My family history

 Quick! To beat my target, I have to get 12 pageviews in two days.

 At the moment I'm up north in Hull staying with my grandparents. I took the opportunity to ask them about their parents etc to add to my family history project, but I wasn't expecting anyone to be so helpful. My grandfather couldn't remember a particular name so he rang up his brother, who dug out some old birth certificates and read them out over the phone so I was able to add about three generations onto my family tree straight away. (We were supposed to go round to his house and make copies of the records today, but my grandparents aren't very punctual so we didn't manage to.)

 Then my great-grandfather came round for lunch: he brought some old documents with him too, and I found out that although I'd always thought that I was 100% British, it turns out I'm actually part Irish! My ancestors came from a town in the Republic of Ireland and came over to England in the Great Famine of the 1850s, I think it was. You know the big potato famine of Ireland? Well, the family came over to work at the docks in Hull because there was always plenty of employment there - at that time they were the biggest docks in England.

 It feels bizarre to know that I'm related to Irish Catholics. Anyone reading this in the Republic of Ireland? It's a small world - I might be related to you!

 I'm going to my family history website now to try and trace my great-great-great grandmother. Happy new year!

Another random note

It was my goal to get more views this month than I did last month. There's one more week left of December and I only need another 29 views! Come on, people! I'll tell you if I make it.

 (Shortest post ever, to counteract really, really long previous post)

Indigestion, earrings, icing sugar and dreams

 Sorry for my post about water biscuits. Ignore it.

 There are several things I must tell you about this Christmas Eve:

Yesterday I suddenly got a mystery illness. I thought at first that it was just indigestion, but it got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. I thought I was going to vomit; I thought I was going to collapse. Then it went away again. I was going to post about it yesterday but
a) I was so exhausted that my arms were too floppy to type, and
b) the laptop crashed.

 I was also too tired to blow-dry my hair, so I went to sleep with it wet.
 If you have thick, frizzy hair like me then you might know what this means.
 If I don't comb it after I've slept with it wet, it looks horrendous. And if I do comb it, it puffs out like thistledown. What I did was I twisted it all up in a bun to hide it and then put in some dangly earrings shaped like little birds to detract attention away from my hair.

 The third thing I must talk about is YULE LOGS.
 Today we're having the promised day of shifting furniture and tidying up and worrying, but I'm not much help in this area so I made a yule log. I've mentioned before that whenever I cook something goes wrong. It was the icing sugar that did it this time. You know when you're making icing and you're thinking, hmm, it looks quite runny, so you put some icing sugar in and then you go, ah, it's too stiff now so you put some water in and you put some icing sugar in and you put some water in and... I tell you, it's a vicious circle of OVERCOMPENSATION.
 Have you ever tried to ice a yule log? It's quite difficult because you have to force the icing sugar to defy gravity and, even though the icing is indebted to you because it wouldn't EXIST if you hadn't made it, it NEVER DOES WHAT YOU WANT.

 I'm sorry. I think I'm still overtired.

 The other problem with chocolate butter icing is that is tastes so divine. I ate sinful amounts of it.

 When I'd done the icing I found an old, plastic decoration that is like a sign saying 'Merry Christmas', but it was quite small so I decided I needed a sprig of holly too. I stole my dad's shoes which happened to be by the back door, took some kitchen scissors and went out into the garden in the rain. (Why does it always rain on Christmas Eve? Does is rain on Christmas Eve where you come from? Or does it snow? Or do you live in Australia or something where Christmas is in summer?) Our holly tree is pretty sad and weedy but at least it's nearby. I cut a sprig of holly and came back inside to put it on the yule log. My little sister known as Small Person No#1 pootled in and said 'Are you going to put berries on it?' I was quite annoyed after going out in the rain so I asked her where I'd find berries.
 'On a bush?'
 'Which bush?'
 'Um.'

 Then I put it out in the utility room to set, because our fridge is full.

 I hope you enjoyed that essay on how I made a yule log.

 There was a large catastrophe at lunch time because WE RAN OUT OF WATER BISCUITS!

The other thing I wanted to write about is this: I seem to have a lot of dreams where people are in love with me.

 I've never had a boyfriend but my dreams seem happy to supply some.

•  Imaginary boy number 1 was called Jack and he worked on a farm. He followed me around until I went into the kitchen (?) and then he kissed me.
• Imaginary boy number 2 was a photographer and I was the model for his photoshoot. He was lovely. He gave me a gift which was a pair of shoes!
• Imaginary boy number 3 was Chinese, and someone told me that he liked me and I should go talk to him, and I did. We stood on a bridge and watched fish and butterflies.

What do these dreams mean? That I harbour secret attractions to shoes, farms and Chinese people?

 I don't mind talking to boys and I have quite a few guy friends but the only boy who's ever flirted with me was our resident playboy who would flirt with anything on two legs, including penguins. Oh and there was Tom but he was just pretending because people were watching us. Which doesn't make sense but I don't want to explain because I don't really want to think about Tom...

 You can ignore this post too if you want; I hope I haven't wasted too much of your time. It was quite long, wasn't it?

 I mentioned penguins once so you can have this picture of a penguin.

I'm such an awful photographer, aren't I? It's in the penguin pool at London Zoo.
 I hope your Christmas Eve is as fun as mine.

Why I like water biscuits

 I am over the moon at how many views I've been getting! I'll write fast before the laptop crashes again. My dad wants to fix it by destroying everything and then reinstalling it, so I hope my blog subscription won't get destroyed.

 I haven't been doing anything useful lately, just reading books. I finished 'Feeling sorry for Celia' and have now started on 'Finding Cassie crazy', the next book in the series, which is equally good.

 I've just had lunch with my family and I don't really like having meals with my family at the moment. I've started feeling like I'm stuck in a time loop, because my family always sit in the same places and always eat pretty much the same things, and have the same kind of conversations. I feel trapped. I've suddenly developed a liking for water biscuits because if I'm not busy I get depressed, so I always nibble mournfully on water biscuits taking tiny bites to make it last longer. Water biscuits are good because they're really just flour and water and don't contain anything bad for you or many calories.

 That is why I like water biscuits. I always feel guilty when I complain about my family, because really I'm lucky in my family situation, since I still have both my parents etc...

 What are your plans for Christmas? We're going to spend the day tidying up, making Christmas crackers and moving furniture around getting ready for all the people coming round on Boxing Day. I'll get to see my baby cousins :D they are both one year old.

 All my posts seem to be the same length. It must be so boring to read. I will leave you with this photo of a tiger which I took a few years ago when I went to London Zoo, and has nothing to do with anything - but I like tigers.

Just a random note...

 I would like to muchly thank the people in China and Croatia who read this blog for making me very happy. It's such a surprise when people actually read what I've written. And also, of course, the people in France, Germany, the USA and the UK because it feels completely cool that people are reading my pointless ramblings all over the world!

Why I fail

 First of all, the world didn't end and we didn't all die. When it got to eleven o'clock (the world was supposed to end at 11:11 am) my friends and I were doing a really loud countdown, and then silence at the end when nothing at all happened... Then two of them dressed up as Santa and hid under my maths teacher's desk... but that's another story.

 Second of all, I FAIL.
 I will tell you why. I TOTALLY fail at sticking to one thing at a time! I've already told you about my inability to finish my Greek short story before starting my other one. I told myself that after I'd finished Dracula (which I have; it was pretty good) I would go for another classic: Heidi. (I'm also reading Oliver Twist. Do you see my point here?) And yet I spent all day reading a really brilliant book called 'Feeling sorry for Celia'. It's all in the form of notes and letters and postcards, not a traditional novel structure. And reading it reawakened my old desire to write a story in that kind of style - so I now want to ditch my current story 'Little Brass Town' and start on that!

 The notes-and-letters-story-idea is called 'Dear Daniel', or it might be called 'The city is watching', because I think 'Dear Daniel' sounds too wishy-washy.

 The other thing about 'Feeling sorry for Celia' (I seem to be using quotation marks a lot right now) is that a lot of it is in letters between a girl and her penfriend. That also reminded me that for a long time I've thought it would be cool to have a penfriend. But, by writing this blog, I can be penfriends with the whole world! It's just a shame that the world doesn't write back.

 My mum wouldn't let me have a penfriend, I don't think. She has a problem with sending messages to people we don't know.

 I'm looking forward to Christmas! This year my family is hosting the big family celebration. However, I want to stop writing now because, as I've said, this laptop is broken and I'm really scared it's going to crash before I can publish this.

The end is nigh

 Hi people. I haven't posted in ages because the laptop was broken. I think it may be fixed now but time will tell.

 It was my birthday on Sunday! I'm now 14. We went up to London on a train (yay! I love London. And trains.) and went to the theatre, which was cool. Also, my sister had promised to get me a unicorn for my birthday, and she did! It was a brass unicorn-shaped pendant for a necklace.

 It's Christmas in five days, which is a strange feeling, isn't it?

 I also wanted to make a note that the world is going to end tomorrow. This, to quote Doctor Who, is the last day of humanity on this planet. The end is nigh. I don't know why or how the world is specifically going to end on the 21st December 2012 but that's what's going to happen. My friend Megan predicts that tomorrow will be the most frantic day in Facebook history, with everyone saying 'Yes! We survived!' Apparently someone in Russia has bought himself an ark.
 But then again, the world also ended in 2000, so it's hard to say...

 I started reading the classic novel Dracula today, so I'll go into oblivion without ever knowing what happens at the end :D

 Bye, people. Thanks for reading.

Test time

This is what my homework diary looks like at the moment:

 

 



 

 

It's that time of year... Everyone is taking tests to see if they're going to move sets after Christmas. What's more, I'm going on a trip with Guides tomorrow so I won't have a chance to revise then - and I have a French speaking test the day after... Aren't speaking tests just the worst thing ever? Writing, reading and listening are all fine, but NOBODY likes speaking tests. Oh, and then I have a maths test and I did badly on my last test so I need to do well on this one. I don't know what to do...

  If I can't handle tests now then I'm going to completely fail my GCSEs and A-Levels.

 

 The crazy pirate story is almost ready! We've almost finished the planning stages.

 

 Random tortoise fact: Giant tortoises in New Zealand are cannibals and if one giant tortoise dies the others will eat its corpse.

I escaped!

 I have escaped from my first ever job: running the hook-a-duck stall. The good news is, I managed to talk to every single person who approached me (I hate talking to people who I don't know). Some were more polite than others. And here is a list of the things that went wrong:

• I think about 70% of the people ran off without taking their change.
• Two kids, in quick succession, handed me five-pound notes. I ran out of change.
• Then the lady on the stall next to me asked to borrow some change from me. I HAD NONE.
• One kid thought that the prize was the duck, and had a tantrum when I didn't let him take the duck home.
• Most kids didn't talk at all.
• I had to keep trying to catch the eye of people standing there holding money, because it was too noisy to try and get their attention.
• The woman on the shift after mine was late; I spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at the clock.
• The guy selling tickets on the door is my neighbour, so I stopped to chat with him and then a family arrived thinking that I was the one selling tickets. Oops...

 Apart from that it was fine! I especially liked it when one mother told her kid to 'give the money to the lady' (I'm 13). I also found it amusing that a lot of kids were afraid of me. Gone is the time of me shuffling from stall to stall being afraid of each cashier person. Now it's my turn to be the scary one!

 

 My mum has finished stressing about the Christmas Fayre, and is now stressing about a concert that her choir is giving. She evidently doesn't believe in taking life easy. So everyone else now had to take an active role in running the house: I went shopping and Marmalade is currently making a lasagne - she's a girl of many talents. She's just perfected the technique of using makeup to make herself look like a zebra, and I'm telling the truth here - it's for a GCSE art project, don't ask.

 

 My mum being out means we can have 3-hour TV marathons in peace. :) Looking forward to a lazy night in.



Alimonsoon the elf

  I'm home alone tonight: my dad's at work, my mum's at the small peoples' school organising the Christmas Fayre and all my siblings are at my Gran's house. I stayed late at school doing art so I missed the chance to go to Gran's; instead I cycled home in the dark and then went to the school to be a little elf and help my mum. Then I went to the school again. It was quite awkward - I walked all around the school trying to find a way in, but it was all locked from the inside so I went back home to find my phone to ring my mum to get her to let me in.

  That challenge overcome, I set up the elf stall and sorted out some presents, and discovered that there is no comfortable way to carry three crates of presents to Santa's grotto. (It was actually the first time I'd ever seen inside the grotto - it was always to expensive. It was disappointing.) I always help out at the Fayre. I clear up afterwards: recycling the raffle tickets has always been my special job. Last year I helped out in the craft room. The year before, I sorted out the change at 'Pin the nose on the reindeer'. This year, I asked if she wanted me to help, and she said that they desperately needed someone to run the Hook-a-duck stall.

 O_O

Hook-a-duck is my FAVOURITE game. How weird! It's such a strange dream to come true.

 Eventually I went home to eat burnt toast and sardines, with cheese and a cup of strawberry juice, and then I ate a satsuma and a biscuit. Some people, when they're home alone, throw a wild party where everyone gets drunk and breaks stuff. No, thank you! I'd prefer to burn some toast and eat a satsuma.

 My Drops of Jupiter project will have to wait because the program I'm using SUDDENLY DIED, and my dad says he can fix it but that'll take a while. So that's on hold right now.

 As for the crazy pirate story, it's coming on very well - we just need to work on a few scenes. I spent my music lesson drawing a pirate with an emo fringe.

 Random otter fact: The otter is a member of the weasel family.

Update on Stuff

 I remembered to eat my lunch today. Admittedly, the pirate story is taking over my life. Megan took me along to a meeting of the school newspaper, which she does drawings for, and I would gladly have contributed something to an article because I love writing, but nobody asked me to so I just did some more sketches for the pirate story.

  Marmalade's told me a few scenes that she wants to include, but if she's not careful Megan and I will end up writing the story. We have so many ideas.

  I also have a lot of homework, but that's not important.

  Yeah, nothing else remotely interesting happened today. Small Person #2 keeps on showing me his Lego models. There is a rule that he's not allowed to talk to me when I'm Working (blogging obviously counts as Work) but he keeps trying to find a loophole ... As for Small Person #1, she's being a child prodigy as always and her design for the program of her Christmas play got selected. At least she's stopped with the trumpet.

 She used to be in a choir as well, and I will say this for her: she's better at singing than she is on the trumpet. That's all I'll say.

 The Christmas Fayre which my mum is single-handedly organising is on Saturday, and all I can say is THANK GOODNESS. There will be no more tasks. In the past week I have designed some elves, wrapped up a million lucky dip presents, made a display of prizes, gone round sticking up posters for a competition and done the ironing while my mum ran up some stockings on her sewing machine. Can't wait till it's over.

 Guides tonight. Not sewing this time.

 Random elephant fact: I like this one. A plant in the African savannah, which is a favourite food of elephants, has developed a coating so thick that it can survive being digested by an elephant. However, now the coating is so thick that the plant's seeds can't germinate unless they've been digested by an elephant. So weird...

The crazy pirate story, featuring cookies

 We have LOADS of new ideas for the pirate story. Megan and I were talking about it at lunch break. I had my ideas page out and was doing rough sketches for scenes, until the bell went for lessons and I realised I hadn't actually eaten my lunch. I'm so intelligent :). Anyway, I showed Megan my ideas for scenes and she agreed that they were OK, and she showed me some more sketches of characters that she'd done last night. Megan and I invented a sub-plot and confronted Marmalade with it and Marmalade agreed to include it yay!
 The sub-plot is all about cookies.

 Marmalade was telling me last night about all the dark, foreboding stuff that she'd thought of, and Megan is all about the ridiculous, funny/ cute, romantic scenes. They're an interesting partnership... Megan and I decided that cookies, made by Roger the little ginger girl, are the one weakness of a certain character. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the plot's coming together, but it looks like it will one day, which is promising...

 Oooooh, it's Thursday tomorrow. Will I do any sewing? Time will tell.

 Random fish fact: One species of catfish, which lives in fast-flowing rivers, prevents itself from being swept away by anchoring itself to the ground with its lips. Bleugh.

The crazy pirate story

 My crazy friend Megan, my sister Marmalade and I have been challenged to make a comic book. I've shown you some of my drawings and I love doing stories too; Megan and Marmalade are kind of the same, although Marmalade has more of a problem with writing her story ideas because she's always doing something else, like her nails. Megan does sweet manga love stories - her favourite is Romeo and Juliet - so she kept suggesting sweet manga-ish storylines and we had to yell at her a few times.

 Anyway, we had a heated discussion and ended up settling on the idea of a vengeful pirate. Megan insisted that the pirate captain employ twin crew members called Jolly and Roger (not their real names); Marmalade adopted the character Roger and made her into a little ginger girl who works in the galley, and I took on Jolly and made him be a depressed boy with an emo fringe. He's the lookout but they have to check up on him occasionally to make sure he hasn't jumped out of the crow's nest. You can really see why they call him Jolly. There may be something wrong with me: I love creating depressing characters. But he ends up happy in the end! I also have to draw the evil king. Megan's characters are the female pirate captain and her love interest.

 As for the plot, we eventually settled on a vague outline of what happens (Megan and Marmalade clashed over ideas a lot) and I've been scribbling down some ideas for individual scenes. Now I just have to convince the others to use my ideas!

Random bird fact: Flocks of chaffinches have been known to fly as high as 4000ft.

The random fact challenge

 For the past few posts I've been signing off by giving a random fact at the end. My challenge is that I can get these facts from anywhere EXCEPT the internet. If I don't manage to think of a random fact without going on the internet, I FAIL. Let's see how long I can go for.

 Here's a random fact for today.

 Random rabbit fact: Because rabbits eat grass they need to digest the leaves for a long time to break down the cellulose. So they digest the food twice, by eating their own droppings.

Posting out of boredom

 Having a break from writing my essay on the Russian Revolution...

 My day yesterday mostly featured my siblings. Activities included chasing Small Person #2 around the house pretending to be a ninja and arguing with Marmalade over how to teach Small Person #1 to knit. She's eight and we're the sort of family where every female over that age has to know how to knit. I was listening to Marmalade trying to teach her and at one point I was actually sprawled on the floor laughing because she was failing so badly. Next week is the Christmas Fayre at the small peoples' primary school, and my mother is organising it single-handedly - our house is now full of elves and laminated signs and lucky dip presents. Marmalade's just announced that she wants to dye her hair ginger, and I think that's all the news at the moment.

  If life throws you lemons, duck.

 Random bird fact: Road runners in the Arizona deserts give their chicks water which they produce inside their own stomachs.