Beautiful Art and a Little Song

This is my Christmas present from Andyroo.  It is an original acrylic on canvas by local artist, Nicole Lawrence.

 It had been on the wall in a local cafe, and every time I went in there and saw it I loved it more.  Now it is on the wall right next to me where I can see it as I write and when I go to bed too.  It's called, "Leap of Faith."  I love everything about it: The beautiful tiger, the choice of colour and the complex layering of it, and the sense of peace it imparts.  We all need to take leaps of faith at times, and Tiger is important to me for another reason too, but I'm not saying why.  :)

Well, it's been a few weeks of not novel writing, and it seems that creativity is starting to build up and pour out of my ears.  Yesterday I spent way too much time recording and making a video for a little song we came up with.  In the SCA they call it filking when you take a song's tune and change the words.  Is that what they call it in the real world? At any rate, we filked a lovely lazy tune by Dean Martin called, "My Rifle, Pony and me," and turned it into a fire brigade song.  I really enjoy playing the original song on my guitar, but once we got the idea of filking it, we couldn't resist it.

Here's the original:

      
And our version, with usual proviso that I'm no professional singer.  It was nice to hear how much better my voice sounds with a good microphone set up, though, thanks to Andrew!

I'm not much of a movie maker either.  Ah well, we'd already spent more than enough time on it by the time we got it up to Youtube and I realised I hadn't noticed the extra title thingy there at the start.  :)

The chookies were out for a quite while yesterday and since it was hot, they had a good time burrowing the in the damp soil under my pet Hydrangea that lives just under our south window. On hot days, I make them a similar cool spot in their chook dome, but they made their own yesterday.

Going to be a few more hot days this week. Poor chookies, they're the only beasties we currently have that can't come into the air conditioning with us.  You can't housetrain a chook!

In writing news, I still have a couple more chapters of Freya and the Hairy Goddess to final edit, and after that it is formatting time for both kindle and print copies, and then once I know the final page numbers, I will need to get the cover finalised.  Still, it won't be long now till Freya rides again. :)