulged. One year I think that I got him over a hundred of these easy reader books as part of his Christmas/Birthday present, and he very much enjoyed them. 

During Covid, we went through them and took the best ones to donate to bear's old primary school. We took bags and bags of them, probably a few hundred as they were all the early readers that were only a few pages long and I'd been buying them in large quantities since before he started school. I remember that it was during lock down and we left the bags in a corner so that they could wait the three days or so that was thought to make them safe. It was the step between primary school and high school. This feels like the step between teen and adult. 

It's so good that he's home.

Hugs and good health to all. 

I Need to Get out More.

I've been doing lots of sort of writing stuff. I'm reading up on how to write, which is long overdue if you ask me. I'm also writing a few extra bits to go with the collection of Kane stories so that if someone buys the book, they at least get something new.

I'm also still thinking about AI. This is why I need to get out more. I've been pottering around and I watched The Great British Sewing Bee last night, but not only have I not done anything to take a pic of, but I'm still thinking about the whole AI stuff still. I even wrote an article on my blog here, a lot like the one on here on Monday, but comparing AI to the Fair Folk, the Fae, that can't quite be trusted. I even did some AI images for it (or, rather, pressed a button on Canva) which was scarily impressive. 

So I looked for a quote and found this, and made up a Canva image without using AI. It's a quote from John Masefield.

I found this quote when I was looking for a quote about computers, but they depressed me too much. This is my second attempt and the text was blurred on that as well. I didn't use AI, so I've spent over an hour on it instead of just pressing a button, but I think that it's pretty and the quote seemed to hit me unexpectedly. Besides, I've a soft spot for John Masefields Sea Fever and I can hear a little of that voice in the quote. 

At least I got out of the house to pick up bear from his friends. It gives me a reason to get out and about. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

Death Pants

Do you remember last week when I posted that I was being outwitted by my trousers? It's here, for what it's worth. Well, apparently, the dirt cheap flimsy stretch cotton monsters that I bought last year and have been wearing for the sake of comfort, have been making headlines, including in the Irish Examiner here. Zara has a line of them, but they seem to be popular on all sorts of sites, including M&S who ought to know better. The fancy ones seem too fitted at the waist to hoick up to the armpits, which is a good way to deal with them, but I guess you can adjust the stretchy ones if you want to risk it. They are incredibly comfortable in warm weather, but... I'm not impressed and I think that I'll save them for heatwaves. 

Things are ticking over here. I got a kilo of carrots on sale and I got them sliced up and stashed in the freezer. I'm still re-stocking, but it's getting there. And now that it's a little cooler, I've picked up my knitting again. I started another hat for the Mission to Seafarers.

I'm feeling quite good about it. I've got to get a couple of sweaters knitted before autumn hits. Mine are so threadbare that you could use them to strain peas - and that's the ones without the holes. The fabric is just wearing away, so even if I had Bless's talent for mending clothes, they still aren't worth saving. And I really don't want to go out and spend money on sweaters when I have yarn, a pattern and needles, a new car to save for, and a hole in the roof. Though, to be fair, it isn't a big hole, but it needs to be tackled.

I'm not looking forward to changing cars. Our battery failed on Saturday. DH and I were all set to drive out to the park to feed the birds but the car just wouldn't start at all. We called the AA who replaced the battery for us. Because we pay a fortune for good cover, it only cost us £35 fitted, but it was replacing the original battery. That battery was eleven years old and they only have an expected life of five years. Red has been a brilliant car for us over the years. I'm going to miss her. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

Thinking About AI

Cherie mentioned about using AI to make a song and sing for her, as she didn't have the means to do it. My friend in Supernovauk is in that position - they don't have the equipment or voice to create the music that they have in their minds, so they use AI. However, a big however, they write all the words and they work hard on getting the music to exactly where they want it. It's supporting human creativity, rather than supplanting it. However, I wish my friend had the access that they needed to do it without, because I can hear what they want to produce, and I very much enjoy the reminder of dancing till I dropped back in the day, but there is always that tiny lack of spark. 

Too many years ago, when I was in the Girl Guides (British version of the Girl Scouts) I blagged my way through the music badge as I was getting guitar lessons and I ambushed the teacher. I was supposed to produce an original composition, and I did, but it was bloody awful. My teacher passed me anyway, but I was frustrated. I knew how I wanted it to sound, but I didn't have the talent, the technical know-how, or the equipment to get there. At 13, I would absolutely have used AI if it were now. It was a little like Einaudi, I guess, with flowing notes. Here is a link to a real musician.

I'm pretty sure that I'm using AI without realising, like when I plan a route using Google maps, but I've avoided it on the whole. I don't know what I'm doing, and that's the long and short of it, and you can find more of my views here and here on my blog. AI can't do the thinking for you, not fully. Here's an example from Weary Wolf, who got AI to design a week of eating three meals per day for £1 per meal, the video here if you're interested. 

It was sort of functional, but I wouldn't have called it healthy, and it was missing something that had nothing to do with nutrition. Again, you could say that it lacked spark. 

The book world is having fits about AI. Authors who are suspected of using AI are likely to find themselves under vicious attack. There are witchhunts going on that are deeply unpleasant. But I get it. If someone has spent months on a book, then paid out for an editor, which can run to hundreds if not thousands, then paid out for a cover, and some of those are extremely pricey, maybe sell a few copies, and then see someone making a lot of money by publishing a couple of novels a week of stuff that isn't that well written, then it hurts. Most of these turn up in non-fiction, where they can be extremely misleading to those who need help or trustworthy information, or romance novels. I read a lot of romance novels, and I have read the first page of so many books that are utterly dire and obviously AI and I've not read further. It drives me nuts because it's time in browsing and choosing from the Kindle Unlimited titles that I won't get back, even if I've only dipped into that one page. However the pennies from those single pages mount up if there are literally hundreds of titles attracting the unwary and there are those out there who profit from this. If the authors were at least honest about AI use, at least you can make a choice. 

It's like a deal with a devil, though. It's incredibly tempting. I have maybe twenty or so outlines for novels. I'm not young, I'm not in good health, and I'm not confident that I'll be able to write them all. The thought of getting AI involved is soooo tempting. It would be my ideas, and I'd almost certainly re-write any text as the stuff that AI churns out is gruesome, but... It would feel like cheating. And I couldn't hope for my work to have that spark. 

Even more tempting is the idea of AI art. It's taking the livelihood of genuine artists who have that spark, but I can't affort to pay someone to draw the beautiful stuff that I imagine. I definitely couldn't draw or paint something myself as I have a negative amount of artistic talent and I'm not sure that I could be trusted with a paint by numbers. It's like a devil's bargain, whispering in my ear. I can imagine what I want, I can see it so clearly, but I could never produce it, not without either paying a lot of money to an artist or using that tempting AI. I feel like I'm being tempted like in those Medieval legends. I keep telling myself to avoid the pictures and stick to words. At least I feel that I can be competent with those.

For the heck of it, I went onto Canva. Until now, I hadn't used their AI function, and I've been warned against using their book covers as there are elements that are AI generated and lead to online lynching, but I wanted to try something. 

I clicked on the AI assistant, and I wrote book cover with a raven flying holding a ring on a ribbon. That is all I wrote. I didn't put in any suggestions about colour or style, just the basic idea. I got this.

I only put in that brief description. However not only did it generate the picture, but it also generated the title, the subtitle some secrets are worth any price, the tag A throne A curse A choice that will change everything and the name, Eliana Vaelor. I checked. At the time of typing, there isn't a book with this title on Amazon, and there is no record online of anyone with the name Eliana Vaelor, author or otherwise. AI went in fully committed.

I find it scary. I also feel drawn to writing the book. For now, though, I think that I'll concentrate on what I can manage without AI, just to be safe.

Hugs and good health to all.