Knilly Frickers

Clumsiness and Muppet Dreams. My name is Rachie......and I am Muppet. When I say Muppet, I'm not referring to my aspiration to join Kermit and co on their travels, swap shoe advice with Miss Piggy and hang out with Animal, Beaker, Fozzy, Rizzo and Gonzo....although I'd totally love that and if someone wanted to make that happen I'd be eternally grateful. I'm referring to my tendency to do silly things. I'm not sure if clumsy is a better word for it, or maybe spatially unaware....  For example, I have lived in the same home for the past 26 years and have had the same bedroom for at least 15 of those years if not more.... I still manage to walk into the door on my way out every day. Most mornings, I find that I wake up because I've hit my head off the wall or my headboard, I constantly hit my arm or my hand off of the door post on the way into the living room (which is basically a straight line across the hall from my bedroom). When I invigilate, I'm forever t...

Rachie's Musings on: The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kauffman The Tiny Wife was a fairly short read but it’s packed full of awesomeness. At the beginning of the story a thief comes into a bank. Instead of taking money from everyone, he instead takes whatever item in the possession of those in the bank that holds the most sentimental value to them. The story takes some strange twists and turns as a result, but the most notable consequence of the robbery is that the narrator’s wife, who was in the bank that day, begins to shrink a little more each day and begins to lose sense of herself and who she is as she finds navigating her way through the every day tasks and experiences. Her shrinking also has an effect on her relationship with her husband who does his best to try and help with her situation and keep her spirits raised. Whilst I can't relate to shrinking, I can relate to allowing something I can't control get to me and start to influence how I feel, act and live my life. The s...

100 Happy Days I mentioned in previous post ' Things That Make Rachie Smile ' that Happy is my favourite mood to be in and that sometimes when I struggle with the happy part, I make a list of things that make me smile.   I recently came across a challenge called 100 Happy Days, where you post a picture every day for 100 days, using either your facebook, twitter, instagram etc and use that one picture everyday to mention something that made you happy.   I thought it would be fun to try and I'm currently on day 4, hopefully I can keep it up for another 96! If you fancy checking my 'happy' progress, I'll be sticking them on my instagram which is linked at the top of the page! Something I'm really happy about just now is that it's almost Autumn, I adore Autumn! Spring and Summer and Winter are great, but those are my prime sneezing, sunburn or shivering months! Autumn is where my seasonal comfort zone is at!  I guess Autumn can seem like a sad season because...

Rachie's Musings on: Loser by Jerry Spinelli Loser follows the story of Zinkoff, or Donald Zinkoff as he is known to his parents and teachers.  The book follows Zinkoff through elementary/primary school and reminds us what it’s like to see the world through the eyes of a child. Zinkoff loves school, for the most part he loves his teachers and he loves life.   You could easy assume that this book is designed for a young audience, it has a teen friendly cover and it follows the life of a school child, but it can also give us ‘adults’ a bit of a kick up the backside!! Zinkoff has that same enthusiasm for life and fire in his belly that everyone is born with, where absolutely everything is a fun new discovery and it’s the most awesome thing ever.   As we grow up, life beats that out of us a little bit, we lose the sparkle and we become grown ups. While following Zinkoff through his story, I could almost see the sparkle starting to fade from him, although it never left hi...

I've been trying over the past year or so to develop new skills and hobbies. Some of these have been to try and enhance my CV and job applications a little but some of them have just been for a little bit of fun.   I'm still learning to drive which brings with it a whole new host of specific things to learn like how to work the gears and the pedals, how to follow a roundabout, how to do a turn in the road - I've yet to master most of these things but hopefully at the end of it I'll have an awesome skill - the ability to drive! I think for the most part I just like to keep my brain active, I do like to relax and have a bit of a TV/Movie session but I hate doing absolutely nothing with my time, I have a compulsive need to fill it, so I search for things that I could try to learn. One Sunday, while alone in the house, I came across an How-To origami video on youtube and by the end of Sunday I had learned how to make origami birds and bats. I now have a box of origami, whic...

Rachie's Musings on: Change Your Mind – 57 Ways to Unlock Your Creative Self by Rod Judkins I was wandering through an art gallery gift shop with friends and whilst my friends were soaking in the artsy stuff for sale, I zoned in on this little beauty.  I initially bought it thinking ‘Great, maybe I’ll get some tips on how to become a bit more creative, cause I really wasn’t born one of those gifted people who can just are creative’ The first page gave me a much needed kick up the bum and bluntly explained to me that some of the greatest creative minds are just ordinary people with ordinary lives who have used creativity to become a bit less ordinary.    The rest of the book dispenses techniques and advice, through habits we can teach ourselves in order to tap into this much feared thing called creativity. I used to think creativity was something you either had or didn’t have, you were born to be creative or you weren’t,  you had a talent through which to express it o...

Rachie's Musings on: The Boy Who Kicked Pigs by Tom Baker When I picked up The Boy Who Kicked Pigs in a bookshop, I didn’t particularly notice who the author was, I just liked the cover.  Apparently you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, in this instance, I’m glad that I did. Upon proper inspection I realised it was written by a man named Tom Baker, who just so happened to play the fourth incarnation of The Doctor in my favourite TV programme Doctor Who, so needless to say I was very excited to get stuck in. The Boy Who Kicked Pigs focuses on a young boy named Robert Caligari, he’s a strange boy and his sister Nerys really gets on his nerves.  As an act of revenge towards Nerys, he kicks her piggy bank and unintentionally discovers a brand new hobby of kicking anything pig related, piggy banks, bacon, you name it – he’ll kick it. Without ruining the story for anyone who hasn’t read it, the rest of the book continues to follow Robert on his pig kicking discovery and the...